"I am not interested in how it thinks"

At the Guardian, Deborah Levy considers the pros and cons of culling one's book collection:

It is true that in the current phase of my life, I have emptied my shelves of many books I have carried around with me for decades. I finally realised that I was not attached to them. Like a relationship that has neared its end, I lived in hope they might reach out to me. To put it more animistically, if these books were speaking to me, I no longer wanted to listen to them. I threw away books I had started, never finished, and I finally owned up to never wanting to get involved with them in the first place. Fiction, in particular, can be boring for the same reasons that make people boring. Its mind is closed, it cannot tolerate doubt, it has no interest in the subjectivities of others, it cannot access the apparently unknowing part of its mind (sometimes described as the unconscious), it is relentlessly cheerful or relentlessly despairing, and most importantly, I am not interested in how it thinks.

(NB I haven't emphasized the Marie Kondo aspect of how the piece is framed because I read Margaret Dilloway's interesting piece on Kondo this morning and do not want to reinforce the patterns of thinking she deplores!

Prospective

It is ironic that the only thing that gets me to do massive and thorough tidying-up at home is the prospect of an imminent departure! However certainly my apartment will be nice and orderly to return to in early February: there is always room for further improvement in the matter of books and papers, but I've gotten a lot of stuff cleared away and effected the traditional end-of-semester expurgation. (If you wait long enough, all papers ultimately can be thrown away!)

I have had a not onerous but fairly long list of things to sort out before leaving, but the mail has been put on hold, prescriptions refilled, cat supplies replenished etc. etc. Will pick up the bicycle from the store this afternoon. Have assembled a lovely pile of books to bring with me: it is my general resolution for 2013 to write less, and though I am hoping January will let me finish two revisions (the style book and an article on the particular detail in life-writing and the novel) and get some work done on a secret project (Moby-Dick is involved!), mostly I will just be exercising and reading, reading on a vast and ambitious scale. It should be glorious!

I have misplaced my real digital camera and my phone camera doesn't provide the click-to-enlarge option, so titles may be obscured, but this will give the flavor of my coming weeks:

Also: next Saturday, bioluminescence!

Tomes

It is a hazard of working on eighteenth-century literature: these are in fact only six books, not nineteen, and in an ideal world I would reread them all over the next couple of days while finishing working on a talk I'm giving on Thursday!  (And where is my 'real' edition of Locke's Essay?  One of these days I am actually going to have to clean up my office in Philosophy Hall....)

Mid-week update

The music is nothing to write home about, but I will link to it anyway because the best word I learned in fourth grade was dendrochronology... (Via BoingBoing.)  This reminds me of my friend Beth Lyman's work on unorthodox play scripts and indeterminacy in scripts and scores.

In other news, I am struck but not really surprised at how many piles of books and papers can accumulate after only one day's teaching....

Evening update

It's difficult to explain how crazy it's been round here; partly I just always feel off-kilter if I don't have quite a bit of quiet time at home, something that's been singularly lacking, and then of course it's the craziest time in the semester...

I finished up two non-school things today that have turned my apartment into a chaos of books and papers (a review and a late-stage supplement to someone else's interview for a literary journal); I got a much-needed haircut in the late morning; in the afternoon it became clear to me that pretty much the only thing I could do was take a nap (they are doing horrifyingly loud facade work outside my apartment, like right outside, but I closed all the windows and doors I could and then put the duvet very firmly over my head and gave myself over to sleep). I slept in a sort of paralysis for a couple of hours; it was probably the deepest sleep I've had for several weeks.

I had a good run this morning, and when I got home from swimming this evening I took an hour to finally tidy up the chaos - recycling all the printed-out drafts of things, stacking library books on shelves, getting rid of old magazines and mail and sorting out the huge detritus of triathlon training. (Triathlon and writing basically have the same effect on my apartment, they introduce significant disarray until things get so bad that a brief lull gives me the impetus to impose my will once more on the random chaos.)

Now I have an absolutely huge mound of student work that must be read tonight; these couple pieces of outside work, plus the usual extra talks and lectures one needs to attend at this time of year, have left me very much behind on marking assignments. But the (relative) tidiness of my surroundings persuades me that it is possible I will actually get everything done in the next week that I need to....

January ploys

Grand Cayman has a truly excellent bookstore called Books & Books, but prices are high and it is simply not an acceptable way to replenish the light reading supply. Yesterday I set foot for the first time in a most amazing alternative, the Cayman Humane Society "Book Loft". It is a collection of books almost perfectly tailored to my light reading needs, as it is overwhelmingly books people have brought here on holiday and not wanted to take away with them again, with a strong British-Canadian-Australian bent rather than centrally USian so that there are lots of things I have not already picked up in US airport bookstores.

This is the first haul, but I am very certain the place will be the source of a good ongoing flow of light reading:

Meanwhile when I get back to New York a week from now I have some massive library-book-returning and office-unpacking to do - I have this awful situation in my office in which I never unpacked when I first moved in last year, it has become in my mind a task of monumental proportions, but I am just going to buy a box of contractor-strength trash bags and go in and ruthlessly purge....