Books

I've written about our household library before, I'm sure. It's still growing. As Ms Che was collecting her MFA in creative writing she bought dozens of books of poetry, but since they don't take up a lot of room, the bulk of them hardly groans on a single shelf in "her office." The rest of the books, numbering several thousand (I'd say 3.25) are scattered around the house, and some are still in the boxes we transported them in from California. They're in the garage and a couple of storage buildings in the back of the property.

As I've watched some of the renovation shows on TeeVee and looked at magazines and the internet for renovation ideas (our house is crying out for another do over, and we're getting the debt down so we can) I see that books are often used as "decor", props. They're turned spine to the wall, so you only see the page edges. They're covered with pastel colored paper, wall paper, white paper, cream paper, and they're arranged by color on otherwise bare shelves. Or on shelves with scattered bits of pottery or other collections. You don't see titles. There aren't any titles. Books made to be there but do nothing except take up space. They're not to be read, not to be browsed; they're to be looked at, glanced at, blankly stared at.

There was a period not too long ago when people with too much money and not much sense bought old leatherbound books by the yard, books in foreign languages that had beautiful bindings, books with no content just beautiful bindings, books ancient and decrepit that couldn't be read because the pages were falling apart, but the bindings were beautiful, and they filled their shelves with them. And then there was the fashion for hanging wall paper with images of full bookshelves instead of having the books on shelves take up valuable room. 

They say books aren't being published, sold, or read any more. "Almost all content is delivered electronically, digitally." That may be true. I don't know. I pulled out my somewhat tattered copy of Lost Horizon the other day and quoted from it on these (digital) pages. I did a quick digital search before doing so, and I could not find the quote I used from the preface of the 1936 edition. There were a couple of truncated versions, but none that gave the whole quote -- which is itself condensed (by the author) from a rather longer conversation between the main character Connolly and the High Lama of Shangri La. Consequently I reconfirmed the notion that the printed book continues to have value above and beyond whatever appears digitally in its place.

A lot of our books are old and not in the best of condition -- somewhat like we are! -- and some I know, like a 19th century Dickens collection, are almost unreadable because the pages have become so brittle. There are some Tom Swift novels in similar condition, as well as a bunch of Horatio Alger books that literally flake to pieces when you open them. It's possible, though I can't be sure, that most or even all of these works are available electronically. The physical book has a presence, a reason for being, but if it can't be read because it is disintegrating, what good is it, really?

Our oldest books, though, books of poetry from 1801 and 1802, are in surprisingly good condition (the pages anyway, the leather bindings not so much.) The pages are rag paper, crisp but not delicate, and the printing is handset and sure. These books will last long enough for the poetry style they present to come back into fashion, say another couple of hundred years.

We have a lot of art books, some of them becoming sought after like early Andy Warhol and David Hockney books. I've been watching The Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix and oh my, talk about temps perdu. It had never occurred to me that Andy had become such a historical rather than contemporary character. The book of his works I'm thinking of (can't find it right now but I know we brought it here) is from the mid-'60s and contains images of much of his work up till then, including the advertising illustrations he did in the '50s and some of his "dirty movies" in the '60s. Acquaintances of ours in Sacramento owned a number of his works, including the famous Marilyn and Elizabeth Taylor silk screens, as well as other less well known Warhols. I don't remember now exactly how they acquired them. Some were from a gallery in New York, I think, but I remember vague references to direct dealings with the artist. It may have been in reference to some other artist though.

Many of our books will never be read again, I'm sure, and most of them, I have little doubt, will be discarded after we leave here. Maybe some will be used for "decor", cut up and used for wall paper, or as might need be, burned for warmth. 

Books are said to be out of favor. Unnecessary burdens on modern life. Well, if that's the case.... we might do well to question, again, the value of "modern life."

Around the Place

Order clothing from India, oh India

Suffering so

Oh India.

They come in a big sturdy box, only a week's time, faster than Target's two day delivery which takes a minimum of ten days and quite likely more than two weeks.

