Library Note:
Networking
8 December 2014
They’re gone. Here we see a couple of trucks engaged in remounting the bishop’s-crook lampposts. The next day, they were gone, along with all the orange cones and whatnot. The street was clear to traffic. There were even parked cars along the curb! The foundations of the station entrances are bound in hurricane fencing, but that is the only sign of work under construction. There are no workers now. Other workers, under another contract, will complete the entrances.
So much for 86th Street. Second Avenue is still a mess. Which is ironic, in that much of the inconvenience attending this project was caused by the failure to block the avenue as a throroughfare at 96th and 61st Streets. Instead, the sidewalks were narrowed, to make room for the traffic and the construction zone. This bad decision severely reduced pedestrian traffic and put a lot of shops and restaurants out of business. Traffic on Second seems worse than ever, perhaps because of developments at the other end of the 86th Street Station, at 83rd Street.
I noticed last night that the lampposts have not been hooked up. Something to look forward to.
***
It’s very cold and very grey, and Kathleen is very far away, in Phoenix. On Wednesday, she flies to San Francisco, where she hopes to see the younger branch of the family, and she comes home to New York on Saturday. Aside from a Remicade infusion on Thursday, my calendar is blank. So I’ll be able to spend plenty of quality time with the Great Wall of Book Boxes. I brought the number of boxes down from 44 to 36 yesterday. There is still plenty of shelf space, although little of it is what I’d call premium.
The Great Wall stands right next to the dining table, so the sensible thing seems to be to empty the boxes onto that. If I set up the card table in the foyer, I’ll have somewhere to put books that have for one reason or another lost their place in the book room — presumably to make room for a newly-unpacked book that has a better claim to that place. At a certain point, I shall stop breaking down empty boxes, and start filling them up with books found for the storage unit uptown. The contents of each box will be listed in an Evernote, and a copy of the list will be packed with each box. (The label of each Evernote will be inscribed on the box.) I wonder if the Christmas tree will have come and gone, and our New Year’s visit to San Francisco will be behind us, before I have finished deciding between which books to put into storage and which to give away. But there’s no doubt in my mind that, by the end of this week, the remnants of the Great Wall will have melted into something like a console, standing alongside the Lutyens bench — I almost said “behind it,” but the bench is backless — masquerading as a clunky piece of furniture that can be lived with for the time being. Four or maybe even five boxes can be slipped beneath the bench, too.
I ought to have foreseen that the move itself would crystallize changes in my thinking about my personal library even more powerfully than the prospect of the move. I say my personal library because I’ve stopped thinking about personal libraries in general and what they might or ought to be. That’s an aspirational outlook, suitable to a young person setting out to build a library. A characteristic of library-in-general is that it ought to be well-rounded, whatever that means. Unless, of course, it is going to be specialist, full of books on two or three topics. I would say that somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of my books are aspirational in this way, acquired pursuant to some imaginary rule. That’s why I have Gibbon in a box. That’s why I used to have several histories of mathematics.
I now see the library as a network. I am at the center of the network, of course, but most books are also related to some, or even many, of their neighbors on the shelves. The importance of most (but not all) books is determined nodally, by the thickness of connections to other books. In the case of fiction, the most important books are those whose authors are represented by five or more titles (although I’m thinking of slimming down my massive Trollope collection, by sending most of it to storage). A singleton, an only-book-by-a-given-author, is probably going to be discarded. So are books about small-tail subjects. I’ll try to collect examples as I cull.
Is this process of moving in taking too long? It doesn’t seem so, but we have had access to the apartment for more than four weeks. And yet, as I wrote last week, the move is done. What remains to be done is all in the nature of improvements that we might well have made to the old apartment. And, briefly interrupting the writing of this entry, my favorite handyman (and I don’t mean Ray Soleil) has installed blinds in the bedroom and the bookroom. Privacy at last! I know that we can’t have curtains by Christmas, but it’s a pleasant dream anyway. Maybe sheers on the living room window.
***
Reading John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts?, I see that modernism is an aesthetic that we both dislike but that we sidestep differently. Carey is happy to go with what I call the weedy definition: just as a weed is any plant that’s growing where you don’t want it to be, so art is anything that anybody regards as art. This solves the philosophical problem, “What is a work of art,” by stabbing philosophy in the heart, but the solution is absolutely uninteresting. Why even bother having the word “art”?
My solution is to proceed in the opposite direction. Like Arthur Danto, I believe that a work of art must be intended as a work of art, but, unlike him, I don’t have to deal with his famous necktie conundrum — Picasso and a five year-old both paint neckties that, when they’re done, are indistinguishable; but Picasso’s is a work of art because he meant it to be one, while the child’s is not — because intention isn’t the whole story. Like John Carey, I, too, ignore philosophy’s search for the invisible qualities that distinguish art from other kinds of things. I insist on the very distinct and obvious adherence to a specifically Western tradition of art. This tradition is still very much alive and well, with many practitioners, among them my friend Devin Cecil-Wishing, and as soon as the “art world” and its attendant journalists see modernism and its sequelae as the branches of literature, not art, that they are, the tradition will return to the foreground.