knowledge

i was sifting through my email this morning and came across a letter that I had written to a couple of my students at about this time last year (dated Feb 10 2010, or 02 10 2010, which is pretty pleasing).   There are some references to things that were happening at that moment, which make it sound dated, but the gist of it is about right. Nothing that I have not written about before, really, but I wanted to put it here for storage, so here it is:

Our brief conversation this morning in the café has stuck in my mind, and since talking about things is how I get them out of my mind and into the world I thought I would give this to y’all and see what you have to say.  You asked me how I know all of the seemingly unconnected little factoids that I know, and though it was probably asked rhetorically, I have been thinking about my answer, and it is a simple one:  Knowledge is power.

Not “power” like in a He-Man “By the  power of Grayskull I have the power” kind of way where your clothes disappear and you become a hilariously over-muscled super hero in a fur loincloth (fur?  Really?  Always seemed like a strange choice to me), more like the power to make one’s own choices and to make a positive difference in the world.  Think about it.

The group that wields the sacred knowledge is always the group that runs things.  In early civilisations this was the shaman or priest or whatever group member stood in in that capacity, the person that held the secrets to the power of the god or gods of the day.  These were the decision makers, the rich and powerful, the people who made the rules and (for the most part) had all the money and the good stuff to eat.

Then there are the people who hold the military knowledge, about how best to kill the most people.  These are often people who are in control in a culture.  It is no accident that the U.S. President is the “Commander in Chief” of the armed forces.  He (Hasn’t been a She yet, but I have faith.  One day, one day.) is in control in part because he has the knowledge necessary to control the most powerful army in the world.  General Mao.  Saddam Hussein.

Then there are the more insidious kinds of knowledge that put the holder into powerful positions:  How to steal legally (as the major banks did, causing the Recession we are currently enjoying), how to lie legally (as, for example, the corn syrup commercials who say that it is all-natural and good for you), how to disenfranchise legally (as in the misogynistic Superbowl commercials that got me all pissed off that I was railing about in Materials class until I realised you were all just looking at me in that way you do when you are just waiting for me to shut up and get on with it).  These are bodies of knowledge that are pretty opaque to the average person, but knowing how to wield them lands one in a pretty sweet position.

So in a culture that has spent so much time and energy trying to breed people not to question, not to think for themselves, not to seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge, the most empowering thing I can think of to do is gather as much knowledge as possible, and to disseminate it to as many people as possible.  And then to encourage them to do the same.  U. Utah Phillips says “the histories we are given in schools is not the history of MY people.  It is the history of the rich, the powerful, the greedy.  The only way we can get a TRUE history of our people is to listen to our elders, and to pass on their stories.”

So how is the history of the Hudnoshonee people relevant to Interior Design?  Because it is all connected.  It has to be.  Every choice that we make is made in reaction to what we know.  Either what we know through experience, or through reading that we have done, or through stories that we have been told.  The more things we know, the farther reaching our design work (and our lives in general) have the capacity to be.  And the greater chance we have to make a positive difference in the world, to “play our part,” as Shakespeare says, and then exit the stage.

I have always delighted in knowing things.  Any things. It is all relevant.  And the best tools you have as a designer are your eyes, to see instead of just looking; your ears, to listen instead of just hearing; and your brain to synthesize it all.  You short yourself as a designer and as a person and your society in general, if you do not use all three, all the time, in a thoughtful way.

Wow, this got longer than I intended.  And I am not even through.  We will have to continue this another time.  Have a good weekend.  For a gold star, bring me an extremely obscure fact on Tuesday and relate it to your project.

Zeke

postscript:  Every time someone calls me “Geek” (which as I told Kennedy this afternoon has long since stopped bothering me as it has been happening since before you were born), I think of someone like this:

Geek

Look up “geek” and you’ll see what I mean.

z

ornament / structure

there is a project on the bench these days that I am not ready to write about yet, but that has gotten me thinking about ornament.  I waffle a lot when it comes to ornament, specifically about two issues, I think:  What is “ornament,” and what is “function?”

