merging and purging

April 14th, 2017

In honor of National Library Week, which is almost over, here is a post about books. Hol and I have kept our books separate until now. But ten years in, it seemed time to organize, cull, and merge them. There were piles of books everywhere, and it was impossible to find anything. It was a big project. For the most part our libraries were very complementary—Hol has large swaths of botany, natural history, poetry, and Jung. I have more fiction, memoir, lit crit, and Freud. But there were a few points of overlap:

In these cases, one of us had to give up a book. I had signed copies of Sarah Schulman’s Girls, Visions, and Everything, and Judith Katz’s Running Fiercely from a High, Thin Sound. Hol had a signed Howl. So we’re giving away the unsigned ones.

For some reason we had three Moosewoods between us. We kept the one with the most notes and food spatters in it. Neither of us could part with our Hero With a Thousand Faces, or A Room of One’s Own. Or The Brothers Karamazov. I never read it, but it’s my dad’s Modern Library edition. Hol read it, and can’t let go of those well-thumbed Penguin Classics pages.

There was one other interesting point of complementarity. I have a boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia that I got for Christmas when I was ten. Somewhere along the line I lost one book—The Last Battle. Bizarrely, Holly, owns one volume of the Chronicles of Narnia—The Last Battle. It’s a slightly later edition, but it fits neatly into the slipcase with the others. A complete set at last.

Postcards from the Edge

April 13th, 2017

The second post-trump episode of Dykes to Watch Out For. It’s up on the site of Seven Days, my local alt weekly here in Vermont. I plan to continue doing these on an occasional basis as a way of staying sane.

decluttering

April 13th, 2017

When I moved into my first apartment after college, in 1981, my friend Stefan gave me this can of water chestnuts as a housewarming gift. I kept moving it from apartment to apartment, house to house, throughout my twenties and thirties. I had a vague plan of writing a comic about it, as the one constant in all that flux, an eternal housewarming gift. It’s been kicking around my current home for twenty years.

Holly and I just did this massive purge of our books. I never thought I would ever get rid of books. When I read Mari Kondo’s “Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” and got to the part where she instructed you to toss your books out, I tossed her book out and kept all the other ones. But after a recent encounter with a hoarder, I can see that I really must let go of a lot of these books which are blotting out the sun. The can of water chestnuts got caught up in the purge. I’m going to open it now and see what nearly forty year old water chestnuts look like. Then I will compost them and recycle the can.