A box of sherwani, dhoti, kurta, all of silk and cotton and brilliant colors, trimmed in gold braid and shiny buttons and intricate embroidery. Fascinating. Unbelievable. Where did this come from? Who made it? How did they manage to do it so quickly and so well?

Oh India.

Order a book from a bookseller in Indiana, oh Indiana

Suffering so

Oh Indiana.

Book goes from Indiana to Las Vegas to Salt Lake City and now sits in Albuquerque out for delivery sometime tomorrow. Or later. Eventually. Only 10 days since order placed.

The Life of the Buddha, Wake Up! Yet another Kerouac to add to the growing pile. 

I wonder what he had to say.

Suffering so

Oh Kerouac 

As he writes of himself, Ti Jean.

C'est vrais, c'est lui.

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Trees have been losing their deadwood, day by day, branch by branch. Slow, methodical, somewhat tedious work. Samu. The lower branches are mostly done now, the higher ones will take some time and planning and preparation. The cut and broken off lower dead limbs are mostly destined for the burn barrel where they form a nice fluffy ash and cobs of charcoal, the ash to spread over the ground, the charcoal for later barbecues and such if there will be any.

Birds will miss some of the higher dead limbs when they're gone. Birds perch and poop on the dead limbs and in the mornings they chirp and sing happily. When the dead limbs are gone, they'll find new perches and they'll poop and sing and warble as birds will do. The ravens will come and perch on the very top limbs and caw and call and chitter and yak at folks passing by. "Tok-tok-tok-tok-tok" These ravens around here are very conversational. 

From time to time, flocks of grackle will assemble in the trees. If anything, they are more conversational with one another and with people passing by than even the ravens. Their vocabulary is complex and detailed. They tell one another stories of grackle love and longing and mock the humans underneath.

An owl. A hawk. Another owl. Perhaps an eagle unseen. Woodpeckers. Robins and wrens. Our trees host so many bird varieties, and a few have broken into the house to raise their babies in the attic. Swallows are due back pretty soon. As noted by a friend, "Swallows are damned messy." Well yes. Yes they are.

In late fall and through the winter sandhill cranes spot on our house, one of the oldest if not the oldest in the area. They circle high or low deciding where to land for the morning or afternoon feeding. Usually they take over the stubble field of the farmer down the road, roosting by the hundreds, lifting off, swooping down, chattering among themselves, prodding for grub-life in the soil, nibbling at the stubble left by the farmer for the cranes.

Once we thought at least a few of them would land on our place, they were so close. But no. We had no stubble. They flew on.

"On the Road" -- by Jack Kerouac (The Original Scroll...)

Kerouac's Own Design for the book's cover, c. 1952

The Scroll Version is a lot more fun than I thought the original Signet paperback was when I read it sometime in the early-mid 1960s. It's looser and more open, more visceral -- though that's hard to imagine -- more lyrical, and strangely, without paragraphs, it's easier to read. It flows naturally, weaving a story in and out, and I think you could literally open it anywhere, start reading, go back, circle around, and even read the same passages several times without losing anything. It's that kind of novel. "Whitmanesque" it's been called. There is a linear plot and storyline, but that linearity is only part of the quality of the near-novel. Take it apart and there's just as much there, maybe more. It's brilliant, it's fun, it's sex, drink, drugs and be-bop. Too early, you see, for rock and roll.

I'm old enough to remember be-bop. Way older than Jack-John-Ti-Jean ever got to be, way older than Neal Cassady, the motor of the crazy-car/truck trip that Kerouac took across the country back when I was barely a gleam in my parents' eyes.

Neal Cassady's Bad Boy Smug mug shot 7-11-1944, Denver, CO

Kerouac in 1942, having joined the Naval Reserves. (I always thought he was taller than that).

It was a simpler and more innocent time? No it was not. It was a different time, and unlike "Dharma Bums," which seems very contemporary or timeless to me, "On the Road" is rooted in its time, it is very late '40s-early '50s, gritty and rough as things were back then. I can remember bits and pieces of my own life from the era (though I've lost many memories in the interims of age) and it wasn't a paradise, far from it. "Gritty and rough" is being charitable. It was a world that had been through the most appalling of wars, the most crippling of economic depressions, the most apocalyptic natural disasters. It was a world that had come apart at the seams and was by no means put back together again. But it seemed to them that the survivors had survived the worst that the world had to offer.

