The Pathos of Obsolete Reference Books

The library at the academic institute where I work part-time recently had a massive chuck-out.  Scanning the tomes strewn across the tables, I was struck by the high proportion of reference books - encyclopedias, dictionaries, guides, thesauruses,  -ographies of various types. Quite a few seemed to be just lists bound between hard covers - an inventory of modernist sculptures made in the UK between 1945 and 1972 along with their current institutional location; a list of works by female visual artists; a cataloguing of examples of land art. 

Reference books used to be one of the most reliable generators of revenue within publishing. The sheer number of libraries around the world provided a guaranteed base level of sales, and there were other institutions that might have a specialist interest in particular reference works. Back then, you could also probably count on some individuals buying them as well -  people with professional or obsessional reasons. Then with general knowledge encyclopedias, there was the association of owning a set with self-advancement and edification. 

But it was the profusion of specialized reference works that grabbed my eye as I browsed the bargain-price tables in the library. It seemed to me that it must have been such a thriving market that publishers of these kinds of books were incentivized to come up with new subjects and concepts for reference works, to the point of inventing needs and desires that didn't necessarily exist until the idea was put out there. How else to explain some of the titles that I saw -  like the Dictionary of Literary Characters. Or like these - 

There were various other kinds of reference works that weren't exactly encyclopedias or dictionaries. I was fascinated by these bound volumes of New York Times theater reviews from just one single year in the early 1970s - attracted by the illustrations printed directly onto the burlap-like cloth covers, instead of onto a dust jacket, but also intrigued by the idea that these compendia even existed.  

But thinking about it, for a drama school or a university theatre department, having these in book form would be much more preferable in terms of ease of use than having to scroll through back issues of the New York Times on micro-film.  Each edition of the Times is vast and on micro-film there would be legibility issues. Ergonomically, and in terms of eye strain, micro-film readers are a nightmare. 

The stuff in this stacks-clearing sale was going dirt cheap and I was sorely tempted to rescue some of the orphaned tomes - but I was put off by the sheer weight of them (going to this place of work involves a lengthy commute by public transport) and also the knowledge that - after an initial flick-through - I would almost certainly pile them up in some corner and never look at them again, The house is already horribly cluttered - I must have around 400 unread books. 

Still, there was something melancholy about these bereft books - I thought of all the effort, diligence, care that must have gone into their laborious construction.  The sense of responsibility, based in the belief that what was being undertaken was of real value. And I'm sure they were valuable to users.  Remember just how hard it was to find things out before the internet. 

Of course, pathos suffuses the objects in any second-hand store - books, records, magazines, whatever. You think of the creative excitement behind each object - the labour not just of the authors but of everyone involved in making a project reach fruition and get out into the world: editors,  designers, marketing etc. The anticipation of impact. DJ Shadow's comment comes to mind -  about the record store basement as "a big pile of broken dreams".

But with music, there is still the possibility of a life in the culture - radio play or streams or YouTube views...  crate-diggers unearthing things and sampling, bringing it back into circulation if often anonymously. The analogue husk of the music is not necessarily the end of the story. Fiction and non-fiction can get reissued or rediscovered by new readers. But reference books - here, it's the very function that has been voided. The internet has usurped the role of the bound ink-and-paper repository of information. 

Before the internet took over, back in the 1990s, one of my main ways of procrastinating - putting off the work that needed to be done - was to pull a reference book off the shelves and flick through it. usually something to do with music. Often it was the Rolling Stone Albums Guide, which had somehow come into my possession - it's not something I would have bought. I'd skim through it and my eye would come to rest on an entry for the Allman Bros, or Bloodrock. Or I'd reread and be freshly bemused by the loathing directed at Sparks, or snort once again at the measly 3 out of 5 stars afforded My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything.

 

Chuck Eddy's "guide" to greatest heavy metal albums was another thing that was good for dipping into.  

