Monday, July 23, 2007
New York City Diary, Pt. 2 - fetishism
Apparently I can only post a few paragraphs before my PDA gets full and won't let me blog any more. So this will have to be a series of entries. Why can't I have a PDA built after 2005? This is so embarrassing.
Right, so leftist lit is thin on the ground. Except at Labyrinth, which remainders Terry Eagleton, Alex Callinicos, any number of critical theorists and has two whole shelves devoted solely to Marxism, in addition to Soviet, Labour, African-American studies, etc. But after two hours, I left empty-handed. I nearly buckled over a 1956 edition of "Documents of the Communist International, Vol. 1, 1918-1922". But then I remembered I already owned "Documents, Theses and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Communist International", and I had never cracked its spine. In fact, for all the interesting books I saw - Neil Harding on Leninism, Henri Lefebvre on modernism, H. Rap Brown on the Black Panthers - I realized I already owned books on all those subjects, and frequently by the same authors.
This is a first: my library is approaching saturation. Either I already own a book or books on every topic I'm interested in, or the books are about postmodernism, cultural theory or the Frankfurt School, which regular readers will know I'm a vulgar philistine about.
The weight of unread literature on my shelves now exceeds the pleasures of commodity fetishism I get in buying books, and I'm getting a little tired of conversations where my sole contribution is, "Oh yeah, I own that, but I've only read the dust jacket."
Right, so leftist lit is thin on the ground. Except at Labyrinth, which remainders Terry Eagleton, Alex Callinicos, any number of critical theorists and has two whole shelves devoted solely to Marxism, in addition to Soviet, Labour, African-American studies, etc. But after two hours, I left empty-handed. I nearly buckled over a 1956 edition of "Documents of the Communist International, Vol. 1, 1918-1922". But then I remembered I already owned "Documents, Theses and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Communist International", and I had never cracked its spine. In fact, for all the interesting books I saw - Neil Harding on Leninism, Henri Lefebvre on modernism, H. Rap Brown on the Black Panthers - I realized I already owned books on all those subjects, and frequently by the same authors.
This is a first: my library is approaching saturation. Either I already own a book or books on every topic I'm interested in, or the books are about postmodernism, cultural theory or the Frankfurt School, which regular readers will know I'm a vulgar philistine about.
The weight of unread literature on my shelves now exceeds the pleasures of commodity fetishism I get in buying books, and I'm getting a little tired of conversations where my sole contribution is, "Oh yeah, I own that, but I've only read the dust jacket."
