In 2016 I sold a bunch of books. Like, 2,000. This made a small dent in my home library, the thing I’ve been building for most of my adult life like it was the damn cure for cancer. Like it was the cure for something less tangible. The cure for my occasional ennui.
We all need a hobby, I suppose. I have two: collecting books and writing things that, most of the time, never make it into print. The stuff that does tends to embarrass me. This hardly stops me from writing and trying to get the stuff “out there.” After it’s “out there,” like a drunk, I wake up the day after and feel the need to apologize.
The result of 2016—which many of us felt was a nightmare—was, along with the deliberate loss of many books, the first draft of a manuscript. It took two more years to get this sad sack account of losing my dog and selling my books and reevaluating my relationships into some kind of publishable shape, and in 2019 The Soft Lunacy was released.
Since 2016, my wife and I adopted a new dog. Then we moved into a new apartment one door from the last, because I just can’t seem to leave this block. I weathered a few other setbacks and kept myself as optimistic as I am capable of being.
What else? Oh yeah. . . we elected a narcissistic manchild president and a virus (the response to which the manchild president has bungled so spectacularly it almost seems planned) has killed (as of this writing) around 333,000 people in the U.S. of A., my country, the one I’ve been told my whole life is the best in the world. We do love our bullshit, don’t we?
It’s pointless to bitch about anything other than sickness, death, unemployment, or small business closings in 2020. Honestly, I can’t complain about much. I am not ill (knock wood) and I have a job and have been able to work from home since March. I am happily married. I have no children to homeschool. I am rarely bored at home. I like it here. The dog forces me to take walks, and my wife is insistent that I not become a total shut in. I’m managing small bouts of exercise and trying to eat well. I’ve even slowed down on booze. And, after decades of collecting, I have plenty of books to read. It’s like I’ve been planning for this pandemic since my teens, stocking up on printed entertainment in case the grid goes and the electronic devices fail.
Here’s a complaint anyway.
Last weekend, I was relaxing on the couch with J R by William Gaddis and a cup of Earl Grey and my dog on my lap. The reluctance to move my pup, who was sleeping peacefully and looking so adorable I couldn’t bear to disturb him, kept me from getting up to urinate. Eventually I had to attend to the needs every creature must address. I got up to piss.
In the bathroom, midstream, I could hear something. Something like a waterfall. I looked down. No, it wasn’t coming from me, despite being in the act of emptying my bladder. This was bigger than any watery sound I’ve ever produced. This was. . . coming from the next room? I’d better investigate. Of course, having downed two cups of black tea that morning, my bladder wasn’t so quick to empty, no matter the level of urgency with which I told myself to hurry the fuck up.
In the back room of my apartment, a second bedroom we call “the study” as it houses a good chunk of my library, water was pouring in from the windows and ceiling. A lot of water. A rainstorm isolated directly above a couple hundred stacked books. Ignoring the obvious “How is this happening?” question, I scrambled to save the books, quickly realized many were beyond saving but others, those stacked below the top, might be salvageable. Of course, there being numerous stacks, I had to save the more important books first. This being the closest thing to a Sophie’s Choice I’ve ever experienced, I can’t say I acted with anything other than pure instinct. Save The Recognitions by Gaddis—I’m deep into J R and I might want to read the other fat, challenging Gaddis novel someday. Oh shit, all the Salman Rushdie books are getting soaked. There’s no saving The Satanic Verses—fuck, it’s now unreadable. Khomeini has his revenge at last.
I got every damn book out of harm’s way before calling my landlady and asking What the hell? Based on the description of the water’s manner of ingress, she determined it had to be coming from the outside back steps where she has a hose coiled outside her door. It’s been cold in Chicago, and her husband, after trying the hose and discovering the flow was frozen, forget to turn off the water. The weather warmed that morning, and the hose started working. Who knows how long it took for the relentless shower to flood the back wall and penetrate the windows and overhead light fixture? What does it matter—the damage was done. Close to two hundred books are now mildew stinking, warped trash.
The majority of my library is in the living room with a good chunk shelved by the front door and a lot of poetry in the dining room. These are the most cherished books in my collection. Those in the study are hardly what we used to call the déclassé books, more the ones I needed to put somewhere. Not the ones I was getting ready to read anytime soon. All the Bulgakov and Joyce and Flann O’Brien and Beckett and Vonnegut and Italo Calvino and Kafka and Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson and Cabrera Infante books were in the living room. Most of the books published by Dalkey Archive, NYRB Classics, Open Letter, Archipelago, and Melville House were in the living room as well. (Yes, I organize my books by publisher as well as by author.) Some of the better art books were spared. But I lost signed copies of some of my friends’ books. And some gems were hidden in those stacks. When you’re sitting on 6,000 + books, you forget what you own. Sorting through the damage, I rediscovered a few books that I should’ve read by now or would’ve loved to keep. And some books were special to me. Sure, I can replace my destroyed copy of Les Chants de Maldoror, but this is the copy I bought in 1996 after fighting with the bookseller who responded to my request to hold the copy with, “You sure you’re gonna come back for it?” a question so obnoxious I complained. The owner overheard me sparring with the clerk and smoothed the situation by offering me 10% off. So yeah, I can get another copy, but this one conjures a memory.
