World Enough and Time

"In other words, the sped-up culture that delivers that novel to your doorstep overnight is the same culture that deprives you of the time to read it."
 Mark McGurl: Retail Therapy (an excerpt from Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon). Bookforum, September 30, 2021.

There, in one memorable sentence, is the paradox of First World cultural consumers: if we have even a modest income and an internet connection, we are able to surround ourselves – with no more effort than a few clicks on a website or an app – with more books, videos, and music than we will ever have time to read, see, or hear, in much the same way the young can bury themselves in dirt-cheap clothes, worn once or possibly never at all and then discarded. Apparently our unwanted clothing is being "recycled" by dumping it in Chile's Atacama desert. As with absurdly underpriced air-travel, the real price is being paid elsewhere, by very poor people in faraway lands, and in environmental damage. It has to stop.

We do try to lead a fairly "green" life, chez nous, at least as far as energy consumption, food, and consumer goods are concerned. We'll discreetly pass over the ownership of two petrol-driven cars; let's just say we're reconsidering that. We are fortunate enough to have sufficient income not to be unduly troubled by soaring energy bills (so far, at any rate) but at the same time it does help that we are not obsessed with keeping the house tropical – the heating is set well below 20° C and goes off at night – or with excessive bathing: once or twice a week is plenty. To be honest, we cannot sleep in a hot bedroom (the occasional bit of frost on the inside of the windows is a blast of pure nostalgia for us older folk), and in a temperate climate the idea of bathing or showering every day seems frivolous to me, but then I do always have my morning wash in cold water, year round, which probably seems a bit hair-shirted to most. I'm also one of those people who wears the same set of clothes to destruction, buying a new pair of trousers, a top, or a shirt once every few years. My current pair of shoes are so old I can't recall when I bought them, and have been re-soled twice, but will need replacing soon. The trouble with Chelsea boots is that the elastic sides eventually give out; I should probably go back to lace-ups, but probably won't.

As for non-necessaries, I usually buy things like my cameras and lenses second hand, but it has to be admitted that I do have a craving for books that almost amounts to an addiction. New, expensive photo-books... Large, beautifully bound, illustrated books... Stout bilingual dictionaries... Cute little pocket editions of classics... Well-produced exhibition catalogues... I love them all, and encourage them to come and live with me, and hang around as long as they like. Thank goodness I'm not German; even their literary novels are stitched and bound with real cloth, rather than glued and with boards covered with that cheapo paper cloth-substitute we use (or at least they were back in the 1980s when I used to catalogue them for a living). So for some while now, I've been trying to wean myself off my bibliomania greedy bibliophilia [1].

The first step, obviously, is to stop buying more books, especially photo-books. Helpfully, in recent years, there have been far, far too many getting published, and keeping up with what's new has become utterly unrewarding. So many of these new books seem to be half-baked projects by over-earnest wannabes, more interested in being an on-message / woke "artist" than a mere photographer (whatever one of those even is these days), and put out by specialist publishers who seem rather more motivated by book-design than photographs, as such. This bad situation is made worse by the desire of these publishers to manufacture scarcity by releasing small runs accompanied by even smaller "special" editions; usually the exact same book, signed and numbered, sometimes in a slipcase, and often together with a small original print. Which is an exercise in separating fools from their money that reminds me of the sort of kitschy ceramic "collectible" plates and mugs that used to be advertised in the Sunday colour supplements.

So, quite apart from any desire to downsize, I find that I have now bought one too many books that looked interesting on the basis of a few page-spreads displayed online, but which turned out to be yet another dud: more often than not, those few pages were the only good pages in the entire book. I have also bought one too many books that attempt to squeeze the last drops out of some notable's notably unremarkable back catalogue. Masahisa Fukase published Karasu (Solitude of Ravens) in 1986, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest photo-books of all time, but then fell down the steps of a Tokyo bar in 1992, suffered brain damage and went into a coma that lasted until his eventual death in 2012. Nonetheless, on the back of the reputation of that one book a steady stream of further volumes of his work continues to appear, most recently Kill the Pig (2021): photographs from his first exhibition in 1961, which interspersed slaughterhouse images with nude photographs of Fukase and his partner and which, despite being given the full over-designed, limited-edition, slipcased treatment, is not one of the greatest photo-books of all time. Especially at £80 for 84 pages. Enough!

