Listen to a nice video:
This lovely Brazilian musician, Rossine Parucci, sings with our choir. He’s finishing his advanced studies at the Great Desert University and soon will return to his family, home, and promising career in Brazil. He has a fantastic tenor voice, a talented man all the way around. We’re going to miss him a lot, all of us having come to love him during his time here.
So it goes.
This morning I got a bug in my proverbial bonnet: MUST CLEAR OFF DESKTOP. MUST GET SIX-FOOT SHELF OF BOOKS OFF DESKTOP!
For as long as I’ve worked off a small conference table elled against a big old six-drawer desk, I’ve kept a row of reference works atop the desk, within arm’s reach: Chicago, APA, MLA, CSE, and AP manuals, Webster’s, Roget’s, Larousse, Harper-Collins’s Spanish dictionary, plus a three-ring binder holding a printout of my rolodex.doc file. And assorted miscellaney.
All very handy…except when they flop over and threaten to slide to the floor, which they do several times a day.
I tried to keep them in place by gluing some of that sponge-rubbery shelf liner, the stuff that looks like one of those anti-slide mats you put under an area rug, to the bottoms of a couple of metal bookends. This worked for, oh…about thirty minutes. Soon the whole lash-up was again flopping over to the east or the west, depending on which book I pulled out.
Today they flopped their last flop.
In a decluttering frenzy, I pulled everything out of the three-shelf bookcase across the room, damn near choked on the clouds of dust, moved the case goods, vacuumed up the heretofore hidden dog dunes and dust bunnies, rescued part of a picture frame that fell off the wall and slid under there months ago, cleaned the shelving, and shoved the thing back in place. Piled up books into mounds: some for M’hijito, some too precious to toss (why?), and some that have gotta go.
I find it difficult even to contemplate throwing out a book, let alone actually doing the deed. What is a book, other than an icon of our culture, a capsule of human intellect to be cherished and preserved and handed down to the next generation?
Okay, well, what indeed? A dust-catcher, that’s what.
My lifetime book collection, which fills walls in three rooms, used to be a working library. When I was writing actively, early in the Internet’s dawn as a cultural icon of its own, I used my reference works, my nonfiction, even the novels and short-story collections, all the time—every day. Now, though, I hardly ever crack a book. When I need to look something up—which is still all the time—I google it or go to one trusted site or another. On the rare occasions when I do have to search out something in hard copy, I barely have the patience to sift through an index and scan my eyes over pages of print to find what I’m looking for. It seems so clumsy. So…tedious.
All right: the decision made. Some of the stuff has gotta go, to make room for the occupants of my desktop.
What to throw out, what to keep?
The Paul Mace Guide to Data Recovery. Out
Frederick Turner’s Of Chiles, Cacti, and Fighting Cocks. Seminal, without a doubt. Out
Judy Jones and William Wilson, An Incomplete Education. (Barnes and Noble 10% OFF!!!!). Fine bathroom reading (why hasn’t it been in there?). In.
Elementary Basic. Out
Turabian’s Manual for Writers…4th edition! 1973. Out
Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal, eds., Thus Spake the Corpse. Just the thing for my son’s library. To M’jihito.
Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect. Dare I throw out a seminal postmodernist? I dare. Out
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature. {grumble} There’s a limit, I guess. In
Chicago Manual of Style, 14 edition. The 15th resides on the desktop, and it’s out of date! Out
Howard M. Zachar’s A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. Why haven’t I read this?… Hm. Eight hundred and eighty-three pages of ten-point type, that’s why. Possibly of interest to M’hijito? Possibly not. In, provisionally
Land of Enchantment: Memoirs of Marian Russell along the Santa Fe Trail. Hm. Liberated from the Arizona Highways library that time when its finest editor, Merrill Windsor, decided to do a little decluttering of his own. Never got around to reading it. I should read this. In
Even with more In than Out, at the end of an hour two and a half shelves were completely cleared. And clean. This created plenty of room for the desktop collection, and then some: enough space to stash the laptop, too! And to move the big Spanish, French, and Italian dictionaries out of the closet (to be replaced therein by the Anglo-Saxon and Latin dictionaries) and into the little bookcase. Hot dang!
The desk still isn’t free of all clutter. Several piles of paper remain for me to plow through. The stuff grows like some sort of vertical, leafy fungus. Two file folders full of paper are sitting on the desk while the negotiations with the insurance company continue—today I had to dig out the deed to prove to the guy that I actually own the house free and clear…he was about to write a check to me and to First Horizon, a long, long-ago lender.
Tomorrow, though, I’ll get it shoveled off. For the time being, though, it’s 10:30 at night, and I’m going to bed.
Running low on music? There’s more!
And check out this pair:
Never found this stuff in my library. 😉