My interest in books began at a very young age. My first collection of books was the complete set of the Hardy Boys mysteries. I read and owned 55 of them by the time I was 12 years old. I was quite proud of the shelf of small blue bound volumes. I never took them from my father¹s house when I left for college. Eventually my father passed the entire collection to cousins in Vermont. The entire set remains together on a shelf in Vermont to this day. More than can be said of my many subsequent collections.
In high school and college I moved on to more substantial material. In high school I discovered Carlos Casteneda, Aldous Huxley and the beatniks. Robert Frost inspired me to take the path less taken. Once in college I began to discover authors and ideas that changed my perspective and understanding of the world. My collection of textbooks was selected by my professors. Most were sold back, but there were some real gems among the syllabi. As an English student at Texas A&M I developed a distaste for “the canon.” Armed with my high school discoveries and a growing number of inspirational fiction and poetry tomes, I built my “counter canon”. I sought solace in assembling a collection of texts of my own selection. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, J D Salinger, Oscar Wilde, and J G Ballard filled my shelves and my mind. Among the gems professors introduced to me are The Beggar¹s Opera, William Blake, John Barth, Samuel Coleridge, Edgar Allen Poe, and most notably Italo Calvino. Calvino¹s Cosmicomics was the first in a tide of foreign works I am still working through today! I do not have a copy of Cosmicomics in the collection only because I have given away every copy I have purchased.
In my last year at A&M, 1988, I moved almost entirely away from my major relishing cultural anthropology (especially mythology) and ancient history. I lapped up the stories of Athens and Rome. I read widely in Irish, Native American, and Sanskrit myth and ritual. In my final semester I created my first annotated bibliography, a collection of books and articles on visions and hallucinations. Since that time I have produced formal and informal bibliographies representing the most important texts for me. My Yard of Books is up to the minute.
I moved from College Station to San Francisco. I discovered Joseph Campbell, Albert Camus¹s essays, Medieval Romance, Gilgamesh, and the Tales of 1001 Nights. I decided after a few months I would attend graduate school in Folklore and Mythology. I was accepted to UCLA in 1990 and received an MA in 1992. During this time many new analytical writers inspired me. Many are French like Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Gaston Bachelard. I also encountered many more primary mythological texts that account several inches of my yard.
I am reminded of an anecdote recorded in an introduction to the Rig Veda. It¹s meaning informs and will inform my collection. The Vedas existed for generations in oral tradition prior to being written down. Two sages discuss the merits of rendering the sacred tales to text. One argues that if the tales are written they will never be forgotten. The sacred texts must be written down for posterity to preserve TRUTH for future generations. The other sage argues that writing the sacred words down would insure they are forgotten. The oral process of preservation has worked for previous generations and delivered the tales to the present. Are the tales flawed? Has their truth lessened for a lack of writing? Once they are written the tales will no longer be alive. They will be fixed in our time. Sacred truth will be a book and not a story.
Thanks
