The Problems of Book Addiction

 

I have a confession to make. I am an addict. I am a book addict.

I have been a book addict for years. I blame it on my mother who, out of love, first introduced me to the many joys of books and of learning from books before I even started school. 

My addiction to books was compounded by the fact that I was a sickly child. I got severe asthma when I was twelve, an illness that often immobilised me, often sent me to the hospital gasping for breath, and an illness which led me even further down the path of a devotion to learning and to book love and book collecting. 

As I have gotten older and even more infirm than I already was my substantial collection of books, a collection that has flowed when sedentary and ebbed when not, and there has been a lot of the not over my life, has become more and more of a problem beyond the simple mechanics of moving heavy them. One way in which they are causing me a headache these days is that the shear number of them are inhibiting me from extricating myself from the shitehole in which I live and the incompetent landlord I rent from, someone who is often economical with the truth and who can’t be fully counted on to actually take care of the problems associated with the place in which I live in a timely manner or sometimes any manner at all.

I currently live in Albany, New York less by choice than due to the fact that I got a job there and kind of got stuck in that old rust belt city as a consequence. It is, truth be told, not a horrible place to live though it has all the problems of a city negatively impacted since the 1970s, for example, by the usual suspects including deindustrialisation, White flight to the suburbs, increasing property taxes, and inflation, including inflation of real estate “values”. Needless to say all this points up several facts about post 1970s America and the core nation world including the fact that money has no inherent objective value, the arbitrariness of market mechanisms, the speculation that undergirds them, and the attempt by hollowed out cities to utilise rising real estate markets to increase their income, an income negatively impacted by White flight to the suburbs, via increasing property taxes, something that, in turn, drives up rents and restarts anew the seemingly never ending cycle of inflation (though, of course, the ideology of growth at all costs that undergirds dominant variants of capitalism does this as well). 

The neighbourhood I live in was once described as a poor area of the city with a mix of poor ethnics and bohemians and there is truth to that description of the neighbourhood I reside in. I live in the neighbourhood and the apartment that I do because by Albany standards it is cheap in all senses of the term. Neither the flat that I rent nor my landlord are that bad comparatively speaking, something that should tell you something about the reality of renting apartments on a limited income in Albany, New York. I live in an old house on Morton Avenue, a house that goes back at least to the 1850s and which has, to say the least, seen its better days. The house was apparently remodelled in the 1970s, an era which saw urban decline and attempts, largely failed attempts, to deal with tis urban decline by a host of mostly inappropriate urban renewal schemes all over the rust belt of the United States, schemes that, as they were intended to do, enriched some often if not always at the expense of others. The flat has little in the way of insulation, a problem in a Northeastern city that gets quite cold. Its windows are, to put it nicely, breezy and let in the dirt and dust from the busy road in front of the house. As a consequence I had to use rope caulk to try to inhibit cold and hot air from readily entering the apartment and had to purchase two air purifiers to clean the unwanted dirty air entering the flat. I wish I could say that these are the unintended consequences of a half-arsed job but they are not. They are standard I want to get rich with the least effort capitalism operating practise. It has rotting kitchen cabinets made of wood product not wood. The shower consists of tiles, mould bearing tiles, a none too wise design in a humid environment during the summer months. The carpet of ugly blue never seems to get clean despite repeated attempts to clean it and which bears the memories of hot irons and other heating devices laid on it at sometime in the past. All the showers in the house use the same system and the same water heater which means that taking a shower at almost any time of the day is an adventure in hot and cold inconsistent running water. The walls are paper thin and crack if you barely lean against them. The heat comes from radiators which barely heat the house in fall, winter, and spring and requires the addition of space heaters to keep the place warm. Needless to say this does wonders—I am being facetious here—for one’s ability to breathe through one’s nose and to maintain a moist mouth in the fall, winter, and spring months. It gets so dry in the flat thanks to the radiator and space heaters that a humidifier is essential to try, if ultimately unsuccessfully, to open one’s nasal passages when lying in bed. It has gotten to the point that the flat I live in is, I suspect, making me sicker than I already am. 

All this, along with the increasing rents on a rundown apartment in a rundown part of town and a landlord who has been unable to fully fix a shower in ten years and who has recently had to turn the electricity off in the entire house four times and who still hasn’t been able to fix the problem as I type, necessitates that I move and that I move soon. I am hoping to move into senior subsidised housing in the Albany area (though frankly I would rather be in Ashland, Oregon or even stone age Athens, Ohio), of which there are, thankfully, several options in Albany even if trying to get on and stay on the waiting lists of these is often a way too complex and way too Sisyphean task. 

One of the problems with moving, of course, are the thousands of books I own, These books are not only unwieldy and heavy to move, they also add to the cost of moving. One quote I got for moving with half of my books already packed in boxes last hear, was the sum of $2000 dollars, a large sum for someone with a limited fixed income. All of this mean that I really do have to downsize my collection of books.

