I won't say that I'm entirely there: I've got a coupla Pelikans I just can't get used to (sold the Mont Blanc), and I couldn't afford a good used standard transmission, so I got a '99 Crown Vic Police Interceptor from the Decalb County Motorpool (they were upgrading to more fuel efficient Chevy Malibus). I'm still saving to get my Well-tempered TT setup and get the old albums out of their cardboard storage boxes.
But in most other ways I'm an anachrophile. My clothes and shoes are vastly thrifted: I can't afford to buy new the good shoes I've gotten twenty-forty years used. Most of my HDDs and all of my main Optical drives are SCSI (the controller U320). Everything I teach is canonical to Survey of English Literature-Beowulf to Blake. And the best new book I've read lately was a new translation of The 1001 Arabian Nights. I write and publish formal verse. To me, the thrills of modernity rise out of Weinmar Berlin, Ornette's free jazz, and the amazing fact that Gram Parsons was around somewhere at just about every epochal stage of the first fifteen years of country-rock.
I love computers, but I'm utterly print-based. I think that's the distinguishing factor that separates me from the tyros--my learned sensitivity to the nuances of text, my obliviousness to the finest nuances of ephemeral electronic media. I'll bet there are lots of older people here who'd say something similar--about the experience of music wrung out of physical instruments, and even the visual apprenticeship of drawing shapes, figures, and 'classical' buildings that was honed for years before they got their mitts on a sampling program, or a copy of Photoshop or Autocad.
I was looking at recent web reviews of a recently released album that I'm fond of--in part because it refers to a nostalgic musical genre, but more because the writer is someone who clearly knows how to read lyrics, and this attention to craft is evident in his song writing. I was stunned by the number of web-reviews in which the reviewers shallowly paid attention to the most superficial aspects of the songs and failed to recognize that the writing's thrust was completely opposite to what they proposed. It was just that they heard groovy summer music, and that's what they figured the bothersome lyrics were about.
) age, or do you think there are legitimate reasons for hangin' with the old and allegedly outdated? I know there are at least a few others here who swear by these things, so thoughts and impressions would be much appreciated. Is it just an affectation to insist on having a clutch or a pen you can refill from a bottle? Or are these things still practical and sensible given the alternatives?
