Being in my office has finally started to truly come together, after a a rather dragging and interrupted year-plus of trying to make it a workable creative space and also my bookroom. About three weeks ago I finally sorted, incorporated, and piled the influx from the librarian/coworker bequest, put a bunch of loose and boxed printed material (official documents, liner notes and art insets from CD jewel cases, DVD cover inserts, schoolwork and materials, bus driver documents, miscellany) in some organizers salvaged from my parent's garage, put up some overdue art on the diagonal parts of the ceiling and painted the beginning stages of a mural on the horizontal part of the ceiling. Also tidied my desk and the whole area, have settled on a nice spread for my rock collection, and have made a pile of things on which to place my laptop so I could dispense with a chair and move into a "type standing up" phase in my career. It seems a logical step for many reasons, not least the clear posture progression: early typings taking place lying in bed, knees drawn up, head propped up on a pillow folded in half, laptop supported on my lower abdomen and leaned against my thighs; my twenties and leading up to now typically sitting at a variety of desks and tables, upon a variety of chairs and stools; and now I stand, surrounded on all four sides by shelves and piles of books, and by art on the walls and ceiling that, at the moment, is comprised purely of pieces painted either by Ezra or myself, and in one case, a collaboration.
Behind me on my left-hand side is the case largely devoted to fairly tall, middle-to-regular thick paperback novels by a variety of authors from a variety of backgrounds, as well as all my books in Spanish ranged from the left of the bottom shelf. Those number twenty-seven, minus a couple I keep on a different shelf; the aforementioned rest of the shelf is comprised of as disparate examples as the following few favorites: We Need New Names, by NoViolet Bulawayo, Haunted, by Chuck Palahniuk, and The Demon, by Hubert Selby Jr., and a few which I have yet to read: Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn, Waiting, by Ha Jin, and Vain Art of the Fugue, by Demitru Tsepeneag. On top of this shelf, a beautifully colored and executed semirealist ceramic lilypad with a frog on it, by Ezra, and four stuffed Jurassic Park dinosaurs from the 1995 Lost World run of merch--my velociraptor Claws which I have had since my grandmother bought him at a Kroger for me in that perfect midnineties, and the Stegosaurus, the Pachycephalosaurus, and the Tyrannosaurus, obtained as a birthday/Christmas gift to me by Ezra.
Above those, on the shelf set into the wall, is my complete Animorphs collection, my picture of my middle brother and I as children, and in the corner facing out, All Colour but the Black, the Bleach art book. Above the Animorphs books, on the flat wall, a painting by Ira and myself in acryilics and watercolors. On that same self stretching across the left-hand wall is my Bleach collection, my One-Punch Man up through volume 15, my Zelda mangas, the Templar, Arizona books by Iron Spike, Adventure Time's Marceline and the Scream Queens by Meredith Gran et al, random assortment of comic books, a couple Pokémon mangas, and at the end, the Penguin Classics collection No. 22 of short works by a wide variety of authors and thinkers.
Returning to the rear left-hand corner back at ground level are the four plastic drawers in which printed material is sorted and stored, atop which is stacked some unsorted material and art objects crafted by Ezra. A wooden frame from an old mirror I salvaged from the apartment I lived alone at before Ezra moved in with me--I used a camping knife given to me by a previous parter to work loose and disponse with the staples that held a rotting board backing to the frame, not without an immature and unenjoyable pleasure in misusing that tool, laden as it was with memory and meaning--is propped in front of a door set into the left-hand wall that leads into a crawlspace. In the mirror frame, in front of the white-painted door, hangs a thrifted scroll with inks of three goldfish derived from a Chinese style, hard to say which, hard to say the provenance, but a nice picture and a nice texture on the material of the scroll, which cost a dollar. Hung on the extreme ledge of the ornately carved top of the frame is my old censorship bookbag, with like banned books printed on it in Courier and the other side is the same print but redacted. I'm a big fan of censorship in that it generates reading lists that are either interesting to pursue or hysterically funny. The destruction of history and the ability to persecute private citizens for what they read or have around to read is less good, but omelettes require the breaking of eggs, as I am sure we all understand and is definitely revelant.
Censorship bad. Just to be clear. Sometimes I do fail to understand how heavily I cloak my irony. This is already a digression, and no place for further elaboration, but as always in our modern times the question of the censorship of hate speech as a necessary exemption hangs over the question of censorship and free speech in general. My take is many takes, originating from many places and making use of different rhetorical leverage and thrust. In another time or place, dear reader, I will say more.
Moving on to the shelving along the left-hand wall at ground level, we have a small shelf extremely laden with art books, comic anthologies and collections, oversize comic novellas and novels, the three Dark Horse Zelda hardcover lore books, and photo essays, topped with and supporting a leaning pile of children's books large, small, in-between, and eclectic in as many other ways as I have been able to manage as well.
Built-in shelves are a feature of this bookroom, and the small shelf of children's lit and art is flush against the one on the left-hand wall. From top to bottom I have my Russians in fiction, my Germans and Central Europeans in fiction, books about writing and grammar, collections and anthologies in hardcover and large paperback--fiction, myth, and nonfiction. The adjacent shelf going towards the front wall is topped with more comics in volumes, anthologies, and collections, graphic novels, and art books. Beaneath them, large paperback fiction and hardcover fiction--as varied a bunch as in the first described shelf.
Above it all, on the diagonal part of the ceiling, a painting by Ezra done on one of the large rectangular panels of the carboard box that held the mattress I bought that we both sleep on to this day. I love this painting, and it is one of the rescues I keep in my office. Ezra has his share of pictures and paintings I have made which I would sooner see destroyed; so it goes.