As someone who loves books and treasures what one can learn from books it is hard for me to part with them, however. I have, despite this, slowly been parting with some of them over the last year and a half. I have been sending books to my son and to friends bit by bit. Despite this I have barely made a dent in my book collection and, of course, I still buy books thanks to my addiction. A few weeks back I tried to sell some books, including a large collection of beautifully produced Soviet Foreign Languages Publishing House, Progress, and Raduga books to the Strand bookstore in Manhattan and to Powell’s in Portland but to no avail. The former wants me to drive several thousand books to Manhattan, something that I simply cannot do physically, while the latter uses a computer programme to buy books with ISBN numbers, something that makes Powell’s less of a real bookseller and more of an automated corporation that doesn’t really care about books to me. I did put in a few ISBN’s into Powell's Hal 2024 but they, or better the programme they purchased from some other corporation who, in what is now commonplace in global capitalism, makes money off of other people’s money, wanted so few of the books and offered so little for them (something that points up how low these profiteers and privateers will go) that it wasn’t even worth the effort to put the ISBN’s into the automated system in the first place. Welcome to the you do all the work and get little for it economy that has become so prominent since the revival of that religion known as neoliberalism in the United States.

So what to do? At this point it looks like I will be tossing the books into the rubbish bin. There really is little else that I can do. It makes me sad to think of doing it but this is the book economy that we have to live with in contemporary America. And for me nothing reveals what life is like in disposable consumer oriented America and in anti-intellectual capitalist America where scholarly and classic literature books are so unloved and unwanted, better than that. The microcosm as the macrocosm. Perhaps I should have bought comic books over the years instead; they might actually be sought after and worth something. Such is life in the upside down world of modern America.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Rubbish In, Rubbish Out

 

You always know what you are going to find on social media. You know that you are going to find a lot of lowest common denominator nonsense about the usual suspects, for example, films, television, women (some scantily clad for the “adolescent” male gaze), politics, sports (including fabrications related to Caitlin Clark), banal and mundane sensationalist and melodramatic clickbait for fun and profit, and music. You never know, however, how low the rubbish you find on social media will go. I was reminded of this fact yet again while I was looking at books by Warren I. Cohen on Amazon, one of the lowest of lowest common denominator social media sites on the world wide web given its poor search engine, its limited and I suspect mostly bot curation of its comments page, a curation that looks for certain hot button words and phrases, and the limitations it places on actual scholarly reviews. Amazon seems to prefer “reactions” that are reflective of the widespread reality of attention deficit disorder in postmodern America and large parts of the core nation world.

I am familiar with Cohen, a specialist on American foreign policy retired from the University of Maryland Baltimore County  and author of introductory books on American foreign policy, including his excellent and aptly titled A Nation Like All Others: A Brief History of American Foreign Relations published by Columbia, his introductory work on US and USSR relations published by Cambridge University Press in its four volume history of American foreign relations series, America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991, and studies of Asian-American foreign relations, which is why I went to Amazon to see what other books he had written.

What I also found and found as interesting as the other books Cohen had written, were the comments on his book America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991. Two of the four comments—the fact that there were only four tells you a lot about the contemporary core nation world—on the book were favourable. The other two comments, however, were negative.  Of course, you are going to invariably find negative comments on almost any critical history and analysis of American foreign policy because you are inevitably going to step on the toes and draw the ire of the many faithful churchgoers of the Church of America who believe in the dogma of American exceptionalism.

One of these negative comments, that by Josh, was more “substantive” than the other, that by Sol D. Josh’s “reaction" to the book—I hesitate to call it a review since it really isn’t a review as is the case with most posts on scholarly books on Amazon—whinged about what he believed was Cohen’s New Dealism and his supposed belief that the New Deal was the best of all possible American worlds. He complains that Cohen interprets American post-WWII militarisation and the rise of its national security state as something other than a response to Soviet imperialism. He whines about Cohen's book being too much of an introductory text, something the book, in fact, is.

Sol D’s “substance” is also a statement of faith. Sol D’s faith is more clearly than that of Josh that hybrid mix of Christianity and America that has long been prominent in American culture and American life. He spends his reaction whining about Cambridge histories being the product of apologists and polemicists for “butt kissing atheist-Marxist tyrannical dictatorship”, a dictatorship, he claims, killed 200 million of its own citizens (today, of course, any self respecting empiricist would have to number many of the corporate and entrepreneurial elite, particularly in places like the Silicon Valley and Austin, amongst the tyrannical dictatorship of the mediocretariat). He ends his diatribe by stressing his devotion to his lord and saviour Jesus Christ.

Both of these comments reveal, as I noted, a faith in America, a faith some theologians would argue is a form of heresy and blasphemy. The faith of both is ultimately grounded in metaphysical and metaphysical manichean presuppositions that some humans are good guys, generally the group, clique, community, state, or nation, in this case the United States of America, that one belongs to, and that other humans are bad guys, that other whoever the goods mark themselves off against, the USSR in most of the mid-to late twentieth century, and, after the fall of the USSR, those liberals and “New Dealers” who are seen as “commies” and, paradoxically, fascists, by many and are categorised as “commies” and fascists by demagogues looking for leverage to gain political, economic, and cultural power. They are grounded, in other words, in the notion that some humans are good and some humans, them, are evil. They are grounded in the dehuhamisation of these others.

