goodbye, artifacts

My parents tell me I always liked to read. As a kid, long before I could actually read, I would be sitting on the couch, thumbing through a book, staring intently at the pages. When my mom would ask me what I was doing, I would tell her I was "reading."

I don't remember this personally, of course. My earliest memory of books is thumbing through--scratch that, actually reading--several Classics Illustrated books. I remember reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (which doesn't actually sound right, as it's a fairly gruesome book near the end, but that's what I remember). Later, there was the Scholastic Book Club one sheet order forms we got in school, which lead to a lot of classics, including an abridged Journey to the Center of the Earth. Someone (a fellow student? or was it in our English text?) introduced me to Encyclopedia Brown, which lead to Alfred Hitchcock's Three Detectives stories. Later, the fateful day in middle school library where I ran across The Hobbit...which led me to beg my parents to buy my own copies, and then, somewhere during my third read-through, have them cover the paperbacks with contact paper to protect them. Later still, when I found a Stephen King book in my high school study hall desk, my fate/addiction was sealed.

Somewhere during my growing reading obsession, I started to fall in love with the books themselves. Given the option, I would look for hardbacks over paper. I started to prowl Chamblin's Book Mine (the world's best used book store) for cool, unexpected titles, all the while wondering why anyone would not just keep their used books yet still being thankful for their oversight whenever I made another discovery.

My love became more obsessive and ornate. I used to drive up to the recently opened Barnes & Noble and spend whatever was left over in my paycheck. Whenever I found a leather-bound (or even pleather-bound) edition--particularly if on the bargain bin tables--I would swipe it up. Much of these visits was spent staring longingly at the leather-bound and lavishly illustrated Lord of the Rings collection, but I could never bring myself to pull the trigger. I would go to see whatever obscure writer my university would bring in, buy a book, and get an autograph. Eventually, I started dreaming of owning a house mainly so I could have my own library (wood-paneled, of course) of leather-bound and hand-signed editions...you know, a gentlemanly room in which I could dwell when I retired, maybe while wearing a tweed jacket and enjoying a snifter of cognac.

When I moved from Florida to Ohio, a good half of my U-Haul was paper boxes full of books. I had bookshelves in my living room, bedroom, and study that first year in my new apartment. Then I had to get a roomate, so there was a contraction...some books went to a used bookstore, others went for sale online. After another roommate, my then-girlfriend moved in with more stuff, so another contraction. Pulled by the allure of washer and dryer hookups, we moved to a smaller house...and another contraction. The more stuff we acquired, the more books went bye-bye. When we started to turn the study into a nursery, it brought on (you guessed it) yet another contraction.

Too many books have, through the years, gone away. I realized long ago I'm never going to have the wood-paneled library...hell, I'm probably never going to own my own house and certainly will never be able to afford to retire, so the lack of a library in which to hang isn't really a big deal. I still have a lot of those old and leather-bound editions, but I never read them. Hell, I hardly even think of them. Instead, when I think of books, I think of my fourth copy of Neuromancer, my second copy of Snowcrash, or my still-contact paper-bound Lord of the Rings set. I can and quite often do close my eyes and recall scenes, lines, whole passages from each. I can, however, do the same with the Bill, The Galactic Hero series and about fifty other books, all of which are considerably more low-brow...and all of which, unfortunately, are lost in the book-contraction breeze.

This year for Christmas, my parents bought me a Kindle. I'm relatively broke, so I immediately downloaded a ton of out-of-copyright classics. It now has tons of Twain, Burroughs, Verne, and Wells residing on it, just waiting to be (quite literally) thumbed through. Immediately, though, I thought about buying a copy of Neuromancer, my perennial candidate for best novel ever. It would be nice, I considered, to have a copy whose binding would never break. And then get copies of all my other personal classics. And then get copies of all the goofy sci-fi and horror I've plowed through. I could, on this one little device, hold the library of my dreams and the library of stuff I've actually read.

Then it occurred to me: if I could have every book I've ever wanted on this one device and back up said library on the computer...what did I need books for?

Artifacts are going away. I've already moved into a post-artifactual music collection. While I have some dvds, they usually remain in storage, as my dvr is a much better storage medium. My papers and teaching material have long been digital. I now store lyric and music ideas on a hard drive rather than cassettes and notepads.

