Boxing

Progress weeding my photographs is slow. The thing that bothers me is that every few images, I stumble into someone who is dead or dying. I never really bought into Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes’ idea that photography is about death. Photographs were always about being alive to me. To break the introspection, I’ve been boxing books. I suppose I’m about halfway done with that. The tally thus far, in standard file-storage boxes:

• 3 boxes of books on art

• 9 boxes of books on photography

• 3 boxes of books on William Blake

• 5 boxes of books on British literature

• 1 box of books on American literature

• 1 box of books on classical literature

• 1 box of books on foreign literatures

• 1 box of dictionaries and atlases

• 1 box of general history books

• 1 box of books on the history of journalism

I haven’t got to most of the twentieth century American lit yet, nor the books on theory. But I am happy to see that I actually own more books of literature than I do theory. I’m not that big of a geek yet.