It was the Post-War era when so many things seemed possible. And it is the possibility of the era that animates the story and the road trip, the adventure, the re-discovery almost reconceiving of America. It could only have happened because of the hobos who pioneered the paths criss-crossing the country during the Depression when Jack-John-Ti-Jean was just a boy. He must have been moved by the stories, for the travel themes would stay with him throughout the remainder of his life.

"On the Road" weaves multiple travel threads together and clues the reader to how that traveling formed the consciousness of some of the writers and mavens and personalities of the era. They cannot be separated from their perambulations, but I'm not entirely sure how someone like Allen Ginsberg got from New York to Denver to San Francisco. Did he take the train? Surely he didn't hitch-hike or take the bus like Kerouac did. Or maybe he did. He might have. We'll let that question sit for a bit.

I've only just begun re-reading (for me, this is the first time with the Scroll version). So far, it's fascinating and notably clearer than when I read the Signet version...

"Today's wild youth..." you bet

The South Bedroom and the Jesus Room

South Bedroom Alight

Unless we have overnight guests and need a place to put them, we keep the South Bedroom and the Jesus Room shut during the wintertime to save on heating costs and don't open them up unless we need to in the summer time to help keep the rest of the house cool.

Our house is not all that large, but it is large for an adobe pioneer house. It's been added on to at various times by various owners, so it kind of rambles about, with wings and spare rooms and whatnot, and it's not very well insulated among other things, like the finish polished pine floor is also the subfloor in some rooms so sometimes when the wind blows in the winter, the cold air seeps up from below.... There is no central heating or air conditioning, only a large free-standing gas heater in the living room that puts out abundant heat but it's kind of iffy getting said heat well distributed to distant rooms. In fact, we use electric heaters in those distant rooms to supplement the main heater when the temperature falls. There are some portable air conditioners, and we run the one in our bedroom through most of the summer to keep things in there nice and cool for sleepy-time.

The South Bedroom has become another library room; there are books and bookcases in every room in the house except the bathroom, where there are stacks of magazines instead. We picked up two new bookcases at Claudio's in town -- his brother builds them out of scrap lumber and they're very rustic and southwestern and nice -- and we thought that would be enough for the books we planned to put in there, but of course they filled up right away and we had to get another one. A skinny one this time because we were running out of room to put more bookcases. Most of our "good" books are in the South Bedroom, that is the ones that have some special meaning or financial value, the many signed copies, the still nice old ones, and some are kept in a glass fronted bookcase that dates from the 19teens or sometime like that that we brought with us from California. One of those Craftsman pieces that are practically worshiped by subcultures of house restorers. We sometimes stack bookcases on top of one another, so they reach toward the ceiling and we should probably have a ladder handy to get to the books at the very top. Practically every flat surface except the bed has stacks of books as well... We'll need to find some place for another bookcase some day.

Jesus Room Shrine Corner

The Jesus Room also has books: your missals and prayerbooks and catechisms and whatnot but also some cook-books and how-to books and so on, simply because we didn't have room for them in the kitchen and other places.

The Jesus Room also has lots of paintings and religious statues and icons and so forth. Many of the paintings are paint-by-number items that I picked up at thrift stores, and some of them are quite nice examples of the genre. The Gethsemane picture above the shrine is paint-by-number, for example (if that weren't obvious). Other paintings are what you might call "motel-commercial." They're actual paintings and they're technically very well done, but their subject matter is so generic, whether landscapes or marinas or city skylines, that they seem to be cranked out rather than thought through. They were probably originally bought for motel rooms or offices or set up on easels on tourist byways.

