John Waters (via heartclef)

Ha! Earlier today I was just thinking of this quote. Look, I love John Waters. No, scratch that, I worship John Waters cinematic achievements. However, this quote is classist and just a tad obnoxious. I know plenty of people (not just fuckable people, but decent and likable human beings) who cannot afford books. That’s why there are libraries.

Also, because I am the measure of all things, I’ll offer myself as an example. If someone came to my place, they would see a paltry, laughable amount of books. Because I hardly own any in physical format. When I moved a 14 hours flight away from my home, I had to make tough decisions regarding my possessions. When I first moved here, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be forever or just for a while, so I left all my books behind, at my mother’s place. Surely that collection (which I had mostly inherited from my father), would have impressed John Waters and others like him. It included 17th, 18th and 19th century books, plus the huge amount of books I had added on top of those initial volumes.

I remember in the beginning (the first couple of years or so), I used to miss those books. Particularly the old (18th century) dictionaries. After a while, I didn’t miss them anymore. And now my entire book collection (thousands of volumes) fits in a hard drive at my server. So for certain people, I would not be dating material, because they cannot measure my intellectual depth at a glance. I guess it’s a good thing I am married.

Also: there is a little application within Google desktop that has allowed me to index the totality of these digital books. Not just the titles or authors but all the text. So now, if I need to find one specific quote or part of a book, I don’t need to painstakingly go through pages and pages, I just enter some key words in a Google toolbar. I never got the nostalgic attachment to old methods when I can have everything indexed and cataloged in ways that were only previously afforded to libraries.