Facing me now, the wall with the window in it. On the left, continuing the clockwise circuit we have been describing, is the shelf for science-fiction and fantasy, especially in series and collections--Redwall, Halo, Star Wars, Song of Ice and Fire, Narnia, Dark Materials, Gormenghast, fairy tale and folktale collections, themed sci-fi/fantasy anthologies, etc.
The middle shelf, spanning the width of the window, is inbuilt, and on the top is my chess set, some old trumpet mouthpieces, a ceramic teacup my brother--the same one from the picture--made, broken, a beautiful clean break that lets the part with the handle stand freely and hold four marbles, and the smaller fraction with its lip tucked under the larger part's bulge and its own bulge curving proudly. Atop the cardboard box which contains my chess set is my silver cross, an old White Pearl eraser, and two little pouches with some stuff from my baptism in them. A wooden stake wrapped in a length of velvet cloth. Four bottle caps. The surrogate ring, part of a set Ezra and I use in lieu of possessing our own wedding rings. A tarnished old silver spoon. A kind of bowl with a kind of flaring lip that bulges and folds to make an inset edge, which makes it an incredible ashtray. It's light green and made by Ezra, and there's a bit of ash and a roach in it now. My ocarina, a replica of the Ocarina of Time, though a small and limited one--used to have a larger Ocarina of Time with a second octave, but it was broken on one of the many journeys I risked it on. Such is fate. The rest is the rock collection I mentioned. Humble nothings, notable only in the brief narratives describing how they were acquired, but each little piece of the world gathered there brings me great happiness.
Books ensconced below this powerful array of spells and tokens live in the Golden Temple. They are the only section in which everything kept in it is a book I have read at least once, with the exception of one or two books kept there because they are recent additions to round out a particular author's ouvre. Most of them have been read many times. For the rest of the library, the range of the read-to-unread ratio for the rest of the below-top bookshelf (which is also almost exclusively comprised of read and reread material) bookshelves goes from about 60 to 85 percent read. The Golden Palace shelf houses my Hebrew Bible translated by Robert Alter, all my Le Guin, my Calvino, my Murakami; all my Tolkien and Nietzsche and Salinger, my Kierkegaard, my nonfiction Baldwin; my beastiaries, several histories broad and specific, a few biographies, many novels, cycles--The Chronicles of Prydain, The Time Quartet, Out of the Silent Planet, to name a couple--collections of short works, of essays, of theology, of comparative mythology, of spirituality, and a book of its own genre and sort, The Art of Looking Sideways. On a technicality, here we we will profit by skipping ahead to the wall-inset tall shelf on the right-hand side, where I have further large and even complete collections of Golden Palace novelists and poets: Jerry Spinelli, Richard Bach, Roald Dahl, Richard Brautigan, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Crichton, John Steinbeck, and Charles Dickens. Also below them on the right hand-wall is the nearly-complete Stephen King collection shelf, which must certainly represent Golden Palace devotion.
On the right of the window, the shelf is devoted to the smaller paperbacks. From thin to thick, the main consideration here is that the book not be too tall. It fits quite a lot of books, exhibiting a great variety of provenance. Atop this shelf is a beautiful framed cartoon-style portrait of a Venezuelan church called Nuestra Señora del Carmen, a gift from my mother. Next to that is a framed, stained, and faded print of a Chinese poem done under a mountain in gray-blue ink.
Moving on to the right-hand wall proper, above the aforementioned shelf of author collections, is a piece by me on a different panel of that cardboard mattress box. Next to that is a handmade monochrome piece featuring the word (provided by me) "obstreperous", gifted to me by Ezra as a housewarmer amost five years ago now. Below the shelf, closest to the front wall and the small paperback shelf, is a large bookstack comprised of my heaviest and most oversized hardcover books on the bottom, a second little set of oversized books leaned against it, and climbing to hardcovers that are merely unwieldy, such as the softcover The Complete Illustrated History: Aztec & Maya, which is a very annoying book to shelve or work into a pile. I don't believe any other book in my collection has a comparable weight/volume ratio, set of precise dimensions, or a similar cover material. Weirder than a green dog, as my mom sometimes says. All these books are nonfiction, from textbooks to art books to history books and more.
That pile is partially suported by the Stephen King shelf I mentioned, which is topped with some oversized poetry books. The bottom shelf also has other horror writers and some science fiction.
Next is the inset shelf on the right-hand wall, directly opposite from the one on the left-hand wall. This one contains, from top to bottom, my Greeks and Romans, my Classical Chinese philosophers, my Zen and Dao, and some more mythology books and myths. Then my poetry, which has quite spilled out of its tethers here and is faced with a growing pile in front of the shelf.
Finally the two shelves in the back right corner are stuffed and heavily topped with all my nonfiction--chess books, dictionaries of slang, idioms, philosophy, music notation; biographies; books about food, genocide, history of various stripes, disciplines, grains and scales, literary analysis, anthropology, magic, medicine, cosmology, war, dinosaurs, gender, psychology, drama, wolves, architecture, law, theology, aesthetics, linguistics, economics, philosophy, sociology, political science, and more. Always more, if I can get it.
With that and the six symbols I painted freehand in black acrylic on the ceiling as a beginning, we have everything, except for my desk, which is perhaps a matter for another day.
*
Hoping to write about some other stuff, but this turned out to be an irritatingly massive, even ponderous post. In addition, its content could only really possibly interest a very specific kind of pedant, maybe, so, I dunno. Uncertain how triumphant I'm feeling here, at the end of a bit.
Ah, well. There's always the next one.
--JL
