So I've been packing. It looks like I have the job in San Francisco, and anyway I took an apartment out there not even knowing. It was just too great a deal to pass up -- Noe Valley, unexpectedly cheap, Victorian, has a garden, around the corner from good friends and my aunt, the roommate has his finger on the pulse of everything interesting in the city -- and I figured I needed a change after a gruelling year in school and eight years (!!!) in New York; all the better if that change had a garden and a roommate who was already cajoling me to join him for a bullfight the weekend after I arrived.

I've basically moved every year I've been in town, what with jobs in Pasadena and Charlottesville and my housesitting gigs in Manhattan, but this one is definitely taking more thought and work. I've got the happy circumstance of being allowed to leave most of my furniture behind for future tenants, and the cat is going to summer at the Apthorp with Jess, so that at least is easy. I've sold off or given away all of the bumper crop of cherry tomato plants I managed to grow from seed, netting me about $55 and apparently helping a neighbor, Dale, start her own business selling tomatoes to the too-pricey natural foods store on 181st. (I highly recommend the tomato variety, by the way. They are Sweet Pea "currant" heirloom tomatoes from Seed Savers Exchange, and I overplanted because I expected them to die under my dubious ministrations; despite the fact that I transplanted them when they were barely sprouted and mangled their roots, not a single plant died, and many of the plants I just gave away were already beginning to bear blossoms after an April planting!)

The real problem is the books. My collection has probably doubled since I started grad school, natch. I shipped about ninety pounds of books off to my future roommate today, stuff I thought I'd need for the job. I've got another thirty to ship, plenty more that is just going to *stay here* (good lord, getting them down from this fifth-floor apartment...), and one box which is going to a book donation drive.

I have the hardest damn time putting any books in that last box. I'm not half the bibliophile some of my friends are proving to be, but I'm always loath to get rid of anything, much less books. There are some books I've walked back and forth across my apartment two or three times, flipping through the pages while I decided and changed my mind and decided again that it had to go.

Some decisions seem traitorously simple. Lots of notes in it? Well, obviously I loved this book even if I don't remember it now, and surely I'll want to remember what I found important last time (no! that's almost never the case!)... my eyes light on the word "privilege," and an ethnography of a classroom stays; they catch a note about a beat author's use of pseudonyms, and it's back to the out-pile for that one.

What these decisions are about is the nature of my library, which has changed plenty over the years. Used to be I would never, ever give up any of my poetry books; this time, a significant amount of Whitman ended up in the giveaway pile. (Sorry, Walt. It was kind of a superficial thing we had going on, anyway. I never finished that class on the Transcendentalists and their descendants.)

What am I going to be using my library for in the future? Round before last it was to inspire poetry, then to help shape my other writing. Last round, something about fodder for political arguments on a global scale. Since I've been in grad school it's changed a number of times; it's supported arguments for and against reductionist views of television, analyses of literacy practices, groundwork for understanding video games, theories of networks, dialectics of knowledge and capital.

Some of my idealist professors would probably answer, Who cares what the library's for? The library is you! It'll all come in handy someday! Hold on to your options for serendipity! The particular professor I'm thinking of at the moment has not, however, moved out of the tri-state area... ever, to my knowledge. He's perhaps not the best voice to listen to. (Hearing voices has finally been included in the DSM-IV definition of "bi-coastal disorder," a disease somewhat like bipolar disorder but also featuring other symptoms -- difficulty staying in one place, a vertiginous sense that one is never really "at home," constant grieving for friends and family who are still alive, inability to bend one's sleep schedule to the demands of time zones, etc. Expect to see Pfizer produce a medication to end this tragic problem any day now. The medication will involve airplanes, and will not really solve anything.)

There is, unfortunately, the matter of books' weight. Absolute heresy to my bibliomane friends to consider this, but I'm leaning towards my nomadic friend Bakon's more ruthless slash-and-burn moving policies these days. Baggage is bad for the chi; heavy crap has got to go. This feeling dovetails with a reversal in my original policy on classics. It always seemed like it would be a good idea to keep the Complete Works of Shakespeare, that anthology of the Beats, the Greeks, those canonical psychology texts and so on. Surely I'll need to refer to them someday. Now it feels like those ought to be the first to go, and it's more important to save the dog-eared children's books; the indie comics; the high school anthologies scribbled to illegibility; the journals containing friends' articles (but not an issue more -- that's what the school's database journal is for); that one issue of Time with the picture of the homeless kid clutching a kitten, and other such personal touchstones; and the cracked-spined copy of Carolyn Chute's Merry Men. For one reason or another, none of these could be replaced by the local library or even Project Gutenberg.

In this tendency to save the personal, I guess I'm more like that couple in a recent issue of Harper's who are busy building a library in the city where I'm bound. But at the same time, I can't be like them. Certainly not yet, though I wonder if I ever will be. My books and I are in an unfortunate position, suspended between two coasts. At this point it's really not clear where they ought to be next semester in order to best support the development of my dissertation. I mean, I don't know where I'm going to be to do that dissertation. This indecision is costly -- storage, and shipping, and strain on my back as I hoist another forty-pound box over the counter to a beleaguered postal worker.