The memories we attach to books (among other items) are what makes them special. I tried to convey this in The Soft Lunacy. Each chapter was inspired by a book or a literary idea, some underpinning to connect the wayward tales of drinking and fucking up along the lines of what Sergei Dovlatov did in The Suitcase. When the book was finally published, I was happy that— to the best of my ability— I’d made some kind of case for my obsession. And I felt like I could put all the pain of 2016 behind me.
2020 has been worse. Not for me, exactly, but for others, for the country, the world. I’ve managed to stay more than sane in my near isolation, only venturing out when necessary and trying very hard to minimize direct contact with humans. Again, I’ve been fine, but I’m well aware that the year has been rough for a lot of people. There are those who’ve lost family and friends and livelihoods. And then there are those who are not dealing well with decreased social interaction. And there’s been plenty of social unrest for legitimate reasons, not to mention plenty of protest over absolutely silly misunderstandings of the concept of “freedom.”
My hope— and I am not alone— is that we come out of this time better than we were before. Maybe “hope” is the wrong word. I don’t really think this will happen. Cynical again, but the powers that be won’t let go of that power willingly, and if we want to remake society so that it is more equitable, and reform our governing entities so that they are better prepared for true crisis, we have to do a lot more than we are willing to do. That I just deleted “capable” in the last sentence and replaced it with “willing” is a sign of hope, albeit a small one.
It took a pandemic to demonstrate exactly how precarious our hyper-capitalist society is, how close we’ve always been to ruin. Anyone ready to take a good long look might’ve told us this, but why look when we’re all enjoying the spoils? What’s that? Not all of us enjoyed those spoils? Well, sure, but we’ve always been good at ignoring them.
Whether or not we reform capitalism, the police, the government, our system of educating people— really most of the way of we live our first world lives— is yet to be seen. Again, I doubt anything permanent will occur. We tend to forget easily, so as soon as the party starts up again we’ll be back to living outside our means and accumulating for the sake of accumulation and blaming immigrants and the poor when things collapse. But let’s hope not. Prove me wrong, America!
As for my accumulation, I’ve spent the last four years buying books at such a pace I’m well on my way to replacing the 2,000 I sold in 2016. My recent loss of 200 hasn’t hurt too much. If anything, it’s caused me to revisit the question that kicks off The Soft Lunacy: why do I collect these damn things? In the book, I suggested that collecting is a form of control in a chaotic universe. I’m still of this opinion, though why collect books? They take up space, are a pain in the ass to move in bulk, and the titles I haven’t read are a cause of shame, glaring at me from the shelves. It’d be easier to collect coins or stamps. But I’ve always wanted to be surrounded by books, to sense the possibilities in the unread titles, revisit favorite stories and poems, bask in the aesthetics of bound pages, relax in the comfort of these products of intellectual toil. And while this recent setback has reminded me that these objects are vulnerable, the permeance of a book is still a cherished thing, especially in 2020 when so many trusted institutions are going belly up. Stalwart businesses, restaurants, movie theaters, cafés. . . vanishing in the wake of a pandemic our leaders were ill-prepared to face.
Capitalism took it on the chin this year. At least the kind of capitalism I was raised to believe in, the kind that rewards hard work and industriousness and small businesses and independent spirit. Instead, we see that the only behemoths will endure, not to mention triumph. Bezos made out like a bandit in 2020. The little neighborhood bar around the corner? God, I hope that survives. Those indie bookshops that got me to move to the north side? Praying for them.
I did a lot of my book buying this year online. Not wanting to give Bezos a buck more than I had to, I went directly to publishers’ websites. Here are a few:
https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/
https://www.openletterbooks.org/
I also shopped using these local bookshops’ websites:
https://pilsencommunitybooks.com
https://www.unabridgedbookstore.com
https://www.powellschicago.com
My money went directly to publishers and bookshops. And yeah, Bookshop.org is a great alternative to Amazon, but if you really care about helping struggling small businesses, why go through a third party? Why allow any of your money to go to an intermediary?
Buying books became a mission to save indie stores and small presses. I was going to buy books anyway, but now I had a more concrete justification for my soft lunacy. Whatever works.
That 2016 was a lousy year and that 2020 was lousier, and that one year saw Trump ascend to the highest office while the other saw him knocked from it, is not lost on me. 2016 ended on a sour note, at least for those of us who see the president as the representation of the worst qualities of the United States of America. And yes, he’s leaving office, but his defeat came after a long, ugly, stupid fight after four long, ugly, stupid years. I can’t help but see this recent loss of books as (pun warning) bookending this weird time in my life and my country. Perhaps this is the way things will be for now on. Every four years I’ll shed some books and the world outside my door will be strange. God, I hope not. I hope for stability and wisdom and quiet speculation and civil discourse and rational thinking and emotional highs and lows born of joy and sincerity rather than knee-jerk reactions and fear. I hope for what books represent and demand: patience, curiosity, engagement, insight, adventure, ambition, knowledge, challenge, reward. More of that, please, on paper and saturating the collective culture.