Sold a mess of LPs today, making room for books. Sold a mess of CDs this week, too. The collection gets smaller and smaller. The library–books–gets bigger and bigger. CDs I like, but they are certainly unhip. Plus I can’t read the liner notes. OK, I never did read liner notes. But even if I did read them, I couldn’t. Vinyl is hip but hopelessly analog. Cassettes I have because I haven’t transferred them onto anything wise. Otherwise I trawl YouTube, though spend too much at it and you get that lazy and worthless feeling, particularly if you read the comments. Eventually, I am reduced to humming to myself, off key, as I pull books out of the closet and slip them in the empty spaces where LPs used to be. I turn off the computer and retreat into a vast and erudite tome on the middle ages, the sort that makes me so dull to sit next to at cocktail parties. We’re still in the late classical period. Rome stands, though they’ve stopped draining the marshes and malaria has returned. The emperor is up in Ravenna, near Venice. Just ain’t the same. It’ll all be over soon enough, though, and things get all fucked up and eventually, well past the last page of the book, I’ll sit here typing this.