There is a stunning photograph, too, of what I think is a Mormon Temple in Hawaii or maybe it's Mesa, Arizona -- very dramatically lit with pinks and golds and a sunset sky -- I just like it, and so it hangs in the corner away from the corner shrine with all the other Jesus (and Mary and St. Francis) stuff. Wouldn't want to cross contaminate... There's a small carving of St. Francis in the shrine that keeps falling down, and I sometimes take that as a "sign," though I'm pretty sure it happens because one of the feral cats that sometimes gets in the house goes exploring the way they do. Cats love to explore. The shrine is like a cave for them. The items on the semi-altar below the shrine also get knocked about from time to time. That's why I think it must be the cats.

There's a pressed tin Our Lady of Lourdes that all the silver has worn off of so you don't really know right off what it is, and then it hits you and it's pretty cool because it is very three-dimensional and serene; There's a huge gold-framed print of The Last Supper that must have come from a church hall somewhere, but I don't know where. Of course there's a photo-print of Our Lady of Guadalupe from her shrine in Mexico. That's her hiding above St. Anthony peeking out behind the door to the shrine in the photo.

Yes, of course, most of the iconography is Catholic, though there are a few overtly Protestant or Mormon or Orthodox items as well. I suppose some of the crosses could be considered "non-denominational" -- though whether they are or not depends on one's point of view. My favorite is the miniature replica of the San Damiano Cross, the one that allegedly spoke to St. Francis in the ruined chapel of San Damiano in Umbria below Assisi, the one that told him "Francis, go, rebuild my house..."

There are "oriental" paintings --*ha ha*-- of the Paint-by-Number kind but nothing, really that be-speaks the Buddhist light behind a lot of this stuff. Except for St. Francis. Who I think must have been a veritable "Dharma Bum." And thus was himself a Buddha.

Nevertheless, we keep the Jesus Room and the South Bedroom shut during the winter and don't open them unless we need to in summer so as to save on heating and cooling costs.

Must be our practical natures.

I'm kind of ticked though because I wanted to go to the Spanish Market at the Santa Fe Plaza today, but I'm too lame and can't really get around for long enough or well enough to make it enjoyable; that and the heat of course. We're having quite a heatwave, the last couple of days in the mid-upper 90s (which is high for here) and it's uncomfortable to be outside, especially if there's little or no shade. It would have been a chance to get together with Nicolas Otero, a remarkably serene santero whose works are beautiful and spiritual and who illustrated several of Rudolpho Anaya's recent children's books -- "How Hollyhocks Came to New Mexico" and such. But not this time. Not today.

On the Resurgent "Great Man Theory" and Sarah Harrison's Harrowing Heroism

One of the most interesting factors of the current series of crises afflicting the human species and the globe is the resurgence of the Great Man Theory of socio-political operations.

Now, I've never been much into the Great Man notion, though many, many people are. They seem to believe -- sincerely -- that the only way out of our predicament is through the agency of a Great Man, and they go to extreme lengths to identify and promote likely candidates. They also interpret history as if only the actions of the Great Men of the past mattered. It's a pernicious concept in my view, one that leads to authoritarianism at the least, totalitarianism if taken to a logical conclusion.

The Great Man, of course, could be a Woman; there may be a lot of lingering gender inequality, but when it comes to Leadership, women are now thought to be almost as capable as men. Almost.

Recently, Jesselyn Radack produced a somewhat shocking piece of Great Man propaganda and posted it over at dKos. It turned my stomach. But this is the kind of thing that happens routinely when the objective is to drive adherents away from one set of elites and toward another, by fostering extreme levels of truly mindless loyalty toward individuals -- selected by other Great Wo/Men.

Books! -- and Other "Nice Things"

Crespi, "Music Library," 1720

The last few days before The Big Move were a whirlwind of packing and disposing and re-packing and disposing of the huge number of Things (some of them quite nice) we had accumulated over our own lifetimes and the lifetimes of several others.

We were delighted to give things to people who helped or to donate them to charity; but a lot of stuff went to the dump. Now that we're unpacking -- slowly -- in New Mexico, we've been wondering why we brought some of the stuff we did to our home here and why we disposed of some of the things we did (that we now see we either need or would enjoy and use if we still had them.)

Sometimes we laugh over what's "lost," while sometimes there are real -- if temporary -- pangs over nice things we "should have kept" but didn't or couldn't due to lack of space.

