I punked out on the usual Thursday evening walk last night. It was late by the time I got home, and I was seriously tired, so I made dinner, talked to my daughter a bit, and then installed myself on the couch with a book and knitting.
My husband headed out for a tournament. I don’t know whether I have mentioned before that he is a very good pool player. He has trophies for it. He has been playing in this local tournament for months, taking his team to continuing victory. We wished him luck and sent him off.
#2 son and I whined and begged until #1 son went out and bought us candy bars. Then we watched Burn Notice on TV and ate said candy bars, and I guess that is as low as I was able to sink.
I was thinking about a little conversation Lostarts and I had. She maintained that it is worse to say negative things on your xanga than to say them out loud to people in the physical world. This she based on the sensible point that a lot of people could conceivably read what we say, and also that our readers might not care to have to read negative things.
I don’t say negative things about other people very often, either aloud or in writing, but I do whine at my xanga every August. I tend to think that this is okay, for two reasons: a) it’s my journal and I’ll whine if I want to (you are singing that line, I hope), and b) you don’t have to read it, while you sort of have to listen when people tell you things.
I figure that you could look at your calendar and say, “Ah, it’s August, Fibermom will be whining. I’ll go back and read her in September.”
So today I want to complain in a peevish way about something very impersonal and unimportant. You have been warned.
Southern Living, in their most recent issue, showed a house with a bookcase prominently featured, and the books were shelved with the spines toward the wall. Yes, you read that right. The pages of the books were facing out.
Now, Southern Living is unsound on book storage in general. They are always showing books in tall stacks with a vase of flowers on top, an arrangement which only works if you never actually read your books or even look things up in them.
But this was a new low.
I guess the idea was to provide a uniform beigeness, but how on earth is anyone supposed to find the books? And if you never want to retrieve books, why keep them at all?
There.
You’re right. It’s your blog and you can whine if you want to. I do that too, even though I don’t think it’s a good idea.
If you’ve been reading Crazy Aunt Purl, you know SHE arranges her books by the color of their spine.
Well, she SAID she was crazy.
But turning the spines in is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of in relation to books.
Are you sure the magazine isn’t called “Southern Inbreeding?”
I hope that is not intended to be a slur on Southerners. I know that there are ignorant people who think jokes about incest and Southerners are funny, but I would not have thought that Lostarts would have been one of them.
I don’t think the “Southern Inbreeding” item was a slur on Southerners; it was probably a slur on the sexual behavior of books suddenly given privacy because their spines are turned to the wall.
The arrangement in Southern Living comes from the interior decorating practice of ordering books for your place in the following fashion: “I need three-and-a-half feet of really tall books and seven feet of medium-tall ones, and maybe a ten-inch high stack of really small ones.”
Oh my gosh. You have no idea how I can get in a lather over incest jokes.
I am offended…
Oh — Ozarque’s comment about the inbreeding books was so funny. But hey, Chanthaboune, I am also offended. Which is why I couldn’t just let it stand without saying something, fond as I am of Lostarts.
books as design objects???? what in the world, probably think people are to illiterate to notice, after all isn’t that what magazines are for, looking at the pretty pictures of the interior of a home that mine will never look like but I can fantasize all I want because I don’t need to know how to read to make a pretty home? sorry that was a little long winded wasn’t it
My father’s wife has covered all of the books with pretty paper covers, so the shelves all look uniformly gorgeous. But again, how can you tell what’s there. I had to stop my giggles when I took down an unidentifiable, but pretty, book to see what it was. It turned out to be my dad’s incredibly shabby, treasured, kept forever from before I was born, copy of Slaughterhousefive. There was some strange absurdity in it all, that somehow fit into Vonnegut’s dark humor. I should have taken it.
Ha! I came here to comment on the entry, but the comments are note worthy as well. Pish on the ordering of books by any method other than the one that suits me. Since knitters *should* like color…..but, no, I don’t sort mine that way either. Inbreeding doesn’t necessarily equal incest. Just sayin’