And this last—dehumanising the other—is one of the fundamental problems with these manichean politically and ideologically correct ways of seeing. Contrary to such manichean faiths humans, to varying degrees, are characterised by their better angels and their less better angels Humans, real humans, be they Hitler, Stalin, those who ordered bombs dropped on civilian targets in the name of victory, or true believers in monotheistic religious inquisitions, are, as history shows, complex and contradictory. They are neither inhuman incarnations of pure evil or cliched and stereotyped incarnations of pure goodness. Those who see the world in such manichean hues, of course, can’t admit the fact that humans, particularly those humans in positions of power (the power corrupts prover ), are the same every where and at every time for if they did they would have to admit that Cohen and other empirically grounded analysts like him are right and that both American and Soviet powers that be are neither evil incarnate of good incarnate and that humans can and do make mistakes and, of course, they can be socialised for moronic ethnocentric conformity. Cognitive dissonance, as it often does, however, in these cases, often ends up making the faith of true believers  even stronger than it was despite empirical facts to the contrary because in so many cases fiction, created reality, trumps, as it does with Trump and his ilk, real reality.

The Books of My Life: The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas

I am not, as I have written before on this blog several times, a big fan of biographies. Most of them—the worst of the bunch, in my opinion—are little better than hagiographies and provide us less with a full understanding of the subject of the biography than a glimpse into the mythic and censorial mentalities of those who write hagiographical biographies and those who buy them and read them. The better biographies, on the other hand, may present a flesh and bones subject rather than a somewhat fictionalised saint but they, for my money, far too often get mired in the quicksands of gossip and insignificance, the latter something sadly common in the writings of far too many historians who focus far too often on the trees rather than the forest. 

Historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s biography of M. Carey Thomas, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Knopf, 1994), gives us a flesh and bones portrait of a significant figure in American and Western intellectual and particularly American higher education history. Thomas, who was amongst the first Americans who undertook their graduate education in Germany and German Switzerland, was, to use a probably overused metaphor, the mother of Bryn Mawr College, the ostensibly Quaker women’s college located in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania near Philadelphia. The scion of a Gurneyite Quaker family, Thomas was Bryn Mawr's second president. 

Thomas was not only the president of what became one of the elite women’s colleges in the US—one of the now mythical seven sisters—but was also, as Horowitz reminds us, an important figure in the history of American education, in American higher education, in American higher education for women, in late nineteenth and early twentieth century suffrage and feminist movements, in philanthropic movements, and in the intellectual life of the era in general. 

Horowitz’s biography does what all good biographies should do: It puts Thomas’s life in broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts. Horowitz does a nice job of exploring Thomas’s 19th century Anglo-Saxonism with its ethnocentrism and Social Darwinism. She does a fine job of exploring Thomas’s seeking after power side. And she does an excellent job of exploring Thomas’s romantic—she was devoted to romantic artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne—and her romantic cultural criticism side, Thomas's passionate side, Thomas's Anne Shirley side, if you will. Horowitz also gives us a lot of information—I would call it gossip—about Thomas’s “smashes", the trials and tribulations of those “smashes", Thomas’s upstairs manor house mentality, Thomas's devotion to wealth and what it could bring, Thomas’s more Machiavellian and scheming side. This last side of Thomas, by the way, seems essential for someone embedded in higher levels of corporate bureaucracies like America's colleges and universities who has ambitions beyond being a cipher of the real powers that be, many of them businessmen (or conservative Quaker businessmen and “local leaders” in Bryn Mawr’s case for most of Thomas’s reign), in America’s educational bureaucracies who serve on the boards of directors of America's colleges and universities.

While I liked Horowitz’s contextualisations I found her polemical argument that by formulating a more egalitarian feminism that called for equal opportunities for women Thomas stood outside of her time to some extent and thus that we can condemn her, from a late 20th century vantage point, for her late 19th and early 20th century ethnocentrisms (moral presentism?), problematic. Thomas's egalitarian feminism, after all, as Horowitz notes several times in the book, was ultimately, grounded in Anglo Saxon Social Darwinism, something she took initially from Herbert Spencer, making it and her very much the product of its and her time. Nor did I find Horowitz’s attempt to argue that Thomas’s anti-Semitism was a projection of her own conscious or unconscious attitudes about herself particularly compelling. Ethnocentrisms of all varieties, in my experience, are generally tied to conceptions of usness and themness or otherness, with the other often demonised, a phenomenon that is less psychological projection and more a social and cultural construction of identity and communituy that is embodied, thanks to primary and secondary socialisation throughout one's life cycle.

As someone interested in the history of higher education and British settler society religion I enjoyed Horowitz’s biography of Thomas. She and her siblings and cousins, many of whom moved in the lofty circles of the North American and European intellectual culture of the era, represent, at least to me, someone who has had a long interest in the history of Anglo-American Quakerism and the increasing secularisation of Gurneyite Quakerism particularly on the east coast of the United States. More broadly, Horowitz’s  The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas restores Thomas to the important position in American intellectual history and the history of American higher education she held and holds, something that should not be but far too often was forgotten.