Man, recently I got this job at a bookstore down here in Dallas. It was a piece of cake getting it. I just showed up and they put me to work. Right now the bulk of work is unpacking boxes and boxes of books and putting them away on newly built shelves. It’s like a dream come true. That is, except when my fellow employees somehow forget the basic foundations of the English language, such as “how to alphabetize something”. They also seem to have trouble assigning correct genres to books; I for real found a copy of The Birth of Britain by Winston Fucking Churchill in the American History section. Next to that was a book called “Irish Royalty” or something like that. I don’t intend to suggest that the people that work with me are stupid or lazy or whatever. It’s a busy store and there are books and systems of organization flying everywhere. What I do intend to suggest is that when I find books out of their proper section or the alphabetization somehow completely mauled, it sends me into a frightmare and I just want to go home rather than deal with things being out of control. Or when I have to make a judgment call on an ambiguous book, like trying to decide if a techno-thriller that takes place during the Crimean War but only talks about the civilians who are only thinking about starting up a counter insurgence movement is a “thriller”, “war fiction”, “espionage”, “historical fiction”, or just “throw it in the garbage, it doesn’t fit anywhere”. I had an epistemological crisis over whether to classify a book called Women in the Klan (awesome.) as “american history” or “women’s studies” because the cover said, “The 1920’s, Racism, and Gender Studies”. I know what I should be saying to myself, “It’s stupid to get so excited and distraught over the minutiae of this particular task. Just do the work as best as you can and don’t worry so much.” But you guts, I can’t. There are clear and rigid systems at work! Defining and outlining the agenda, functionality, and actual human experience! The difference between placing the “linguistics” section within the main room next to “dictionaries” and “grammar” instead of placing it in the back room next to “french”, “spanish”, and “other languages” is monumental! I’m stunned and paralyzed by the complex structural interplay. Especially since I have no way to grasp it and order it myself, to make sense of it myself and define the underlying structures; to model, in effect, the bookstore in my own image.
At least, that’s what I was feeling when I first started working. But recently I have been given the job of unpacking the texts and assigning them into genres. I spent two hours today making a framework for storage and assignation in the storeroom. It was an exciting and stimulating job, ordering space and content into place; snapping rules and limits into straight, solid, sometimes unexplainable lines.
I’ve been depressed for months, somewhere deep in the back of my mind, about all of my books being packed up in boxes, separated into different states and storage units without form or contextual definition. I’ve always craved a kind of control over my personal library, which over the years has stretched out of control, gotten hairy and wild like hedera helix on window sills. It’s a blessing to have a job so soothing and satisfying. This has been a flowery update on my life.
First published: the eastReprinted: the west
Comparative Lit and Film. I really enjoy Scott Bradfield, David Foster Wallace, and Kenneth Rexroth.
