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.
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