KonMari and You and Me

Friends,

Today is February 6th. It is 70 degrees outside, but I still have my electric feet warmer going because I’m a weirdo. We’re in the middle of the third week of the semester, which is around the point I’m comfortable with all the students’ names and we’ve settled into a familiar rhythm. I’m teaching an 8am this semester, which is great for me and avoiding traffic, but not great for having an attentive and on-time class! The annual That Takes the Cake competition is coming up soon and I am pretty happy with a spicy chocolate bread recipe I’m entering. Recipe forthcoming!

Carolina is trying to convince me to rewatch Game of Thrones in preparation for the “final” season, but I don’t have the stomach for reintroducing that amount of anxiety to my life anymore. Instead, I plan on finally getting to Marie Kondo’s show soon.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping score at home, Marie Kondo is a Japanese author/speaker/consultant who focuses on organization. Her most popular book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up , was published in English in 2014, but she’s reached a new audience more recently with a Netflix show, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo . Her guiding principle as to whether or not to keep objects is to decide if that object brings you joy (which has sparked some pretty great satire ). This week, she’s been on my Twitter feed primarily because of racist Tweets about her from Barbara Ehrenreich, Katha Pollitt, and Elaine Showalter (you get a shallow news link because there hasn’t been a solid essay about it yet, but give it a week). Of course, those racist ideas are fed both by complete falsehoods ( Kondo does speak English , America has been a very multilingual country since its inception ), but are also rooted in longstanding malignant stereotypes about Asian women, as written about thoroughly by Muqing Zhang .

BUT I DIGRESS. The Kondo-related topic that I’ve been thinking about is a comment of hers that set off a firestorm in literary Twitter last month, that people in general should only own about thirty books. This was taken a little out of context and made people wildly defensive (defensiveness that was also tinged by racism, as seen in Zhang’s article above), but her comment is something that really hit home with me. I must confess: I have mostly stopped buying books that will end up on my bookshelves. I very, very rarely reread books. The university library will get me any book I could dream up, as long as I’ll wait a week or two in the rare event it’s something not in their collection. I end up with more books than I intend to thanks to review copies and gifts from friends. And I want less stuff, writ large. Both for KonMari reasons of being less weighted down by physical possessions, but also in terms of trying to make less of an impact on the physical world in general. Oh, of course, I still buy books. I buy them for friends, I buy a couple each year that end up signed, I’ll preorder ones my friends write or appear in. I also think it’s important when the children in my life come over that they see books as everyday, common objects, and not something special or unusual. But regular book purchases are purposefully much less a part of my life than they used to be.

AND YET, this is conflicting for two reasons.

The first is that my bookshelves do bring me joy, which is Kondo’s criteria. It makes me happy to run my eyes across the titles and think about the memories connected to many of them. I like that they’re a conversation piece for guests who come to the house, just as I like browsing and discussing other people’s bookshelves when I visit their houses. I wish I had enough books to fill up my office at work, too. I like what it says about me that books are featured prominently when you step into our house, but I’m not sure that is necessarily a good thing. Or, to put it another way, I’m not sure the reasons they bring me joy are good reasons.

The second is that I need to buy books to support writing. It would be very hypocritical of me to expect to get paid for my writing while not spending much money on any for myself. Now, I can shift it around some by instead subscribing to more magazines, newspapers, websites, etc. Some writers I can support directly through things like Patreon or their newsletters. But I also want books to continue to be a thing, and like it or not, that means I need to get some money to book publishers. So, if I don’t want to continue to accumulate physical books, what’s the best way to do that? Buy books with the intention of donating them? Buying only electronic books? Mailing a check straight to the publisher and the author and saying “hey please continue making stuff?”

I don’t know the answer! I should probably just go bankrupt starting a bookstore instead and make this even more convoluted.

Do you want to buy more books or fewer books in 2019?

Further reading:

• I wrote some satire: The Great British Thesis Committee . Had to put all of that GBBO viewing into some good use.
• Your monthly dose of literary drama: the saga of Dan Mallory .
• Fatbergs are a thing I didn’t need to know existed. Likewise, have you ever really thought about stadium bathrooms ?
• This article is a little older, but I’m working on something related to the author Robert Gipe. You should read a profile-ish piece about him by Beth Macy, author of Dopesick .
• I often challenge my students to consider how much things actually change for different generations versus the exaggerated differences people shout from the rooftops, so I am still wrestling with whether the phenomenon described in this very viral AHP article about millennial burnout is really new or not, but man, it does feel spot-on.
• EVEN JSTOR IS WRITING ABOUT LO-FI HIP-HOP .

There are a dozen things falling apart in our house, but I’m spending my time making the transition from Chrome to Firefox, experimenting with cold-brew coffee recipes/ratios (1c Cafe du Monde:4 cups water+1tbsp vanilla extract, 24 hours in the fridge is what I’ve settled on), and writing this newsletter. It’s all for you, gentle reader. I hope you are better at prioritizing, focusing, and, well, everything than I am. Go forth.

新年好!

-g