Is the ‘repeat’ button on CD players useful for anything other than sex?

Before I opened it, I already knew I was getting my money’s worth from the Massive Attack box set. It’s solid-looking and heavy. I spent half an afternoon listening to it, though, and it has so far failed to live up to its promise of plenitude. (I’ve got three of the eleven discs left.) It’s actually a box set of singles, so remixes make up most of its musical bulk. I knew that in advance. That didn’t put me off, because when worrying about getting ripped off, I revert to high-school buying patterns; those patterns were formed at a time when if a remix wasted your time, it was because it bore no resemblance to the original. If you were such a sucker that you bought an instrumental remix, it came without any proof that it even came from the song you thought you started with. I didn’t mind this time. I was ready to branch out and hear some goofing around.

Joke’s on me! Most of the remixes Massive Attack put on CD singles until about 1995, I can’t tell apart from the original. After half an hour of “Protection”, I realized I had bought the Instructor’s Edition of Massive Attack’s career to date; I’ve had the important points drilled into me, I’ve seen the idea permuted, I’m reading to look knowing while the kids furrow their brows. I know my “Big Wheel” backward and forward, except that nothing quite so interesting as backward tape-loops happens the first half of the box.

I hope something so musically cool happens in the next four years that I’m eventually this jaded about Mezzanine.

At the book store yesterday, the guy in front of me was buying several cheap, used non-fiction paperbacks. The woman behind the counter said “That’s good, the history of Japan.” Guy says, “By this author?”

Unfortunately, she did not respond “No, just in general.”

The book I bought was Love, Etc. by Julian Barnes. It’s been something like ten years (maybe not quite — it was the spring of 1991, but I don’t remember any snow) since I first voluntarily read a book of fiction which wasn’t science-fiction (okay, or fantasy); not long after, I bought my first entirely unfamiliar novel: Talking It Over by the aforementioned Barnes. God, I was hooked right away. I’m trying to remember now whether I had ever identified with a character in a book before, beyond wanting it to turn out that I, too, would be the greatest mage of my generation once I stepped through the dimensional portal. If I did, I’ve forgotten about it now; I must have already forgotten it then, too, given how excited I got that THIS character was like THIS person I knew, and maybe I was like this other one — but no, he turns out to be a creep. And I realized that I’d been fooled, and that I could probably be fooled in real life by the temptation to act like that character.

Reading that Barnes had written a sequel to Talking It Over stuck a knot in my stomach on a recent Sunday morning. The various people I’d associated with Stuart, Gillian and Oliver over the years still existed, most of them having gotten more and more like whoever they were avatars of; score ten for Barnes’ grasp of human nature. The events that had brought me up against them had sequels, too, some of which are still playing out. I’d read the book, though, on the cusp of going from Books That Have Sequels to Books That Don’t. It’s not declasse of Barnes to be continuing his story, just that, within his part of the literary world, announcing a sequel brings the reader up short in the same way as, say, the reappearance of someone who was very important to you ten years ago but who has since left your life entirely.

I wasn’t even sure I wanted to buy it yet (how many hardcovers do I own that went unread until sometime after the paperback edition came out?), but I opened it in the store and read this:

Well, I've changed. Sure. This is all grey for a start.         Can't even call it pepper-and-salt any more, can I?              Oh, and by the way, you've changed too. You probably think         you're pretty much the same as you were back then. Believe me,         you aren't.

It hit me in the stomach again, and I felt like if I didn’t buy it immediately, I’d be postponing my life rather than delaying a transaction. So I did, and I stayed up reading the first third of it.

(Later I learned that the French translation of Talking It Over was titled “Love Etc.” Poses an obvious problem.)

[2004 note: The translation of Love Etc. ended up with the lifeless title "Dix ans apres".]