Arrrrggggh

I probably shouldn't have even opened the door, but I was pretty sure it was in there. My old flute, that is, the one I played in middle and high school. I needed it because I'm on a wicked prog-rock kick right now; and how can I really do that up properly without my old flute to (attempt to, ha) play along with 'Supper's Ready' or 'The Cinema Show'? Air flute is just not going to cut it. Trust me, it looks really dorky.

I won't say I was being brave. After all, I'd been in that closet under the eaves not all that long ago. And there, sure enough, under a layer of shoes, was my flute, yay!

But then my eyes wandered over to the side all innocent-like and THERE THEY WERE!!!



(Press the play button below for full effect.)

Oh arrrrggggh.

Empty Bookcase Pictures

Got my camera back today, so I've been able to get some after pictures finally, though of course I didn't get the befores, and I do apologize. I took these without the flash so some of them are fairly grainy and dark; I ran them through Photoshop but they really don't have to be perfect quality, do they. (I have to say though I am a little suspicious about the camera, even though it works perfectly fine now—when I sent my camera off it had a rather distinct dent in it which has somehow completely vanished; also I got it back with an old piece of masking tape covering the brand name on the front which was not something I put there. Yes, the serial number is the same, but then again it's only on a sticker, not engraved into the case or anything. Odd. But it works, so I'm not really complaining.)

So. Bookcases. In the last couple of weeks I believe I've made four runs to the dump to dispose of books. Behold the nearly empty living room bookcase (what's left are actually ones that are worth keeping):



And the one in the hallway by the phone (the excess and outdated phone books will go with the next batch of recycling). We finally have a space to put vases of flowers where the cat can't reach them (it is a cherished hobby of his to eat cut flowers, then throw them up):



A couple from the piano room. That empty space with the bench and the lamp is not only a space that is now devoid of books, it is also now devoid of the bookcase that was there:





And the last one, on the attic stairs. This is opposite the one that had held all those dusty Nazi books not too long ago:



That's a lot of books that have gone, and a lot of empty space, which honestly I'm not entirely sure what to do with now. But so many of them were musty moldy things, so they would have had to go anyway. I think I am going to wash down the interior of each of the cases that remain, then paint the insides, to seal off any residual mustiness. The attic stairs/hallway I think I'm going to paint entirely, in a color of my choosing, since both my bedroom and studio room are on that floor.

A coat of paint really does work wonders.

Preservation

Well aside from working on the garage with Tara last night (and hopefully she'll post about that, since she has some very nice pictures on her camera of the progress we made, hint hint), I've been continuing to chip away at the musty old book contingent here at the Best Little Hoardhouse in Massachusetts. I've gotten all the books save a single antique several-volume set of The History of Rome out of the piano room, and Tara even took the bookcase that was behind the piano (with Mom's permission) over to her house to use in her library. I'm itching to fix up that Steinway now, since there is now room to play the thing.

That was the last load. This week I took all the ones from the last remaining bookcase in the stairs/hallway to the attic (which tiny space has three built-in bookcases!), and then I started on the living room ones.

The first things to go were a very musty set of Encyclopædia Brittanicas from 1939. Now, I had held onto these things myself as the entries on mythology were actually quite comprehensive, and mythology (Classical at least) is one of those subjects that was fairly well established in even the nineteenth century. The interpretations may have changed, but we don't really know any more of the facts about it (unless new texts have turned up, which usually they haven't). Which isn't to say they weren't otherwise very outdated. Adolf Hitler had a long article in there, but mostly it just said that he is (present tense) the leader of Germany and We Have A Very Bad Feeling About Him. So, no, not very useful.

They were in a cabinet, which I opened while I was considering whether I should toss them too. As soon as I opened the door I started sneezing. That would be a yes. They went.

Other books to go were the interminably old and outdated Life Science Library, one of those Time-Life series that you used to be able to buy in the mail one at a time. This one, which was a few years older than I am (I was just about alive for both the moon landing and Woodstock) had such wonderful titles as Giant Molecules, The Mind, Health and Disease, Machines, and, the one I find particularly annoying as a feminist, Man and Space. That last one is by one Arthur C. Clarke, which, while it gave me a moment's pause, was not, after all, enough to save it from the dump.

Another series that went was the Life Nature Library. The pictures are mostly black and white, the writing is dated, and I can easily find better information and pictures online. Nowadays if I need a photo of a cheetah I can find a hundred in less than a minute. It is not, in fact, entirely unlikely that I won't find live streaming video of some adorable cheetah cubs frisking in a zoo somewhere. Even better.