The next, more painful step is to get rid of stuff. I've been sneaking up on actually disposing of any books by first chucking out the accumulated junk of thirty-plus years of family life. Now, some men are shed-men: they construct themselves a well-ordered refuge in the garden shed, probably equipped with a workbench, an array of power tools, and an implicit KEEP OUT sign. For the rest of us, a shed is a sort of holding place for the stuff that ought to have been dumped years ago, but which we're too idle to sort out. "Oh, just put it in the shed... What do you mean, it's already too full? A shed is never full!" So I've been clearing out the shed, rather than the bookshelves. It's a start.

Amazingly, amongst the usual stuff like pet paraphernalia, rusty tools, unidentifiable bits and pieces of wood, and ancient electricals, I discovered that we have four tents (I thought we had two), two inflatable paddling pools, and as many plastic buckets, spades, and sets of sand-moulds as we have had family seaside holidays; it seems we always forgot to take any with us, and always brought some new ones back. Maybe that's also the reason why we have four tents, though that does seem less likely. I also found enough bagged collections of beach pebbles, shells, and fossils to ballast a sailing ship, matched only by the extraordinary quantity of spider webs and the deep drifts of dead woodlice, which I'm pretty sure I didn't put in there.

The determined and vaguely green clearer-out has three friends. There is Oxfam (or the charity shop of your choice) for the useful stuff with resale value; it feels good to put put stuff back into circulation, and to put cash into the coffers of your favoured charity. There is Freecycle for the useful stuff with little or no resale value; it also feels good to put stuff back into circulation without seeking any benefit beyond whatever karma points are earned by doing someone else a favour. Then there is the last resort for the useless junk, the municipal dump (sorry, Recycling Centre); which feels bad, on the one hand, as you know most of those carefully labelled skips ("Ferrous metal", "Wood (NO MDF)", "Garden Waste", etc.) will probably end up in landfill, anyway, but on the other hand it still feels pretty good just to be rid of that useless crap. The fourth way – loading up a van and, under cover of night, fly-tipping on the verge of some country lane – is for professionals only.

Of these, I have found Freecycle the most interesting experience, not least because it means interacting with the kind of person who monitors the Freecycle bulletins for free stuff; the "Freecycle Community", I suppose. They're a very mixed bunch. There are cash-strapped families, happy to take away a paddling pool or a bag of frisbees. There are bargain hunters, many of whom, like scrap-metal dealers, are clearly hoping to sell on their freebies for a profit. There are opportunists, offering to take away your unwanted LP records and CDs. And then there are the strange ones, who pounce on "three broken panes of glass", or "one large bag of string". Lurking amongst all of these are the time-wasters – the ones who repeatedly message you "is it still available?" and then, when you decide to let them have whatever it is and mark the post as "taken", never show up; the disturbingly illiterate – the ones who cannot spell any word longer than four letters, and have never mastered the shift key or basic punctuation (I was quite tempted by "childs gardn gaol"); and, my personal least favourite, the abrupt and discourteous dickheads, who have abjured the use of "please" and "thank you".

I'm curious, though. I wonder if there would be any takers for a "large bag of dead woodlice"? You want it, I got it. It does make a rather pleasant rustling sound, it's true: maybe a deep-green substitute for maracas?

The Gift

1. To quote Wikipedia: "Bibliomania is not to be confused with bibliophilia, which is the (psychologically healthy) love of books, and as such is not considered a clinical psychological disorder." One bad habit that many of us could take a serious look at is the tendency to throw around the names of genuinely distressing mental disorders – things like OCD, bipolar, paranoia, and depression – to describe more-or-less healthy, everyday states. A person who likes a neat desk and to have order in their life does not therefore have OCD, for example. They are just annoying.