Once I had resolved to reduce my book collection to a more reasonable size I faced the question of what to keep. I knew I’d have to devise some kind algorithm, some mechanical means to measure the value of the treasures I could allow myself to put aside for my private enjoyment. Principles were needed. Firm, clear, definite principles else I would just sink and slide away in the selection process. But I’ve always had a problem with principles. Faced with temptation and a Super Ego perpetually on the blink my principles would tend to dissolve as fast as Disprin in the breakfast Martini.
To make life easier I decided to chuck out all the embarrassing stuff first.
So Colin Wilson went. Does anyone take that stuff seriously anymore? My only excuse is that I was very young and counted myself ever so clever as to have discovered the difficult to get hold of later works on existentialism and post-Freudian psychoanalysis when all my mates in Sixth Form were still plodding through The Occult! The damn misguided fools. I bet they never even finished The Outsider.
And that other weirdly wonderful Wilson, Robert Anton . . . yes, he goes too, and all his cronies and hangers on. No regrets, I’m sure we’ll meet again in another dimension. Probably at the bar with Tim Leary and Allan Ginsberg.
What the hell was I thinking when I bought all those books on mysticism? Jewish, Islamic, Christian – several brands of Christian codswallop in fact, Gnostic, Alchemical, Creation Centred, Monastic, Russian and Greek Orthodox . . . and I wasn’t even taking drugs! Perhaps that was the problem, a deficiency in self-prescribed mind-altering, mood-shifting, morality-melting medication? I do remember why all that Gershom Scholem on the Kabbala, however; I went through a bit of a Walter Benjamin phase inimy late twenties and read everything in his library. No shame in that I suppose. But no reason to hang on to it either. Mysticism! I haven’t exactly got to grips with realism yet and I doubt I’ll ever develop an inclination for other-worldly wisdom. Mystical nonsense is out.
As is all the niche literature I procured. You know what I mean by niche? Of course you do; for the delicate darlings amongst us, erotica, or just plain old porn if you don’t want to be so bourgeois about it. Those with constricted consciences and spiritually over-sensitive souls may want to jump to the next paragraph as I explain the reason for this particular embarrassment of raunchy riches . . . Put simply, a few years ago I made a decent living dabbling in filth. Not the kind you download onto your laptop when your loved one is out getting her hair done – I should be so lucky! No, my contribution to the collective erotic happiness of mankind – or, more accurately, the satisfaction of a very narrow cross section of ladies of a certain libidinal bent – the sum total of smut that I supplied was entirely confined to the literary arts. In short I wrote bespoke masturbatory fantasies for a very select client group – well, select in the sense they could afford my services, and I wasn’t cheap. A good two thousand word titillation could set you back a couple of hundred quid. Now is not the time to relate how I happened to find myself in this predicament initially – there was a woman, a pool table, and a misplaced prophylactic involved – but I spent a happy couple of years inventing elaborate set-ups and scenarios of seduction, riffing on the rigmarole of tease and foreplay, finding novel ways to describe the act of sex. It wasn’t an entirely random career move to be fair. I’d always been fascinated by the way words had the power to do things, change minds, make people happier – that’s why I became a therapist, as Freud said words were originally magic – and here I was, conjuring up words that were certainly causing incredible things to happen to lots of people, and definitely in the direction of happiness. Fun was being had by all. All that is except the current girlfriend who did not regard my literary efforts with quite the same levity. Was I at my desk every day, nine to five I asked. Yes, I was she agreed. Did I pay tax and were all my bills covered, I enquired. Again, she concured, yes. Then, I argued, this was a job, a vocation, a respectable livelihood. But you are making random women come, she retorted, and that is sordid, scandalous, and seedy. My protestation that the only fluids involved on my side were bottles of blue-black Mont Blanc ink – did I mention the sexual screeds were all written by hand on the finest paper? it was a proper little craft industry – and a tumbler of Jamesons, and that the ladies in question were rarely in the same city let alone the same room, fell on deaf ears. I packed my bags that very night, along with the four cases of dirty books that I’d been collecting for research purposes. That is all those books meant to me, honest, just research. It was all above board and respectable. Simply a transaction, nothing personal. Though I did meet one lovely lady in the course of my short but distinguished career as a trafficker in muck, a head of department in a serious subject at a swanky Southern university. We almost got married. She was a psychotherapist so must have understood me. She was insanely bright, sexy, stable, and most of all had shelving to spare. Call me shallow – oh I’m as deep and about as transparent a cling film, and I admit it – but the thought has crossed my mind that I could have done worse.
