The pleasures and limits of inconvenience.

In the midst of this e-book revolution, fans of physical books can take heart, I think, from the story of vinyl. Because I can't resist putting things in (loose and rusty) Heideggerian terms, here goes: vinyl dropped from the center to the margin of our culture. With the advent of cassettes and CDs, and the resulting loss of everyday expertise in vinyl and record players by most non-audiophile folks, the vinyl object and the record player themselves became what Heidegger might call "present-at-hand" for most: more object than tool, bulky, time-intensive, involving the placement (and maintenance) of a needle, the flipping of the record, and so on. There's no track reordering without a bunch of work; there's no shuffle between songs on separate albums without even more work.

Of course, that's what those (like me--guilty as charged) who have become vinyl revivalists began to miss after a while. And I don't think, as others have claimed, that it was pure nostalgia. It's a return to music as a physically produced medium, rather than an invisible, abstract, one-click shuffle on a computer. It's like actually watching bow put to strings on a violin, rather than just hearing the result. And it preserves the integrity of the album as a single piece of music. Now record players are back in major music stores and as part of stereo systems (they'd all but diseappeared, except as DJ units, at their lowest point).

Books are busy falling to the margins now, but I think they may be picked up again by newer generations who grow up doing the bulk of their reading on computers and e-book readers, not just barely kept in business by dyed-in-the-wool bibliophiles like me. The only thing that scares me a bit is that books don't have the same degree of inconvenience as vinyl does, so they might, paradoxically, be victims of their own relative efficiency. For instance, I don't see videotapes ever coming back; they certainly seem a tad out of date, but there's not enough of a difference between the experience of putting a videotape into a VCR and playing it and putting in a DVD (or playing a movie on your computer) to create a demand for videotapes. VCRs just seem slightly worse, less efficient and lower-quality. There will be videotape collectors, insofar as there are collectors of anything, but there ain't gonna be a new videotape industry, as there now is with vinyl and hopefully will remain with books. In the end, I think there is indeed enough of a difference between sitting down with a physical volume, with the smell of its paper and the look of its printed words, among other lovely physical minutiae, and sitting down with an e-book, that there will always be a market for well-made, high-end editions, broadsheets, and the like, probably by small and academic presses, much in the same way that small music labels put out vinyl editions. But that could just be my old-fashionedness talking.

In any case, now I'd like to broaden my horizons a bit, and move from a pretty pragmatic discussion of music, video, and book forms, to the idea of inconvenience, or presence-at-hand, in general. Plus hipsters. Because I think those concepts are what more extreme hipsters (the word "hipster" itself is beginning to seem more like a present-at-hand, rather than a ready-at-hand, word, these days, to the point where I don't like to use it but can't find a better alternative) are after, more than the rest of us: a complete presence-at-hand lifestyle. I don't think anyone considers seeking out the vintage, the odd, the kitchy as distasteful if it's done to a moderate degree; it's an essential human instinct to be collectors, to reach for what's at the margins of our culture in order to define ourselves as unique people or subgroups. But there's also an instinct to say "fuck off" to those at the extreme, those who won't lower themselves to the everyday, shallow coping behavior that is nonetheless essentially human: those who wear sunglasses at night, who just can't have a standard haircut or new, non-destroyed jeans, who won't go to large chain stores even if they're the cheapest place to find something they desperately need, who refuse to (non-ironically) like a new Avril Lavigne song even when it's good because it's corporate music (damn it, when are we all gonna join hands and sing "Girlfriend"?)

Life can't all be presence-at-hand without a trust fund, in other words.

But as I've said, I like my vinyl, not exclusively, but for my all-time favorite records (I just got REM's first two albums on 180-gram!), and I like my thick-paged, boutique-edition physical books. And you can bet if I ever live in a place where me and my friends can have lofts, we'll send messages to each other on the legs of thoroughbred pigeons. It'll be like having thirty iPhones that poop and mate.

