There's big doings in central Pennsylvania today.
Members of congress and their families are gathering at a convention center in Hershey (also known as Chocolatetown, USA) for theirsecond "'civility retreat." Travel arrangements and events scheduled to entertain spouses and children have been made public, but the specifics of menu items have been kept secret for "security purposes." And the area is still hosting the Girl, Interrupted crowd!

But I'm off for elsewhere this afternoon -- another road trip for the quarterfinal Class A Boys' Basketball title. This time I'm headed north to the edge of the Poconos. This will take me through the coal country where my mother grew up, and, if it's not too windy and I can get out of town before 4:00, a brief visit to her gravesite.

I put a piece of fiction in the Sampler today -- a snippet of a novel-in-progress that I sometimes refer to as "My Bestseller." I'm not entirely satisfied with its look and feel. That's because I'm not entirely satisfied with my own fiction, nor am I enthusiatic about the idea of fiction on the web.

There are a number of places to get fiction on the web -- in some you can read part of a work for free and then pay to download the rest. Another diarist is about to unveil a section of his site where he's posted what he calls a Shareware novel -- you can read it all and then pay something for it. Some sites are devoted to posting classic works, which can be read entirely free of charge.

While I like reading personal pieces of the length usually found in on-line journals (and mine -- I think unfortunately -- tend to be much longer than the average examples of the genre) and poems, I haven't warmed to the idea of sitting at my screen for the dozen or so hours it might take me to read the average novel. 

Nor do I relish the idea of downloading the piece into Acrobat Reader and printing it out.  Eventually, I'm afraid, my personal library would start to look like the canvas bag I used to haul back and forth to school, stuffed with student essays.

As I've said elsewhere, fiction almost demands to be read on a big comfy couch, my hands wrapped around the book. In this sense, reading is a kinesthetic experience, often more complex than it might appear. 

When I read a library book, especially one that's worn at the edges, I'm sometimes aware of all the other readers who've enjoyed the same tale. (One thing I lamented when my school's check-out system went electronic was that there was no longer the little card in the back with the signatures of other readers, both student and faculty, some of whom I recalled with much affection.)

Even some of the books I own have that power. Several years ago I had to write a paper about a classic American book. I chose Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, which I had read in a 1962 paperback edition brought out to coincide with the release of the "major motion picture" version of the tale.

It's a "pocket size" book, four inches by seven, with a color picture of the final scene, Atticus holding Scout while the injured Jem sleeps, on the cover. The paper is non-archival quality acid-laced newsprint, set in type so small that for comfort's sake I borrowed a hardback re-issue from the library so I could re-read it and complete my paper.

On the title page I pasted a picture of Harper Lee cut from Walter Scott's Personalities page in the Sunday Parade Magazine. "Harper Lee, 37," it says, "is working on a second novel." (I actually refer to this fact in the snippet posted today!) On another page I've written out the names of the movie's cast members.

When the fellow journaller invited list members to check out his fiction section in a sort of sneak preview, I clicked immediately, as I like this writer's work. As it happens, his piece is science fiction, and I do not, as a rule, like science fiction. In commenting to the list about the idea, I wondered why so much of web fiction is sci-fi or fantasy. (I'm told this is a techno-geek thing.)

The discussion sent me to review one of the two science fiction tales I love. "The Fun They Had" is a short-short story written by Isaac Asimov and first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1951. I have it in another yellowed paperback, a collection of short shorts that I bought about the same time I acquired Mockingbird.

The story is set in the year 2155, and opens with a young diarist's statement, "Today Tommy found a real book!" It seems the children do not go to school, but are tutored at home by something they call a "mechanical teacher," a television screen where the words of their texts move along. Their "teacher" is on the blink at the moment, and they have amused themselves by foraging in the attic.

There they find a book -- amazingly enough, one where the words stay still and the reader must do the moving -- that tells them about how school used to be two hundred years before. They are awed by the idea of going to a special building and mingling with other children and being taught by an actual person -- they can't believe that a person could be that smart. The story ends with a wistful sigh for the way things used to be, for the fun they had.

I hadn't read the story in quite a while. More critical at 52 than I was at 15, I'm wondering at the unexplained nature of the little girl's diary -- is it electronic, like this one? And I smile at Asimov's quaint perception of the nature of technology's future -- the repair man who comes to service the "mechanical teacher" works on its "dials and wires," and the little girl prepares her homework in "punch code" for insertion into a slot on the side of the machine.

Downloadable fiction won't do it for me. Leave me with my tattered copies of To Kill a Mockingbird and Scholastic's Best Short Shorts.
Better even than looking at a photograph, holding those books allows me to touch once again a part of the girl I was. I can't imagine that forty years from now, cradling my old mouse will do the same thing.