How to Rid Yourself of Books [Man and Bits of Paper]

I will start with a declarative. More than any other possession, books are hard for me to let go of.

I hold the printed word in such high regard that I can sometimes lend books (but only to the trustworthy), rarely give books away (but only to the special), sometimes sell them (but I am always frustrated that they are not worth as much to others as they are to me), and never, never throw them out.

The one time I ever threw books away outright was when they had been stored over the summer in my friend's basement, and that basement had flooded. Not, you know, a big puddle flood. A foot deep of nasty groundwater seeping in from the hardest summer rainfall in a hundred years.

One or two big boxes of books and clothing were at the bottom of the pile of stuff, and after five minutes of examining them and choking on the clouds of mold emanating from them, I realized that exactly 0% was salvageable, and that both boxes should be summarily blackbagged and tossed.

I mean, of course, big industrial garbage bags for to hold trash. Not that each book should be disappeared fascist regime/ secret police style, bag-on-head. Wow- some sort of V For Vendetta / Fahrenheit 451 crossover is playing out in my head now.

And so we arrive at the problem- I am probably moving in the next few months. My apartment has approximately 30 linear feet of books in it. That's 250 pounds of books. I cannot move 250 pounds of books. Moving them across town was a bitch. Moving them across the country will either be painful or expensive or both.

Enter my friend Alan. Alan grew up about six hours northeast of Pittsburgh, in Middle-of-Nowhere-No-Really-We-Mean-It, PA. He has had two stays in Pittsburgh of around two years and then around one year, and although he loves the hell out of the city and its residents, he hasn't been able to stay permanently, due to ongoing financial crises of various sorts. He visited for the long weekend, and crashed on my couch (and it is a damn comfy couch too).

He even helped name this blog. The suggestion of TS Eliot's 4 Quartets beat out my idea of The Waste Land as a source of floral but effective language.

In any case, it occured to me sometime tonight that Alan is someone I trust. I trust him to not only not throw books away, but to appreciate the hell out of them the way he appreciates me, and the way he appreciates Pittsburgh. He is a man to which I would love to give books.

Given as well that he is a poor man, and can purchase perhaps a book or two a year, giving him as many books as he could take seemed like the best of all solutions.

Boxed in his car's trunk are about 60 books- a sixth of what I own. I have given them freely, without any sort of monetary solicitation, however paltry, from either party.

I want him to have these books.

True, they cost me money to buy when I did buy them, but that is money I don't remember spending. That is money that could have gone to movies or popcorn or something frivolous, but instead they went to paper, and the enjoyment of paper. I've gotten my pound of flesh from the books he's getting- they are all one's I've already read. And if I really need them again, its not like things go out of print anymore. No book I own is old enough that copies are rare, or even semi-rare. Half of them are mass-market paperbacks anyway.

True, keeping them is a comfort. Knowing that all that information, all those quotes and paragraphs and words are just at arms reach is a good feeling, a sort of warm blanket of information and phrase. But it can be smothering, and although a good feeling, it is just a feeling, and perhaps not as good as other feelings that not having so many damn books might allow. You cannot keep everything.

But everyone wins now.

Alan feels good- he has books, and he loves books. And they were filtered through me and my tastes, so they probably won't be crap.

I feel good. I'm three shelves lighter than I was this morning. It sounds sort of callous, but its one more thing I can check off on my List of Things to Do.

And the books feel good to, as they aren't being tossed, or disappeared, or thrown into a big Nazi fire, or turned into terrible, terrible sewer mold. They are being loved.

Just not by me.

Household Plant is Sad and Gone [Man and Bits of Paper]

Some time ago, I had some crazy architecture student roommates. Those times are now over, and have been for quite some time.

One of their stranger ideas was inherited from a crazy forty-something Russian one of them had stayed with in a sixth floor walkup in Brooklyn during an architecture conference. (Never thought I would say that sentence, but there goes) Rather than a shower curtain, he instead had a long, low pot (almost a trough) full of ferns and small plants. The splashings from the shower would fall into that and water the plants.

To mimic this, we bought a potted plant. Not a fern, a plant. One of those five foot tall fern-on-a-stick plants that doesn't need sunlight, or love. After a month of pulling fronds out of the drain and mopping up the spilled shower water brown with dirt, I bought a shower curtain and moved the plant to the living room.

I think I watered it once.

I think.

Today, I looked at it, and saw that all but three fronds had turned brown. I took it out to the dumpster. Tonight, I will watch the garbage man laugh and then crush it into planty death.

If it isn't dead already.

In any case, this is instructive as to how things go in my apartment- there is a weird thing, then it becomes a clutter problem, then it is ignored, and then I flip out and deal with it in the most final, regime-changing way I can.

I do not clean in halves.

Bates, Juliet, and Romeo Streets; South Oakland [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Note: Some of this article is supposition, and is noted as such.

In the 1820s and 1830s, the area which is now South Oakland was owned by a woman named Juliet Simple. Juliet Street is presumably named after her. Later as more streets were built, presumably, the naming trend continued, but rather than pull from the names within Ms. Simple's family, "Juliet" was taken to be a Shakespeare reference, and so one now finds Hamlet, Ophelia, Juliet, and Romeo Streets in the vicinity. Or so I presume from the cartological records I came across.