The second question maybe needs to be addressed first as I think of my work as being “function-based” design.  That is to say, that I eschew adding elements that are not in some way dictated by the structural needs of the object.  Certainly structural needs are one compelling mandate, but there are other aspects that dictate functional needs, and that can influence the finished form.

In the current project, there are aspects that have no structural function, so they led me to question the “functionality” of them at all, and their necessity within the overall piece.  In the recurring “form v. function” debate, I tend to think that form and function are like the chocolate and vanilla in a marbled cupcake, that they can not be separated in any meaningful way, that in the best design work there is nothing that one could remove that would not be sorely missed in the remaining piece.

There are, however, functions beyond the purely structural.  As I was contemplating these panels and their place in the overall piece, I thought of the bed I made a few years ago and the oak branch that I found on the forest floor that became the lamp-post/headboard:

There are of course a variety of ways I could have kept that corner of the bed off the ground, and there are other ways to solve the need for a reading light.  The structural functionality of the base of the oak branch as a leg of the bed or of the rest of the oak branch as a lamp-post are important, but the necessity of introducing an element that had the æsthetic function of providing relief from the relentless straightness of the machined planes is just as important, making the æsthetic choice a choice about functionality as well.  Which brings us back to the first question, the question about ornament.

“Ornament” is a dirty word to a lot of designers that I greatly admire.  Often it is to me as well.  The idea of creating something that is ornamental not an appealing one, and often when I look at heavily ornamented structures or objects I feel that though I may admire the maker I do not want to live with that object or in that structure.  That being said, there are of course ways to make necessary structures ornamental.  To say the same thing coming at it form the other direction, there are ways to see the inherent beauty in the structure of an object.  Japanese hand-laid "washi" paper is a good example of this:

The structure of this paper, that is to say the fibers that are the paper, can be presented as we are used to seeing them in a sketchbook; homogenized and bleached to the point that they appear as one solid sheet ready for the mark of a pencil.  But in the paper shown above the fibers are not homogenized like that.  They are allowed to have their own life by the maker, they have a voice and an identity.  Though decorative, in a way, they do not strike me as ornamental.  And they are integral to the paper, they in fact are the paper.

It is this parsing of the line where æsthetic function becomes ornament that I have been thinking a lot about lately.  As I make the objects I make, as I develop my teaching, I am navigating the murky waters of ornament and trying to figure out what it is that really resonates, what it is that really needs to be there.  I have also been re-thinking whether, in a basic sense, ornament is, in fact, a bad thing.

Because this is really about asking questions about my own life, of course.  What needs to be here?  What are the things that are (for lack of a better word) “structural” and what is “ornament?”  What in terms of emotional and intellectual and physical needs must remain, and what can I strip down, strip away?  As I build my life and the life of my family, are there things that are ornamental, and if there are is that okay?  And what are the structural needs?  Are there moments where emotional ornament is actually structural?  And are there ways that I can make the emotionally structural necessities ornamental?

appropriateness

as I age (I am occasionally reminded that I am pushing forty) I am mellowing.  Though there are things that I believe firmly and fiercely, my overall world view is getting more relativistic as I wander farther into my time on this planet, and many of the things that I once felt stridently about are getting harder to parse, with "right" and "wrong" being less abundantly clear.

In 1997, as I was in my final year of my second undergrad, I took a class from a teacher and mentor and friend named Bland Wade.  He runs the Theatrical Properties department at my alma mater, and in addition to being a great teacher (one of the highest compliments I can pay) is also a great designer and craftsperson.  Though I have not seen him in a few years now, he remains present in my life in a number of ways, not least in this little footstool:

I took a class from him in my senior year called "furniture for the stage," in which one of the projects was this footstool.  We carved the cabriole legs ourselves, assembled the stool, upholstered it, and finished it.  Though it was built for the stage, I have kept mine all these years and it has seen some hard use, always being paired with a chair that belonged to my great-great grandfather, even wearing the same upholstery fabric for many years.  But the legs have gotten loose, and the upholstery is sagging, it was clear that fifteen years later it was really time to attend to this little workhorse of our living room.