We hadn't moved in many years, but prior to settling down a couple of decades ago we were moving constantly, several times a year, so we'd pared our stuff down to essentials that we could pack into a station wagon and (sometimes) a trailer and head to our next destination. We could move most or all of it ourselves without additional help and we didn't need a truck -- or, except briefly, did we need to put things in storage for later sorting and disposition.

But once we settled, we started accumulating (we called it "collecting"), and that accumulation became our main burden during the final days and weeks of The Big Move. What to do with it?

The problem was compounded by the fact that our house in New Mexico was already fully furnished and quite liveable without a single additional item at all -- and it already had its own assortment of "collectibles".

What to do?

Though we gave away or donated hundreds of books, perhaps 90% of what we sent out to New Mexico via truck turned out to be... paper. Books primarily. Boxes and boxes of them. Thousands of volumes. Much other paper as well:  Writings, newspaper clippings about ourselves, scripts by the box full (most by others), ancestral documents, memories and souvenirs, photographs. There was a lot of stuff we don't need but couldn't just throw away because it has ID information on it (like SS numbers and such). It would have taken too long to shred it all. So we brought it with us to shred here. (But we didn't have room to pack a shredder!)

As we settle in here, though, we miss some stuff that is now gone, "nice things" that we used all the time in California and could definitely use here, though there are substitutes here for everything that was left behind. In other words, we don't lack for anything. Far from it.

The sense of loss was hard for a while. We had so many "nice things" in California, much of which is now either in other hands or disposed of. But we have plenty of "nice things" in New Mexico. Too much as we're coming to understand.

So part of our task since we've been here is... getting rid of stuff. Paring down. Simplifying.

Re-conceptualizing our lifestyle.

I think that happens to most people who move here.

Reading List

Thucydides

The History of the Peloponnesian War c. 433-411 BC

It's a wonderful read, densely packed with too much information and strangely modern insights into the roots of war, the selfish motivations of all involved, the difficulty of maintaining honor under any circumstances and how much more difficult it is under the pressures and deceits of war. That's just to scratch the surface.

I'd been warned off of Thucydides back when I was a student, can only recall reading what seemed to be a totally opaque excerpt in a literature history class that convinced me at the time that the Ancient Greeks were simply too remote from our own Advanced Selves to bother with, and besides, they were terrible writers whose works were almost indecipherable. Feh.

Well. This 1954 translation by Rex Warner is nothing short of magical. The work strikes me much as reading the Ancient Greek playwrights did somewhat later in my education. It's like opening a window, breathing a fresh or noxious breeze, but whatever the case, facing something true about the universal human condition.

Two thumbs up, but be prepared to spend lots of time...

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Jean H. Mariéjol

Philip II -- the First Modern King, 1933

I picked this one out of a used book bin a couple of years ago. It's a first edition that had belonged to a professor at UC Berkeley. His notes and marginalia, written in a tiny, beautiful hand, mostly in brown ink, some written in Arabic, add to the remarkable nature of the work itself.

What's remarkable about it, in part, is its perspective on the Philip and events in Europe during his reign. What we Anglo-Americans "know" about Philip and that entire period of history is almost entirely filtered through an English prism. Philip was married to Mary Tudor, aka "Bloody Mary", who tried to reimpose Papism on Britain after she ascended the throne following the deaths of her father Henry VIII and her half-brother Edward VI. She would die as Queen of England, etc., while married to Philip II, who was at the time styled King of both England and Spain. Though you wouldn't know that from most of the history books. Then Philip would send the Armada against Mary's successor Elizabeth and face utter defeat. Thus, Spain's power was broken, and Elizabeth Regina sat unchallenged atop the mountain, Shakespeare wrote some plays, and All's Well That Ends Well. Exeuent stage right.

Mariéjol looks at the picture from a distinctly Continental point of view, barely acknowledging the English episodes in Philip's reign, and explores in enormous and often bloody detail the situation on the Continent -- in Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, the Low Countries, the Papal States, and details endlessly complex dealings with the Ottomans and North Africa.

Looked at from perspective of the whole scope of Philip's duties, authority, and reign, the English episodes are for all intents and purposes a sideshow.

