The White Towers

The subject line of this entry sounds like the title of a fantasy novel, doesn't it? That's not it, though. I'm talking about towers that really exist. They're about six feet tall, and made of cardboard, and currently driving John and myself to distraction.



The photo above was taken in the kitchen of the Museum of the Weird, otherwise known as Casa Blocher, just a few hours ago. So was the photo below:


Inside are probably books and magazines, Happy Meal toys, fanzines I edited when I was 16, and Thâle knows what else. Maybe the Star Trek lemon-soaked paper napkins are in there, too. I actually have no idea what's in them. John hauled them into the kitchen temporarily in an attempt to organize our boxes-o-stuff, so we can start going through them and figure out what to keep and what to dump, and how to dispose of the stuff in the latter category. There's no easy answer. Some of what we won't keep is potential eBay fodder, but nothing worth big bucks, or the time to list and sell and ship it. Some will probably go to Bookman's, some to a yard sale, some to Goodwill, and some into a dumpster. The rest of it, probably half, will stay here, and we'll need to find a better way to store it all. Even the new library probably won't accomodate all the books, let alone the useless junk cherished mementos we've been storing all these years, waiting for a chance to sort it all and a place to put it all. There are things in these boxes that are absolutely precious to me, and irreplaceable. But where the heck do we put them?

So you see the problem. There's a lot to organize, based on too many parameters. John struggled with the job for quite a few hours today before officially pronouncing himself "overwhelmed." And who could blame him?


We did make a little progress on the sorting, though. This afternoon, we went through bookcases in our half-finished library, and did some "weeding" of books we no longer felt we had to own. Some stuff was easy to dump: a 2000 Writer's Market, a collection of reviews of 1971 films, a book about Jack Benny's tv show, and other outdated or marginal items. Some were harder to judge. We both wanted to keep the books about writing, but did that have to include the one by Henry James? John picked up and reshelved one book twice, and finally decided to keep it. I picked out an unread fantasy novel with computers in it to discard, changed my mind, and put it back.

Another book I've had for thirty years I intended to keep because it was one of my books about film. Or possibly science fiction. Hmm, what was it? For the first time in a decade, I tested my faulty memory with respect to this book, The Expanded Moment. It turned out to be an anthology of literary short stories of yesteryear, Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein, "The Rocking Horse Winner" and other stuff that gets shoved down students' brains in English 101. I placed out of English 101 back in 1975, and I didn't want this book after all. Away it went.

But I did find out I had a book by Charles DeLint to try, and a Jane Yolen I've never read, and several other fantasy and sf authors whose books I didn't know I had. Someday I'm going to read those books - and the one with the wizards and computers.

I didn't do much with Wikipedia today, except help to fight a few fires, mostly set by the same person who's been causing trouble all along. But I did finally finish my revision of Chapter Two of Mages, and opened chapter three to start on tomorrow evening. The rest of the day, aside from church and laundry and shopping, I mostly spent putting a dent in my backlog of unread blog postings. I caught up with Judith, Patrick, Becky, Shelly, Georganna and TNH, and would have started in on Julie had her server cooperated. That probably accounts for less than half of the backlog (and only one of the emails!), but it will have to do for tonight.

Karen

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