So I took it down to the shop and started to disassemble it.  One of the first things I noticed was my signature:

I remember being so proud of this stool when it was finished, and thinking that it would last forever.  In a way, I was right, to a twenty-two-year-old fifteen years is functionally forever, isn't it?  I remember thinking that I now had the secrets to making furniture, and that this would be a family heirloom, and that my great grandchildren, whom I would never meet, would have this stool.  See, I thought this way even fifteen years ago.  No wonder I can not escape it now.

This is how this stool was put together:

Lag screws and drywall screws.  Not a "for the ages" construction methodology, really.  Wood, as I think I have written about before, expands and contracts with the seasons.  In humid summers it absorbs water from the air and swells, in the winter when the air is drier it loses the water and contracts.  When you put metal fasteners into the wood (which do not expand and contract with the seasons), they crush the wood fibers that expand around the fastener, so that when the wood shrinks again the hole is too big for the fastener.  Over several years this can make the hole permanently too big for the fastener, and in this case makes the legs loose.

The important thing to remember here, though, is that this was intended to be a theatrical prop, not a piece of heirloom quality furniture.

Everything in the theater has what can be an interesting dual life:  they are simultaneously used much harder than normal objects and used for a much shorter time than normal objects.  There are no forces more destructive than an actor in the throes of a scene or a careless stagehand rushing to complete a backstage task in the dark.  So objects get beaten up, clothing gets torn, doors get slammed much harder than in real life, even in a house with a toddler or a teenager.

So when we built this stool, the intention was to make an object that would stand up to that kind of use over the run of a show, not to the slow and inevitable wear to which the seasons subject it.  Subtle difference, maybe, but important.  Thus the lag screws.

Disassembling this object, seeing its guts again after fifteen years, has inspired me to think about these intentions, and about the ways that we choose what is appropriate.    The construction and lack of refinement (there are bandsaw marks and file marks on the cabriole legs, for example, something I would not normally allow to remain on a piece I made now) were completely appropriate for the intended use of that object, and only seem out of place when looked at in a different context.  In the same way, the methodologies that I now apply to my work would be completely inappropriate in a theatrical context, as they take too long and are too exacting for that milieu.

Which of course also gets me thinking about the relativistic nature of so many of my other beliefs.  Obi-Wan reminds Luke that "you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view," which I find true more and more.  With the exception of rules about hitting and hating and stealing, there are often more than one way to look at a lot of the issues in my life just now, and I am trying to be more mindful about the fact that alternate approaches are worthy at least of a thoughtful ear and patient consideration, even if they seem at the outset to be misguided or inapplicable.

on rituals and passing them along

rituals are important, of course.  As I raise my son, I am working to imbue in his life a number of different activities that are ritualistic to a greater or lesser extent, one of which is frequent and regular time spent actively making things.  Impossible to tell if it will stick of course, but that is the plan as it stands.  So weekend mornings we go down to the shop (which at nineteen months he pronounces as "shah") to make stuff.  He knows that I wear certain shoes in the shop, and has taken to bringing them to me and saying "shah, dada!" Melts my heart.

Once in the shop, I sit him on the end of the workbench, where he pounds away happily as I work.  As I can not leave him alone there, I have had to create projects that can be done entirely at the bench, which means that they have to be made entirely by hand.  Over the last few weeks this has been a valuable way for me to reconnect with a part of my making life that I had been letting slide.  Here is a photo of him on the bench:

The little mallet in front of him with the blue painted handle was a part of my first ever tool kit, which you can see here:

As you can see, the chisels were real chisels, the saw was a real saw.  I used that kit to build all kinds of things for years, and still have (through the auspices of my father, the family historian) some of the tools from it.  I will not give my son real chisels yet, of course, but he has a screwdriver that he calls his chisel, and he will very studiously hold it on a piece of wood and hit the back of it with his little mallet, copying in miniature what he sees me doing.

