The English settlers of my home turf---until the advent of clambakes on the beach, St. Patrick's Day, and the Boston Red Sox---weren't much fun. Given to uttering such grim admonishments as "Virtue is ye own reward" and "Idle hands are ye Devil's tools," they held an even dimmer view of folk who labored or enjoyed themselves on the Sabbath.
Last Sunday, those Bay State sourpusses must have been spinning in their cold, narrow graves because I did both.
Sufficiently obedient to my Puritanical heritage to feel that I must somehow "earn" my collapse on the couch with a book---not the Good One, but a good one---I decided to run barefoot through my bookshelves, weeding my collection for donations for the library book sale. This is no quick-and-easy undertaking: I have caches of books in every room in the house, save the dining room (yet) and the two baths (an oversight). There are books on shelves, in baskets, in crates, on tabletops, stacked on the floor, and I went through them all.
As always, it was a time of rediscoveries and resignations. Why do I own four different editions of "The Canterbury Tales" and two of "The Wind in the Willows?" How did I wind up with two copies of David McCullough's "1776" and have read neither? Do I really want to read this debut novel by a former funeral director which jacket blurbs describe as being in a class with "Six Feet Under?" (No.)
As the fashion gurus advise of clothing not worn for two or three seasons, this was the opportune time to divest myself of all those unread shiny new novels by shiny new novelists that looked appealing when they first came out but aren't really my style.
Some I will hang onto, read or not, because every literate home should have a decent copy of "Madame Bovary" and you never know when you will need a good translation of the "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." Some, like the elderly hardcovers of Edith Hamilton's "The Greek Way" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's letters to his daughter, will have a home in perpetuity on my shelves because they were rescues from previous years' book sales. If it hadn't been for me, their pages would have been torn from their covers and recycled, and the covers thrown in the trash. I just can't consign them to that fate again; it would be like taking the dog you adopted because you felt sorry for him back to the shelter. Besides, I just might read those books some day.
Naturally, to choose which books go and which stay, I had to read a little of each, so my weeding took the best---and I do mean "best"--- part of the afternoon. All of my Kurt Vonnegut will stay, Sarah Waters will go. I guess I can let Murray Kempton's collections of columns go---but not Molly Ivins' or Mike Royko's. Glad I didn't go for that deluxe edition of the collected Wallace Stevens; I already own one. You will have to pry these "Amphigorey" compilations and the All-American Ads series out of my cold, dead fingers.
I am still undecided about the Sir John Fielding series of mysteries by Bruce Alexander and the Marjorie Eccles and Caroline Graham books I accumulated after I had read one novel by each author and decided in my obssessive-compulsive way that I had to have them all. Maybe I'll give them a year's reprieve, as I did with Reginald Hill and Ian Rankin last year. Which worked out: I have actually been dipping into their books this winter.
At the end of the afternoon, my Sabbath-breaking netted the book sale five liquor-store boxes (Nyah-nyah-nyah, Cotton Mather!) packed with some pretty good stuff, and I had had a perfectly marvelous time.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Hey, Hey, DMA---How Many Trees Did You Kill Today?
You will pardon me, I'm sure, while I blow on my fingers and toes to get the circulation going. I am just back from a quick jog to the curb with most of the day's mail, and a pair of flip-flops was the nearest available footwear.
Normally on Tuesdays I wait for the mail lady's delivery before I put out my recycle bins for Wednesday pick-up, but it was late today and chockablock with glossy catalogs, charity appeals, and amazing limited-time-only offers in which I have absolutely no interest. I couldn't wait until next week to get them out of the house, hence the trash run.
The pleas for donations are my own darn fault; give money to save the whales, the children, or the blue-footed booby just once, and the effusive letter of thanks from their champions will come complete with postage-paid envelope and pledge form for an even more generous contribution. A week without letters from the World Wildlife Fund, the ASPCA, and Doctors Without Borders would make me doubt my own existence.
Second to these begging letters in number (but not by much) are the siren songs of merchants hoping to find geezer gold with their products and services for folks of---shall we say---a certain age. All the life insurance policies, guided tours of Alaska, elastic waist pants, and Velcro-fastened sneakers you could hope for, courtesy of AARP's brazen sale of its membership lists. Our local Lions Club puts out a phone directory specifically for East Aurora and environs, which is admittedly handy when I'm writing Christmas cards, but it also serves as a primo mailing list for area businesses, such as the hearing-aid dealer who today sent me an handwritten invitation for a "free" hearing test.
The bulk---and I do mean "bulk"---of my junk mailings, though, are the catalogs that account for at least 90 percent of the paper I discard, well over 500 pounds a year by my extremely conservative estimate.
Some I actually keep, read, and order from: L.L. Bean, Land's End, a few booksellers, garden suppliers, Aerosoles, The Company Store, Dick Blick Studio, and---when they deign to send me one---the annual IKEA catalog.
