In Praise of the Material World
Had an experience last week that revealed some of the limits of online, digital life -- a life I also must admit is not without benefits since we are reading this online! My enlightening experience occurred when I decided to pull one of my old jazz reference books off the shelf. It was the Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD , sixth edition from 2002, which may have been one of the last paper copy versions they published. It's a massive book, some 1000 pages long with very small type. It's a record guide, with capsule reviews for as many recordings by as many artists as they could fit. The only criterion for inclusion, as the title indicates, was that the records had to be available in CD -- which was a small plastic and lacquer disc that you would insert into a device to play it, lol. Funny side note: I actually used to lug books like this on vacation to read on the plane or the beach or the deck. Sometimes on vacations I would have as many as three books. Insane. Now it's all on ...
