Tiger Bay by St Etienne (1994) is a criminally neglected album. I found my copy for £2 in the bargain bin of HMV in Oxford. I didn’t expect much when I played it at some ungodly hour. My jaw dropped during Urban Clearway and hit the floor when Like a Motorway started.

Although rooted in 90s dance and heavily influenced by synthpop of the 70s, Like a Motorway has an enduring timelessness (above is the single version, I prefer the album version). “Where does that tune come from?” you ask yourself. It draws a line right back to the distant past. It seems almost medieval.

Then, by chance, you hear this song. Silver Dagger by Joan Baez. You feel your gut-wrench. Is that really the same tune?

Thematically similar, Like a Motorway‘s lyrics even reference Silver Dagger.

Silver Dagger: And in her right hand, a silver dagger.
Like a Motorway: And in her right hand, she clasps a letter.

Silver Dagger was first published in the USA in 1907 and is very closely related to another song, Katie Dear which shares a similar theme and melody (here’s a version sung by a Japanese Country and Western trio). These two, in turn, derive from Drowsy Sleeper, a song first published in America in the 1850s. Here’s a recording I found on YouTube:

In turn, it seems Drowsy Sleeper has its roots in England although I can’t trace its history back further with any surety.

Like a Motorway by St Etienne is timeless precisely because it’s a song that’s always existed. It might have been played with different instruments, but Sarah Cracknell is singing the same tune that a thousand broken hearts have sung for hundreds of years.

I’m not the biggest fan of flying, but I appreciate the opportunity they give me to work. Hours on end with nothing to do but read and write! Over Christmas I had a flight long enough to read the whole of the latest Tin House as well work on redrafting a short story. Such luxury!

Airplanes are a curiously public-private space, like coffee shops or trains. You sit there, engrossed in a book but that cover acts as a beacon to others. Countless times people have struck up a conversation asking what I’m reading. It happened on that flight and we had a great chat about writing. Although you experience the contents of a book privately, the physical book is a social tool.

Next time I fly or am in a coffee shop, I’ll probably take my tablet. I can load it up with books and copies of Tin House, The New Yorker and The Paris Review. I can take so much with me, even less weight. My interaction with the content is as complete and private as before. But the social aspect of the physical book—the conversation starter cover, the coincidental meeting of someone reading your favourite book—that’s gone.

Instead of proudly displaying a jewel from my library, my library has become invisible. A furtive, hidden thing. I wonder what my bookshelves will look like in years to come. Will I even need bookshelves? For various reasons, I lost almost every book I bought between 2001-2011; does this mean my physical library will be frozen in 2001? Walking through someone’s library is to know their mind. To pick a book off a shelf is to ask about a memory.

Sure, I can scroll through someone’s digital book collection. But the physicality is gone. Music has already gone this way. When I lost all my CDs it didn’t matter: I’d already digitised them.

This is not a bad thing. It’s a different thing. I can walk the Earth with less weight. I save trees. I have access to so much more information than I ever had. I embrace change and I love my table. It’s worth noting, though, that we live in a time of seismic change in the way we relate to our personal book collections and, in turn, each other.

(Image by Emgonzalez.)

Possibly the most trite tagline for Jean Baudrillard’s America imaginable.

Both insightful and slap-dash, it’s a highly accessible work. Simulacrum meets the desert. Even though there are excursions into cities, Baudrillard keeps returning to the desert. Hyperreal America is founded on the desert—equally a place of death, of speed, of space, of disappearance.

I felt honored that, on page 50, he wrote about the city in California I used to live in:

Irvine: a new Silicon Valley. electronic factories with no openings to the outside world, like integrated circuits. A desert zone, given over to ions and electrons, a suprahuman place, the product of inhuman decision-making. By a terrible twist of irony it just had to be here, in the hills of Irvine, that they shot Planet of the Apes. (50)

Actually, they didn’t. The fifth film (last in a series that obeyed the law of diminishing returns) Escape from Planet of the Apes was filmed at the university. Not that Baudrillard cares, he’s not trying to give me a history lesson. Some of what America considers important seems curiously obscurantist and quaint (I had no idea Reagan had cancer of the nose). But the majority is filled with eye-opening (if occasionally weird or philosophically odd) perspectives:

The city was here before the freeway system, no doubt, but it now looks as though the metropolis has actually been built around this arterial network. It is the same with American reality. It was there before the screen was invented, but everything about the way it is today suggests it was invented with the screen in mind, that it is the refraction of a giant screen. (57)

I found this one on April 23rd at 5.36pm:

A shopping list, it reads: “Oatmeal, Grits, Rice, Whips [I can't be reading that right!], Turkey, Eggwhites, Watermellon, Ground Turkey, Sweet Potato”

And this one on April 17th, at 1.14pm.

This coffee shop order is really well preserved and written on the back of Kenneth Cole receipt paper.