Thinking back to much earlier in my life, certain reference works were revelatory. Take The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - a thick, full-color book teeming with illustrations and reproduced covers of paperbacks and s.f. magazines, but also crammed with well-written, informative essays on various sub-genres and scenario typologies, and mini-thinkpieces by some of the great writers in the field (there's a terrific one by J.G. Ballard on the cataclysm novel).  

The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction was a present I asked for for my 14th birthday, or maybe it was Christmas 1977 - I'm not sure.  Another present request was a pictorial dictionary - the one below. See, I fancied being able to recognise and name things like, say, all the different parts of a shoe, and to know all the different kinds of shoe as well... basically have at my command the names of appliances and tools and vehicles and garments and plants and creatures and ... every kind of object and substance in the world. 

However although I never got rid of it - and recently was reunited with the book after years of it languishing in storage -  I have never once found myself using The Oxford-Duden Pictorial English Dictionary.  So I still couldn't identify the different bits of a shoe or name many types of footwear.  I guess there's still time... 

Among my late father's effects were a number of reference books, including Who's Who and Debrett's Peerage. But they were all too yellowed and crumbly to welcome into a home. I particularly regretted that his copy of Brewer's Phrase and Fable was not in salvageable shape.  But of course, if I ever did need to know the origins of an idiom like Hobson's Choice, or "sent to Coventry", there's always the internet.

Still, perhaps there remains some demand out there for these kinds of work in solid form, use that is still made of them. 

Indeed recently I was hired to do some consultation on a music encyclopedia (it just occurred to me I have no idea if it is ever going to exist in paper-and-ink form or is just going to be available online, through subscription). I also contributed a few entries. 

Back in the 1990s, I did some things for Encyclopedia Britannica. The entries can be found online, credited to Simon C.W. Reynolds - but they have been updated by unknown hands, so after a certain chronological point in each entry, the style - and the opinions - are no longer mine. (Of course, they were probably not meant to have discernible personal style or a non-objective perspective in the first place). I don't know if any of these entries ever made it into the book form of the Britannica. Obviously I quite fancied the idea of being in this gigantic set that door-to-door salesmen used to flog to families who saw knowledge as aspirational, a form of status.  

Then there's the Spin Alternative Record Guide, where being opinionated was valued, although there was also an emphasis on encyclopedic comprehensiveness (every last release by an artist had to be at least listed at the top of the entry and graded -  but ideally mentioned in the entry itself, even if only passingly). There was also an element of  faux-objectivity maintained for the grades awarded each recording (we as contributors were instructed to be restrained with our 10 out of 10s...  but the editor was noticeably generous with his own favorites). 

People of a certain age have testified what a lifeline the Spin Alternative Record Guide was in those days just before the Internet took off - especially if you lived somewhere remote. For there were no easily accessible sources of information or guidance when it came to left-field music.  But beyond that the Guide was something to read for the pleasure of reading. The contributors were the best in the American business at that time - and they were expected to be stylish and individual rather than restrained and quasi-objective. 

And there are other reference works that count as literature, guide books where the compiler's personality suffuses every sentence. Most famously: David Thomson's A Biographical Dictionary of Film. A flickable feast of perceptions and descriptions to savor, sat right alongside gluey globs of facts (every last film a director made, an actor starred in). 

I also love  Have You Seen...? -  DT's twist on the 1000 You Must See/ Hear / Read Before You Die format. I'm always blown away by the way DT deftly threads together background stuff about the making of pictures (money, the process of a script coming into being, disagreements over casting, conflict on the set) with aesthetic responses, zooms into details of scenes or performances, where a movie sits in the arc of a director's work, meta-thoughts about the nature of cinema. Here, reference and reverence, usefulness and ecstasy, coexist.  

As long as I live I won't forget this line from his Blow Up entry.