There is one passage in that series, though, which I would like to remember. It's in the Africa volume, and the poetry of it surprised me very much when I came across it some years ago. I will write it down here, as a way of remembering it, much like taking a picture of something while getting rid of the thing itself, a very useful strategy for de-cluttering if one is worried one might miss the original thing.

The book is from 1964 and is by Archie Carr (who according to Wikipedia was most well known for his work on saving sea turtles). It is about that famous bird from Madagascar, the long-extinct dodo. He wrote:

The dodo was first seen by Europeans when the island was discovered in 1507. One hundred and seventy-four years later the last dodo died.... Because dodos were big, easily caught and fair eating, they attracted ships that were running short of victuals, which ships in those days always seemed to be doing....

Anyway, all that remains of the dodo is a lot of bones and a pitiful scrabble of other relics, which Greenway inventories thus:

"A great store of bones has been found in a marsh, the Mare-aux-Songes, in Mauritius, and these are in the British Museum, Paris, Leyden, Brussels, Darmstadt, Berlin, and New York. A head and foot are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University.... The British Museum possesses a foot, and there is a head in Copenhagen, and a small fragment in Prague." A small fragment in Prague. That really sounds pathetically extinct, doesn't it.

Zoographically speaking, the man-made losses in Madagascar and her neighbors represent one of the greatest, per acre, the world has known. To me, the devastation of these amazing islands would not seem quite so bad if we had only kept the dodo. The ruin of the dodo stands as a symbol of mindless destruction....[N]o extinction by human hands can match that of this gross, inept bird. The passenger pigeon was, after all, a pigeon, and the world is full of pigeons. The extinct Carolina parakeet has kin left in the world, and the ivory-billed woodpecker, in slightly different guise, still chops at Central American trees. But nowhere is there anything remotely like the dodo. It was a fantastically vulnerable species....

A craving for the impossible gratification of seeing, touching, or hefting the sheltered, innocent bulk of a dodo comes over me strongly in my more whimsied moments. I suspect it must come over every man with any time to think. I believe our descendants will have more time of that kind. I know they will have a lot more dodos than we have, to yearn to have been allowed to see.

Archie Carr died in 1987, and so did not live to see that we were wrong about the ivory-billed woodpecker.

And now I can put that book in the car with the rest of them.

Save Yourselves!!!

Came across this little picture today whilst surfing and let out a scream! It's not just me! This is irrefutable proof that National Geographics are evil! Evil evil EVIL!! See how they menace nearly the entire state of Ohio and parts of Michigan and Ontario too!?!?!



Run for your lives, Ohio and Michigan and Ontario!

Well we did our part yesterday. Tara took another several piles of the things, which had been in the upstairs garage, home with her to sort and/or toss. We also went through some books in the garage proper, which are loaded up again in the back of Larry, and which hopefully tomorrow I will be able to drop off at the dump, er, recycling center. Tara took before-and-after shots with her phone, since I don't have a camera. Boy it sure would be nice to see some pictures, wouldn't it? (Hint, hint, hint.)

Gone Gone Gone

Well yesterday and today I started attacking some of my father's books that were still sitting in various bookshelves about the house. Now, I like books, quite a lot, but they have to be good books: ones that actually have some value to them. I mean, I know that is subjective, but they have to have either good pictures, up-to-date information, or good scholarship. The books my dad hoarded? Popular accounts of heroes from the 1930s, semi-sensational war tales, guides to mills of the Hudson River with just a scattering of small black and white pictures inside them, how-to books on taking good photos with few pictures in them (right, don't ask me how that works)—all this popular superficial stuff that was trash when it was new.

So last night I gathered them all up, from the remaining shelves in the piano room, and from the bookcase in the front hall over the phone. I threw them into the back of Larry the Volvo, where they sat a couple layers deep, and today I took them to the dump (sorry, recycling center). So much crap. As I was piling them in the swap shed I noticed that more than one of the books on Admiral Byrd (the famous Antarctic explorer) had Art Deco penguins on the covers; also, it came to me that 'Admiral Byrd and the Penguins' would be a fantastic name for a girl-band from the mid-60s. Or maybe a modern grrl-band, with a punk attitude and raucous sense of humor, preferably with a lead singer named Evelyn (Byrd's middle name, according to Wikipedia).

