I CLAUDIUS MEETS THE iPHONE

My good friend David Schoffman is never at a loss for words. In fact some people would call him long-winded. Neither innocence nor ignorance has ever discouraged him from weighing in with his own special brand of discursive moonshine. He's been known to tackle Kurdish autonomy, rugby handicapping, interest rates on the ten-year treasury note, fly-fishing, charter schools, the dangers of wheat, show dogs, Adorno's Negative Dialectics, Singapore's health care system and the optimum sauté temperature for olive oil, all in the space of a three-hour dinner party.

On the surface, the scope of his interests may seem wide and even intriguing but knowing him the way I do I can assure you he's very much of a bore.

I say this without the slightest malice or even envy. I'm merely stating a fact. His own wife - who, incidentally, still very much adores the guy - avoids him like a postponed colonoscopy. In their twenty years together she has heard it all at least twice and it never gets better the second time around. She once confided that if she were ever able to keep her eyes open, the crushing redundancies would drive her to drugs.

The only time he's quiet is when he's painting, though I can't even assure you of that.

I once caught him in the studio mumbling to himself while listening to an audiobook of Provençal poetry. I think I heard him kvetching about the poverty of contemporary expressions of courtly yearning though he also could have been talking about his digestion. Anyway, I wasn't sticking around to find out.

Texting seems to slow him down, which is fortunate. It's hard to be garrulous when you're all thumbs.

There might have been a time in the not so distant past where people enjoyed each other's company, shared stories and engaged in passionate debate. Maybe in the old days an aptitude for clever gossip and witty repartee was cultivated and even admired. It could very well be that in the medieval, black and white, pre-Twitter days of yore, glib, sententious memos were seen as rude or at best, incomplete.

      
But then again, I don't remember that far back.