Reason Not the Need

"There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse." ~Quentin Crisp

Would that I could live so, without shame, with even more dust than I do. It took real character, and many years of studious neglect, for Quentin Crisp to become the gloriously passive old savage who could say the words above and truly mean them. Sadly, I am still too much my mother's child. Unlike Q. P., I must now and again, make an effort. We have weekend guests coming. This means the hired cleaners come tomorrow, so we must clean up tonight.

One of the greatest luxuries of having married into the -- now retired -- middle class, other than having a house big enough to accommodate my library, is being able to afford "having help in." Now my beloved mother used to be a cleaning lady, and dear A., for all his managerial ease with hired temporaries, had a mother who worked too. This means that the night before the morning the "Merry Maids" come to clean the place -- we clean the place. Not extensively, you understand, not so much as to no longer necessitate the aid of professionals, but enough that we don't shame our mothers. Porn, for example, is tucked away. Allen even puts post-it-notes over the unmentionables of the more provocative nudes in his office, to spare the delicate sensitivities of the ladies, don't ya know. A. invariably cleans the stove and replaces the foil guards under the burners. The dishwasher is run. And I do my part: gathering the laundry up and doing such of it as might be done in a night, putting out fresh folded sheets and blankets and such with which the beds might be freshly made up, washing the throw rugs and the throw blankets left throughout the house -- we're great ones, in this cold climate for "throws." (It is 41 degrees outside as I write. Ah, Spring!)
(See illustration of a "tidied" library at right.)
The worst of my tasks on such occasions as this is the great gathering in of scattered books. Every room, as you might imagine, is littered with them. They overwhelm my nightstand, as was shown in an earlier post. Books seem to gather in every least likely corner; stacking up before my bathroom mirror, occupying the steps of our only stepladder, drifting behind the television, accumulating on every available flat surface, or so it seems, in the place. As I've doubtless much lamented here before, I have more books than shelves and just as doubtlessly always will. Such is a happy life. But writing here has loosened my already slack standards of housekeeping, and National Poetry Month in particular seems to have necessitated pulling whole shelves of poetry out and then distributing them, in no special order, about the room. (Tomorrow's quote for the "Daily Dose" will be from a book I searched for a couple of weeks ago and could not find -- because I must have taken it down for just that purpose the week before that and then promptly lost it in the subsequent poetic floods.)

In fact, writing here has all but undone whatever attempts I might ever have made to systematize my library at all. Because I generally hate unattributed quotes, which still make me feel stupid when I don't immediately recognize even the most common, I distrust most if not all the online sources for such. There are a few respectable sites offering poems, by title, author, but almost never by first or most famous line, which, maddeningly, is most often the only scrap I tend to retain. If and when I try to search these things up online, I've usually got them just slightly wrong, but not often so slightly as to be able to find them among the suggestions offered by the helpful faeries that live in my computer, bless 'em. I still find I am generally better off trusting to instinct and going to my shelves to hunt up anything longer than a phrase of verse. And as for the many sites that offer prose quotations, most often grouped by insipid themes, I find these wholly inadequate and untrustworthy still. Besides almost never siting the book or essay from which the quote was pulled, these virtual Bartletts tend to repeat endlessly the same pat quotations, often from people I am unlikely to ever have heard of or give a damn about -- inspirational speakers? comedians? gurus? -- and if from recognizable and worthy authors and wits, then misattributed or multiply attributed or offered in two or three crazy-making variations, all or none of which may be original to the person quoted. A pox on all such sloppy, lazy sentimentalists and practitioners of uplift! Let them open a goddamned book now and then!

Here now, my favorite poem on attribution:

OSCAR WILDE

"If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it."

By Dorothy Parker

(But then you knew that.)

The one advantage, constant reader, to my need to clean up the joint tonight, is that you will be spared at least a little my usual rambling. Whatever else I should be doing at this late hour, this ain't it. And so, for once, goodnight before morning. I have sheets yet to fold, ashtrays to empty, and smut to stow. Mustn't let the "Merry Maids" find us in our natural state of disorder. Must make some sort of effort, mustn't we, Mother?