What is my world going to look like when I finally make the complete move to virtual storage? My stuff is losing its tangibility...and I'm surprised to find myself perfectly fine with that.

my changing relationship to music

(first in a series)

I've been trying (in some respects) to be a proactive parent. So, not too long after we learned my wife was preggers, I realized I was going to have to rethink my relationship to music.

Bear with me. While like most parents I had no true idea what I was getting myself into, I did know that we were going to have a little person roaming around the house. This naturally means baby-proofing. I knew I would have to move electrical cords and lock up household chemicals (which we used to just keep in the liquor cabinet). What scared me, though, was learning the DuBose-to-be would be mobile at some point...and while I really couldn't picture my child at the time, I would picture this potential infant learning to crawl, heading over to my wall of cd cabinets, pulling cds out at random, pulling the disks out of the cases, and hurling them all into a giant, jagged pile.

I didn't want to have to decide between my love for my child-to-be and my love for music, so I spent hours online searching for good storage options. New cd shelves with doors, though, were quite costly...and since we can't even afford to move out of our two room wooden shack with dirt floors, I realized quickly that purchasing expensive storage shelves with doors was not the solution. I considered then rejected making my own doors, because I really didn't want to count myself among the ranks of those home repair and woodworking enthusiasts who have lopped off fingers. I briefly thought about rigging up some kind of strap system to lash the cds into place but rejected each plan as being too Goldbergian.

It was clear there were no other options. I had to get rid of my cds.

I spent about two months sorting cds and ripping them to mp3. I would take my time, gazing at the prisms of light reflecting off the disk as I poured over the packaging for the last time, all while trying to remember where I bought the disk in the first place. Music ripped, I would then file the disk away in a big plastic tub for easy transport to a relative for safe-keeping.

It all seemed too big to me, the end-of-an-era-type event. I remembered getting my first cd player...one of those portable units which skipped whenever you tripped or stumbled. I found my way to a pawn shop and bought a dozen used disks, two dollars apiece. I then joined one of those music clubs to jump-start my collection. They outgrew my shelf. Then my collection outgrew the carousel storage unit. Then I bought my first shelf...then another...then another...until I had seven shelves and a few thousand disks. Now, though, I would have an empty wall and a number of used bytes on my computer. It seemed...inadequate.

Moreover, it was unprecedented. I never really liked cassettes all that much...they were too disposable of a medium, and if a tape was of an album I really enjoyed, I would most certainly go through three or four copies...so getting rid of them was no big deal. I liked records, particularly because of the artwork, but my stereo receiver died a few years before I finally divested myself of all my vinyl. Besides, all of these were a move from one media to another. The end of cds was a larger event in that it meant the end of artifacts. Yeah, I still had the songs, but there was no "thing" attached to them. For the first time in my music-consuming life, it was impossible for me to sit and hold my favorite album.

I moped for a while. Abandoning my cds was a move I had to make. I knew that. A child, my very own child, was much more important. I knew that. I couldn't, however, stop myself from being a little sad from thinking of the empty spaces where my racks of cds once stood as standing for something more...a hole within me, perhaps.

Then my daughter came...and I found myself not thinking very much of my cds at all.

Christmastime came. Me and my wife knew we wouldn't really need to buy each other piles of gifts. We were broke, yes, but my wife has long insisted on having at least some level of presents, so she could tear open wrapping paper with her hands...because she is, as she feels free to tell you, a little kid. Christmas is (and will increasingly become) all about our daughter. But we agreed to still give each other at least a token gift.

We decided on on the massively sentimental and romantic present of gift cards...and, as the actual holiday hour approached and our lives as a result became more frazzled, we didn't even put them in envelopes.

I got a gift card to Amazon. First thing I did was buy a couple of albums I'd been wanting...but as I had no more cds, as there were no more artifacts of music, I found the downloads to be cheaper...so instead of two cds, I could get five albums! Furthermore, as I wasn't getting anything physical, I didn't have to wait to get my music. In five minutes, all of my new albums were sitting on my hard drive, ready for consumption.

Yes, I no longer had the artifacts. I did, however, have increased access to the music.

Realizing this is a bit of a game-changer for me. How long before my Kindle renders my bookshelves moot? Should I get a streaming service and do away with my dvds? What is next? I dream of a future where I buy a fiber optic tee shirt and download its graphics directly from the bands.

Why not? It's the end of the artifact. Let's hope it makes content more important.