Hello friends,
It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Libra season! I took some time off because it was my birthday, whoopty-do! I got a record player, I went to the south of France, and now I could not be happier to be home as the days get shorter and the air crispier. Light the candles, it’s about to get gezellig in here!
Despite the growing resentment I feel towards all of the shit I've accumulated, and barely have the will to unpack knowing I'm going to have to pack it all up again in another year, well, there I was yesterday, joyfully swinging a totebag full of new records.
I wouldn't consider myself especially materialistic, but I am acquisitive by nature. I'm a collector. Books, wine, and now vinyl. But also: seashells and stones, notebooks, old letters, ticket stubs. Shoes. Coats. Friends. Cities.
In the essay, "Endless Inventory," from his brilliant collection, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty, music critic Ben Ratliff asks:
"But why do we build collections? Perhaps we want to turn a musician’s work into a living thing. We want to make it something to live around, rather than have it live around us. We want to corporealize it, give it a body and perhaps a soul. We want to have a relationship with it, as we would with a friend; or we want to codify it into a tradition or a belief. And at that point, when it is fully grasped and known, the work can be internalized for ever as an open question, a principle for living.
Over the past year, I've returned to this paragraph more times than I can count. I suppose you could say I have a relationship with it, in a way, having internalized Ratliff's words as my own principle for living. Sometimes it represents my desire for total immersion, or indeed, embodiment of a particular artist's work. Sometimes it represents how music and literature and art make me feel in general. Today, I'm focused especially on the first bit, the idea of our collections as something we want to "live around." How our collections make our home.
Isn't this just a more philosophical way of talking about–cough-cough–conspicuous consumption? How having the "right" books and music and wine are status signifiers meant to project a certain impression of who we are as people? I won't argue with the John Waters school of thought on this one, but it's not just about a matter of taste, for which we all know there is no real accounting.
For me, collecting is like building my nest. Twigs, bits of straw, feathers, and shiny things that catch my eye, finding each piece is its own treasure hunt. It's both determination and serendipity. The end goal is only an abstraction. It's finished when it needs to be, when I say it is, or perhaps not at all. It's a life's work, iterative. To live around a collection is to be enveloped in the spirit of someone else's own life's work, and the forcefield of the creative energy that went into it. What greater inspiration is there to create and produce oneself than to be surrounded by centuries of cheerleaders reminding you of everything that has been possible so far, and what might be.
All Your Music Are Belong to Us*
As an avid Spotify user and music collector, Kyle Chayka's piece about the "digital death of collecting" struck a nerve, and certainly hastened my long-standing desire to start collecting vinyl.
He quotes Walter Benjamin: “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects...Not that they have come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”
(*The real geeks know that’s not a typo…)
And All Your Books Are Belong to Us, Too*
As much as I despise being tethered to Amazon for my ebook purchases, I'm not sure I could live without my Kindle. I'm already on my second, and probably close to needing a third. I read a lot, and I move around a lot. But, yeah, ebooks are an abomination, and we just sort of accept it. I still buy plenty of books from independent bookstores. But for better or worse, ebooks help keep my compulsive book-buying somewhat under control. At least until I own a home, then all bets are off, and I'm totally going to live my dream of having a library with one of those rolling ladders.
(Not the first time I have used this GIF, for obvious reasons. It me, as the kids say.)(Probably they don’t say that anymore.)
The Museum of Me
Marie Kondo appears in these letters with shocking frequency. Maybe it's because I reject her principles with every fiber of my maximalist collector being. "Kondo’s combination of empathy and minimalism makes for good television. But it won’t get you to the kind of lived-in, peculiarly personalised space that, for most people, defines the ideal of home." This article, written by a museum curator, is a thoughtful guide for making and organizing our own acquisitions.
Scents of Place
My acquisitive tendencies are inextricably connected to an aesthetic nature: a desire to be surrounded by the beautiful, the sensual, the lyrical, the poetic, the romantic. It's a Libra thing. And as much as I adore lighting a ritual stick of Nag Champa as I roll out my yoga mat, I'm also keen to up my incense game. Scent, as this recent T Magazine article notes, is a powerful way to define a space, both physically and mentally.
An Alleluia of the Romantic Self
Just a lovely piece of writing by the wonderful Lauren Groff, on re-reading Walden (which, as it happens, I am as well, albeit very, very slowly) and the shifting seasons and moods in her own writing space.
Just a little FYI: I’ve got a new music-related project brewing. Stay tuned!