Dedication

I continue (to try) to weed. Franny and Zooey, by JD Salinger — I don't remember reading it. I'm not sure why I have it; I mean, apart from it being Salinger, I never felt a particular draw to reading this or any other of his work, no matter how much I love-love-loved The Catcher in the Rye. It's sat there for years. Occasionally my eyes set upon it, and I think I should get round to reading it one of these days.

I start reading on the metro platform the next morning. Inside the front cover is a brief dedication. My heart breaks a little.

love to izia
on her 21st
'lainie

From my best friend, a very long time ago.

We were messed up at 21. And somehow I managed to cast aside this gift she gave me. That is, I kept it, on a shelf, but I failed to receive its message. Or non-message. And this makes me tremendously sad.

We knew there's no keeping a born scholar ignorant, and at heart, I think, we didn't really want to, but we were nervous, even frightened, at the statistics on child pedants, and academic weisenheimers who grow up into faculty-recreation-room savants. Much, much more important, though, Seymour had already begun to believe (and I agreed with him, as far as I was able to see the point) that education by any name would smell as sweet, and maybe much sweeter, if it didn't begin with a quest for knowledge at all but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge. Dr. Suzuki says somewhere that to be in a state of pure consciousness — satori — is to be with God before he said, Let there be light. Seymour and I thought it might be a good thing to hold back this light from you and Franny (at least as far as we were able), and all the many lower, more fashionable lighting effects — the arts, sciences, classics, languages — till you were both able at least to conceive of a state of being where the mind knows the source of all light. We thought it would be wonderfully constructive to at least (that is, if our own "limitations" got in the way) tell you as much as we knew about the men — the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas — who knew something or everything about this state of being. That is, we wanted you boh to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tse and Shankaracharya and Hui-neng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree or the definition of a peninsula or how to parse a sentence. That, anyway, was the big idea. Along with all this, I suppose I'm trying to say that I know how bitterly you resent the years when S. and I were regularly conducting home seminars, and the metaphysical sittings in particular. I just hope that one day — preferably when we're both blind drunk — we can talk about it.

We've seen each other only a handful of times since we were 21. We even got drunk, though not quite blind. We've talked in circles around something essential; we manage to get a little closer to it when we talk with our pens, now our keyboards — a dialogue at such lengthy intervals, it may as well be conducted by message in bottle.

(The conversation started some 10 years previously and is primarily about the nature of happiness.)

By 21, we'd made fundamentally different life choices, and non-choices; talking was strange, but also strangely... unnecessary.

What was she trying to tell me, with this book, when we were 21?

Did she see herself in Franny? Or Buddy? Or was that supposed to be me? She admired the writing, thought I'd like it too.

I read further; I recognize parts. I have read this book. Simply, it failed to make an impression on me. Which makes me tremendously sad.

That's why Franny and Zooey is on my shelf.

Still life

As I've begun to weed, inevitably covers are drawn back, pages are turned, and snippets are read. While this is mostly an act of instinct, a lack of self-control, it is, on the whole, useful to the decision process.

Some books I don't remember reading at all; I just remember liking them. What do I do with those books?

Take for example, the prologue from Tom Robbins's Stll Life With Woodpecker (a beat-up mass-market paperback):

If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.

This is the all-new Remington SL3, the machine that answers the question, "Which is harder, trying to read The Brothers Karamazov while listening to Stevie Wonder records or hunting for Easter eggs on a typewriter keyboard?" This is the cherry on top of the cowgirl. The burger served by the genius waitress. The Empress card.

I sense that the novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3 — although it writes much faster than I can spell. And no matter that my typing finger was pinched last week by a giant land crab. This baby speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard.

"What are you looking for in a typewriter?" the salesman asked.

"Something more than words," I replied. "Crystals. I want to send my readers armloads of crystals, some of which are the colors of orchids and peonies, some of which pick up radio signals from a secret city that is half Paris and half Coney Island."

He recommended the Remington SL3.

My old typewriter was named Olivetti. I know an extraordinary juggler named Olivetti. No relation. There is, however, a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like part of the act.

I have in my cupboard, under lock and key, the last bottle of Anaiis Nin (green label) to be smuggled out of Punta del Visionario before the revolution. Tonight, I'll pull the cork. I'll inject ten cc. into a ripe lime, the way the natives do. I'll suck. And begin...

If this typewriter can't do it, I'll swear it can't be done

How do I discard a book that starts like that?

Weeding

I've decided to weed my books. There's just not enough room.

There is various shelving around the house, for the kid's books, for cookbooks, for colouring books, for board games, for dictionaries and the atlas. But 4 bookcases are mine, and they're bursting at the seams. More bookcases is not an option.

For this reason mainly, as well as a few others, I'm ready to go digital. (Not tomorrow, but I'm preparing.)

Books by some authors I will not part with, such as Calvino, Saramago.

I have duplicates of Douglas Adams, and of 1984. I don't think I will ever read Anna Karenina again; if I do, it will be in a different translation. I'm keeping Bridget Jones's Diary, but not the sequel.

I'm taking each book off the shelf and carefully weighing its worth before sliding it back into position. I am formulating criteria:

Will I ever read this book again?

Really, that one question ought to do it.

The discards are accumulating. But.

But this hoarding of books is an unreasonable compulsion, and it's a tough habit to break. I find excuses.

Did this book have a significant impact on me?
Will I ever have reason to refer to it?
Do I have a strong sentimental attachment to this particular physical specimen (for my notes, an inscription, a memory)?
Is it a book that is exceptionally hard to find?
Is it a book likely to fall out of print and not be digitized? (I will keep the Delacorta books.)
Will I regret having disposed of it?
Should I keep it for Helena's sake, to tempt her, to guide her literary discoveries?

I discarded The Children of Men, but then I created an exception for all books fitting the category of u-/dys-topian fiction (if anything's my thing, that's it), so I pulled it back.

There's the broad category of, umm, "esoterica" — for lack of a more precise, overarching label — (Schulz and Gombrowicz; Breton and Appolinaire; Perec and Pavic), some samples of which fit my criteria, others not quite.

I don't know what to do about The Martian Chronicles — I bought this paperback at a garage sale for 50 cents, after having spent weeks looking for a copy, overwhelmed with the need to reread it, having no idea whatever happened to my own. If I put this copy in the box, will I be able to find it at a garage sale when I need it?

And, seriously, what of the impact on the child? I did not grow up in a home with shelves of books. I relied on libraries and instinct and gifts for literary guidance. For better, or worse? Do I keep Dracula, Frankenstein, Ayn Rand (oh, come on — every adolescent goes through an Ayn Rand phase) just so the kid might "discover" them earlier? Or would she then snub them as her mother's books? If I dispose of them, will they be out there for her when she's ready for them, will she be able to find them, will she know that they exist?

I used to imagine I'd grow up and have a house with library. But life happens, and I'm letting go.