Wednesday, March 6, 2019

20190306.0430

It should come as no surprise that I have a personal library; I was for many years engaged in formal study of English languages and literatures, and I spent no small amount of time trying to be a professor in those same fields, and they call for books more than most. Even before that, I was an avid reader, given to spending money on books instead of on the kinds of things that others of my age, when I was of such an age, spent money on. And while I have made much use of the libraries where I have been, and I have at times pruned items out of my collection, I have tended to hoard the printed pages. There are several reasons, of course, and I may come back to them in another post, and it may even be that some of them still apply. But I think I may be about to go through and rid myself of some of the books and magazines and journals I have acquired over the years; I think they have outlived their usefulness to me, and the sentimental connections they embody and reinforce are not what I need them to be.
Clearly, not all of my books and suchlike fall under such rubrics. There are the fancy copies that my wife and I keep in the living room, decorations for it and advertisements to those who visit us that we read. (Yes, it's a bit snobby.) There are the copies of books I still use for what research I do, their pages stained by the oils of my hands as I've flipped through at high speed, looking for that one line to quote or that one passage to summarize. There are the copies I've been given as gifts, tattered from age and use by now and falling apart, but kept because they came from people I still value. And there are no few that I use in the recreational activities I still undertake--because I am a raging nerd, and the things I like to do involve reading even when they're not typically thought of as "reading."
But I also have boxes and boxes of academic journals, as well as many issues of them still in their wrappings. Some, such as CCC, College English, PMLA, and Profession, I no longer subscribe to; I am not a member anymore of the organizations that produce them, and I have no reason to be so. I will never be a real college professor; I will never be a full-time teacher. So there is no need for me to align myself with the MLA or the NCTE; they do not represent me, and they should not, so I should not give my time or the representation of my time that is the money I earn to them. And I probably ought not to continue to give space to works that I no longer use and am not likely to open again.
To be fair, such a thing feels like quitting. It feels like another admission of defeat, another acknowledgment that I have been wrong. It is not, at least not so much; when I undertook to get such things, I had honest hope that I might be one of the fortunate folks who picked up a professorial job. If I am wrong, it is in holding onto a hope that will never be; letting go of the things that informed that hope and that emerged from pursuing it is more a correction than an error. Such a correction is good to have, even if the reminder of error that it necessarily is is not the most comfortable thing to have provided.

No comments:

Post a Comment