The Wily Filipino

Unpacking My Library.

Right now I'm reading this excellent -- no, fantastic -- book entitled It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff by Peter Walsh. No, it's not exactly about organizing your clutter -- it's about examining your emotional attachment to objects and why you still hang on to them. And yes, it sounds like a self-help book, despite my misgivings regarding the genre. But it absolutely works. The only reason I haven't finished it is that I'm going on a decluttering rampage at the apartment right now.

Two things though: you have to be disciplined and ruthless. If that heirloom is so important, then what is it doing inside a box that's in the back of a closet? Give it the respect and honor it supposedly deserves, or throw it out. Haven't worn those clothes in a year? It's on its way to Goodwill. Saving those clippings / ticket stubs so you can put it in a scrapbook later? Later = the future; what about the present? Too busy? Then why is it OK to paw through the piles on your desk for ten minutes looking for a document? (That's me.)

I can't throw that away; it's too expensive! One of my friends who shall remain nameless has been paying $85 a month to store crap he hasn't looked at in three years -- that's almost $3000 worth of "too expensive to throw away" right there! (Getting rid of my clothes were easy, though my T-shirts are increasing. The CDs I've been steadily culling, though I could be doing it at a faster rate; the DVDs are kind of hopeless right now.)

And so I took a good look at my books, wondering what I was really going to use in the future, wondering if I'd ever assign them to students, and thought about how academics are supposed to have good libraries -- no, are supposed to surround themselves with books, and I figured that most of those books will be in the library anyhow, and I already had good detailed notes on them, and so...

Not shown: two bags of garbage, two boxes of clothes, ten shopping bags full of papers and magazines to be recycled (my landlady will have a fit), and three more stacks of books, raising the total to almost 300 books in total. All the above books to be driven to Moe's in Berkeley tomorrow.

Those with good eyesight will spot Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice and Foucault's Madness and Civilization side by side -- and look, there's Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart peeking out from underneath! Is that Anthony Giddens I see? A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's The Andaman Islanders? And underneath it, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment? A beat-up copy of Tristes Tropiques? (Just so it's clear, Distinction, Structural Anthropology, and Discipline and Punish are staying.) Habermas, Goux, Derrida, Jameson, and Baudrillard won't be darkening my door again. But Freud stays. All of Freud.

Gregory Bateson's Naven, even E.E. Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer, too many books that I bought because they were "part of the canon" but never got to read -- gone. Almost all of Malinowski's out-of-print books -- except for Argonauts of the Western Pacific -- into the pile. Only Coming of Age in Samoa and an excellent copy of Growth and Culture are all that will be remaining of Margaret Mead. Victor Turner, however, is staying at the Wily Filipino's apartment.

I love James Ellroy, but am I ever going to read The Big Nowhere or L.A. Confidential ever again? "But it's part of the collection," the devil on my right shoulder protests. No matter -- out it goes. Some time when I'm retired, won't I go, "Darn, I used to own Infinite Jest and never read it and now I want to read it and now it's gone and I can't believe I sold it?" Nope. (I'm keeping my copy of My Dark Places that he signed for me though.) And there's that Roddy Doyle trilogy I'm never going to get to, and that John Irving novel (in hardback, alas, which Moe's probably won't buy). Calvino, Lovecraft, Ligotti, De Lillo's Underworld and Vollmann's The Royal Family, both of which took me months to read -- out the door.

And three science-fiction books I loved, but will probably never read again, are going into the pile: Valis, Snow Crash, and Dhalgren. (Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, John Crowley's Little, Big, and my signed copy of Octavia Butler's Bloodchild aren't going anywhere, however.). The same goes for -- oh, the Poeta will scream blasphemy -- Mike Carey's Lucifer collections. The Sandman's staying, though!

I'm keeping most of the Philippine stuff -- pretty impossible to find here -- but there are probably a few titles that I have no earthly use for (which I bought "just because"), and so they're going too. Almost all of the Southeast Asian ethnographies get to stay, as do the Asian American books -- at least until the next culling.

So yes, it feels good to get rid of stuff -- but the real victory is in not allowing the stuff to enter your house in the first place.

And so some grad student in the East Bay, poking around at Moe's sometime this week, will be the (un)lucky beneficiary of all this clutter. If I'm lucky. Just don't ask how many books I have left.

Posted by the wily filipino at July 19, 2007 01:32 AM