Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from the memoir “Stay True” by Hua Hsu, posted below.

Our prompt was: “When the needle skipped…”

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An excerpt from the memoir "Stay True" by Hua Hsu.

You make a world out of the things you buy. Everything you 
pick up is a potential gateway, a tiny, cosmetic change that 
might blossom into an entirely new you. A bold shirt around 
which you base a new personality, an angular coffee table that 
might reboot your whole environment, that one enormous 
novel that all the fashionable English majors carry around. You 
buy things to communicate affiliation to a small tribe, hopeful 
you’ll encounter the only other person in line buying the same 
obscure things as you. Maybe I, too, will become the kind of 
person who has books like Infinite Jest casually strewn on his 
cool, angular coffee table. Maybe I’ll become the kind of per-
son who seems as if he should have that book but choose not 
to. I spent hours at Amoeba Music, walking back and forth in 
the same few sections (“Rock,” “Indie”). There was an entire 
other wing devoted to jazz and something called world music; 
I looked forward to one day becoming the type of person who 
understood these genres and, by extension the world. One day, 
I bought a jungle 12-inch based purely on a description I’d read 
in a magazine. At first, I thought the record was defective, since 
it was nothing but jittery drums and a bass line that kept mak-
ing the needle skip, Where was the rest of the song? But then I 
realized it was supposed to sound this way, that this bass line was 
a portal to somewhere new, and I couldn’t wait to hear more. I 
started picking up rave flyers at coffee shops and record stores. 
It was electrifying to think about how much more music there 
was in the world left to hear.

Credit: Hua Hsu