As We See It

At the beginning of the 2022 novel Checkout 19, by Claire-Louise Bennett, I encountered some ideas that resonate in interesting ways with my recent experience of recorded music. The first idea is expressed in the quote above: You take out many books from the library—as many as they'll allow—and you don't read any of them all the way through. There's too much temptation to move from one to the other, "tossing one book down and picking one book up and tossing that to one side and picking up yet another and so on and getting nowhere. ... And we went on like that for quite some time didn't we until we realized that just because we were allowed to take out six books eight books twelve books four books didn't mean did it that we had to." An education.

I've been bringing home too many records from the record store, or too many CDs from the CD shop, for decades—so many that it's difficult to focus on just one, to listen to it again and again, to give it the attention it deserves. In the era of streaming—of having a sizeable fraction of the history of recorded music at your fingertips for $10–$20/month—the temptation is especially acute. It's too easy to move among favorite bits of our favorite music—especially when, as is too often true of audiophiles, we're so eager to hear how a favorite moment in this or that piece of music sounds on our system, now that we've added in that new component.

The second resonant idea in the book comes soon after, in the very next (long) paragraph. The narrator now takes out just one book at a time. "You'll have that finished by tomorrow, they'd say. ... So what. As if the only thing you could do with a book was read it." You could, for example, sit for a long time with the book beside you, unopened, "because we could wonder couldn't we about the kinds of words it contained." Have you ever done that with a new record that you couldn't wait to listen to? Just sat there, excited, a ritual before listening? I have, though not for a long time.

Then Bennett's narrator goes on to talk about the position of the words on the page. "The left page ... has a much stronger pull on us than the right page. We always look down first of all at the right page. ... The words on the right page always seem much too close. Too close to each other and too close to our face." And on it goes. "Very soon our rattled eyes leave the right page in order to seek refuge in the left."

The interesting thing about my experience reading these words was that I was reading them on a Kindle, the e-reader from Amazon. I like the Kindle because the battery life is long and it is backlit. It's lightweight and hard to damage, all of which make it ideal for reading in bed, which is where I do a lot of my reading. If I fall asleep and drop a Kindle on my face, I may get a bruise, but it's nothing compared to the damage an iPad Pro could do, and I don't worry about damaging the device.

The Kindle, though, doesn't have left and right pages. It doesn't have pages at all. The number of words that appears on the screen depends on your choice of font size—adjustable by the reader. The advantages go beyond the most obvious ones. The words are easy to see even if your eyesight is bad—and your attention is focused on the author's creation, the words on the page, on a single word, a cluster of words, a sentence, a paragraph. It's a good way to read.

(Too often, though, those words are mangled by typos, especially on older works, which have usually been moved onto the Kindle platform by scanning a print source and applying optical character recognition software, apparently with little if any proofreading.)

Despite the advantages of the Kindle, I miss the structure of a physical book—the shape of the pages, how far along I am: I'm getting near the end! Kindle convenience and readability is off the charts, but, excellence of Kindle's e-ink acknowledged, I miss the way the ink looks on the page.

I came of age during the LP era, when an album was round, usually black, and usually had two sides—sometimes more—each with about 22 minutes of music on it. The length of an album side was a historical and technological accident, yet for me, 22 minutes, give or take, was just the right amount of time to listen in a single sitting. Importantly—connecting to one of the points made by Claire-Louise Bennett—it made a very big difference which side of the record a song was on.

Indeed, Sides were—I'm tempted to write are—so important that during the CD era I would often find myself wondering, as I listened to an unfamiliar album, is this song on Side 1 or Side 2? It was a meaningless question, since CD releases don't have sides. I knew that of course, and I knew I was listening to a CD, but for me the CD has always been, and continues to be, a stand-in for the real thing—the record—even when no LP version exists.

Even today, when much new music is once again released on vinyl, vinyl is no longer the dominant medium, so "Sides" are incidental, not fundamental. "Sides" are no longer a thing, yet I never got over the habit. Even today, I sometimes catch myself wondering, is this song on Side 1 or Side 2?

And then, with vinyl, there's the question of where it is on the side. The arrangement of songs on an LP is important, a key part of an album's composition. Which song starts off the album? Which comes next? Which song ends the side? Which one starts Side 2? It mattered for the composition of the album—some albums more than others—but it mattered for technical reasons, too: Songs closer to the center experience more inner-groove distortion.

In the LP era—and for LPs still—position was—is—an important consideration.

In the digital, streaming era, the changes from the LP are extreme. A piece of recorded music is no longer associated with a physical object, so it has no existence in space—no geometry, shape, or form that interacts with the music. How the music relates to our turntable, ourselves, our discernment, our psyches—has gone away. Like music itself, recorded music exists now almost exclusively in time—no longer in space. I regret it, yet this transformation isn't fundamentally good or bad—it simply is what it is. We have gained much, but we've lost something, too. It's one important reason I still listen to records and why I still often read real books.