Gotham Diary:
Unfolding Ceremony
Friday, 3 June 2011
A spell of fine, dry weather has set me to a thousand household chores that were unthinkable during the dark, dank spring that preceded the blisteringly sultry spring that made the even more unthinkable. Ray Soleil came by this morning, to help out with one or two things (such as hanging the three photographs from Christian Chaize’s Praia Piquinia series that I picked up at Jen Bekman’s 20×200 Project). After lunch and a bit of shopping — when we walked into Crawford Doyle, Dot McCleary was holding up the Times obituary of Hans Keilson, which prompted me to buy a copy of The Death of the Adversary — we came back to the flat, and I decided to rearrange my closets. Although strange in many ways, I am quite normal about closets, and habitually throw things into them for as long as I can get away with it. About two months after I stop getting away with it, I do something. Reorganizing the closets this afternoon turned out to be farily straightforward, and it was done in the short time that it took Ray to watch Blame It On the Bellboy, Mark Herman’s glorious 1992 farce. What I’ve still got to deal with is the clutch of shopping bags that had, over time, been thrown into the closet for lack of a better hiding place. One of the bags, naturally, is stuffed with neatly folded shopping bags. It is not the only one in the house, I’m afraid. What do you think would happen if I threw it away?
***
Thanks for the encouragement and  inspiration! I threw away another bag in its place. The bag of bags that emerged from the closet was packed with really big bags, from Venture Stationery, Eli’s, and Gracious Home. But if I couldn’t quite do without them, I resolved to get rid of the bag of bags in the hall closet, the one that’s full of the cheap paper bags in which the laundry returns my “boxed” shirts, as well as a large accumulation of plastic shopping bags from Agata & Valentina. Agata & Valentina used to dispense a stout paper shopping bag that was perfect for storing just about anything, from a stack of books to a half-dozen short-sleeved summer shirts to an entire collection of Silpat bakeware. But, at just about the time when these bags were discontinued, I became incapable of overlooking the downside of storing things in shopping bags, so I don’t miss them. I’ve also gotten rid of a lot of the stuff that I was storing in shopping bags. Getting rid of the bag of bags just now was yet another breakthrough in my resistance to the permanent attachment of everything that comes through the front door and doesn’t rot.
***
In addition to The Death of the Adversary, I bought two other books, a first edition of Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics that beckoned alluringly from the shopwindow (Edith Sitwell is the most gloriously perfectly genuine old fraud that ever was) and something that I hadn’t heard of, John Armstrong’s In Search of Civilization: Reclaiming a Tarnished Idea. I’ve been getting better at resisting the appeal of books that “look interesting” (meaning that I didn’t know they existed five minutes before), but I’m pretty sure that Armstrong’s book is not going to make it into the Guilt Pile. It’s not very long (195 pages) and the objective stated in its subtitle could not be more arresting. Even if I disagree with Armstrong’s ideas, I’ll get plenty out of the book — and the prospect of serious disagreement is very doubtful, if my random glance at the discussion of the Japanese tea ceremony can be generalized. “The lesson of the tea ceremony is not that we should copy it exactly. The lesson is that we can take fairly minor ordinary activities and raise them to a higher meaning.” Good heavens, this was written for me!
When I paid for the books, I told Dot that I didn’t need a bag. I’ve already got dozens, folded neatly in a shopping bag.