More wittering about books

(If this is getting boring, just skip it. Chaz needs to shed a load of books; Chaz is finding this difficult. That's all you need to know, and let's face it, you know that already.)

Witnesses for the prosecution are witnesses for the defence.

On the one hand, a book I didn't know I owned, a book I didn't even know existed. By definition - surely? - a book I do not need to keep.

On the other hand, a book I've owned for forty years, and probably haven't opened for thirty. Ditto, then, ditto.

But...

The first is the collected short stories of Tennessee Williams. Did I even know that Tennessee wrote short stories? I might have guessed at it; I wouldn't say I knew it. I don't believe I've ever read one. Again, this is not strong evidence of need. But I like short stories generically, and have a professional interest in them; I like American short stories particularly; even more particularly, those stories that come from the American South. Southern Gothic, I guess: it does its thing for me. My father introduced me to Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, while I was a teenager; I may have discovered Tennessee myself, but Dad might have sent me copies of his plays before I ever saw them. Now that I've found this book, I want to read it - but not right now. And I'm going to America, where, y'know. American writers are possibly available.*

The second is the Penguin Dictionary of the Theatre, a paperback edition dated 1970. I'd had the theatre bug for a long time by then (I remember what I think must have been my first experience of actors under lights, in the hall at my infant school, and my first Shakespeare, a school production of Hamlet that my dad took me to when I was eight; I remember being utterly enraptured, both occasions), but at eleven I was just kinda figuring out the breadth and depth of what I had to discover. This book is kind of a touchstone, back to the boy I was then: the sensawunda, the bated breath, the plunge. Keeping it would be a sentimental gesture, and nothing else; I don't need any of the information it contains. I don't believe we have the shelfspace for that kind of gesture - especially not as that particular emotional connection exists for a thousand other books as well.*

*Both of these rational arguing-of-cases, you understand, come with an undercurrent, which is my whimpering, "But it's my booook...!"

In totally other news:

It is of course not only the books that must be dealt with. There is also a larderful of food to be disposed of, much of it by eating.

We have been doing our best. I myself sat at this desk munching chocolate-coated coffee beans all morning, and then went downstairs to find the boys' contributions in the middle of the kitchen floor: a well-chewed raw cabbage core (Mac), and a well-suckled oily kitchen towel (Barry), both earnestly recycled from the compost. Well done, boys!

Then I settled in front of one of my favourite movies (The Man Who Would Be King) for the afternoon - and Mac bounded into my arms and went cutely to sleep for the whole movie, so now I have a tingling thumb and an aching elbow, but how is that not worth it?