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attention elsewhere / taxonomies
I've been spending a lot of time lately working on various non-weblog projects: Chris and I have been mastering the new Number None album and finalizing art, and I've been revising old Imaginary Year entries, as well as beginning to orchestrate a much-overdue beautification of the first two volumes of that project.
In addition all of us here have been continuing to get the new apartment organized—we're deep in the project of unifying the book collections of three people who have been lifelong readers and book-buyers.
So far, these are the books that we have in triplicate:
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault
Literary Theory, by Terry Eagleton
I think it's likely that a few more will emerge before the shelf organization is all over.
Organizing bookshelves shelves is a project that I enjoy because it involves the creation of taxonomies, which for some reason I never tire of thinking up. We're currently using this as our organizational system:
» Fiction
» Poetry
» Drama
»Theory / Philosophy / Literary Criticism
» Reference / How To
» Cookbooks / Health & Diet
» Comics / Design / Art / Children's
» Assorted Nonfiction
The "Assorted Nonfiction" section will probably undergo further subdivision. As it stands, this taxonomy is considerably more coarse-grained than my last one, which was subdivided perhaps to the point of obsession. If I recall correctly, it looked like this:
» Art
» Graphic Design
» Comics
» Children's
» Fantasy
» Horror
» SF
» Slipstream
» Fiction (American, subdivided by region, beginning with NYC)
» Fiction (South American)
» Fiction (European, subdivided by country)
» Fiction (Asian)
» Fiction (African)
» Fiction Anthologies
» Essay Anthologies
» Memoir
» GBLT
» Erotica
» Drama
» Poetry
» Myth & Religion
» Psychology
» Science
» Theory / Philosophy / Literary Criticism
» Urbanism / Architecture
» Media Arts
» Pop Culture
My favorite thing about that particular taxonomy was the way that each category gradates smoothly into the next; there's always at least one book that sits exactly on the boundary between categories. (For instance, Jung's books sit on the border between Myth & Psychology, as, say, "A Wrinkle In Time" fits between Children's & Fantasy.)
I now conclude this enormously indulgent and self-congratulatory post. Labels: personal, projects, taxonomies |
