The All-Seeing Eye of Google the Great, Cont.

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I argued, in comments, the other day that my piece on 21st century fandom and music collection wasn't nostalgia. Here's an interesting counter:


Well . . . in a way, you ARE talking about nostalgia: The frustration-turned-sweetness of a memory that, at the time you were a boy wracking your brain over that fragment of a song that you knew you had heard but no one else seemed to know, coming to seem, after a while, like a dream, or like a legend. And I say "sweetness" because, after all, you hung on to the memory of that--the search as well as the fragment--all this time. As Emily noted down-thread in her quoting the Phaedrus, the ability to write, preserve and access information makes (collective/communal/tribal) memory less necessary, and there's a sadness in that fact. And, politically, a danger (though, as your posts on the moonlight-and-magnolias reading of the Secession make clear, nostalgia can be dangerous, too). 

I'm enormously grateful to the 'Nets for providing me access to music I otherwise literally never would have known existed, much less heard, even here on our pretty-good NPR station. (And not just jazz or alt-folk or ambient, but music from West Africa, fado from Portugal, etc., etc., etc.) But I have yet to feel nostalgia over a successful Google search. I still have clearer memories of trying to explain to pop-loving high school kids what Little Feat sounded like as I clutched Waiting for Columbus to my chest after just having spent waaay too much money for it but glad I had.

I get this. I guess what I want is some exploration of what changed and what we lost--if only on an emotional level. I believe that "loss" is interesting in and of itself. So I'm very interested in, say, how Howard University thrived during segregation, when it had a virtual monopoly on the black intelligentsia. I'm interested in the NFL before the advent of free agency, when you could follow a player throughout his career on one team. 

But I don't want to get trapped into arguing that the world was better under segregation, that the NFL was better when the labor force lacked bargaining power. I don't want to get locked into a substance-less romantic conservatism (small "c.") 

The past should be interesting for its own sake, on its own merits. It should not be shoe-horned into a database for solutions to our complicated present. The past can be literary. It need not be a think tank.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore -- not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-'90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

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