In between swimming at the beach and reading Lenin during the early signs of autumn, I have been scrounging the neighbourhood for wood. Old bed-heads, cupboards, shelves, the last pieces my father collected before he died – as long as the wood is good quality. None of that chipboard shit. Sand, saw, drill and dowel – the pieces eventually come together into a bookshelf.
But what to put in it? Or rather, what can be rearranged to ease the overflow?
Of course, all those eminently useful ancient languages need a new home.
Next? I have just found (ht to sc) a great old cupboard … destined for a kitchen somewhere.
19 March, 2011 at 1:02 am
When capitalism collapses which bookshelf and which ancient language will be first on the funeral pyre of inequity?
19 March, 2011 at 10:18 am
In the end, it’ll be just me and my skin.
20 March, 2011 at 1:10 pm
Was that a copy of Max Müller’s little-known Sanskrit Grammar: the Aryan roots and Solar Myths of the Primitives of Van Dieman’s Land?
20 March, 2011 at 2:53 pm
‘fraid not, old chap. Whitney’s Grammar, published by Motilal Barnasidas, orginally from Cambridge. Thorough anti-Semite; bought into the whole fascist Indo-European language thing that structured classics at the founts of civilised knowledge known as Oxford and Cambridge.
20 March, 2011 at 2:55 pm
Bought it when I was studying Sanskrit back in the ’80s, with a gay prof who used to feel me up in the corridor, a maths teacher, a mum and a BHP worker. We met from 8-10 pm, twice a week, drank cheap sherry from the prof and smoked to our heart’s discontent.
23 March, 2011 at 8:06 am
I remember when a guy in my class at high school tentatively mentioned that the school librarian seemed to regularly rub herself up against him. And once he’d nervously mentioned that, then the floodgates opened, and every boy in the group had a sordid little account of his unusually intimate interactions with the school librarian. I think we all felt a mixture of yuckiness and amusement, and considered she was a bit of a sad case. It became a bit of a joke. Decile 2 (out of 10) school, so she probably stayed on for many years more worth of free frots, without any complaints.