"As long as I live I won't forget the breeze in the trees in that park"

Winging its way through the post, a little Christmas present to self.

postscript

Just remembered I recently got sent this attractive-looking and impressively detailed listening guide to   genres of British popular music in the second half of the 20th Century - 

Home-grown Sounds, Far-out Visions, conceived and written by Richard Costa with design by Leo Cooper.  If you are stumped for a stocking filler (in the case of this large format book, stocking distender) for a music nerd, this is an ideal candidate. 

magazine as time machine

" To Truly Understand the Past, Pick Up an Old Magazine" -  Brian Dillon in the New York Times writing about the way that reading old magazines (his examples are a 1984 issue of The Face and a 1965 issue of Vogue) immerses you in history in a way that dissolves the inherited and calcified ideas of what a decade or epoch was actually like. It's a battle between "edits" - the original selective version of the then-present as captured in that issue of the magazine, versus the edited-down version of the era that comes down to us through a gradual winnowing into hardened cliches and stereotypes, stage after stage of nostalgic retrospection and generalization. 

"What surprises me now in the pages of The Face: There are just the tiniest hints of the British miners’ strike and the swelling unemployment that are convulsing the country politically. And not a single mention yet of AIDS; in a Wrangler ad, a model’s speech bubble announces, oblivious: “I’m Positive.” In these magazine pages, it both is and is not the 1984 of my memory."

Dillon describes the way that everything about a vintage magazine - not just the obviously notable, signs-of-the-time identifying articles, but the adverts, graphics, listings, etc - is like a plunge into the (almost) raw material of an epoch. 

"When research takes me offline to libraries and archives, or (better) into the depths of a dusty eBay find, I can’t stop at the magazine or journal pages I was looking for; I want to read everything, from masthead to classifieds. Old magazines are cheap time machines, archaeologies of collective desire."

This is where my head has been at for a while now - at a certain point, I got far more excited by and interesting in gathering up ancient print music magazines than old records. Here's something I wrote in an essay for The Wire around the time Retromania was first published:

"Shopping for secondhand vinyl: I can’t be alone in too often chancing on an intriguing record and then being halted just shy of purchase by the thought: “Hmmm, I can probably find this on the Internet for free... save myself $15... do I really need another record cluttering up the house?” Digiculture has here damaged a multifaceted set of pleasures: the thrill of the hunt, the risk of taking a punt, the tactile delight of ownership.

"Curiously, revealingly, my crate-digging lust is shifting to another analogue-era object of desire: the vintage music magazine. Now and then on a blog you’ll come across a download link to a zipped file of scanned pages from an obscure fanzine or periodical, but for the most part these yellowing bundles of ink and paper have yet to undergo the fate of dematerialisation/dissemination that’s befallen almost the entirety of recorded music. Part of the sudden allure of old magazines is, I’m sure, that they retain a scarcity value that records have forfeited (at least in terms of pure sonic information: the physical records obviously retain potent fetish appeal in terms of packaging, the period flavour of the design and the label, etc).

"But there is also a more elevated aspect to the attraction. Packed with uncommon knowledge, these vintage magazines provide the kind of information that’s hard to find on the internet owing to the particular way its archiving system is structured. Online, you can uncover a vast amount about an artist in terms of diachronic trajectory (discography, biographical arc). Much harder to reconstruct is the synchronic context: what was going on at the precise moment in time of a record’s release, whether in terms of the genre in which the group operated, the general state of music culture, or the political and social backdrop. A musty, yellowing 1970s copy of NME or Melody Maker, Creem or Let It Rock, is a precious capsule of circumstantial evidence: reviews and features about contemporaneous groups, but also record company adverts and the graphic design and typography, which ooze period vibe. You can’t fully understand the impact of glam rock without a sense of how drab and style-less regular rock groups looked then, of how visually depleted the whole media environment was. Likewise, the stark angular minimalism of post-punk groups and record covers derived its salient edge from juxtaposition with scruffy Old Wave and Stiff-style pub rock. 

A time-slice of history, stubbornly analogue, the vintage music magazine in some sense resists the decontextualising vortex that is netculture, that endless end of history that never stops churning. "

Actually, nowadays you can find a lot of whole issues of vintage magazines in pdf or online form - there's a list of repositories in the side bar of my own vintage music writing blog Pantheon.

