Like most kids (in fact like most human beings) our son is in love with his mobile. When my wife and I mentioned to him that there were no personal computers, internet and mobiles when we were his age, the look on his face revealed a mix of pity, disbelief and contempt. He seemed sorry for us, but you could tell he thought we were sad and pathetic.
Needless to say my wife and I never felt sad and pathetic at the time. (Well, perhaps we did sometimes, but for entirely different reasons.) You can't miss something that doesn't even exist. Or even things that do exist but which you're not aware of. I suppose there were many things we didn't miss for the simple reason that we didn't know any better. Ignorance is indeed bliss.
For example, off the top of my head, our son has already been abroad a few times. When I was his age the only place I had been to was Ancona, less than 100 miles away, and I absolutely loved it. For me it was the best place in the whole world.
Quick digression. Roughly speaking, Italian dialects are divided into three groups: northern, central and southern dialects. When you look at a map of Italy, Pescara is right in the middle (which makes Pescara either Italy's belly button or its anus, depending on which side is the front and which side is the back), and yet the dialect is unmistakably southern. Make no mistake, I'm a terrone.
(Terrone is the derogatory term Northern Italians use for Southern Italians. I guess you could translate it as country bumpkin. That's me. All that is missing is a bit of hair gel and and a gold chain over the t-shirt. Groovy.)
As I mentioned earlier, Ancona is not that far, and yet the dialect is completely different. Anconetano is a central dialect. (Personally I'm not fond of it either.) Ancona is in the Marche region, which is adjacent to Abruzzo, which means that they hate each other, of course. Why wouldn't they?
When I was growing up in Pescara, every time I told people that my parents were from Ancona (they could tell I couldn't speak the dialect very well), invariably they would recite to me an old saying that every Abruzzese knows: "Meglio un morto in casa che un Marchigiano alla porta" (better to have a death in the family than a Marchigiano at the door), to which you felt like replying "Better to have raging hemorrhoids than listening to some moron repeating some bullshit.”
Digression from the digression. Slang words tend to vary from region to region, of course, especially the ones that have to do with reproduction or reproductive organs. When I was a kid there were at least five different slang words in Pescara for the female reproductive organ (different ones were to be found in other regions):
- Topa
- Fica
- Cocca
- Ciuccia
- Fregna
(The first two are pan-peninsular, if that's the word.)
And that sort of brings me back to the pre-internet days. In the 70s and 80s kids in Pescara (and anywhere else around the globe, I imagine) had to rely on the odd adult magazine that someone had thrown away to see what things looked like.
(I grew up near the railway, which was notoriously a good spot to find those magazines, for some reason. Did people read them on the train and then threw them away from the window? Did people from other neighborhoods walk all the way to the railway to discard them? Was my neighborhood particularly pervy? I don't know.)
But that makes me wonder: in the pre-pornography days (from the 60s backwards) what did young boys do to satisfy their curiosity? Did they pass around a pencil sketch copied from some medical textbook? I suppose they relied a lot on rumors and hearsay.
My uncle Remo is from Rome (only in Rome you find people called Remo, but not Romolo, being the fratricidal brother), and years ago he told me that kids in 1950s Rome had a really bizarre (and rather racist) rumor going around. They believed that Chinese women's vaginas were not vertical, so to speak, but horizontal. That was before I met my wife, otherwise I could've put to rest any residual doubt he might've had.
Talking of her (and genitals, but not hers) reminds me of an interesting anecdote she once told me. One day she was walking to school with a group of schoolmates, all girls. There was a middle-aged man further up the road, just waiting, and when the girls got close he showed them his penis. (As you'd imagine, Taiwan has its share of perverts. Pervs have no boundaries, in every sense of the word).
One of the girls was a very cocky and confident person. She took a quick look at the guy and said to him "Too small", and then they all walked away.
But let's go back to computers. (I know, about bloody time. I could talk about genitals for hours. Not everyone is a fan, though. Leonardo da Vinci once said "The art of procreation, and the members employed, are so repulsive that, were it not for the beauty of the faces and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species”. If you say so, Lenny.)
While I did grow up in a computerless world, I couldn't imagine my life without them now. (I know what you're thinking but no, it's not because of porn.) I could see myself living without TV, but not without the PC. Gun to my head, I'd choose my books over the PC, of course, but I would be sad about it. (And a little bit scared, given that someone just put a gun to my head.)
I won't bore you with the usual reasons why computers are great. Instead I want to mention an important (and often overlooked) role computers played for those who love old, forgotten comics (like yours truly).
Comics are printed from the original artwork, of course (the original pages happen to be much bigger than the printed ones), but the artwork of many old comics is lost forever. Comics were regarded as rubbish (in all fairness many were), often even by the very people who drew them and published them, and not everyone made an effort to preserve the original art. (In fact very few people did.)
Until recently that meant that those old comics were never reprinted. Even if some modern publisher wanted to do that, it wasn't possible. The original pages are gone. (Literature doesn't have that sort of problem. As long as there's one surviving copy, the whole thing can re-typed by anyone.) Most comics were printed just once and that's it. An aficionado had to spend a fortune to buy the first (and only) edition, if he or she wanted to read those works.
But nowadays it's possible to scan (and then reprint) the printed pages of the old comics, and while the result is not quite as good as printing from the original artwork, it's still pretty good. (Of course scanners have been around for a few decades now, but they got a lot better.)
And even when reprinting those old comics is not financially viable (some of them are really niche), there are fans who scan them and put them online for anyone to read, which is better than nothing.
On my bookshelf you'll find a few comics that have recently been reprinted for the very first time since their first publication several decades ago. (And some of those comics are getting close to being a hundred years old.) I'll always be grateful to those IT engineers who made it possible.
