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[14/365] Books
Jan. 14th, 2019 11:43 pmThe prompt for this month's writing group was "New Year's Unresolutions, or Irresolutions if you prefer. Perhaps it's things you're going to let go off, or stop giving a monkey's about, perhaps it's things that you've no intention of giving up, even though you probably should, or the things you want to celebrate. Anything that isn't a New Year's resolution, or maybe kind of is."
It was such a great idea that I wish I'd been able to do something better with it than say I'm not going to lose weight and I'm not going to KonMari my house, haha.
We talked quite a lot about both things, about the desire for control but also about the judgment and shame and moral values that are put on the state of our houses and our bodies (espeically as women; this isn't a WI group any more but it's still "women writers").
Of course with the Netflix show, talk of KonMari is everywhere and I'd found it incredibly stress-inducing since one of my friends talked about it a lot last year (right before she moved on to talking about weight loss, actually...). It was such a relief to see this come up in the "Unfuck Your Habitat" facebook group I'm on, where while some people were saying aspects of it had worked for them, a lot of people were saying it set off their anxiety, it wasn't for them because they were too poor, too disabled, too neurodivergent. Here I was thinking it was just me, with my weird combination of feelings about all I abandoned when I immigrated here, about living with someone who finds tidying stressful and pruning the bookshelves not just impossible but undesireable...but it's not just me.
But as with everything popular, there is a backlash. The one against Marie Kondo seems to have focused on her advice not to own many books. This one-size-fits-all type of proclamation is a big indicator that she's not talking to people like me, and I'd leave it at that, but people have been absolutely vicious about this and I've seen several memes and "jokes" already and heard of more. Inevitably, these reactions have been racist and sexist to varying degrees, in a way I'm grateful to my Japanese-American friend for calling to our attention.
And even on its own terms, the demonstrative love of books has crossed a threshold into a kind of fetishization, as if books are inherently sacred objects. I heard it called "owning books is a replacement for a personality" on Twitter and that sounds exactly right to me. One of the images-with-words-on I saw on Facebook said "It doesn't count as hoarding if it's books" which I think is terribly disrespectful and far too flippant way to talk about something as serious as hoarding, which is already surrounded in so much shame.
So anyway, I got home from writing group and the first thing Andrew said when I walked in the door was that Book Twitter had so annoyed him about exactly this subject that he'd done something I spent years trying to get him to do and always failing: he piled up some books to get rid of. They're mostly duplicates, and books he realized are really racist so he doesn't want them any more, he said. But it's something! There's a couple dozen books piled up on a chair now, and he did it without me even mentioning it.
He did it, in fact, because he thought Book Twitter had been so racist and obnoxious toward Marie Kondo that even though he knows nothing else about her or her tidying-up system or anything, he did the opposite of what they say just to spite them.
It's an unorthodox motivation to declutter, but I'll take it!
It was such a great idea that I wish I'd been able to do something better with it than say I'm not going to lose weight and I'm not going to KonMari my house, haha.
We talked quite a lot about both things, about the desire for control but also about the judgment and shame and moral values that are put on the state of our houses and our bodies (espeically as women; this isn't a WI group any more but it's still "women writers").
Of course with the Netflix show, talk of KonMari is everywhere and I'd found it incredibly stress-inducing since one of my friends talked about it a lot last year (right before she moved on to talking about weight loss, actually...). It was such a relief to see this come up in the "Unfuck Your Habitat" facebook group I'm on, where while some people were saying aspects of it had worked for them, a lot of people were saying it set off their anxiety, it wasn't for them because they were too poor, too disabled, too neurodivergent. Here I was thinking it was just me, with my weird combination of feelings about all I abandoned when I immigrated here, about living with someone who finds tidying stressful and pruning the bookshelves not just impossible but undesireable...but it's not just me.
But as with everything popular, there is a backlash. The one against Marie Kondo seems to have focused on her advice not to own many books. This one-size-fits-all type of proclamation is a big indicator that she's not talking to people like me, and I'd leave it at that, but people have been absolutely vicious about this and I've seen several memes and "jokes" already and heard of more. Inevitably, these reactions have been racist and sexist to varying degrees, in a way I'm grateful to my Japanese-American friend for calling to our attention.
And even on its own terms, the demonstrative love of books has crossed a threshold into a kind of fetishization, as if books are inherently sacred objects. I heard it called "owning books is a replacement for a personality" on Twitter and that sounds exactly right to me. One of the images-with-words-on I saw on Facebook said "It doesn't count as hoarding if it's books" which I think is terribly disrespectful and far too flippant way to talk about something as serious as hoarding, which is already surrounded in so much shame.
So anyway, I got home from writing group and the first thing Andrew said when I walked in the door was that Book Twitter had so annoyed him about exactly this subject that he'd done something I spent years trying to get him to do and always failing: he piled up some books to get rid of. They're mostly duplicates, and books he realized are really racist so he doesn't want them any more, he said. But it's something! There's a couple dozen books piled up on a chair now, and he did it without me even mentioning it.
He did it, in fact, because he thought Book Twitter had been so racist and obnoxious toward Marie Kondo that even though he knows nothing else about her or her tidying-up system or anything, he did the opposite of what they say just to spite them.
It's an unorthodox motivation to declutter, but I'll take it!