Dillon again: 

"Carry on reading, however, past famous names and images that seem most of their time, and you find the past does not look or sound as you imagined or recalled.... Of course, you might come away from such pages smirking at the fashions, assumptions and ambitions of the past — or with a nostalgic ache for its objects, textures or habits of speech. But also a sense that the past is never the past of present cliché, any more than our present is purely itself, entirely made of the self-celebrating now." 

ArchivFieber (death by data)

Here's a piece I wrote -  for the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel - tagged to the Find the File symposium   that I participated in last week in Berlin. 

I boldly, even rashly, tried (using internet translation machines in the absence of any knowledge of the language) to come up with a bunch of German-wordplay headlines myself. Among them were "Delirium von Dateien" and "Dasein und Dateien" (yes I'm afraid that is an attempt at a Heidegger joke). The newspaper came up with their own headline and I'm sure that was the correct decision. 

There is a longer version - about three times as long - of this piece which I may well post here at some point.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 

In 1975, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida published a slim, dense book titled Mal d’Archive. It would be lying to say I understand all of his typically abstruse argument, but what struck me immediately and stayed with me is the brilliance of the title phrase as rendered in English: archive fever.   I imagine it looks and sounds even better in German: ArchivFieber.  

The word impacts me like a miniature poem, distilling the essence of how many of us live our lives nowadays. Since the launch of broadband internet, a mania for cataloging, list-making, documentation  and commemoration has enveloped our culture – particularly affecting music fandom and consumption, but not limited to that region by any means. The total recall and instant recall enabled by search engines means that we live in a proximity with the cultural past that our ancestors would have found inconceivable. Open-access archives like YouTube, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, and Discogs are somewhere between a library and a labyrinth: you could get lost in any one of these for a lifetime.

ArchivFieber and “retromania” are interchangeable concepts really: you might say that one of the main symptoms of catching the retro-virus is coming down with ArchivFieber.  And the malady has made me a sickly being, whose memory is tattered, whose arms and fingers ache from daily races back and forth across the internet. I get temporal whiplash oscillating between different pockets of the past.  Like a practitioner of “check list tourism” I can barely retain any after-images from the musical museums and sonic monuments I’ve visited.  I’ve tried to cram too much in. I don’t want to miss out on anything, so I end up just barely experiencing everything.

Archivfieber is a transitional affliction: it’s particularly chronic among those who grew up in analogue-era conditions of cultural scarcity and have only partially adapted to the digital abundance. People – such as my children – who are digital natives don’t have the same compulsion to keep and collect: they might bookmark favorite things but they feel no need to own the MP3s. People from my generation grew up inside that gnawing need for more music than you could then afford to buy or to copy (given that blank cassettes also cost money). That’s how come an individual with my particular mix of curiosity, wide taste and sheer greed ends up with thousands and thousands of hours of music stockpiled in an external hard drive, vastly more than I could hope to listen to even once during the remainder of my time on earth.

People predisposed to obsessive-compulsive disorder could get just as out of hand in the analogue era, of course – trawling into their homes unmanageable quantities of vinyl recordings, books, etc. But the digitization of culture – through its removal of the limitations of storage space and the disincentives of cost – causes the mania to balloon to grotesque degrees. The fact that it is out of sight, compressed into the miniscule cubic space of a computer, laptop, or phone, conceals the disgrace from other’s eyes, but it does not alleviate the squalor of the cluttered soul. 

For sure, rampant music-libido is a form of curiosity and pleasure-seeking, and in that sense belongs to the category of life-affirming Eros. But something about the internet’s effects on music consumption habits pushes into the morbid zone of repetitious and near-automatic behavior.  There is a neurotic aspect to archival drive: a denial of mortality. “We buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them,” said Warren Zevon, adapting a maxim of Schopenhauer’s. The same applies to records and MP3s.

