2.27.05/ Welcome to the Library...

Last night I had dinner at the house of a friend who is the adult version of my friend-with-all-the-cool-toys. His cool-toy collection is particularly remarkable because it's unisex; sucking both me AND my boyfriend in with equal voracity. Under normal circumstances on ly one of us would be distracted by our host's library/pets/gadgets, leaving the other free to be polite. But in this case, we both ended up in antisocial states of rapture when we should really have been enjoying our friend's conversation. While my boyfriend wandered around recording noises with my friend's fancy microphone, I got all wrapped up in the amazing magazine collection.

Suddenly surrounded by glossy, well-organized magazines like ReadyMade, I.D., Cinefex, and so on, I was reminded of all the stuff I'd been missing out on while living my ex-consumer existence. At the end of the night (like some kid that gets to borrow one of their friend's Barbie's 'till the next play date) I was given my very own copy of ReadyMade to take home with me. I've been obsessively paging through it ever since, thinking about the hardest trial the Ex-Consumer has presented thus far: the ban on print media.

Since I stopped buying magazines and newspapers, I'd begun to believe that I didn't actually miss or need them. Certainly I don't miss the guilt that comes with not finishing the Sunday New York Times. I could never bear to part with unread newspaper sections, and I would keep them around on the table for so long that I'd forget they were there; buried under a month's worth of other, partially read publications. I'd only remember to throw them out when I cleaned house two months later, finally realizing the disposability of articles which had seemed so important just months before.

There have been a lot of funny side-effects to the Ex-Consumer Project. One of the most interesting has been that I've had to start facing up to the fact that there are limitations on my time. Before the ex-consumer project, I would often buy books because I felt good knowing that the information they held would always be there for me, ready on my bookshelf when I wanted to read it. Strangely, though, something about knowing the book was always right on my book shelf often meant that I would never actually read it. It was as if there were no reason to read a book I already owned, since there would always be time to do it later.

This isn't to say that it never occurred to me that, in the grand scheme of things, there might not actually be time to read them all... Even during my craziest book buying binges I knew in the back of my mind that I would one day choke on a spoon, or kick the bucket, and that then I'd certainly run out of time to read all those books I was getting. Now that I can't buy the books, though, the knowledge of my impending death stays closer to the front of my mind. When you can't take books home you suddenly have to face the fact of your limited lifetime on an everyday basis. You have to get what you want out of a book while standing in the book store, searching and cramming as much information into your brain as you can. Eventually your body starts to intercede, though. You get tired of standing, or you have to pee. And that means you have to leave the books behind. While you're there, you have to act seriously on things that really interest you, and learn to let go of the things that don't.

I think that not buying reading material has even started to change the way I read. Right before my job at Harvard ended, I went to the library and checked out a huge stack of books in the hopes that I could feed off of them for the next six months. (Harvard's Libraries let you check out books for a really long time.) Curled up in my apartment with my new shelf-full of library books, it came as a terrible shock, when, three weeks later, the first of many "book recall " notices arrived in my inbox. I hadn't even finished the first book yet, and already they were trying to take it away from me! Horrified, I plowed my way through the rest of the book; which was unprecedented for me, given that its less-than-glamourous topic was "how Catholic Parish boundaries affected 20th century race relations."

Deathly afraid of the Harvard Library fines, I rushed it back the moment I'd finished, returning it only one day late and incurring a mere $2.00 fine. As I walked back from the library, it suddenly occurred to me that I had not only read "Parish Boundaries" much faster than I usually read books, but that I could actually remember a lot of what the book said; particularly the last few chapters that I'd read after the book had been recalled. Knowing that I'd no longer be able to get my hands on the book motivated me to try to really learn and remember the things that I'd found interesting in the last chapters. So in the end, the recall notice had actually forced me to read better.

I am now finding that the "Parish Boundaries" effect is also starting to happen with other things I read. I have started to go to reading rooms at the library to read articles recommended to me by my New Yorker-loving friends. Rather than buying the New Yorker and then loosing it before ever reading the review of the new Jared Diamond book as I once would have done, I actually went to the reading room, looked it up, quickly read it, and left. For someone like me, this is an example of miraculous efficiency.

Of course, walking to and from the library takes time, as does looking up the thing you want to read. But it also makes you feel like you've earned your information. Feeling appreciative of information rather than bewildered by it is a wonderful sensation for someone typically frazzled by information overload. As wonderful a sensation as it is, though, it comes at a price.

When I visited my friend's house last night, all I wanted to do is sit around and read the rags. It was then that I realized that my publication-free puritanism was probably setting me dreadfully behind the times. While my friends banter about the latest New Yorker article, I usually sit in awed silence, wishing that I, too, could join the New Yorker-addicted elite. Worst of all, I've noticed that lots of the magazines I never read are beating me to the punch. Their freelancers are writing about things I had wanted to write about, but they're doing it better than I could, and getting the articles published before I ever set finger to keyboard.

Through all this angst I try to stay calm. I remember how back in my publication-free life, the world feels cleaner and brighter. Not buying magazines has been giving me my memory back, and helping me sort through all the words of the day. It's nice not to have to rent a storage facility for your books, or to buy extra computer memory for all those half-read articles. As an added benefit, now that I don't shell out for magazines and books, I've also ceased to feel guilty about writing for free. There's a lot that's good about doing all one's writing on the internet. Like our own lives, it is a fleeting media with no archival promise.

Ex-Consumer Report/ links: