There are weeks when I admire my book collection. Sunlight in the guest bedroom window brightens the Hernandez Bros. hardcovers; a book of out-of-print Joe Bob Briggs essays, $200 on eBay, is right there for me to thumb through; the signed copy of Bill Ayers’s “Fugitive Days” sits awkwardly next to the signed copy of Antonin Scalia’s “Making Your Case.” If I’d been born 10 years later I wouldn’t have built this collection. Same if I’d been married five years earlier. It’s a Ray Bradbury tattoo that covers the whole house.
But there are weeks when I feel like the kid who dad caught smoking a cigarette and is punished by huffing down an entire pack. Book culture has its cope — I’ve seen the slogan “it’s not hoarding if it’s books” on two T-shirts, worn by people who couldn’t possible know each other — but after a point you’re just piling up Stuff and moving around Stuff and sacrificing wall space that could be used for your wife’s perfume organ. You think, “the people who paid for experiences instead of stuff had it right.” You paid for experiences, too, but new books always tumbled into your luggage on the way home.
This weekend, really the final break before the campaigns take over everything, was about organizing the books and getting rid of the ones that passed the Marie Kondo test — I literally picked the bastards up and decided whether I really “loved” them. This process has taken around two years, intermittent, spurred by — in order — disgust with how the place looked, letting friends use the place in the 13 days before their home was ready, prepping the place for a subletter, and merging my wife’s life with my own. By the end of today, I’ll have given away 14 bags of clothes (Hefty 30-gallon strong, accept no substitute), and 10 boxes of books. Giving away clothes is easy — you want to wear the thing or you don’t — and some of the book giveaway came easy too.
Easiest to give away, in order: Damaged books; uninteresting books given to you for free at work; cheap graphic novels you picked up in the cut-out bin; classic books you now have access to as e-books; interesting books given to you for free at work; somewhat more expensive graphic novels. It’s normal to pay for a movie ticket, see the movie, and never see it again, and this is how I had to re-conceive of the graphic novels I’d bought.
Do I regret re-discovering graphic novels in college, when my friend group was into them and there was a nice, curated store full of them (Comix Revolution) that made a perfect study-break walk from my dorm? Sometimes. Now that I’m reading the classic literature I missed on my Kindle, I do wish I’d spent a little less time on mediocre comics. I never spent enough money on them to get embarrassed, but the things take up an incredible amount of space. And if you have a completist mindset — I did, and have been trying to break it — following a few reliable writers or characters can mean filling entire shelves with mediocre work.
Out it went. I’d keep around the first volume of something I liked — Peter David’s Jungian 134-issue “Hulk” run, Brian K. Vaughn’s gyno-dystopia “Y: The Last Man” — and get rid of the rest. I had something on the shelf to check back in on, but when was I going to read these entire series again? (Delphi’s cheap, well-designed Kindle collections of the great authors’ work have driven home how little time I really have to read what I want. Please, nobody tell me anything bad about Delphi.) I’d get rid of minor work by favorite writers unless it was rare and out of print. Maybe, sometimes, it was out of print because it was mediocre; if someone wanted to collect a few of the pieces I reported when I was 24 I’d turn them down. If it was signed, I felt I had to keep it, even though I owned several books that had been signed for someone who, probably in the same position I’m in right now, had handed them to Second Story Books or Half Price Books.
It was hard to part with stories I hadn’t even tried to read; I haven’t moved in seven years, but the sight of something you’ve paid to cart between two or three houses and never opened is depressing. This is where my “kid forced to smoke cigarettes” analogy came in. Before I dropped them at Goodwill or a Little Free Library I quickly started reading these hanger-on books, and figured out if they were masterpieces that deserved permanent shelf-space or move tickets for shows I didn’t need to see again.
What else? We worked, mostly, and gave ourselves a nice Saturday — a trip to buy some furniture, extended into a trip to the Museum of the Bible, which we were told was free, but wasn’t, and cost slightly more a trip to see Elvis Presley’s personal Bible should.