So far, I have only discussed the anal-retentive aspects of music consumption in the age of overabundance: the residual impulse to collect.  What about the “anal-expulsive” – the people who are compelled to share and upload? In some ways, this is more mystifying, the motivation for these manic sprees of generosity (an artists’s entire discography laid out on a blog for the feasting - a gift to complete strangers). Although I’m vastly more a taker than a giver, I too have felt this archivist-sharer impulse to digitize rare things– cassette recordings of pirate radio broadcasts from early Nineties London, B-side 12 inch instrumentals that no one else has yet thought to upload to YouTube.  There is a vague feeling of virtue attached to these acts of unofficial archiving. But also a neurotic completism: you are correcting sins of omission, filling in gaps in the historical record

How does the metastasis of online amateur archiving affect music itself? In two areas: the listening experience of fans, the mentality of musicians. Giving that time is finite and we all have other things to do, fans confronted with a surfeit of choice -  unlimited listening both in terms of current music and the history of recorded sound– must listen faster, or listen while doing other things. Nowadays, anybody with access to wi-fi is in the same position as only music critics and deejays - who were sent things for free – used to be. So they listen like critics and deejays: playing something once and never returning, making snap judgments after partial listens.  They give things partial attention: listening while doing the kind of multitasking that computers and phones not so much make possible as enforce.

As music streams into our lives like a mere utility such as electricity or water, people come up with tactics to “re-enchant the commodity” (which of course is no longer a commodity, but price-less and therefore increasingly value-less). Bloggers set themselves tasks where they listen to just one album for a whole week, or attempt to digest an entire artist’s oeuvre in a one giant bloc of listening. You can turn the internet into a sort of sedentary, stay-at-home substitute for the record shop, “browsing” its virtual racks and discovering things you never knew existed. You can recreate the thrills of scarcity by fetishizing the impossibly obscure, pursuing either the absolutely (and deservedly) forgotten, or the exotically remote. There are blogs dedicated to the state record company releases of folk music from various Soviet republics, to  African dance pop of the 1970s and 1980s that was only ever released on cassette and never reached the West…

As for the musicians, stuffing their sonic guts with an overly rich and various audio diet, well, inevitably they excrete a maximalist music whose aesthetic I term “glutted and clotted”.  In these overloaded circumstances, it takes tremendous spiritual strength and aesthetic rigor to fend off the inundation of influences and create any kind of distinctive sound-identity.

This stubborn mettle is also essential for critics and historians, not just of music but in any field.  The archival overload makes over-research irresistible. To be a historian or a writer of a non-fiction book today involves an inverted version of Hercules versus the Augean stables: a gathering in of masses of shit which must then be cleared away almost entirely. Researchers  have to summon the ruthless will to consign details, incidents and characters to historical oblivion, forcibly imposing a shape on the material.  We see a version of this steely will to narrativize in current affairs: the rise of meta-journalists like Seth Abramson, whose role is not to do original reporting on Trump, Russia, Mueller et al,   but to process and organize what is already out there in the public domain, constructing timelines and connective threads that rescue events and disclosures that have already slipped out of the public’s short-term memory.  They used to describe journalism as “the first draft of history”, but figures like Abramson are annotating and abridging what would otherwise likely be illegible and indecipherable to future historians.  The dark side version of this drive to create narratives amid chaos is conspiracy theory, those secular demonologies of causation. Indeed paranoid schizophrenia has often expressed itself through a mania for archives, esoteric knowledge, and grandiose system-building. 

If we’re adapting poorly to the vast and immaterial info-world we’ve built, it’s because for millennia the human sensorium was oriented around immediate surroundings and the present tense. It’s really only been a little more a century in which recordings (phonographic, photographic, cine-video, etc) have existed. In just a couple of decades, individual access to archives has become freakily enlarged even as the archives themselves have expanded astronomically, while the scope for personal self-documentation and self-broadcast has likewise swelled to be almost limitless. Yet we still have the haptic and present-tense orientation bequeathed us by evolution. Is it any wonder that our nerves are shredded, our sense of ego boundaries and memory grow blurry and tenuous, that personality disorders proliferate? 

As we say in England, you can have too much of a good thing.

retrodance

Random Access Memories hovers at the perfect convergence point between Retromania and Energy Flash. Here's my New York Times piece on how Daft Punk fell out of "digital love" and down an analogue time tunnel .

