“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”
“Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin

One of the marvellous things about being a committed reader is the way unpacking complex texts can increase our tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity and the need to reconsider or adjust; thus, it also makes one sort of shock-proof. My reading has let me see, hear, or imagine all kinds of lives, and through that alchemy every serious reader recognizes, I’ve sort of lived them too. Paradoxically, however, this understanding of complexity is what makes possible one of the things that does startle me occasionally: the notion one often hears expressed that language is an abstraction, not quite real, or is separate from the body and the world. However much language’s operations may depend on convention, on deferral, and on self-referentiality, my reading has taught me its effects (and affects) are undeniably real. Moreover, my experience of language is profoundly embodied; language for me is partly breath, sound, posture and movement; the pressure of tongue on palate, on teeth. I have never given a reading (and rarely even spoken) without first adjusting my posture; I never sit in a chair to read a book without leaning in; becoming intimate. And stories, a particularly interesting deployment of language, are absolutely material; certainly my reading has changed me. And I need only look around to see their very solid effects far beyond merely my self; I can see it out there in the world: narratives of freedom, historical narratives, narratives of sexuality and gender, for example. Now those have serious effects: All this makes my library a specific case of my relationship to language writ large; it is the material form of my autobiography. Those volumes and their arrangement in some ways constitute the man I am: the man I have become.

I should note that even my bookcases are a kind of account; they were custom-made for me and consist of a pattern of cubby holes that run the length of the wall in my living-dining room and are sufficiently deep to hold two rows of books in a kind of visual and physical analogue for the way my reading has piled up; one layer atop another. That accumulation is driven, appropriately enough for a life’s story, by passion, because I am the kind of reader I suspect most writers want. If I like a book I will almost invariably seek out others by the author, and in the case of my greatest loves, I will read every word: the novels and the collections of fiction and poetry as well as the occasional writing, the volumes of journalism and essays. I love to watch a theme develop, and most writers will return to their central theme(s) time and again, tunnelling deeper and deeper. The ones who do this well are touchstones for me; points of gravity that have pulled me in new directions in my reading and in my thought. So I can see whole periods of my life take shape on those shelves when time and again, I – and my partner – reconsider and reorganize the library. The simple fact of looking at the shelves and moving books from one spot to another visibly, and physically, becomes a making of connections, a reassessing of long stretches of my past; I can see the links appear and change every time.

The act of arranging my books is for me an act of writing: an act not simply of curation, but of narration. The process involves not merely deciding what to keep and what I can let go (letting go is an unusual thing I’ll admit, but not entirely unheard of), but determining how to organize my books, how to make sense – meaning – out of the accumulation. Given the bookishness of my temperament, the sheer amount of time I have spent looking at books, lingering in bookstores when such things were more common and more welcoming, reading and thinking about what I have read, means these organizational decisions are one way I make meaning out of my life itself.

My first instinct has always been to shelve fiction and poetry alphabetically by author. But no sooner do I begin than another thought arises: that’s not how I acquired these books. That’s not how my reading grew, spread, proliferated and hybridized. So how about periodization, or literary movements? Romantics all together, gothic novels likewise, the Victorians. But what of Wilde? My obsession with him has led to the possession of a sufficient number of volumes to fill a cubby hole with his work alone. I came upon his books early and found much there of value for the path I was beginning to understand would be mine. There are other exceptions to this classificatory system too, writers in particular schools or groups: Expressionists, Decadents, the Beats. Surely the Beats can only be grouped together…… but what of Burroughs, another iconic figure for me? How can he not be with the Beats? But how could he not just as easily be placed with the works of occulture that have drawn me since the late ‘eighties; he being the spiritual father of the field in so many ways (with his collaborator Brion Gysin, who for some reasons is with the Gs; I am not always consistent). Of course, he could also be placed with the queers though he would be an uncomfortable fit with the Violet Quill in some ways. And so it goes.

The variety of nonfiction is a minefield. Subject area is the criterion, of course, but how to order subject areas. Anarchism should surely go with politics and my Marxist tomes. However, I have pause over some figures: John Moore; Wilson; even Landauer. I have tended to read them as part of a deep current of visionary utopianism. A spot between politics and the occult collection, perhaps that makes the most sense. It will remind me always of my refusal to either dilute my materialism or give up my commitment to the visionary. This also partly explains the sovereign presence of surrealism on a shelf all its own in my office. Surrealism has marked me deeply. There the works of the writers themselves occupy the top shelves of the case while the scholarly work, heftier volumes, fills the shelves at the bottom, stacked one atop the other.

And erotic writing or porn; where should I put those? I acknowledge the value of canons, and of canon making as a practice, and though I have some questions and ideas about how we make them (and absolutely question the notion of a single canon) I’m not a fan of arbitrary aesthetic hierarchies. So, should I put my dirty books with fiction and poetry? Or given both my tastes and my politics, should I shelve them with Queer theory and LGBTQ studies? These texts were of central importance to me in my younger years. The writing of Preston, Califia, Scott O’Hara and others were what made the sexual adventure, or experiment, I was living through (as were many gay men of my generation) legible in a real sense; they helped me understand that, although pleasure mattered absolutely, there was more to it. Those books made my cruising and my affairs meaningful in a way they might not have been otherwise, or might have taken years, perhaps many, to come to entirely on my own. So where I keep these books, how often I might look at them is something of great import to me.

The questions are endless; they are vortices. But even as they swirl they are the very substance of my life, my movement through the world. They are the roots of my writing, markers of various turning points, and the scaffolding of the principles on which I have built all of my relationships. The books that marked me are my memories, because I am a man who, literally, always has a book with him. There is always at least one in a pocket or a bag, and because of that the books I take from the shelf sometimes contain other things tying me to my past: flyers, pamphlets, invitations. Here, in a volume of Bataille, for example, I find slipped between the pages a flyer announcing a gay leathermen’s party back in the 90s. I believe I may have gone to it. And in this book by Jeremy Reed, another advert: this one for an experimental drag theatre piece at London’s Soho Theatre; I definitely went to that. The overlap of book and event seems filled with significance to me in both cases. Here is the book I was reading the night I met my man. Here is the first book we argued about. This is the first book from his shelves that I read. (This one from early enough in the relationship that we still policed such divisions.)

And thus however often I reconsider and reshelve, I do so in all likelihood largely for the pleasure, for the renewal of memory and vision, because, in the end, there is no organizational model that can capture, replicate or codify my desire, or my life. These arrangements matter to me because, although I, like everyone, have my memories those volumes are what inform the recollection. My relationship to my library is - in a vital sense - my relationship to my life, because mine is a life shaped by reading and these massed books are the material traces of the vectors that culminated in lived experiences that often pass without many other forms of tangible residue. And these books contextualized those experiences, layering meaning atop brute fact. Therefore, it is only appropriate to rearrange, to adjust, to fuss, to respond to changing circumstances because reading and living are ongoing, and are happy unions of chance and necessity. Thus, such negotiation, such relationality, whether with books, thoughts and ideas, or the world, or other people, is the stuff of life too: think, do, rethink, share. And so it goes. And goes.