August 11, 2024

Finally a box filled mostly with non-fiction. I could stop with that and readers might be left with the belief that I am a true academic, egghead through and through. However, as Paul Harvey used to say, here's the rest of the story, all appropriate for a white unmarked box.

The box contains 4 DVDs, two magazine and 22 books, 5 of which are clearly Lincoln's. As for the other 17 books, the title of one, "The Encyclopedia Of Stupidity," might tell us all we need to know. However, the box's contents would even be unfair to Matthijs van Bossel's 2003 scholarly work suggesting that stupidity is a condition for intelligence, the timeless adage that failure is important to ultimate success. (As an aside, if that adage is so, I must have missed out on a lot of people's later successes throughout my career.)

However, the fact that van Bossel's book was a scholarly tome suggests it was misplaced, not just in the box, but even in my house. I purchased the book thinking it was a collection of stupidity examples, anecdotes, and events, presented without analysis, "A Book Of Lists," when the only category is stupidity (the thinness of the book should have checked that instinct). In other words, I thought it would be a worthy bookshelf mate with "What's The # for 911: American's Wackiest 911 Calls," "Roman Soldiers Don't Wear Watches: 333 Film Flubs," "The Cultural Idiocy Quiz," and "And Nobody Got Hurt: World's Weirdest, Wackiest True Sports' Stories." And, if I'd had the space in the computer room, which houses most of our permanent non-fiction, it could have co-existed with Lincoln's two Mad Magazine collections: "Mad Spoofs Movie Classics" and "Mad: Golden Treasury of Trash" (of which I find two copies in the box).

Among these other "classics" is a book on Optical Illusions; a cultural literacy test book; "Humor For Boomers;" a book comparing great movie scripts to bad movie scripts (did I, at one time, desire to be a movie screenwriter?); three Good Eats DVD; and a Cirque Du Soleil DVD. If mysteries are mind munchies, these throwaways provide even less intellectual caloric instinct (o.k., maybe not the Good Eats). Yet for years, I found myself drawn to these weird "little" books (they often are smaller) in the reference or humor section or games section of the local book chain.

Even though I don't buy these kinds of books anymore, the addiction is evident when I pull Paul Davidson's "The Lost Blogs: From Jesus to Jim Morrison" from the box for a return to the permanent collection. "This could be a fun read," I think.

Despite all of this, two seminal works, Edith Hamilton's "Mythology," and William McNeill's "Plagues And People" have ended up slumming it with "Humor For Boomers." McNeill's book has my mother-in-law's name on the inside cover. I hope we didn't abscond with that until after her death (but I seriously doubt it). Additionally, I'd like to say I am proud to say I own "Get Down To Earth: What You Can Do To Stop Global Warming," but then again, where is it to be found in our home -- an unmarked box sharing cramped space with "What's The # for 911?" 

In my defense, I am not sure any box I unpack will have a collection of non-fiction I am proud of. I mentioned earlier that I have a higher threshold for the non-fiction "permanent" collection. As we have already seen, much "classic fiction" can end up in these boxes, but less so with non-fiction. I suppose that is why I am shocked that "classics" like Hamilton's and McNeill's books ended up in this box. The best non-fiction surrounds me in the computer room where I write these blogs, fantastic books about Chernobyl, Putin, pandemics (written well before COVID-19), Henrietta Lacks, female spies, the opiate crisis, the future of food, school shootings, the education system in America, the Middle East, and the Numerati (just to name a few, a very few).

Yeah, now I am beginning to think "The Lost Blogs" belongs nowhere around here. It's going back down. Besides, that sounds like what somebody will call my website when I am dead and gone.

Full series here.