Serendipity

Nora’s in the kitchen making pesto from yesterday’s pre-frost harvest, and I’m reading 93 student papers from Wednesday’s class, listening to Pandora internet radio in the background.  The assignment was actually about listening to music as well, so the overall mood is pretty pleasant rather than the grind it might otherwise be.

For those of you who haven’t discovered Pandora, it’s a pretty ingenious internet service that allows individuals to start “radio stations” by naming songs or artists that they like, and then the software goes through the hundreds of thousands of other songs they have and finds things that match your favorites across several hundred criteria.  So every station periodically plays a song you’d never heard, but which you like right away because it’s musically related to your own preferences.

So I was listening to one of my stations (you can have as many as a hundred) and the song Sonho Dourado by Daniel Lanois came on.  I have another CD by Lanois, who’s brilliant, but I’d never heard this particular song until my station started playing it once in a while about two weeks ago.  It’s on the soundtrack of the movie “Friday Night Lights.”  Sonho Dourado is a haunting folk ballad played quietly with deeply distorted guitars; it stops me cold every time I hear it

I could go buy this on iTunes, and have that one song in less than a minute for $1.29.  Seems like a good deal.  But really, what I want to do is to go listen to the whole soundtrack.  If there’s one song this good on it, there might be others.  Or to find out if there’s another version of it on one of Lanois’ own albums.

It seems that iTunes is a particularly modern phenomenon, not in its technological savvy (which is amazing), but in its inexorable urging toward an immediate-gratification consumer environment, as opposed to browsing and finding new things. 

I want exactly this thing.  I want it now.  And then I want to be done.

We do that increasingly with libraries as well, in which the aisles and shelves are replaced in intensity by databases and quick look-ups.  We know exactly the article we want, we know how to download it from JSTOR, and we’re finished.  But I remember when I was in grad school (and even before that when I was a grade-schooler at the Hackley Public Library), how much I learned from just browsing the shelves and seeing what was nearby to the book that I thought I wanted.  I would be looking for something on rural sociology in the Golda Mier Library, and all of a sudden I’m discovering Walter Goldschmidt and immersed in a moral argument on corporate farming that actually has empirical data to support it.

Of course, I had time to do that.  That was my job then, to be curious, to poke around restlessly and satisfy my huge curiosity.  Nobody gives themselves time for that any more.  We’re too busy to learn new things; we can only learn more about the things we already know.