As this blog is mostly about making, I thought I would show what I have been making for him.  He loves pounding and hitting right now, so it seemed to make sense to make him a pounding bench like the one that I had as a child.  Good for teaching fine motor skills as well as giving him something that he can hit as hard as he wants, so it is a win-win.

I had some ash that was left over from a project several years ago.  I don't use ash much unless I am bending it, so I have been carting this stuff around for a while, and I finally decided to use it for this.  I did all of the work by hand, even cutting pieces to size, which is an operation I would normally do on the table saw.  There are a couple of benefits to this:

First, I got to use my big bow saw, a tool I seldom use any more.  I could almost feel it quiver with excitement when I took it off the wall.  The blade is of course still sharp, and it sang through the wood, ecstatic to be useful again.  Damn fine, clean cut.  What a joy to shake hands with a friend one has not seen in a while.

Also, Thomas learned about marking and sawing.  Every step I take in the shop I talk about with him, so we talked about pencils (which he calls "p'tiss" which is also what he calls his penis, which can be confusing sometimes.  I often have to rely on context to know which he means.  A little like speaking Chinese) and drawing lines on wood.  Then we talked about saws, and about different saws (which he pronounces "Shah," again, very similar to the way he pronounces "shop.")  He watched me saw the wood to length, and since then has used his little toy saw on all kinds of things around the house, saying "shah, shah" as he does so.

Now when we enter the shop he starts by sitting on the bench and pointing out all of the tools and naming them, taking great pride in naming each one as I point to them.  He is learning that these things have identities and uses, and he is learning what those uses are as he watches me.  I am working on what the next project will be that I can work on with him, for a couple of reasons.  I love reinforcing in his little brain the import of making and using his hands, but it also is such a vacation to be making things at my own pace by hand in the shop that I really treasure my time in there on these weekend days.  How lucky.

Here is the finished pounding bench and hammer that we made:

And here he is using it.  I love that look of extreme concentration as he pounds.

Values

a colleague of a friend of mine that teaches at Rhodes College did a project recently called "American Values."  She has described it really well here:  American Values

Though my photo was submitted after the deadline she was kind enough to include it anyway, for which I am thankful.  It is an interesting question and an interesting idea, as we hear so much about values from the politicians and the talking heads.  I am glad that she tackled the question and was happy to be able to participate.



I did not have to think long to find my answer to her question ("what is one of your core values?").  Working with my hands (in whatever capacity) is so important to me that I have a hard time coming up with what I would do if I could not.  It is central to my livelihood and to my life.  I play guitar, I make things, I cook, I plant things.  I am working to teach my son to do the same, and as he sits on the end of my workbench and watches my hands work he tries to copy the actions I am making, so I have a feeling that he is headed down this same road.  A couple of years ago I wrote this paean to my hands, and I still feel the same sense of awe when they do what I want them to and when I see what they can produce.

Working with my hands is important to me in another way:  It is central to my politics.  In my grandfather's generation, most Americans worked with their hands as a matter of course.  Materials were precious in a different way, and most households had a saw or two, a hammer, a couple of hand planes.  Not everyone was a furniture maker, of course, but everyone was able to use their hands to make things and fix things. My grandmother knew how to pluck chickens, and did so regularly.  The objects in their lives and their homes were, for the most part, mechanical, and repairing them or improving them was within the average person's realm of understanding.

Of course, the average life expectancy for men was 43, for women 35.  It is so hard for me to not dive headlong into the pool of nostalgia.  But that is not what I was writing about. I was writing about politics.

