found objects

In case you didn't pick up on the subtext, yesterday's post about how busy I am was (in part) an apologia for not blogging much throughout January and February. What can I say? These things are cycical. I think my blogging energy may have been boosted by the looming prospect of the Academy Awards ceremony next weekend. Those interested will see my predictions on this page sometime (late) on March 5.

It's hard to believe, but I have been blogging for over a year now! I'm not sure that it's really changed my life, but I am impressed that I've kept it up. I feel best when I average one posting every couple of weeks, but I don't think I've ever fallen below one a month. And I've been happy to have built a tiny following of readers and commenters -- it makes me feel good to know that you're out there and I'm sorry if I've left you hanging recently.

I go about my life these days formulating blog entries in my head. When I haven't written in a while, it doesn't mean that this blog is off my mind. Far from it! More than likely, I've been mulling (pun intended) over a subject for a few days, trying to figure out just exactly how I'm going to crack it. I may even have begun a draft that won't be posted until weeks later. Which means that I have a "blog idea queue" in the same way I have a Netflix queue and a book queue. I know I blog differently than many people -- this is not a daily journal of my thoughts or experiences. These little essays are worked out and pondered over, which may make them less amenable to online digestion, but c'est la vie! This blog is not in the same family as those little news tickers that scroll across the bottom of the screen on CNN or FoxNews; it's more like those "Comment" pieces by Hendrik Hertzberg in the front section of The New Yorker -- topical but not immediate, up-to-date but not breathless. I take a few breaths (s0metimes quite a few) before I write.

This motif of a "queue" has been with me for the past few days. I love to think of new paradigms and ways to categorize experience (which is why as a frehsman philosophy student I was so weirdly enchanted by the "catgeories of understanding" in Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, for example). The queue model does indeed reflect the way I think about a lot of different activities in my life. I did want, though, to calrify one point in particular.

There is a very important way in which my "book queue" is different from Netflix and I think it's worth unpacking. I've got a list of books on my shelf right now, waiting to be read during my subway rides: after I finish Edward P. Jones' collection of short stories, I've got Don DeLillo's Libra, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and 1491, a history of the Americas before Columbus, to read. What's interesting, though, about the books that I've been reading recently is that I haven't paid list price for a single one of them: they've been gifts or, increasingly, they've been used books that I've picked up on second-hand book tables throughout the city. My favorite places to browse recently have been along Broadway up by Columbia and on the weekends outside the Starbucks on Astor Place. (The two freckled, pierced and totally hot straight guys who sell the books at the latter location are also appreciated!)

Because I'm not choosing these books at will from a hugely comprehensive database (as I am when choosing discs on Netflix), there's a stronger element of serendipity involved in the selections I make. I'm sort of proud of myself that I've been "subsisting" on books borrowed, donated, or purchased at a cut rate. I've always felt a kind of moral imperative towards thrift and, of late, I've kind of bent my standards when it came to clothes or food. I never was able to buy only used clothes (as I once tried to do) or to shop only at food co-ops. Maybe I should be beating myself up about that, maybe not. But the not-buying-market-rate-books thing has been surprisingly easily achieved, without even conciously deciding to do it.

Acquiring my reading material in this way makes me less prone to posessiveness, too. Having finished a book, I'm more likely to lend it to a friend and not care if I ever see it again, or to donate it to the library at work. It feels nice to have sampled things and decided not to hold onto them, not to have them taking up space on my shelves.

It's also wonderful to experience those little serendipitous moments when you find that book, the one you'd been looking for but hadn't realized you'd been looking for, the one you'd been meaning to read but hadn't set out to find. The other week it was Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts/Day of the Locust. Two novels I'd long wanted to read but ones I never would have set out to buy; and not, it turns out, ones that I particularly enjoyed or want to keep. That volume will probably be given away to someone else quite soon, but I will always treasure the memory of the afternoon I bought it (from the sexy Astor Place guys). I was riding the Q train home above ground across the Manhattan Bridge (easily the nicest stretch of subway on the whole MTA), with the late afternoon sun shining in across the windows, a new book in one hand and some pastries in another (I was bringing those home as a surprise for S who was working diligently in my living room). It felt nice to know that one could rely on Providence to supply the things one needed. To have discerned what it is you needed and then remained open to the possibility that sometime, when you least expect it, that thing would appear.