And the story of what was going on in Europe, much of it the consequence of dynastic interrelations between the Hapsburgs of Austria and everyone else, is a tale of almost inconceivable destruction and bloodshed, monstrous cruelty exercised on behalf of privilege, religion, and pride.

Bad as things were under Spanish rule in the Americas, it was no better, and arguably worse, in Europe.

And this was the "first modern king?" Oh my god.

Fascinating for the insight and perspective it brings to the history of the 16th Century, and for what insight that history can shed on our own struggles.

Two thumbs up but be prepared for the worst that humans can conceive of.

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Mao Tse-Tung

Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung -- aka "The Little Red Book", Peking, 1967

In San Francisco back in those days, China Books and Periodicals over on 24th Street was a destination for all thinking radicals, and for some tourists, too, who wanted to "see for themselves" what the Great International Communist Conspiracy looked like. It was a remarkable place, bright and sunfilled, with extremely orderly displays of periodicals, shelves of books (not a lot of them, though, as I recall), in English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and other languages, and a very... interesting... staff deeply committed to the Revolution (and at the time, the Cultural Revolution as well, also). I think you could even get "Mao Jackets" and caps at the store.

The shop was registered as a Foreign Agent, and I seem to recall a prominent notice to that effect greeting everyone who entered.

It is no doubt obvious that there isn't much Communist literature in my personal library. I have not studied Communist theory and I don't intend to. Oddly enough, The Little Red Book demonstrates why, as did some of the other things I picked up at China Books and Periodicals. I have some copies of "China Today", for example, the glossy magazine published by the People's Republic and distributed to English speaking lands and peoples, and like nearly all Communist propaganda at the time, it was ludicrous. On its face, it was utterly ludicrous, something that should have been obvious to anyone (much as, if the truth be known, "Life" and "Look" magazines were pretty ludicrous, too.) Communist theory had a certain appeal to those who were convinced a better collective future was possible, but the impact of the propaganda claiming it was "Here!" was just the opposite of the intent.

Mao's quotations, even in the context of the times, seem deeply naive on the one hand, and grossly anachronistic on the other. If they seemed that way then, just imagine how they seem now. It is little wonder China has all but abandoned Communism for a highly idiosyncratic nationalist version of Capitalism -- Usually With A Human Face, But Sometimes Not. Mao is revered as a Founder, but his thought, well, the less said about that the better, and China Books and Periodicals of (now South) San Francisco no longer sells "The Little Red Book" -- and the staff would probably feign ignorance if you asked after it.

Ché says read it anyway. You gots ta know.

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Elsewhere I've posted about the seemingly limitless number of books I've collected and perversely hold on to. I haven't added any since Christmas when I used a Borders Gift Card to get me the one new book I was hankering after. I have never counted and have barely organized the books I have, but I estimate altogether around 12,000 volumes, some pretty old (the earliest are two volumes of the "Poetical Register" from 1801 and 1802), some said to be "valuable" (mostly illustrated children's volumes), some sets of encyclopedias from the 1920's, '30's and '40's, many books on art, some on the sciences, certain categories of literature and plays (Shakespeare, Hemingway, Williams and so forth), novels by selected contemporary writers, thousands of National Geographics dating back to around 1907, some religious tomes, including Holy Writ from Islam, Catholic and Protestant Xtianity, the Jooz, some Buddhist and Hindu stuff, the Dao, etc, etc, anthropology and archeology (primarily of the Americas -- though I've got a whole shelf of King Tut books), a smattering of sociology, history of all kinds, travel -- oh my god, the Travel Section! -- and cook books by the hundreds, lots of home improvement and how to books, and here and there a few political tracts and tomes. But not many of those. Too depressing.