A few I will keep overnight and at least glance at, if the clothes/home furnishings/paper products look like something I might actually wear/use and the prices aren't too outrageous.
By far the greatest number, however, the ones that make me ponder replacing the mail box with a recycle bin. These are the work of: (a) sellers from whom I have not now nor have ever ordered; (b) merchants from whom I made a single purchase so long ago I don't remember what it was. An example of the former is Wisteria, a supplier of upscale tschotkes, whose taste is not my own. I think they got my address from Better Homes & Gardens, to which I have not subscribed for five years or so.
Examples of the latter include Title 9, a supplier of women's sports gear, from whom I ordered a gift certificate for my younger daughter at least eight years ago, and Chinaberry, purveyor of twee children's books and toys, who provided a costly Christmas gift for my preschool granddaughter. (I don't recall what the gift was, just that it WAS costly.) Since she will officially become a teenager a month hence, you have to admire their dogged pursuit of my custom. I expect that should I live long enough to become a great-grandmother, I'll still be on their mailing list.
Yes, I am aware that there are purported remedies for the receipt of unwanted catalogs: the above-mentioned Direct Marketing Association, with whom I have had absolutely no luck; www.catalogchoice.org, and others that might get me out from under the avalanche of paper.
I am not, however, optimistic, just resigned to a life of carting four-color junk to the curb.
As my sister remarks of the magazines that plague her to renew at even lower rates just months after a new term starts, her subscriptions will likely outlast her and the post office will be delivering Good Housekeeping and Woman's Day to her plot in St. Mary's Cemetery forever.
As for me, I may be getting a perpetual flame.
Normally on Tuesdays I wait for the mail lady's delivery before I put out my recycle bins for Wednesday pick-up, but it was late today and chockablock with glossy catalogs, charity appeals, and amazing limited-time-only offers in which I have absolutely no interest. I couldn't wait until next week to get them out of the house, hence the trash run.
The pleas for donations are my own darn fault; give money to save the whales, the children, or the blue-footed booby just once, and the effusive letter of thanks from their champions will come complete with postage-paid envelope and pledge form for an even more generous contribution. A week without letters from the World Wildlife Fund, the ASPCA, and Doctors Without Borders would make me doubt my own existence.
Second to these begging letters in number (but not by much) are the siren songs of merchants hoping to find geezer gold with their products and services for folks of---shall we say---a certain age. All the life insurance policies, guided tours of Alaska, elastic waist pants, and Velcro-fastened sneakers you could hope for, courtesy of AARP's brazen sale of its membership lists. Our local Lions Club puts out a phone directory specifically for East Aurora and environs, which is admittedly handy when I'm writing Christmas cards, but it also serves as a primo mailing list for area businesses, such as the hearing-aid dealer who today sent me an handwritten invitation for a "free" hearing test.
The bulk---and I do mean "bulk"---of my junk mailings, though, are the catalogs that account for at least 90 percent of the paper I discard, well over 500 pounds a year by my extremely conservative estimate.
Some I actually keep, read, and order from: L.L. Bean, Land's End, a few booksellers, garden suppliers, Aerosoles, The Company Store, Dick Blick Studio, and---when they deign to send me one---the annual IKEA catalog.
A few I will keep overnight and at least glance at, if the clothes/home furnishings/paper products look like something I might actually wear/use and the prices aren't too outrageous.
By far the greatest number, however, the ones that make me ponder replacing the mail box with a recycle bin. These are the work of: (a) sellers from whom I have not now nor have ever ordered; (b) merchants from whom I made a single purchase so long ago I don't remember what it was. An example of the former is Wisteria, a supplier of upscale tschotkes, whose taste is not my own. I think they got my address from Better Homes & Gardens, to which I have not subscribed for five years or so.
Examples of the latter include Title 9, a supplier of women's sports gear, from whom I ordered a gift certificate for my younger daughter at least eight years ago, and Chinaberry, purveyor of twee children's books and toys, who provided a costly Christmas gift for my preschool granddaughter. (I don't recall what the gift was, just that it WAS costly.) Since she will officially become a teenager a month hence, you have to admire their dogged pursuit of my custom. I expect that should I live long enough to become a great-grandmother, I'll still be on their mailing list.
Yes, I am aware that there are purported remedies for the receipt of unwanted catalogs: the above-mentioned Direct Marketing Association, with whom I have had absolutely no luck; www.catalogchoice.org, and others that might get me out from under the avalanche of paper.
I am not, however, optimistic, just resigned to a life of carting four-color junk to the curb.
As my sister remarks of the magazines that plague her to renew at even lower rates just months after a new term starts, her subscriptions will likely outlast her and the post office will be delivering Good Housekeeping and Woman's Day to her plot in St. Mary's Cemetery forever.
As for me, I may be getting a perpetual flame.
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