Featuring cameos from Giorgio Moroder, Nile Rodgers and Paul Williams....

Nostalgic both in sound and in theme (songs about lost futures - "Giorgio By Moroder", "Contact" with its sample of the Eugene Cernan, the last man to set foot on the Moon's surface - songs about memory and loss like the gorgeous soft-rock/AOR Todd Edwards-sung "Fragments of Time"), Random Access Memories seems to be a deliberate attempt to turn back time.  It's consciously conceived as a near-total flashback to analogue modes of being. Not just to the methodology of pre-digital recording (live musicians, etc) but to the promotional strategies, the cultural economy of anticipation and delay that characterised the Analogue System

Even Daft Punk’s business strategy could be construed as a throwback. When their contract with Virgin expired several years ago, they could have self-released their own album to their huge fan base via the internet, as Radiohead did with In Rainbows in 2007 and My Bloody Valentine has with m b v earlier this year. But instead the duo signed with Columbia, the most major of major labels, which Thomas Bangalter praised in the interview as “the first record company, the inventor of the 33 rpm record”.  Comparing the record business in its Seventies and Eighties heyday to Hollywood’s studio system, he sounded wistful for the era of  “sonic blockbusters” like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Off The Wall, albums that everybody heard or at least heard about.  “Pop culture is the monoculture,” he argued.  “Today the only monoculture is brands.” Using the marketing muscle of an entertainment conglomerate like Columbia/Sony, Random Access Memories  tries to swim against the historical tide of popular culture’s fragmentation into niche markets and micro-genres. 

in this interview with New York jungle stalwart DJ Dara of Breakbeat Science shop fame, he discusses with Village Voice's Michaelangelo Matos, the problem of cultural overproduction in a digital era:


"I'm not necessarily crazy about this whole digital idea, and the fact that anything can be released. I'm firmly of the belief that just because you can release a tune doesn't mean you should. I do miss [having] A&R men to weed out the mediocre music. Because there's no overhead involved in releasing music anymore, the bar has been lowered substantially. There's a lot of music out there that's OK, but it wouldn't have been good enough to have been pressed on vinyl. 

"When people say, "[This track sold] 200 downloads on Beatport in two days," my question is always, "OK, you got 200 people paying $1.99 for your tune. How many of those people do you think would've paid $12 or $15 for it?" It's easy to get people to pay $2, but would they pay $12? Because that's what it would have been a few years ago—they would've had to if they wanted it. I think that the overhead barrier definitely made sure [there was] a certain standard. There's always been bad music. But I think there's less bad music when it costs money to put it out.

"People say, "This barrier's been broken, there's all this incredible music that can be discovered now that wouldn't be discovered before." But I see it the other way around. I see that the really incredible music is being buried in an avalanche of mediocre music. [laughs] And it gets harder and harder to find it.

"Often, I'll be on Beatport and I'll just give up: "I cannot listen to any more bad music that is right up there next to really quality stuff." What happens is, I just end up going to the same artists that I've known all the time, rather than trying to check out new people, because so much of the new stuff that I check out . . . I'm not saying it's terrible, but there's nothing that makes it stand out. It sounds like a million other people."

Yes, indeedy --  in the transition from the Analogue System to the Digital System, the DIY principle has run rife -- it is now almost completely unchecked and undaunted by any reality principle ie. the costs involved in the materiality of solid-form culture-objects that must be first manufactured, then physically transported, then physically stored both by stores (shelf space being limited) and by individual collectors who are limited both in terms of cash and their living space....   all that filtering that used to be involved, simply because releasing a record required investment either by label or by the release-it-yourself artist...  what seemed anti-aesthetic (a cold-hearted financial calculus weighing up outlay and outcome) actually had incalculable aesthetic side-benefits at every step of the process

without these filters, checks, impediments, disincentives, discouragements, and yes, gatekeepers too...  we are "free" to roam, increasingly confused and demoralised and with our appetite fading, through an impenetrably dense yet flattened cultural landscape, in which the great is buried by the good which is smothered by the pretty good which is flooded by the not really good which is engulfed by the really not good