I miss my physical media

I gave it all away. How about you?

How many of you used to have one (or more) of these things?

I had maybe three of them that I took to college with me freshman year (1988) along with my Panasonic dual cassette boombox. This was the swan song for my cassettes, as I was already in the midst of a full transition to music on CD, and once I was in a position to bring my full stereo, I stopped buying cassettes entirely.

I don’t own any cassettes anymore. I also don’t any CD’s or records or even DVDs. Come to think of it I don’t own a stereo either.

I’ve gotten rid of all of these things over the years, hundreds each of cassettes and CDs, the vast majority of them given to Goodwill. My older brother has retained some of the records that would’ve been mine back when we lived under the same roof, since I’d abandoned them at the house and he claimed them when our parents downsized.

In contrast, I have hundreds and hundreds of physical books, maybe more than hundreds, but I’m afraid to truly estimate in case it is 1000s and Mrs. Biblioracle reads this. By necessity, because I don’t want to become one of those people who is crushed by a falling pile, I periodically cull my books - I’ve gotten rid of 1000s over the years - but the thought of getting rid of my physical books, even though I know I will never even open the vast majority of them again, is unthinkable.

Lately I’ve been regretting giving up all of my cassettes, CDs and DVDs, and I’m wondering why I did it so readily.

The trigger for my regret is this piece from tech writer/critic Paris Marx who cataloged his challenge to buy a Blu-Ray copy of Dune: Part 1 and found it impossible to find at a retail outlet.

Of course, the movie is easily streamable, either through whatever streaming service currently houses it or on-demand through a cable provider or Apple or whatever. But as Marx notes, while this is not a difficult hurdle for a relatively new and popular movie, there’s lots of media that is not streamable.

For example, an old favorite TV show, Northern Exposure, was, until recently, not something you could even pay to stream. It’s now available through Amazon Prime.

And just because something is streamable for the moment does not mean it will be streamable forever. The terms under which something is streamable are not constant. Two months ago I could’ve watched those Northern Exposure episodes commercial-free, but Amazon recently introduced ads to the lowest tier subscription level. To go ad-free, they want a couple extra bucks a month.

When I allowed iTunes to swallow up my existing database of digital music, much of which had initially been converted from CDs I lost some specific versions of songs that have been replaced by whatever is in the streaming database. I had a CD copy of the King Biscuit Flower Hour Presents Steve Miller, a live performance at The Beacon Theater in Boston from 1975 that pre-dates the recording of Miller’s biggest hits from albums Fly Like an Eagle and Book of Dreams. It features performances of some of the songs that would wind up on Fly Like an Eagle and it’s interesting to hear how different these songs are in a concert setting before they’d been nailed down in the studio.¹

There’s an album of my brother’s I remember from my childhood, Concerts for the People of Kampuchea, a series of benefit concerts put on by Paul McCartney in 1979 to help alleviate the famine in Cambodia. The shows featured McCartney and Wings, The Who, The Clash, and Elvis Costello, but the songs I particularly remember are three from The Pretenders, including a performance of “Tattooed Love Boys” that’ll make your hair stand on end. This recording is close, but not quite it.

I’ve spoken in this space previously how I am not a big fan of nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia, indulging those feelings simply because change can be unsettling, or we confuse the comfort of our past memories with something truly meaningful.

But…there are other aspects of physical media, which I think are genuinely meaningful which are largely lost in the streaming era. While I’ve already noted some cases where old media has not made it to streaming, the reality is that streaming is all about abundance, and abundance is not a de facto good. Sometimes scarcity can engender interesting experiences.

I remember going to hockey camp summer of 1983, a couple of weeks after The Police’s Synchronicity album came out when I’d forgotten to bring my suitcase of cassettes, leaving me with only the album in my Sony Walkman (Synchronicity) for the two weeks of the session. I listened to that thing dozens and dozens of times. I’d never listened to something so closely in my life.

When I finished graduate school, as I played out the string of the remaining months on my apartment lease, I gradually divested of my stuff, selling my furniture and shipping my books back to my parents’ house. By the end, I had a bed roll, a lamp, a clock radio, a dog and a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I read the entire book through, and then huge chunks of it all over again.

I don’t want to overstate these experiences as somehow seminal or transformational, and I’m grateful m times of scarcity have been uhh..scarce, but being forced to make do in those temporary moments of scarcity showed me something about reading/listening closely and the power of concentrating one’s attention on a narrow field.

