“You can spot the vinyl addicts…”
2017 January 18
Any time I read a Nick Hornby novel, I wish I could borrow my friend David Stanley‘s brain for a week. Then, I could understand the full beauty of Fever Pitch! I know my limitations. My brain only gets music, not soccer, so I am left to read High Fidelity, for a third–or is it fourth?–time.
But how can you not love this, even the fourth time:
“You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible purchases in their head (“If I don’t find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to do”), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have wasted looking for something they don’t really want. I know that feeling well (these are my people, and I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a prickly, clammy panicky sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling” (Hornsby 96).
Isn’t that lovely?
(For the record,
1.) I don’t buy vinyl, but I do own above average headphones, so I think I can still relate.
2.) I’ve read Fever Pitch once, but I don’t know if it counts. I bought the novel and Dave saw it in my classroom, and I pretended I had finished it to sound cool; but then I actually did read it, but I skipped a lot of the soccer scenes, and I watched the movie, instead. It was about a girl, right?)
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