Embarrassed as I am to admit to such a shady, shabby, insalubrious occupation as purveyor of pricey porn, I’m much more ashamed to recall that I once called myself a consultant. All the books from that era will go without the slightest fibulation of regret. Consulting seems to me an unholy crossing of quackery, con-merchandising, and cold reading, and I’m happy to say I never had the instinct for showmanship and self promotion required to succeed in that game. Apparently Mike Chitty has spotted one of his old cast offs somewhere in the pile . . . give him a tweet, I’m sure he’ll give you a fair price.
Same goes for any book that has the whiff of the workplace about it. I was mortified earlier today when Ivor Tymchak noticed a Paul McKenna hidden away in a box of chaff. My only excuse was that I once had a large budget for a work library, he was someone the clients wanted. The only book I would consider reading of his is one entitled, I Can Make You Homicidally Enraged. He successfully does that to me all the time.
All the books on conflict management, dealing with difficult behaviour, negotiation skills, mediation, and general do-goodery are out.
Any book that attempts to uplift, edify or otherwise improve me goes too. I’m beyond fixing.
Self-help. Need I say where self-fucking-help will end up! When I was editing a worthy and woefully obscure radical oppositional forward thinking mental health magazine back in the days when I did that sort of thing, I got to review thousands of such atrocities. Read so many my eyes bled, my fingers cramped, my brain shrivelled. Did one sentence of it do me any bloody good? Well, look at me . . . hardly the best advert for Anthony bleedin’ Robbins am I! Bin! Bin ’em all.
Books on environmentalism, feminist philosophy of the ethics of care, anti-science diatribes, apologetics for the idiocy of rural life, and smug tomes of a anti-Enlightenment bollocks (postmodernism if you prefer) similarly get the big heave ho. You wouldn’t believe how much of that crap I subjected myself to. I am a recovering postmodernist. Take your epistemological perspectivism and your social constructivism and stick them where Margaret Mead’s Samoans stuck their nuts (which was a big fat fib of course, she made all that appealing counter culture twaddle up, just her fetid imagination!) . . . though if anyone needs this stuff for their sociology Masters make me a rational offer, it’s all yours.
Wilfully obscure books I bought to pander the clever Dick in me are toast. How embarrassing is this?
I even have a book on Concurbits in literature of the 18th century. Concurbits! That’s Courgettes and cucumbers to thee and me . . . in the 18th sodding century. All I can think of is I must have had a crush on a girl with an allotment and a fascination with Dr Johnson. No innuendo implied.
So, there it is. I’ve winnowed the contenders down to a more manageable, modest pile of a thousand or so. Tomorrow I need to make some tough decisions, less about what I can’t be doing with, more about what I can’t do without.
As I recall, my discovery of the Paul Mckenna book was preceded by your question to me about religion, which you must have formulated with Harrison Richards who was with you at the time. I only mention this because in the bath this evening I pondered on my belated answer.
Your question to me was, “Has religion done more harm than good in the world?” The conclusion I arrived at in my warm bath (a more than reasonable substitute, if administered correctly, for some of the opiates you missed out on during your youth) echoes, to a large extent, your reflections on self-help books. I intuitively understood that religion has probably made no difference whatsoever to the amount of suffering in the world. Humans do what humans do. The rationale to explain our actions is the superstition we invent to explain natural phenomena. Religion and self-help are a couple of the stories we like to entertain ourselves with when sat around the camp fire on a night time… but they make no difference to the brightness of the stars in the night sky.
Phil: how did we ever manage to avoid our shared production of facetiae?
Mine was for the American market, although I wrote under a female nom de plume also a largely female readership. Probably explains much of my antipathy toward Nicholson Baker’s later output.
Hehe. Now that’s made me chuckle
Some of these books look a lot like the ones I left at TW when Emma was setting up a mini library. Certainly High Impact Middle Management and Corporate Governance. When I put them down at TW it was not with a view to them being sold!
Still sorting through the stock Mike. Hard to keep track when there’s super keen interns around . . . See you soonS