marie kondo derail / decluttering chatter!

yeah mercury that's what makes me uncomfortable too i think, when it's white dudes on HGTV no one gives a shit but the moment a woman of color talks about a way of choosing possessions that is very informed by her culture and cultural values (i read someone from a japanese girl that i'm friendly with and that sort of animism thing is definitely very japanese) everyone starts talking about how awful she is for telling someone to get rid of books that don't make them happy to own

and as an academic i saw SO MUCH OF TWITTER just like "that's not what academics are supposed to do!!! hoard books even if you never read them!!! real literature doesn't have to spark joy, it can make you depressed too!" which like, yes, but that's not what 'spark joy' means, as can happen when things are being translated to different languages, she never said to toss depressing books or to toss all your books period, there's a specific line that idr if it was in her book or in an interview where she was like "you can keep a ton of things, one client kept a like 3 bookshelves full of books because we went through their overall collection that was taking over their living and mental space and donated books that they'd read and didn't necessarily feel the need to keep around, books that they started and didn't enjoy enough to finish, etc." aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa apparently i have a lot of feelings abt marie kondo sorry folks

 

i am definitely biased though because i was absolutely a mini hoarder because i was afraid to throw things away for some reason even if they were literally broken trash (i used to keep broken phone chargers, like broken to the point of not even working if you jiggled them, ??? why) but her general philosophy helped me to realize a whole bunch of stuff that im finding hard to articulate rn but that definitely helped me to realize that if something used to make me happy but doesn't any more, doesn't mean i need to keep it around just for the sake of sentiment

 

OH MAN THOUGH people get so incredibly weird about books! A friend of mine recently went pared down his collection (and this was before the internet was having conniptions about Marie Kondo) because he had way more than he could ever catch up with (PhD student!) and it was depressing him. Cue some of his acquaintances losing their damn minds that he would ever dare get rid of a book! He never said one word about what anyone else should do with their books, but him just mentioning that he pared down his own personal collection of mass-market paperbacks that he would probably never read was practically heresy.

 

....I've never understood that, cause like, okay
I have a book and I'm not reading it and I'm not going to read it in the future, or I read it and I didn't like it, or something
why would I keep it?? someone else could be reading that book and getting enjoyment out of it. it's not. doing anyone any good just hanging out on my shelf forever.

 

This is the aspect of criticism of her that bothers me. I hear lots of bitching about minimalism or minimalism adjacent things, but I don't hear names named usually. Kondo gets very specifically named though and words are put into her mouth. So while I can get kneejerk reactions to her, especially if one's had her methods used against them abusively, I'm very ehhhhhhhhhh about the current outrage towards her because a lot of it feels like 'EW THE EVIL FOREIGN WOMAN IS FORCING HER INHERENTLY EVIL FOREIGN WAYS ON US,' type shit. And there's this aura of 'If we can just kill the witch the evil of minimalism will be gone!' Especially when her shit is being heavily misrepresented and the very Japanese nature of her method is kind of just...ignored. By a lot of the bitching I see.

People are getting very defensive of her because a lot of people are being disgustingly ethnocentric and bigoted in how they use this woman as some sort of fucking scapegoat for minimalism that we can all set on fire.

 

BOOKS ARE FOR SHARING I DONT CARE WHAT ANYONE SAYS

Like yeah I've had someone not return a book I loved, but that meant they loved it too, right? And that's a win. Go. Read.

I always pass on my books if I can, unless it's one of my very treasured collection of gifted hardback first edition Discworld novels, or something with a limited cover, or an out of print edition. Everything else? Fair game tbh.

 

thats exactly my philosophy - i used to really love the artemis fowl books as a kid, and i held onto them for ages because of that even though reading them no longer gave me that rush of "hell yeah". not long ago i realized that if i donated them, some other kid may get the same joy out of them that i used to, so why not?

 

A lot of people treat books as objects of reverence to the point that it's less about what's in the book so much as it is that It's A Book and Therefore Important By Virtue Of Being A Book. A lot of those are people who treat being a Reader and Owning A Lot Of Books as a defining personality trait to the point it might be their entire personality. It's the ~intellectual~ version of being defined by the stuff you consume.

I kind of get it on one level - I remember when I could afford as many books as I wanted to read, had read everything in the library that had interested me, and had read the books I did have so much they were falling apart, and at the time and place I was then being a kid who read for fun was considered weird, so I was very defensive about my books! But, yeesh.

 

In terms of books...I get weird about losing them personally but I try to keep that to me personally. Because it's my personal bullshit that doesn't necessarily apply to everyone else. I love having lots of books though, even if I don't read them through very often or at all, because I like the aesthetic of a personal library. I just like how books look and feel and smell. So even books I kind of hate I take a sort of joy in having because I mean. It's a book. Look at these qualities of it and look how I can organize it and my other books. I can take it out and tell you stories about how I fucking hate the god damn thing and then it will inevitably get reshelved or reput back into my seemingly chaotic hell piles of books. So books serve like dual purposes as like things to actually read for information or entertainment and also like aesthetic art pieces for the sake of being books at all.