We live in a very different world, now.  a world in which the things that surround us are so complicated that even if we had a desire to fix them, the vast majority of us would not know how.  This computer, for example:  When it does not work, my ability to fix it is limited entirely to turning it off and then on again, in the hopes that it will magically fix itself.  I might as well burn some sage and wave the smoke over the thing for all the knowledge I have with regard to repairing it.  In almost every respect, this object, like my car and my television and even my alarm clock function for all the world like magic.

The same is true for the systems that govern my life.

Think about it:  Do you know where the power plant is that makes the lights come on when you flip the switch?  Or where the water comes from when you turn on the faucet (or less apetizingly where it goes)?    What about the factory where the shirt you are wearing right now was made?  Or the processes and machines that were used to make it?  Or the food you ate for dinner?  The gas that you put in your car?

We are surrounded by systems and items that, when examined, are pure mystery, and we are encouraged by the providers of those systems and items to keep it that way.  I have a theory why that is, and it is pretty sinister.

The less we question these things, the more likely we are to just pay for them so that we can go about our daily lives.  I would much rather pay someone minimum wage or less to pluck chickens for me so that I don't have to do that messy, cold, foul job myself.  I get a plucked, skinned chicken breast for dinner, and I don't have to think about how it went from running around a henhouse to sitting on my plate.  I also don't have to think about the person who raised it, and what their working and living conditions are, or the person who slaughtered it and how they live.  Or even the person who packaged it, trucked it to the store (trucking accounts for over 25% of annual Green House Gas emissions in the US annually), took it off the truck, stocked it on the shelf, or rang it up at the cash register.  I just get my chicken breast.

We can do the same thought experiment for anything, of course.  Textiles and clothing is another chilling one.  Or plastic toys.  Or plastic anything, really.

The companies that sell us stuff don't want us to think about the processes of making the stuff, because if we really did we would be more thoughtful about the things in our lives and less likely to buy so much stuff.  As long as we are told not to consider the processes and systems that run our lives, as long as we surrender that much of our free will, we willingly subjugate ourselves to the interests of large corporations.

Which brings me back to using my hands to make stuff (you thought I would forget that part, didn't you?).

When we wanted a coffee table, for example, we were faced with two basic choices:  Buy one or make one.  If we had bought one, my son (who is in a real phase of hitting things these days) would probably have destroyed it in a couple of years, and we would have thrown it out and gotten another one.  Since I chose to make one, though (maybe I will do a post about that one of these days), it occupies a very different place in the emotional map of our lives, and we care for it more meticulously.  It is a lot more likely to be a part of our lives until our son has a house of his own and needs a coffee table.  The product of working with my hands will have a long and useful existence, and at least until I am dead will not be seen as an object that can be thrown away.

What if we could apply that to more of the things in our lives?  What if we knew the farmers that grow our food?  The folks who make our clothes?  It is not particularly possible for all of us to make everything in our lives, of course, but what if we could make SOME of the things in our lives and the rest were provided locally by people that we knew and trusted?

What if (to flip it around) we chose NOT to trust large corporations, who have no allegiance whatsoever to my community, or to ecological or social responsibility?  What if we all just started to choose to make more, buy less, and think often about how we live?

To quote Arlo, then my friends we would have a revolution.  Not a bad idea.

So thanks, Dr. Johnson.  What a great project.

happiness

i just watched a TED talk by a gentleman named Nic Marks.  He is a statistician, and he spoke about the "World Happiness Index," which is not what I wanted to write about here, but I highly suggest that you go watch the talk.  It is so refreshing to hear someone be hopeful about the future.  His group came up with 5 steps to a happier, and therefor healthier, planet, one of which was "Learn."  He was talking about lifelong learning, of course, and about how people that continue to learn after they leave formal schooling tend to say that they are happier than people that don't.  In talking about learning, he threw out a word, almost as an aside, that has bubbled up in my life a lot lately:  curious.

He suggested that we stay curious.  This is actually a pretty revolutionary (not to say incendiary) statement, when you think about it.