The first in a series

of random, brief comments I blurt out that still seem somewhat amusing a day afterwards:

"I don't turn on anyone. I just spin."

So

I was back at Berkeley to witness the glorious 37-16 romp over Leland Stanford Junior University on Saturday. It was wholly satisfying. However, the day before, I was a bit saddened to see that the building where I took my final class at Cal--and outside of which, afterwards, I had a beer with my housemates, on the green where we had often played spirited games of croquet--was, well, gone. There is now a big hole there, with huge metal spars coming out of it. To come in 2009 is a new state-of-the-art (and super-green-compliant) biomedical research facility:



which is all for the good, I think. I just get nostalgic.

So, Warren Hall, fare thee well. You weren't pretty:



but I remember you.

I missed a few states, but not a bad performance.

I didn't expect North Carolina or Indiana to go for Obama, but they surprisingly, and very narrowly, did. It's good to see them in blue. Oh, and I missed that one Nebraska electoral district that went for Obama, splitting Nebraska's vote 2-1. But two states off, plus one EV, is pretty good. You may worship my predictive abilities starting now (yes, it may just be that I relied on a lot of very good polls, but let's keep that quiet).

My final presidential election prediction.

Since the economic problems gave Obama a huge bump in the polls, the electoral map has changed. For what it's worth, here's my prediction for what is likely to be one of the most historic elections of our lifetimes. If I'm completely right, you all owe me a beer.

Obama 338
McCain 200

States

Obama: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, DC, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, New Mexico, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Hawaii.

McCain: South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia, Louisiana, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Kansas, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Alaska.

A poem for Brian and Lindsay's wedding.

This is what I'll be reading on Saturday, for those of you who won't be there (or for those of you who will be there but want a preview):

I come to you, my listeners, as the only
eyewitness of the end of Brianless Lindsay;
she perished nobly, driving 85
down a Carolina highway, getting caught
by cops in Rocky Mount, trying to flirt
her way out of a ticket. It didn't work,

but later that same night, she flirted herself
straight into something worse, the ponderous clod
who wobbles before us now, and ponderous marriage,
a density of man and institution,
a Jupiter whose pull is obligation.
Despite it all, against my better reason,

I want to orbit this gaseous entity:
in there's my oldest friends, who stuck with me
through awful high school, and a girl who helped
make New York bearable, with wit and kindess.
I'll call it late at night. I'll have a beer
with it. I'll be its happy satellite.

How the Electoral College Is Shaping Up

I am a polling nerd, and nearly every day for four or five months have been tracking first the primary and then the general election polls in every state, state-by-state. Looking at so many polls for every single state I've gotten a real sense of polls that are misleading outliers, and leads that remain remarkably consistent, if small, over time. My prediction, with a couple months still to go, and obviously lots of possibility for the race to swing unexpectedly in one direction or another, is that this race could damn well end in a 269-269 electoral tie and (!) go to the House of Representatives. Which is fine by me, because they'll elect Obama. Just an interesting possibility. Here's how the states break in my scenario:

McCain: Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Alaska

Obama: Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, Rhode Island, DC, Maryland, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Hawaii

As you can see, I'm giving almost all the famous swing states from previous elections to McCain, just because over time the polls have generally leant in his direction in most of them. The most likely two swing states to defect from my McCain column to Obama on election night, and pretty much clinch it for him, are Colorado and Virginia, where his leads are very weak. I think Florida and Ohio are pretty solidly in McCain's camp, though, so don't look for any big Obama jackpot in either spot.

Obama's "269" strategy relies on winning all the states he's generally expected to win in the Midwest and Northeast and West Coast, and just adding two "swing" states: New Mexico and Nevada, where, with the exception of a very few polls, he has shown and still shows slim, consistent leads. I think these two increasingly diverse, growing, and complex Western states are ready to go progressive this year (or in New Mexico's case, go back after a bit of slippage). Nevada is much closer than New Mexico. It's amazing that after being so conservative for so long, this little ignored state might have the chance to decide a President.

What do you think?