On books and libraries

I re-organized my library last night. I divided it into a couple major categories: fiction, art and architecture, literary criticism, political theory, and science. I then tried to thematically organize within sections: polemical works like Towards a New Architecture were placed next to works like Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, not next to my biographies of Louis Kahn, Rembrandt, and Da Vinci. I had some trouble grouping Walter Benjamin: architecture or lit crit? I also had difficulties subdividing fiction. Classical lit (Caesar and Thucydides) shouldn't directly abut the modern and post modern (Kafka or Pynchon). I tried to keep the Americans together, Thoreau and Keruoac and McPhee seemingly more aligned than Nabokov or Dostovesky. I think my collection, as I've grown older and moderately more selective, has solidified in some ways. I don't have the broadest net of fiction, for sure. I have authors that I like. I have 2 editions of Gravity's Rainbow, partly because I love it, partly because it is the greatest post-modern novel, partly because I started collecting Pynchon in high school ( Crying of Lot 49 and V and then reading Vineland and Mason & Dixon and sneaking his short stories (especially "Entropy") from the Norton when I was bored during English class). I have most of my history books stored at home: history of the British Empire, Classical and Roman history, considerable survey of the Cold War and Nuclear Doctrine. My newest collective urges are towards memoir (U.S. Grant, W.T. Sherman, E. Shakeleton, C. Darwin, B. Franklin) and late retrospection. I've been dabbling in magical realism (Marquez, is there anyone else?) and memoir, lately, and I have some foreign novels (there's more to the diaspora than Rushdie) and of course a steady diet of Supreme Court decisions (working on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld[.pdf] right now, in fact) but I wouldn't really say I've been reading anything that's grabbed me.

What's the point of re-organizing a library, then? It lets you know what you have, and what you don't, it lets you see the connections between what you have, it lets you see if you have any obvious holes, it provides a thematic sense of what is valuable and interesting. This is valuable, obviously, because it also forces a confrontation with the physical particularity of the collection, the different sizes and hefts of the books, their distinct smells, memories of reading them, memories of where they used to be, in a book box, or on a different bookshelf, in a different room. Some of the books I have are old posessions: my rather dog-eared copy of Hamlet, which I sourced from The Owl over at Bryn Mawyr back when that Frank Furness mansion was a rare books store, my copy of The Great Gatsby, first read in high school in 1996, copy of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality from my sophomore year, Williams, read formally thrice, sprouting post-its like an old potato, the copy of Gravity's Rainbow that is the same edition as the library copy I read in high school, 1996, even though I bought it in Seattle, used book store right by UW. Some are brand new: I picked up these two superb, economical, essays by the late, great, Susan Sontag, I bought Tom Wolfe's new journalistic take on the psychedlic '60s (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), I'm going to read Daniel Leatherbarrow's work on the importance of siting and construction of dwellings, Uncommon Ground, I want to read Nabokov's short stories, and, well, much more.

When you really get down to it, books make me happy in ways that nothing else does. I enjoy film, to be sure, but it isn't the same. I find television (tee vee) frustrating, empty, and sadly repetitive, the slow parceling of shows between (very) occasional commercial interuptions. TiVo is freeing, insofar as it shows you how swift shows are, purged of commercials, but is also a re-affirmation of the necessity of television. So then there's reading, the active repose, individual and private action in an increasingly hectic world. So I propose to read more, and to write more, and to eschew television, (as much as possible), because television is dull, repetitive, and banal.

Sometimes, though, we feel dull, repetitive, and banal. I'm not self-important enough (although I do have a blog, ha ha, but seriously folks!) to imagine myself immune to this. I just need more time for reflection, time for more honest contemplation (though that is hardly a recipie for anything beyond methane, pace Nietzsche) for more consideration of "we knowers, we ourselves." I ask this question again:

We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers, we ourselves, to ourselves, and there is a good reason for this. We have never looked for ourselves, - so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves?

That all may be so. In any case, there's a lot in draft that is heading down the sluicegates. Cancer drug discovery. Adaptive re-use. The questions of balcony decoration in condominiums that are visible from my work. Illness as Metaphor. Some film reviews. Keep reading, then, and I hope there will be something interesting, at least occasionally.