Most of the teachers that I have had have not encouraged this at all.  The really good ones, the ones that I still remember, the ones whose work still inspires me, are the ones that encouraged me to be curious.  Unfortunately, they are few.  The bulk of the teachers that I had as a child (and in college, actually), though well-intentioned I am sure, were only interested in information transfer.  They did not inspire me to learn on my own, or indeed to learn anything at all.

I am not the first person to say this at all.  The general hue and cry against public education that is the subject of so much of my reading these days is full of people who are saying the same thing.  At the end of the day, though, it is not about information at all; it is about curiosity.

I am lucky to have two parents who are naturally curious, and who encouraged me to be growing up.  We used to talk about how things were made, and about why plants are the way they are.  Walking through the woods, my mother would name the trees and flowers for me.  My father made furniture and toys for me, and encouraged me to be a part of the process, instilling early in my life the idea that everything comes from somewhere, everything starts as raw material that is manipulated in some way to become a finished product.  I always used to love on Mr. Rogers' when he would go to a factory that made crayons and we would see how that happened.

The result is that I have continued to be interested in all of that.  I continue to want to know what things have been, and what they could be.  I continue to ask how we can make change for the better, how our decision making processes can be healthier, how our making can be more responsible.  I blithely assume that everyone else feels the same.  This is often an erroneous assumption.

As I talk to my students, I am often caught off guard by how little they have an interest in questioning.  They have been specifically trained not to be curious, to accept decisions made by external sources about what their opinions should be, what their aesthetics should be, what their desires should be.  It is really arresting.

Our seniors are in the process of doing what we call their "thesis."  This is a semester and a half long project that begins with self-guided research, which they are in the middle of now.  The "self-guided" part of that is a real sticking point for them, and my colleague and I are trying to gently empower them to make their own decisions and to draw their own charts.  It is harder than I thought it would be.  Of course, this is really just a process to inspire curiosity, and the hope is that it is a curiosity that continues.

We are really getting somewhere with some of them, which is heartening.  Some of them are really laying into this process of critical questioning and are directing their own research.  The steps in many cases are tentative, and require a lot of encouragement, but they are happening.  I have had several conversations in which I had to calmly reassure students that it is okay to deviate from the original thrust of their research when they find an interesting fact that inspires them, or when they realise that the question they are asking is actually parallel to the question they thought they were asking.

So one by one we are beginning the training that will lead (we hope) to an interest in life long learning.  My question is this:  How can we reach more people faster?  How can we inspire more people to ask questions about their daily lives?  And I am talking about hard questions, ones like "where did the plastic in this water bottle come from?  What are the working conditions of the person who made it?"  Or maybe "what is the effect that my buying this ninety-nine cent water bottle at Wal-mart?  Does it have a better or worse effect than if I drink water out of the tap?"  These are hard questions for many people, and as such they are often glossed over or ignored.  Most people, I think, would not say that they want to oppress workers in foreign countries or engage in acts that specifically make our planet less habitable, but so many people are so used to not asking questions, to not being curious, to not making connections, that they do not even know that there might be another way to approach life.

Lest this get too preachy, I should hasten to point out that sometimes I do not ask these questions either.  I sure as hell am not perfect.  But I am often curious.  And I wish more people were.  And I would like to try to find a way to encourage more people to be.

information storage

the main library at SU is called the Bird Library (named after benefactor E.S.Bird). It is facing a problem that many libraries across the country are facing, apparently: Storage. No matter how big you build your library, eventually it will be filled to the brim with books, periodicals, sound media, films, et cetera, and decisions will have to be made about which books are stored and how they are stored.

As early as 1869, a fellow named John Dancer was able to photographically reduce printed text with a ratio of 160:1 using daguerreotype, which was the first step to what eventually became know as microfiche. Microfiche always seemed so magical to me when I was young. There were WHOLE BOOKS printed on these tiny tiny rectangles of plastic, and when I put them into the machine I could read them to my heart’s content. It seemed like such an efficient way to store knowledge. No need for all of this heavy paper and cardboard covers! Just print the book once and photograph it, and the entire collected works of Shakespeare can fit into a box the size of a small paperback.