I also don't really need my books to be in like perfect condition, though I do like the feel of new and well maintained books. I like books 'with history'. So beat up old things are lovely. I like coffee stains, I like dog earred pages, I like finding little cards and notes in their pages from former owners. There's this copy of God Stalk I've borrowed from the school library that I really wish I could make mine and keep around because I like how it 'feels'. I already have an ebook copy of the book, so I don't really need a physical copy per se but it looks so nice and smells so nice and feels so nice. I could sit down and organize it with the rest of my fantasy section and it could be one part of my Kencyrath collection...Alas, I cannot just steal it and it must go back and I'll have to find my own copy of the thing. Since I do want a physical copy.

Books are romantic objects with history. They're like people to me. I love them dearly.

It's like collecting toys or photos of trains I guess but with books? It's also related to one of my earliest memories, which was looking at the books arranged on these shelves in my childhood house and thinking that they looked nice. All in a row like that.

 

It occurs to me - minimalists are all about "you have to get rid of stuff", but Marie Kondo is, as I understand it, saying things along the lines of "you don't have to keep stuff". Which is an entirely different approach and, I feel, one that can be very freeing if you've gotten in to the habit of feeling like you have to keep stuff for Reasons. Poverty, for instance, can really get a person stuck in that mindset long past the point where it's helpful.

 

I used to be on the Konmari hate bandwagon, because my mother had read her stuff when it first came out, before the Netflix show, and the way my mom explained it to me sounded like Los Angeles rich white lady bollocks. But that's presumably because my mother spent decades surrounded by Los Angeles rich white lady minimalism and crap like that (and then we were immersed in Steve Jobs' Silicon Valley pseudo-Buddhist minimalism when we moved north), so when she heard people raving about the basic premise—having vastly misunderstood the basic premise—it sounded like that exact same kind of bollocks. Still, that's another case of putting words in someone's mouth. I'd kind of been ignoring all the internet wank about Marie Kondo until I read that same article about ethnocentrism and Shintoism and how no, she doesn't want you to get rid of your books, thank you very much, and now I'm absolutely on Team Marie.

 

It's actually interesting how when it's a dude telling 20something white cis boys to clean their room, he practically starts a cult.

 

That actually reminds me that I need to figure out what to do with the computer of unknown age (but it's got a Slot 1 Pentium III, so...) I found in the trash a few months ago. There's got to be something.

 

my mom got me one of marie kondos books a yeqr or two ago and its ironically been sitting on the side table in the living room, often hidden under a bunch of clutter that i dont actually want, and my landlady has already given me a lecture on cleaning up

so im thinking i should read the book but i also saw a thing that was like "white people Dont Get the konmari method"

 

ever since ebooks have become easily accessed and affordable, ive pared down how many books i buy by a lot. this is great bc half of the books that make me happiest are also large enough they could be coffee tables by themselves

 

Would you mind explaining what about a large number of books is horrifying? Geninuely curious, as someone to whom books are very much comfort objects. Hundreds of books just sound great to me because theres almost certainly going to be some i havent read yet in there. And while I buy mostly ebooks for reasons of speed and money, paper books are still good and special.

More on topic, Im actually glad to hear that Marie Kondos philosophy isn't that kinda awful minimalism I heard it was. I love both books and clothes as comfort objects, so the idea of throwing out either if theyre not unusable or unwanted upsets me. (Even then I would donate anything not broken because trashing something that could be used upsets me, which is definitely growing up poor damage)

 

Convenience is like the one reason I like and use ebooks. So I can just cart around massive amounts of books and paper. There's also the ease of Perfectly Legitimate Means and creating massive shared libraries with others. Or legal massive shared libraries online! Or why I tell people to Never Ever Buy Buddhist Books. Chances are you can find those online for free in some legal net library and temples often offer the things too (though it is polite to donate).

But I just...really don't like the experience of reading on screens? The physicality of physical books makes it easier for me to manage. They're also not like internet capable so my stupid ass isn't prone to going LOL LET'S LOOK UP CAT VIDEOS WHOOOOOOOO as I am with ebooks on my phone or laptop. I know I can like set up things that prevent me from doing that on the internet, but my dumb brain is also like 'Well, we're the one who set that up soooooooo...bye restriction, hello cat videos!' The jump from 'put down book, pickup laptop or phone,' is apparently significant enough to keep me from doing that.

I do like obsessively organizing my digital texts though. Honestly, organization alone is like. At least HALF the point of texts for me.

 

I'm another one for just enjoying books as physical objects. I like the weight and the Texture and the smell, i will legit stick my nose into books because it makes my brain purr.
I like reading stuff online, but if i wanna get really lost in something, i pick a paper-book. They're just way too soothing comfort objects to me.