Tag Archives: used book stores

Whuffling Through the Social Sciences

Posted on by
7

IN THIS EPISODE: Shopsitter Andrew Whalen gets more than he bargained for while trying to impose a little order on life’s chaos….

Things got a little too real today when I tore apart the “-Ology” bookshelf and set out to rebuild it. This shelf contains folklore, sociology, anthropology, self-help, career advice and research best practices.

At first reorganizing was fun. In a confusing world it can be comforting to establish hierarchies and draw borders. This is the appeal of the low-stakes nerd debate. Does it matter if Kirk or Picard were the better starship captain? No, but it feels good to put things in order (this one always seemed easy to me: one survived the reign of Kodos the Executioner, has the middle name Tiberius, passed the Kobayashi Maru test, and defeated conqueror-of-all-Asia Khan Noonien Singh… the other is Picard).

But some chaos cannot be cornered, tagged and boxed. Some chaos can only be whuffled, which is the word I made up to describe the sensation and action of bottling various fogs. Or the word I thought I had made up until I typed it into a search engine and found it used to describe sniffling, gentle affection and thankless online forum moderation. If we’re going by my definition (not endorsed by the Internet) it’s a feeling that accompanies so much of what we try to set in place. And the more I stared down the “-Ology” shelf, the more I begin to think the whole world is made of whuffle.

Yes, whuffle is verb, adjective and noun. It’s very versatile.

Before the “-Ology” shelf this uncertainty seemed very abstract to me. It came up primarily when considering genre. Is it fantasy just because there are swords? Is it sci-fi just because there are spaceships? Read Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun and get back to me. Welcome back. See what I mean? And that’s before we get into odd-balls like Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Thomas Pynchon, and Margaret Atwood. No wonder people just gave up and invented the term speculative fiction.

The “-Ology” shelf was supposed to be different. It represents entirely separate realms of human knowledge! It’s like a UN of social sciences, each field a tiny nation-state with its own territories and agendas.

But my distinct borders kept getting knocked down. What to do with Typetalk, which purports to be a study of the Myers-Brigg Type Indicator, but has self-help cover language promising to aid in determining how you “live, love and work”? Things only blurred more from there. When is a study on families anthropology and when is it sociology? Are Coping with Difficult People and Coping with Difficult Bosses really so different that they should be three shelves apart, one in sociology, the other in career guidance? ARGH.

So I started fresh, with a new theory. I could arrange the shelf like a continuity. There was a spectrum at play, beginning with psychology: the individual opening up onto the family, expanding into the society, then reaching out to other societies and forms of governance before finally drilling back down into the individual stories each society treasures. Brain to Folklore, with all of human experience in between. Made total sense for like two seconds. But things just got worse. And by the end I had almost convinced myself that Life-Span Developmental Psychology and Normative Life Crises was interchangeable with Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads.

I look at the shelf now and see nothing but whuffle. No matter how hard we try (I’m looking at you, Dewey, with all your decimals) nothing exists entirely separate and apart. Categories are cool, but they are never definite. All things interlock and nothing is simple. But as maddening and confusing as that can get for the bookshelf organizer, it probably makes for a more interesting world.

The Weight of Books

Posted on by
2

Yesterday our “Let’s Talk” group met for its monthly session in the bookstore. This is an open-invitation group that chooses a one-word topic, rotates moderator duties, and has a grand time dissecting the ideas involved.  Past topics have included evil, debt, karma, suffering, forgiveness, and–last night–ghosts.

Many tales were told of spirits returning, and as we shared stories, a theme emerged: that the returns we were speaking of were almost all benevolent, and that often even those of us (like me) who have never seen a ghost have felt presences, sensed weights or feelings that gave the impression of someone–a loved one or a stranger–being there.

That led us to the idea of a word I’m not sure I can spell: nefesh (that’s the phonetic version) the spirit that animates, the complete life of a being, in Hebrew. That word appears fairly often in the Bible, and more often than we might think in our lives, even if that’s not the term we used to define it.

The weight of being, the sense of someone’s presence, stays in their physical stuff, was what the group basically agreed. Call it memory projected by the bereaved, call it animation from beyond by the departed; just don’t dismiss it, because even those who have no truck with ghosts and goblins still have encounters with this nefesh thing when they enter a departed loved one’s room, pick up her hairbrush, smell his aftershave.

Could books be a prime example? People read book for all sorts of reasons: entertainment, information, enlightenment, to score points, to follow the crowd, to escape. Whatever the reason, does the reader leave a tiny piece of self behind in it? Not the jammy fingerprint at the top of the page or the grease spot from the burger–although we see plenty of those in the trade. I mean do people leave the weight of their presence behind when they read a book? Rather than your picking up a blank slate full of ideas for you to accept or reject as you choose, are you picking up (in a pre-loved volume) a little bit of the ethos the previous reader left? Does the book have a wisps and whiffs of what those who went before thought of it?

It’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? I really had considered books as idea houses: take them or leave them, but what’s in here is written down, pinned like a butterfly for study rather than one to admire in flight. But what if, oh what if books that have been read twenty, thirty times by different people carried just the hint of what people thought about the ideas contained therein? Would the dissonance of conflicting ideas create white noise to rub out acceptance? Or previous approval aid the willing suspension of disbelief?

Sometimes, when I’m handling the few very old books we have in our shop, 1800s titles, the tome in my hands feels heavy with solemnity, a weight beyond paper and print. Perhaps it really is nefesh, a sense of all the people who have read it before, and left the breath of their thoughts on its pages.

Hmm……