Here we are, back on the balcony, the dinner invitation having fallen through...
Margaret, in a comment on not-the-real blog asks:
I wish the ABC had sent me a box of 50 books, although a handy house extension to fit them in would be more useful. I await that post with interest, as the book situation here is out of control - how can I throw them out, when a piece of my soul resides in each?
Have you noticed how houses in real estate ads have no books, and if you go to an open house all the books are gone?
Hmm, well, nicely put but I don't know that a piece of my soul resides in each of the 50 books sent by the ABC (yet), tho beggars can't be chosers.
I plan to write some time on stuffology, but for now, I will just concentrate on the sub-category of books, a sub-category that does not plague all stuffeurs but is plaguesome nevertheless.
In my time as a blogger, I have been party to some conversations about the ways in which bloggers organise their books. (Of course, bloggers have books in the way that they have cats.) I began by organising mine by colour (mmm, a lot of orange, thanks to Penguin) and height; I graduated to alphabetical ordering after visiting the abode of Whitebait and Dr Dr Fraulein. I'm backtracking to this, because there is some merit in the idea of books as decorative, tho there also seems to be a tipping point where they simply turn into clutter.
N.B. the answer that Margaret gives to her second question in a later comment:
Nah, real estate agents tell people to get the books out because they look like clutter.
Sobering, eh? In fact, they probably are clutter. I had to come to terms with this when I left teaching, and was no longer in possession of an Academic Book Case in an Academic Office (well, it was kind of a mud-brick academic institution, but we did at least get a book case and an office with a door that locked for our troubles). This necessitated buying two new small bookcases (one of which I assembled wrongly; smaller so I could still see the canvas hitherto hanging on the wall) and then fashioning a makeshift student-like bookcase from two planks and some bricks to shelve the burgeoning collection of CNF books in my bedroom. In fact, there are bookcases in every room, except the laundry, and now another 50 books from the ABC to house.
I don't know where I'm going with this, because I have no real answer to The Problem of Books (a bit like The Problem of Pain or The Problem of Evil -- not!) Part of the problem is that many of the books I own I've only read once, and I'm never sure whether I'll read them ever again, so why am I holding onto them? A hippyish/new-ager person (i.e. an older Gen-Xer like me caught in a bandwidth difficult to categorise) (or so I like to believe) once rudely drew my attention to how unecological old books were -- how much space, paper, etc, they took up, and encouraged me to give up clinging to them sentimentally. After all, there are:
- Books one could never part with because they're deeply equated with some supposedly meaningful moment in one's life, even if it was Long Ago and Entirely Stupid. (e.g. Mates at Billabong)
- Books one could never part with because they're deeply equated with some supposedly meaningful moment in one's life and probably are of Eternal Cultural Significance (e.g. A Passage to India)
- Books that don't interest you much that you hold onto because they might be good syllabus material if ever you get a teaching job again (e.g. The Kadaitcha Sung)
- Books that someone who's now dead gave you that you would feel shitty about dumping (e.g. A Praise Anthology of Short Stories; A Junior Science Encyclopedia)
- Books from a long-lost moment in theoretical thought that no longer interests you and never really did (e.g. An Apprenticeship in Liberty; even An Introduction to Jacques Lacan)
- Books of obscure poetry that someone thought you might like (e.g. The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood)
In terms of note buying any more books, there is one possible answer, acc to Amazon, and that is a Kindle. I was optimistic about this solution for a while, especially since I live in a remote area and am used to internet ordering, but now I'm skeptical. I read a New Yorker article the other day that fulfilled my worst fears: (a) Kindle 2's screen is hard to read; (b) Not All the Books in the World are available on Kindle -- not by a long shot yet.
Another solution is: stop buying books and use the local library. There are even books in Alice Springs library I've never read.
And of course (c): read the shipment of ABC books over the next year.
In relation to t'uther painful matter: culling (let's be up front). Up until now, most of this concerned concealing the books one felt were too Daggy for Public Display, except for a Painful Moment during the Dissolution of the Budgewoi Holiday House, in which one was asked to bin all the books (yes, in a giant wheelie bin) that one did not think they could take back to Melbourne in their Macpack. Ah yes; mother is a pragmatist.
So where were we? Perhaps some kind of mathematical equation is in order to deal with the question of the Culling of Books, like:
If O = Obscurity, D = Design, S = Sentimentality, U = Potential Use Factor, X = Inescapable, Unquantifiable Soul Factor, De = Decay, A = Antique but not something useless from Ridiculous Past Theoretical Paradigms, and C = Cullability then:
C = O + [ D X S - {U + tanX x De}/A]
That's as far as I've got in this two-bedroom townhouse.
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