Library Thing

And so it is Christmas Eve, a day generally adrift in melancholy for myself and a surprisingly large number of Americans. Nashville has presented itself in dull grays and muted ochres for the occasion, seemingly as non-plussed about the situation as I am. Rejoice! And, in a funny way, I do. Stan and I are supine in the living room, fresh back from a walk around the neighborhood that was fairly uneventful except for a completely chance run-in with Peter Collins, the producer of my first album, and his dog, Dave. This, of course, is what the holidays are supposed to be about, old friends and good cheer.

I checked in with a long-lost cyber portal of mine last night to find that I had all but been erased from its memory. Library Thing is a web site that has been in its beta version for over two years now. I stumbled onto it in 2006. It allows you to catalogue all of the books in your library online. Or all of the books you have ever read, if you like. Whatever you want to do, as usual.

Upon first finding the site, I hastily set about adding all of the books physically in my library as well as every one I could remember ever reading. This process was long but very satisfying. My books are the only material possessions that have remained with me from my adolescence. As much as I strive towards complete unattachment to things, I cannot let them go.

I hang onto my books because they are my history. The wonderful thing about my scrappy little library is that I can pick up any volume in it, read a few pages, and suddenly remember when I was first read it, where I was and what my general mood was at the time. This experience is unique to books, surprisingly; I usually lose most memory of similar circumstances surrounding a creative act within a few months of its occurrence.

Sometimes I wonder if this strange literary sensation is some sort of compensatory sub-conscious balance for my lack of powerful olfactory functions; I have read that smells are one of the most powerful agents of recall, but never really experienced the sensation myself. I liked to blow my nose a lot when I was a kid... perhaps I did some permanent nerve damage, I'm not sure.

So last night I checked in with my Library Thing page and realized that, somehow or another, all but ten of my previously added books had been deleted from my collection. I was shocked for two seconds, aggrieved for one, then pleasantly elated at the prospect of adding all the books again. Because the adding, the accumulation of books is the most enjoyable thing about the site. It allows the cataloguer to relive the experience of reading all of these wonderful and shitty books again at warp speed. The total number piles up in front of your eyes, the covers are all displayed in front of you, the rich melancholy of all that information stewing somewhere in the recesses of your addled psyche washes over you like a warm vat of honey. This is mine, you think. This is me.

But, as with nearly everything online (this blog included), Library Thing tempts with the short term gratification found in the further display of oneself for the perusal of others. 'Look at me, I've read this, and I liked it so much I read six more by the same author.' And, like nearly everything online, it also offers the opportunity for complete and utter fabrication. Which is where things get tricky.

For example, before I began writing this I was adding all of the Norman Mailer tomes I could remember reading in the past 35 years. An American Dream, cool. The Executioner's Song, yeah. Harlot's Ghost, sweet! Marilyn, of course. Tough Guys Don't Dance... loved it! Wait a minute... Marilyn? Mmmmm... I cross-reference a few other Monroe biographies and realize that Mailer's was not the one I read at all. Well, shit. There's an entire week of my life misplaced, in the literary sense. I confused Mailer with some crappy thing I probably picked up in an airport on a long layover! What does it all mean?

It's survival, bitch. I have a supremely annoying tendency to canonize all aspects of my life, the triumphant, the mediocre, and the downright shitty, into capsules of grandeur. It's only natural that the legacy preparation assistant in me would inject the tawdry knuck-a-knuck of an airport paperback into the form of Mailer, for the sake of preservation for future generations. What can I say? I like the night life, I love to boogie.

But it does raise a slightly disturbing possibility: How much of my life have I modified to fit into the hardcover limited edition autobiography that will, surely, any day now, be published to great acclaim and interest?

I will never, ever know. I release it all into the goddamn cosmos. To swirl around my head like so much dirty water in a high-school toilet bowl and then evacuated to the long, grey sea.