During my four days in Austin for the South by Southwest Interactive Conference, I’ve seen a lot of this:

Despite my extensive exposure to artificial lighting, the conference has been excellent. It’s been a great place to get ideas for the next technical generation of World Hum, which will be arriving in the not too distant future.

I also saw this in Austin:

The scroll of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” along with other Beat-era material, is on display at the Harry Ransom Center on the University of Texas campus. It’s glorious. The physical evidence of Kerouac’s writing—the indents in the paper from the typewriter keys, the strips of tape holding the pages together, the editing marks—seen in contrast to the soft tapping of the bloggers and Twitterers in the SxSW conference rooms, held more power for me than I expected. It’s easy to imagine the frantic energy of those three weeks Kerouac spent writing the “On the Road” scroll.

At the same time, the exhibit also showed that the Beats and bloggers have significant overlap. The letters Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, etc. wrote to each other had their share of self-absorbed babbling, such as the detailed recounting of what they ate for dinner some nights.

So when I say that I’m sitting here with a belly full of barbecue and Tex-Mex, and am ready to grab one last enchilada lunch before I head back to Washington D.C., consider it part of a proud literary tradition. Or not.