But Reading: The Bookshop

Moving: walked 1.7 miles

House: ZOWIEE!

25 June 2000: Usefulness

Friday, the day before our fifth wedding anniversary, we got our new bedroom furniture: a bed, bureau, and nightstand. RDC liked the furniture because it was Craftsman or Mission or quarter-sawn white-oak or whatever. I liked it because it reminded me of Phoebe's furniture, warm, bright, with a three-dimensional grain. When I got home, RDC had wrestled the boxspring and mattress onto the bed and put Hamlet on the shelf of the nightstand for me.

Also on Friday, the slow leak in the ceiling my study developed into a fast leak. Friday evening, therefore, we developed our plumbing skills: RDC figured out how to solder copper pipe and I figured out how to watch and hand him stuff. Friday night, finally, we went to bed.

The bed squeaks. I have not had creaky furniture accompaniment since early in college, I think.

So. Saturday morning I finished The Hero and the Crown and ooo what a fantastic book that is. One bit that I particularly liked is that the heroine had two lovers somewhat overlapping. She was not a Woman Wronged or a Woman Wrong or a Widow or anything, just a woman who had relationships.

Then, for our anniversary, I unpacked almost all of the rest of the clothes, took an artist's paintbrush to the trim in the study to cover the sage that dripped on the white, and scrubbed off the paint on the floor. RDC disassembled his Mac and furniture. We moved RDC's office (previously in the dining room) to the study and the bookcases (previously on their sides in the living room) into the study.

I gleefully began to load up the shelves. Literary theory, cultural studies, and software manuals, of course. Spanish dictionaries, textbooks, and dual language texts, sure. Whatever boring nonfiction I could sneak in there (Nietzsche, Freud, a biography of Woody Allen), absolutely. The fact is that these two 7' bookcases comprise a fair proportion of our total shelf-feet, so I would have to divorce our fiction somewhat. Hemingway he could have without reservation. Papa is obviously his even if I did like For Whom the Bell Tolls. Kerouac, fine, I haven't even read On the Road. Pynchon, okay. I've only read The Crying of Lot 49 anyway. With DeLillo, I began to fret. I love White Noise and I did read Libra even if I didn't like it at all. Nonetheless, DeLillo went up. The Family Mark Twain and a volume of Poe I could spare, because we've got Tom, Huck, Pudd'nhead, and that stupid objectivist Yankee separately downstairs with me and I have no sentimental attachment to old Edgar Allen. But Tim O'Brien? Okay, I've only read The Things They Carried, so he could have In the Lake of the Woods and the rest. And where did the second copy of The Things They Carried come from? It, the unsigned copy, came back downstairs with me. We have two copies of Ulysses, but I kept A Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners. With poetry I began to itch. William Blake he must have, because Blake figures prominently in his scholarship. Gary Snyder, fine. But Donne and Eliot too? Where is my inscribed copy of Old Possum's Practical Book of Cats, anyway? (Inscribed by MRC, a fellow I dated shortly, not by T.S. Eliot.)

He may not have Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino. Nor Cormac McCarthy. Nor Norman Maclean. But maybe I can sneak Henry James and all his accursèd turn of the century ilk like Theodor Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and William Dean Howells up there too.

When we moved from one bedroom to two, the books moved from the living room/dining room-used-as-study to the larger of two rooms. They didn't accost the eye when you walked in our front door, and that made me crazy enough. I want to be known as a reader as soon as someone walks in my door. When HAO's friend Scott came over on Easter, he was looking around, asking where all our books were, so I took him back to the study and showed him its book-covered walls. The only books in the front of the apartment were cookbooks (Sacramental Magic in a Small Town Café, Enchanted Broccoli Forest, The Splendid Table), guide books (Frommer's Seattle and Portland, National Audobon Society's Western Birds Field Guide), and boring leftovers like Personal Finance for Dummies and What Color Is Your Parachute.

Now our books are divided into five rooms and there are even fewer books visible when you first enter the house, and I might break out into a rash.

The same selection of useful and how-to books (those without personal significance) is in the same bookcase in the dining room, just as it was in the apartment, because cookbooks should be near the kitchen. The built-in shelves flanking the fireplace hold coffee table books, photograph albums, and games, and are not full. The bookcases in RDC's study are not filled with books because I left him four shelves to be messy on; he'll want more. I bought four more shelves for my study and, now that the leak is fixed, can use the fifth as well.

But how to arrange the books? That's this evening's task. I have the shelves and two largeish bookcases in my study; the family room (the fifth) has two medium and two small along the south wall. (All the bookcases cannot go into my study because my study will double as the guest room, whenever we get a couch-type futon in here.) I'll figure it out.

The real problem will come when we get good bookcases we wouldn't mind having in public view like oh for instead this one. At that point, RDC has said, we should put our nice books in those. Like my beloved hardcover editions of Watership Down and To Kill a Mockingbird, presents from him no less. As if I would ever shelve my favorites anywhere but at my fingertips just because they look nice for guests.

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Also yesterday we quested for lamps. As we drove, a song came on the radio. RDC said, "That reminds me, Dani is flying to somewhere in California to see Roger Waters." I replied, "Roger Waters wouldn't appreciate that 'On the Turning Away' reminded you of that."

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We walked across the park to Le Peep, a brunchy kind of place that's not as bad as its embarrassing name would suggest. I had blueberry panckes, because that's what I always have, and when the server brought me a plate of three, I knew my usual twinge that this would not be enough. I was able to finish them all, but only just, because of course when properly slathered with butter, blueberry topping of uncertain parentage, and maple syrup, three is plenty. It had taken us until noon to motivate that far, having previously imbibed only coffee. When we got home at 2:00, I took a nap. I love Sundays.

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Later:

• How is it that I never knew we had two copies of Dunn & Byrnes Medieval English Lyrics? I mean, of course; that was the first class we had together, although, thankfully, it was an impression of me RDC was able to overcome. I probably kept mine on my medieval shelf and he his with anthologies--but I'm the one who organized the books just 16 months ago.
• And two copies of the Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching? How did this escape my notice? Again, I had probably had one copy in my poetry and the other was in the general mix.
• We each bought Lyrics for a class; we each had the Tao Te Ching because it's one of those hipster things you have even though, according to PSA who would know, the Mitchell translation shares mostly only the title. Those two make sense. But why do we have two copies of McTeague? I maybe should classify it with Sister Carrie and Portrait of a Lady among those late 19th-century novels I could never ever ever like, except I do. But two copies? Though I like it, I read it on RDC's recommendation, not for a class, so I didn't buy it. He bought a Norton and a Library of America edition: did he have it in two classes, or is he just absent-minded?
• Two copies of The Book of Margery Kempe?! We don't like her enough for one!

I now have all the non-fiction there and all the fiction here. I am breaking away from Dewey and keeping poetry and plays with prose, LOC style. I can never remember anything about the Library of Congress system except P is literature. I couldn't stomach Dewey anymore once I realized the man made no provision for the future, how eurocentric his system is, that the same book might be assigned a different number by in different libraries, and, finally, the day in the Virginia Village branch of the DPL when I couldn't find Lloyd Alexander under the As of fiction but instead found him in nonfiction, numbered 398 or so for folklore. Emily Post and Miss Manners are also in the 390s (etiquette, customs, folklore), but Greek mythology is 010 or so (or was in Phoebe, my point of reference): does the Prydain Cycle have more to do with manners than with Welsh mythology?