Part of the reason for my bibliophilia is due to my sense that books -- as in physical volumes that you can hold and touch and read by flipping actual pages -- are disappearing. They are actual historical objects. And they contain the documentation of historical periods no matter what the ostensible topic is. This is why they are preserved, at least some of them, through all the ages since writing was first figured out. An electronic book is all well and good (and I have hundreds of those as well), but if we continue to revert as we seem to be doing, there will come a time when those electronic books are no longer accessible to the masses. Either the technology will fail (how many of us, for example, have documents on floppy disks that we can't access or read any more?) or restrictions on access will prevent more than a few Adepts from acquiring the Knowledge therein. So. I keep building my library. With the thought that one day, it will serve a greater purpose than my private interest and pleasure.

On Books

By now, everyone's heard of the Kindle Kontroversy, in which the Amazon folks up and abruptly deleted Kindle copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from users' Kindles because the Orwell copyright holders objected. Poof! Gone. Anyone who remembers Fahrenheit 451 from back in the old days can understand my rationale for collecting and preserving as many books as I have from eras gone by, particularly the period from 1920 - 1960.

Above is a picture of part of our library in New Mexico. Every time I go I try to find more room for more books in our house that is already jammed with them. There are books in every room -- except the bathroom, where there are plenty of magazines instead. And we still have several thousand more books to take to New Mexico over the next few years.

I've stopped buying them in quantity any more; once the count reached well over 10,000, I figured it was time to take a rest from purchases for a while, organize what we have (somewhat) and cull duplicates. While I will cull the duplicates and consider using the books in the worst condition in artistic projects rather than trying to preserve them whole, this is nothing like "deleting" them the way Amazon has done with the Orwell classics.

I've long been dubious of digitizing the printed word and making access to it dependent on the devices that can read the format. Then to take it a step further to Amazon's Kindle, wherein the device is linked to a service, a service which can, quite arbitrarily and without warning remove digital works from the device remotely and at will.

Digitizing has a benefit in the short term in that more people are theoretically able to access works easily. The thousands of books I have collected are not at all easy to access: you have to physically present yourself at my house in rural New Mexico, or you have to contact me somehow and ask me to physically send you a volume, or you're shit out of luck. You can find the volume somewhere else. Buh-bye.

But then over time, you get into the problem of books disappearing. Most of those I have collected in the last few years, for example, have been discards from households, libraries, and so forth. Books that people and institions no longer want for whatever reason: they're obsolete, not in the best condition, they contain erroneous information, they're duplicates of other volumes, or nobody ever read them in the first place, why would anyone want to read them now? I have a lot of text books, for example, from the '30's and '40's -- some with all sorts of interesting theories on psychology and eugenics. Hmm. None of this information is currently in vogue (thank goodness) but to see how pervasive it once was is bracing to say the least.

The instinct is just to discard them all, but I look at them as historical artifacts and a means of understanding some of the reasons why earlier generations believed what they did and did what they did.

These are books that are unlikely to be digitized, but they may be preserved in the flesh as it were by people like me in various places around the country, and in time may become useful historical documents.

I also have numerous volumes preserved on my various computers, and every now and then I wonder idly what will happen to them when the machines in question crash, as they are wont to do, and access to their contents is difficult, costly to restore, or impossible? While I can understand and anticipate that my current PCs and notebooks won't work properly forever, and I'm more or less prepared to lose the contents of the machines if I don't get on the stick and back up everything pronto, that's quite a different thing from Amazon (or some other company) literally deleting digitized volumes from devices without warning and without recourse.

In fact, making it possible for companies to do this -- not just in the literary field, either -- has been a corporate goal for a long time. How to perfectly control individuals' access to and use of all kinds of entertainment, educational, and financial resources and information is the Gordian Knot of our age. Governments try to do it -- our own included -- as do corporations.

The point of having so many literal books on hand is to make that control slightly less possible on a micro scale. If enough people do that -- hold on to their books among other resources from the past -- they preserve part of history, and from that history, learning can continue, whatever happens to the electronic works and world we are so reliant on.

Books largely vanished from the Western World during the aftermath of the Fall of Rome. But many books had been preserved outside the confines of Dark Ages Europe, and it was their rediscovery by Europeans that spurred the Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was a return to learning, and it was made possible because Arabs and Byzantines (among others) had preserved or recopied ancient books and made them available.

No matter how successful digitization is in the short run, we'd do well to maintain libraries of actual books as well...