When was the last time you looked at a microfiche machine? I was in the bowels of Bird library with some students and explained what one was and not one of them had ever even seen the machine, let alone used one. They laughed at the antiquated technology, which is their right, of course. The future belongs to the young. And in their world, all of this information is stored digitally somewhere in the tubes of the internet, where there is unlimited storage. For them, the idea that they would have to go to an actual building to find information is tiresome.

In talking to the librarians it came out that all the microfilm and microfiche is being “deacquisitioned,” recycled to harvest the silver that is part of the developing process. Hundreds of 50 gallon drums of microfilm were packed up and carted off to the recycling facility, in order to make room. The same is happening to hundreds of thousands of slides in the slide library.

Apparently all of the faculty are up in arms about the slides being gotten rid of, but when they are told that they can take whatever slides they consider too useful or important to throw away, they seem to never be able to find the time to come and claim them. They seem to like the idea of having those slides there, but not to have a real use for them, like that tie-dyed shirt you wore to the first Dead show you ever went to, the one where you kissed that really smelly hippy girl and you had eaten a pile of mushrooms and her patchouli made you think of dirt and you thought you were being buried alive, remember that show? Not much, but you remember the hippy chick and there is no way you are getting rid of that t shirt, just like there is no way you will ever wear it again.

Same with the slides. And the microfiche.

Libraries in general are in the midst of an existential crisis since they are no longer the main repositories of information. The number of students who visit Bird Library has dropped sharply in the last fifteen years, as more and more are doing their research on line in their dorm rooms. I myself, a lover of books and libraries, go much more rarely than I used to. Even I do a lot of research on line and a lot of my reading digitally.

The intent of this post is not to write eulogy for libraries and books. I had started out to relate a pretty small moment from today, but of course providing the context for the moment takes some doing. And writing up this context stimulates some philosophical flights of fancy: As we separate the information from the storage method, interesting things can happen. We don’t get nostalgic, particularly, about computers, for example, in the same way that we get nostalgic for, say, that tie-dyed t shirt. Items like that shirt, or my great-grandfather’s handsaw are the totemic objects that (Bachelard would tell us) store information in a more abstract way than a record or a book or a piece of microfiche. For some reason, we hang on to the shirt in a way that I did not hang on to the computer that I used to write love emails to my wife when we were first dating and she was overseas for Christmas. I have objects from that time that are very important to me, but the computer is not one of them, which I find intriguing.

Why do we feel that some storage methods are important while others are not? Why can I not bear to throw out the journals that I wrote terrible poetry in in college, when I had no desire to keep the computer that I wrote terrible poetry on in my early adult-hood? Why did I keep the dictionary that I was given when I graduated high school but not the (much bigger) dictionary that came as a CD with my last laptop? Hard to say.

Today we were in the basement of the Bird Library, talking to the person who is in charge of “deacquisitioning” books and other media to make room for new books, a diminutive woman in her early fifties, friendly, obviously kind. We were talking about the microfiche (much of which is being saved for now) and how it is getting moved, and about the microfilm, all of which got sent off for recycling. This nice woman started to weep, standing there on the vinyl tile floor, telling us about how big bins of books were getting sent to the landfill when she first got here, and how the fact is that her job is to throw away (she tries to recycle as much of it as she can) books. Throw away BOOKS.

I was nonplussed to say the least. I wanted to give her a hug, to tell her it is okay, that the information will live on, that all will be well. But it does seem like a hard job. And it is a job that requires a constant awareness that time “creeps in its petty pace from day to day…” as Macbeth reminds us. The inexorable-ness of that is pretty intimidating.

So I have been thinking about books a lot today, and about other ways that we store information, and about how hard it is to let go of the object at hand. And I have been thinking about that nice woman who is trying to get the objects to go gently into that good night, and about how raw and powerful it was to see her overcome with love for these objects, these things, these books.