iPod, Therefore I Am.

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Author: Castle, Terry1

I am a pod person of some six months standing. I filled up the twenty gigabytes on my first iPod within three weeks and now have two iPods and fifty-nine days of uninterrupted sound, should I ever require them. And like every iPod user I've met, I am exhilarated by the way my darling prosthesis--a small white digital appliance, equipped with miniature headphones, that can store 10,000 songs--allows me to pretend that I'm not myself, that I've gone abruptly and enthrallingly into the mind, heart, and even lungs of another person.

What is a "favorite song" after all, if not an extraordinarily fetishized fantasy world, an auditory objective correlative for private, otherwise inarticulate or unmentionable aspirations? Air guitar is a relevant notion here; likewise karaoke. If only for the duration of its playing, the iTune can seem to emanate, phantasmagorically, from some funky Neoplatonic recording studio, a Mussel Shoals or Abbey Road of the mind. You may be familiar with these sorts of fantasies: For unaccountable reasons my colleagues at an English department faculty meeting have handed me a Fender Stratocaster and begged me to play. I crank it up and, astonishingly, effortlessly, I sound just like Eric Clapton! Everyone is hugely impressed--I knew Terry was an eighteenth-century scholar, yes, but I never realized she was such a righteous rock guitarist tool--etc, etc. etc.

In one or two clicks, I can range across a century of recorded sounds, changing sex, race, nationality, language, and vocal and ethical registers at a whim. When Vanni Marcoux sings "Madamina," from Don Giovanni, I'm the greatest Mozart singer ever. When Fred Astaire sings "The Way You Look Tonight," I can dance exquisitely down staircases. When Billie Holiday sings "The End of a Love Affair," I'm so fucked up from drinking and drugs (I'm only a few months away from my premature death, after all) I can barely start, let alone finish, my song. And when Minnie Wallace sings "Cock-eyed World," I'm just a big rough sweaty gal having a hell of a bad day.

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By Terry Castle

Terry Castle, the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, is the author of Boss Ladies, Watch Out! and the editor of The Literature of Lesbianism.