AudioShocker

Have I slouched into some kind of every-other-week pattern with Culturology? It would seem so... As usual, though, I immediately rise to my own defense (though I have no excuse for missing last week, other than the fact that I was busy hosting a visiting poet in Miami), but I feel pretty bad about it. Since Neal's been busy and skipping his Monday posts, I suddenly have realized that maybe my contributions to Audioshocker are actually important (and with Time Log: The Web Comic (official story sub-title coming soon!), coming 'round the mountain, my contributions will certainly be more notable), and I should really keep pursuing these articles, rather than letting Culturology fade off into the sunset.

I do think I'll do another Summer of Booklove reading club this summer, so I'm officially accepting recommendations or requests for books to read (my own reading habits tend to take these big swings away from fiction--I'm currently in a 5-month-long span of not really reading any novels (though I've been unsteadily chipping away at Ellison's Invisible Man for most of these five months (the book is amazing, and I'm glad to finally be getting around to reading it, but for whatever reasons (again, these kind of fiction droughts that I got through are rather obscure to me), it's taking me months and months to actually read it all). Usually what happens during these spans is I start to get all self-conscious and wonder if I'm finally caving in to contemporary culture and not reading books anymore, and then, once the fiction-blockage clears itself  I read a bunch of novels real fast all in a row, and feel better again about my ability to read. So maybe it'll be book-blogging the summer months that facilitates that pattern this time around.

Speaking of books, I've also been having the interesting experience recently of greatly liquidating my book holdings. Having so many books (mostly paperbacks, incidentally) strikes me, now that I'm post-grad school as being this kind of awful grad-school thing where, even though I would like to claim that I'm above such thing, it meant something to have all these shelves of books, most of which I'd read, on display in my apartment (which one can then imagine transporting to the claustrophobic confines of some professorial office at some small liberal arts college where everyone is impressed at how well read one is). So, the obvious remedy is to get rid of all those damn books.

I'm about to be donating the remainder to a local library, but the first step in reducing my holdings was to go through and just select all the books that I didn't care about at all, then to more thoroughly go through and get rid of the books that I knew I was never going to read ever again. Pretty quickly, I amassed a pile of books on my floor that amounted to many many shelves worth. Then I went through the books that didn't make the cut, and wrote down the ISBNs of the ones that looked like they might be worth selling on the internet. From that list, I wound up posting around 40 books on the internet, many of which I've now sold (making a couple hundred bucks in the process). Then I brought a few of my (also grad-school(ing/ed) friends over to see if they wanted any of the books I was getting rid of. At first, they were shocked that I would do something so drastic as to get rid of my books (and, come to think of it, I think  I had a similar reaction a few months back when Nick announced that he was getting rid of so many of his comics (many of which I wound up with)). But once they picked through them, there were very few that they actually wanted.

Which is part of the interestingness of this phenomenon: as soon as the books were off the shelf and on the floor, they lost all of their value. The remaining books, which none of my friends wanted, and weren't worth selling on the internet, are now going to be donated to a local library, which hopefully be able to find some use for them. I haven't yet found myself missing any of the books that I've hosed, and really wonder if I ever will. Seems doubtful. It isn't precisely a cathartic exercise either though; mostly I just get this sense of satisfaction at making my self-image slightly less douche-y (slightly more cathartic was my recent sale of my half-stack (for approximately 88% of what I paid for it seven years ago), but maybe that just feels that way because I've been living off that cash ever since).

Before the cull, I had 14.5 shelves of books. I'm now down to 7. Not too shabby. Which is also to say, I've still got a shit-ton of books in my possession, but it's a much tighter collection, and more practical feeling, since it's mostly books to which I will probably actually return (or books that I still intend to read). I've also been going through the process of trying to get a rid of a bunch of my records too, in a similar way, to get my collection down from two crates to one. And would like to do the same with my CDs, but they're kind of lost-thing at this point, since I don't have any of their jewel cases, and no one wants CDs at this point (though I guess people could take them, rip them onto their computers, and then just recycle the disc?)