The LongPen
I’m not a candidate for the LongPen. My queue for book signings at the Edinburgh Festival wasn’t unmanageably long, my wrist didn’t ache by the end of it, nor did legions of disappointed fans leave Scotland with their copies of Coconut Chaos uninscribed by me.
The LongPen isn’t for all of us. But VIP writers can now sign books without tipping out to the Festival yurt. ‘By using the LongPen instead of taking a round trip flight from New York to Edinburgh, a writer saves the atmosphere over one tonne of carbon emissions.’ It’s the invention of Margaret Atwood. I didn’t see it in action but it was there at Edinburgh and I gather it works something like this: The author – the celebrity author – is on video and has a sort of electronic writing tablet in front of her or him. Across the seas, in the yurt or bankrupt bookshop, there’s a LongPen kiosk. The fan goes into the kiosk with the bought book. By video the fan gives an inscription request to the author: The author writes this on the tablet and the robotic pen comes down and copies it on the bared titlepage! ‘Suck it Henry. Margaret Atwood. Edinburgh’.
Gosh! And it’s a legal signature. Authentic. The Real McCoy.
Where will it end. Why stop at LongPen signings. Why not sessions with Ruth Rendell, cosy at home, robotically nibbling the ears of distant fans with her robotic EarNibbler or A.C.Grayling varnishing admirers’ toes with LongVarnish.
Our virtual world is out of hand. Efforts at togetherness with those we’ll never know, define our isolation. We’re turning into machines. But maybe we’re machines anyway. For some reason I’m reminded of how when St Teresa of Avila’s coffin was opened nine months after she died, the Father Provincial cut off her left hand and took it to a monastery in Lisbon. Her right foot’s in Rome, there’s a middle finger in Paris, one of her shoulder bones is in Brussels and some of her teeth are in Milan and Venice. Everlasting LongLife.