So:
The Best Thing I Read. Not any of this stuff I just mentioned! It was “The Good Soldier,” Ford Madox Ford’s climb inside the rambling mind of an English gentleman in a passionless, broken marriage. John Scalzi’s “The God Engines,” a horror novella in which captured Gods are tortured to power space ships, was the runner-up — there is no way to describe great Weird Fiction without sounding silly, but this was great Weird Fiction. Two all-time opening sentences here: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” and “It was time to whip the god.”
The other reads were for the giveaway pile. “Marvel Romance Redux” was a very Aughts idea — remixing old romance comics with “funny” new plots and dialogue — executed poorly. The Brian Azzarello/Cliff Chiang arc on “Wonder Woman” was the best take I’ve ever seen on the character, better than the George Perez run that served as the original reboot.* Taut stories that had real fun with the inherited mythology, gorgeous art that built its own momentum. But I don’t need to own it forever.
(Cliff Chiang’s Wonder Woman.)
I had a lot of dumb fun with Jim Valentino’s “normalman,” a parody comic about an alien (Norm-L) from the planet Arnold who lands on a planet of superheroes and keeps stumbling into adventures with idiotic take-offs on famous heroes. I’m going to say something stupid: Reading “Candide” prepared me for this. The material Valentino is making fun of is fresher to us, and stupider, than the philosophers and disasters 18th century Europe. But it’s the same overall approach, of a naif encountering people who quickly reveal how ridiculous the author thinks they are, like the The Fanatical Four and the Legion of Superfluous Heroes and Man-Man, a Rastafarian with the power of “ganja breath.” You understand why this was so fun at the time and why nobody’s trying to jam it into the canon.
The Best Thing I Saw. Do you remember how I suddenly got into Hal Hartley, “Godard of Long Island” who made a series of smart, absurd films in the 1990s but hasn’t financed a new once in a decade? Dave’s good taste, confirmed: Criterion put almost all of Harley’s work on its channel, from “Kid” (his thesis film from SUNY-Purchase) to “Ned Rifle” (the conclusion to his “Henry Fool trilogy,” following the lives of a garbageman and his sister after they are upturned by a charming, untalented drifter, which I’m saving til the end).
I had some downtime in between cleaning, reading, and work, so I watched a few Hartleys, none dislodging “Trust” as my favorite. “The Book of Life” was the most formally interesting, Hartley’s entry into a French institute’s millennial film project that also produced the terrific Don McKellar film “Last Night.” Two Hartley regulars, Martin Donovan and Thomas Jay Ryan, play Jesus and Satan, respectively, written to sound exactly like their iconic Hartley characters — “Jesus” is conflicted about the role he’s thrust into, and “Satan” is a prick who uses too many clichés. It was shot digitally, which in 1998 meant it looked immediate and blurry, a good treatment of the most low-key apocalyptic film I’ve ever seen. (The Book of Life is a blue file on a MacBook.) “Surviving Desire” is the only good movie I’ve ever seen about a professor lovestruck by a student. Also, this happens about halfway through.
The Best Thing I Heard: Stitcher shut down before I could finish the Video Archives podcast run, a real shame; the parts I surprised myself by enjoying were the interstitials by Gala Avary, who helped move along conversations that clearly lasted forever by breaking in and talking about herself. (“I LOVE you Brad Dourif!”)
So I listened to “Who? Weekly” instead, and the stupid online arguments over whether Bradley Cooper should be wearing a false nose to portray Leonard Bernstein got me re-listening to Bernstein’s best Beethoven orchestration, which is right here.
*If you aren’t a comics guy: The big publishers of what we now call “IP” characters like to reset their clocks every couple of decades. Perez did it in the 1980s, re-telling Diana’s origin story then slowly reintroducing and rethinking her supporting cast.