but luckily I have hard nails and it didn't hurt.
My father is moving out of his rental house in the suburbs of northern VA (into another house of equal size and shape in the same suburb of VA). I am frantically going through my reams of print-outs, books, notes, journals, field-notes, letters, pay-stubs, magazine articles, sketchbooks, receipts, thesis drafts, and mangas dating back to before the millennium. D, R, and I recently discussed our attachment to material objects that - in addition to taking up space - give us access to privilege. What do I mean? Well...
For example, my books. I have all these ridiculously articulate books about literary theory, poverty in America, Native cultures, immigration law and theory, and sewing machines, most of which I have not read, but which place me in the (over)educated class, one marker of which is that we have more than 100 books in a personal collection. For more on the educated class, read the liner notes for College Dropout by Kanye and "The Rise of the Educated Class" by David Brooks.
My books got me my honors degree, and if I keep them, my children (or anyone I'm connected to) will be able to read what's written in those books and get their degrees and so on. Well, maybe it's not that simple, but there's something about having all these books that cultivates a culture of prioritizing knowledge for the sake of having knowledge - a concept that may seem like a universal virtue but actually is not. (For more on why, I recommend Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children.)
In any case, I am trying to glean as much information about my past lives by skimming dusty pages of printer-paper as they fall into the recycling bin. Oh the agony. My problem is that I keep forgetting things - even tortured conclusions - almost as soon as I write them down. It makes waking up in the morning a little easier, I guess.
My father is moving out of his rental house in the suburbs of northern VA (into another house of equal size and shape in the same suburb of VA). I am frantically going through my reams of print-outs, books, notes, journals, field-notes, letters, pay-stubs, magazine articles, sketchbooks, receipts, thesis drafts, and mangas dating back to before the millennium. D, R, and I recently discussed our attachment to material objects that - in addition to taking up space - give us access to privilege. What do I mean? Well...
For example, my books. I have all these ridiculously articulate books about literary theory, poverty in America, Native cultures, immigration law and theory, and sewing machines, most of which I have not read, but which place me in the (over)educated class, one marker of which is that we have more than 100 books in a personal collection. For more on the educated class, read the liner notes for College Dropout by Kanye and "The Rise of the Educated Class" by David Brooks.
My books got me my honors degree, and if I keep them, my children (or anyone I'm connected to) will be able to read what's written in those books and get their degrees and so on. Well, maybe it's not that simple, but there's something about having all these books that cultivates a culture of prioritizing knowledge for the sake of having knowledge - a concept that may seem like a universal virtue but actually is not. (For more on why, I recommend Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children.)
In any case, I am trying to glean as much information about my past lives by skimming dusty pages of printer-paper as they fall into the recycling bin. Oh the agony. My problem is that I keep forgetting things - even tortured conclusions - almost as soon as I write them down. It makes waking up in the morning a little easier, I guess.
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