cover image Lost in Cyberspace: Essays and Far Fetched Tales

Lost in Cyberspace: Essays and Far Fetched Tales

Val Schaffner, Van Schaffner. Bridge Works Publishing Company, $17.95 (192pp) ISBN 978-1-882593-03-3

Schaffner, a columnist for the East Hampton Star on Long Island, N.Y., offers a lively and eclectic collection of some 40 brief essays on topics from travel to technology. Several pieces are entertaining but ephemeral, like his suggestion of ``virtual inventions'' (i.e., a battery-operated ``quilt snorkel'' to provide ventilation for those who like to sleep under layers of blankets) that he offers to potential manufacturers. Other columns are more resonant, such as when Schaffner asserts that ``authenticity becomes the enemy of art'' and proposes that we make unlimited reproductions of established works and provide patronage only to younger artists: ``For the price of one Jasper Johns painting, you could send 1,000 students to art school.'' His musings on the inevitable onslaught of sophisticated home-office machines lead him to fear ``the technological realization of the haunted house.'' Schaffner has a good eye--St. Louis's Gateway Arch is a ``colossal, half-buried zero, a Brobdingnagian croquet wicket,'' but his prose only sometimes rises to those heights. (Oct.)