In a world where a moment’s disinterest can be met with a fresh bit of stimulus, this kind of focus feels like a minor super power.

Another aspect of physical media is that it fosters the act of curation, an active process of deciding not just what one wants to keep, but why. The books I keep represent me in some way, and the fact that I have too many books and must continually make judgements about what I keep vs. what gets given away is an active process of considering who I am, and what’s meaningful to me.

(I feel particularly strongly about books as an indicator of who a person is and what they’re about. At the times my wife and I have been looking at houses, if I saw existing owners’ books on the shelves that I didn’t approve of, I would immediately think it wasn’t the right house for us.)

Remember the mixtape? Making a mixtape is an activity which is governed by the principles of both scarcity and curation. You have 45 minutes per side at the most, and the selection and ordering of the songs becomes freighted with meaning.

Austin Kleon

posts his mixtapes on social media and his newsletter, and I’m jealous! I want to make a mixtape, but I have nothing to make one with.

An iTunes playlist is not the same thing.

Anything that exists only in digital form can be disappeared forever in an instant on the whim of the person who holds the power to cut off access to those bits. I just realized that includes something like this newsletter, where I’ve published hundreds of thousands of words over three-plus years. I mean, I’ve always known this, but I don’t often think about, or maybe don’t think about it enough.

It would be ridiculous to download every newsletter, print them out, dig out the old three-hole punch out and secure them all in a nice big binder, wouldn’t it?

Wouldn’t it?

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I write about a terrific new novel from Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations.

Here’s a fantastic review of Percival Everett’s James, by Mark Twain scholar Matt Seybold.

At LitHub, Maris Kreizman argues that when it comes to personal book recommendations, people are better than algorithms. You know that I agree.

I am typing this while licking my wounds from the beatdown of the University of Illinois men’s basketball team by the University of Connecticut, but I will nonetheless recommend this article from Matthew Salesses talking to Hanif Abdurraqib about writing and basketball at Esquire.

April is almost upon us and the New York Times has 17 new books for the month.

The 20th Tournament of Books wrapped up this week with a final matchup between Blackouts by Justin Torres and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Story by James McBride. You’ll have to click to get the winner.

From McSweeney’s this week, one that hits a little close to home for those of us close to higher ed: “How to Reverse Declining History Major Enrollment Numbers, Which Are All the Faculty’s Fault” by Ryan Weber.

Recommendations

1. The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia
2. The Virginity of Famous Men by Christine Sneed
3. In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
4. Poor Things by Alisdair Grey
5. Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell

Mariana - Toronto, Canada

I have a hunch Mariana will have read this, and if so she should email me for a do over, but if not, it’s just right: Geek Love by Catherine Dunn.

1. The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff 
2. Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie
3. Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer
4. Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward
5. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton 

Natalie G., Ormond Beach, FL

I think Natalie will be a good match with Ruth Ozeki’s rather strange and surprising A Tale for the Time Being.

1. The Fraud by Zadie Smith
2. The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
3. Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm
4. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu
5. The World as I Found It by Bruce Duffy

Joshua O. - Seattle, WA

I’m going to take advantage of Josh having included a collection of short stories to recommend more short stories, The Department of Historical Correction by Danielle Evans.²

Anyone out there who held on to their records, tapes, CD’s, DVDs, Betamax, wax tablets? How about books? Has anyone made the leap to digital only?

Happy Easter to all who celebrate.

See you next week.

John
The Biblioracle

1. We have a weird family connection that has made me a lifelong Steve Miller fan. He and my father were fraternity brothers at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1960’s and he even dated my aunt (my dad’s sister) for a time. My grandfather supposedly called him “Johnny One-Note.” My grandmother owned signed copies of Steve Miller’s albums that he’d sent her over the years, and my first proper concert was Steve Miller in Chicago when was six or seven years old attended with my parents and grandmother. We met him backstage afterwards and my brother has a signed program from the show. I fell asleep during the synthesizer solo/light show.

2. All books linked throughout the newsletter go to The Biblioracle Recommends bookstore at Bookshop.org. Affiliate proceeds, plus a personal matching donation of my own, go to Chicago’s Open Books and an additional reading/writing/literacy nonprofit to be determined. Affiliate income is $49.20 for the year.