Books and Music

I jumped on Friendster for the first time yesterday. I'm not sure I get it. I'm not the kind of person who has a lot of friends to begin with.

Howard Stern reportedly was recently talking about how adults don't have friends - that friends are a childhood construct. [I can't for the life of me remember where I saw this; it was a female blogger, that's all I recall. Googling Howard Stern, adult, and friend doesn't give me quite what I'm looking for.] Of course living in Denver I don't get to listen since Howard commented that the high school girls who live here are too good looking to kill.

Anyway, I don't reckon that I will make much use of the service. But as I was reading Melanie's profile, I thought it was interesting that she brought up this High Fidelity quote.

A while back, Dick, Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like. Books, records, films – these things matter! Call me shallow, it’s the fucking truth.

That was a great movie, and that was one of the great truths so succinctly stated. Then this morning I was reading Eric S. Raymond's old blog post about how both selling published books and simultaneously giving them away for free on the internet actually boosts sales at least for certain types of books. These books, termed identity goods, are the kind that you want to own and to display on your bookshelf because they say something about who you are.

My mother has never been able to figure out why my father and I buy books instead of just going to the library. Why buy it when you could get it for free? Subsequently, she can't understand why we would want to keep read books around. If we've read them, why not donate them to a school or library or retirement home? She clearly does not understand this concept of identity goods. These collections say something about our personalities, about our inner selves.

When I go to someone's house for the first time and there are no books on the shelves and no records near the stereo and only a few crappy CD's, I can tell an awful lot about that person. I'm pretty sure I'm not interested in dating someone who does not have at least one room that is cluttered by books and/or music. The pieces that make up the clutter and how closely they parallel or resemble my own collection probably could be correlated to the likelihood of the success of the relationship.

What reveals more about a person than the little things that they enjoy when they are alone? The music we listen to and the books that we read tell far more about us than the schools that we attend or the jobs that we hold.

Jonathan 7/04/2004 10:09:00 AM