Anyhow they are now gone, though I am sniffling a bit again having handled them. And again, I apologize for the lack of before-and-after pictures, as I am still camera-less; I know how helpful they are, and, honestly, would love to see some myself. But they are gone now, and there are even more empty bookshelves.

I don't know what we are going to do with those empty bookshelves, though my mother has already claimed the one over the phone ('Go for it,' I told her). The ones by the piano were added in fairly recently, in response to his overflowing 'collection' of books; but they make it a tight fit around the piano. Now, the piano is in a bit of disrepair and isn't actually playable now, as one of the tuning pins sheared off and the dislocated string is affecting others; but I don't, actually, think it is a very difficult repair. And the thing is a Steinway grand, and otherwise a solid piece of work. I would love to be able to play it. Perhaps those bookshelves can just go themselves, and free up some space, since one does need a bit of room to play a piano.

All those crap books, though, got me thinking.

When my father was here he would sit and read those books on a regular basis. I don't for a moment think he read all of them, of course; I doubt there is enough time in a human lifetime. He had a lot of books.

I can't see that it ever made a difference, though. Let me explain.

When I read a book I am changed. I learn something. I acquire knowledge, or wisdom, or a new way of looking at the world; even if I disagree with what is said inside it, it makes me think. Even novels of a fluffy sort (though I tend not to read too many of those) alter me at least a little. But with my dad? As far as I could ever tell it just didn't. He read all the time, yet he learned nothing. He had all these books on, say, Charles Lindbergh, yet I never once heard him talk about him with any kind of expertise. You would think something would get in there. Well, if it did, it certainly never came out again.

Which isn't to say he wouldn't talk about these things. Oh he'd talk your ear off if given the chance—just it was always the same things, either the same stories of experiences you'd heard a hundred times already, or something very general about something he was interested in. If you asked him about, say, the Nazis, about whom he had many many books, on them and on WWII in general, he would just shake his head and say, 'They were very bad people.' I used to think it was because they were just so horrible he didn't want to go into detail, but now I don't know. I am realizing this makes him sound very, I don't know, slow, or something; but I wouldn't say he was. At least I always thought him fairly intelligent.

But he just couldn't change.

Nowadays, he is in a nursing home up the street. My mother brings him his Aviation magazine, and he sits there with his reading glasses on, and she flips the pages for him. From the outside it certainly looks like he is reading. But he isn't, and I know he cannot be, since after the stroke there is little left of his brain, and even before the stroke he was beginning to suffer some dementia.

Strange how so much of him was just a pattern. I don't think he has changed all that much.

Gone

They went away! I can breathe easier now. I don't mean that metaphorically, either.

Today Tara took most of the National Geographics away to her house, to see about integrating them with her own collection. I personally think that's crazy, but, well, that's her business (and her house). My mother took the remaining three piles of duplicates out to her art studio, where they can sit on a shelf out there for years if she likes, since that is her space and it does not affect me, unlike the house. At any rate they are no longer in here, sitting around being dusty and moldy and contributing to the allergies I 'mysteriously' developed a couple years ago.

I'm sorry I didn't get any before and after shots; my camera is rather on the fritz. Lately it's been taking pictures that look like this:



As you can see, not very helpful. (Luckily it's a known problem with one of the chips in it, and the maker will repair it for free, though it's long since out of warranty. They even sent me a pre-paid UPS label to put on it, so I don't have to pay postage.) You'll just have to take my word for it that there is now an empty space on the living room floor, an empty spot on top of one of the bookcases in the living room, and three large empty shelves in one of the bookcases in the piano room.

And I already know, despite my worries about what to do with them, that I won't miss them for an instant.

Now on to the actual books.

Auf Wiedersehen!

I can't get over how useful blogs are. Because yesterday I kept thinking about how I'd like to be able to put another blog post up here at Tetanus Burger. But I didn't have anything to show, really. So I went looking around the house for something to clean. Which, let me say, is deeply uncharacteristic of me. No, I'm not myself a hoarder, but neither am I exactly a neat freak. But I found a residual hoarding spot within the house that hadn't been hit, a bookcase full of my father's crappy WWII books. Including several volumes of Ballentine's History of WWII, which, checking Amazon, sell used for like $2, if you're lucky, and include a book written by one David Mason, who I could have sworn was the guitarist for Traffic. Anyway, out they went! Auf Wiedersehen, old dusty Nazi books!

Behold:



It is such a wonderful feeling to throw things away.