Juliet is a relatively flat street that runs close to North-South. To the west the land falls down into a short valley that was once called Three Mile Run (after the creek that formed it, which entered the Monongahela three miles from the Point (see Four Mile Run, Nine Mile Run for further use of this creative naming scheme), but after the Democrat publisher of the "Tree of Liberty" newspaper, Tarleton Bates, who was killed there in a duel on January 8th, 1806, the name was changed. He was slain by Thomas Stewart, an Irish shopkeeper who was friends with Ephraim Pentland, Bates' rival, the Republican publisher of "The Commonwealth."

In that paper, Pentland called Bates one of the "most abandoned political miscreants that ever disgraced a State." Bates responded by purchasing a whip and attacking Pentland in the street some days later. Pentland challenged Bates to a duel via Stewart, who served as messenger. Dueling, however, had been outlawed since 1794. Bates declined, and then subsequently published an account of the whole incident, in which he accused Stewart of being "ungentlemenly" simply for being the messenger. Stewart called for an apology, and when none was given challenged Bates himself. Bates accepted the challenge.

One cold winter morning they boated out to Oakland, then wooded and far from the town, and finding a glade half way up Three Mile Run, proceeded to duel. William Wilkins, the lawyer after whom Wilkinsburg is named, served as Stewart's second. Morgan Neville, son of the colonel for whom the street is named, was Bates' second. Pistols were drawn, paces marched, and facing each other, shots were fired in unison. The first round, both parties missed. The second round, Bates was struck in the chest. He died within the hour. The duel was the last one Pittsburgh would ever see.

Since then, the glade has been paved over, and the valley mostly filled, but the name remains.

On the side of the valley, west and uphill from Bates, east and downhill from Juliet, lies her lover, Romeo Street. It is hard to call it a street, however, because it is in fact a set of stairs. Four houses line the staircase, all of them with their own sub-staircases leading down to their respective doors. Three of them were built some time before 1906, and the fourth some time between 1914 and 1932.

They were most likely built, as were many of the houses in the area, as housing for the workers at the Linden Steel Corporation. The plant employed 1500 Linden steel was owned by WJ Lewis and his son, WJ Lewis Junior. In the 1890s they were embroiled in a massive fraud incident. Apparently one of their employees had made a copy of the official inspector's seal used on steel that had been certified to a certain quality. Substandard steel was being stamped with this fake stamp and sent on as certified, full price steel. The subterfuge might not have been detected, save that one of Linden's chief customers was the US Navy, who had their own set of inspectors. Indeed, during the 1880s and 90s they sold more steel to the Navy than the Carnegie Corporation did.

WJ Lewis Jr. sold Linden Steel some time before 1901, sold his mansion on Chatsworth Avenue in Hazelwood, which was apparently a bit of a "Millionaire's Row" back in the 1880s, and moved to Texas. The mansion and grounds were sold to the city, which turned them into a community center and a now-gone park.

But I digress. The three houses and one wreck that stand today on Romeo street appear to have the same overhead plans as the houses on the 1932 map- they are probably original. They are, I believe, the most extreme examples of the city's tendency to fill ever nook and cranny it can, a testament (and tenement, if one will pardon the pun (or parole it)) to the will to expand, to fill.

Moleskine Zombie Prep page [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Crossposted to skine.art

UP...C? [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) made the US Steel Tower (the worlds tallest triangular-floor-plan building) its headquarters a few months ago. They got permission to put their logo at the top of the building.

I just took a picture of that logo today. The M is missing- did it fall? I called the building's lobby and was told that no, it is simply a larger letter, and its installation was saved for last.

Macrotypographers, beware?

I want to make a kerning joke, but I sans serif.

The Zombiemobile and Eve, of the Pittsburgh Department of Zombie Disposal [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Since time before time (and by that I mean the early 1970s), Pittsburgh has been a town of zombies. More recently, one can see a beat up red little car around town, upon whose sides is stenciled the seal of the City of Pittsburgh, and the words "PITTSBURGH DEPARTMENT OF ZOMBIE DISPOSAL"

I recently interviewed Eve, the owner of the vehicle, at her place of employment, Heads Together, Squirrel Hill's last independent video rental store.

"Part of its just to entertain people in traffic," she thinks. "Like there's a suburban mom who's really frustrated and she sees my car with the zombie in the back and goes 'Oh, thats lovely!' "

Eve was born in Pittsburgh, and has lived here her whole life. She's known about zombies for just as long. She attributes her interest in zombies to George Romero's many zombie films, especially Dawn of the Dead, filmed locally at the Monroeville Mall. All of Romero's zombie films were filmed in and around Pittsburgh, and the most recent one (Land of the Dead) took explicit advantage of Pittsburgh's geography in its plot- the Golden Triangle has returned to being a fort- its rivers serve as barriers against the zombie threat.

Eve gave me a brief history of zombie lore in America and Hollywood.

"My friend Greg who works over at the Warhol was in Haiti in the peace corps for a couple of years. He was in this small village, and people were dead serious, they told him not to go near this one guy because he was a zombie. He was just this slow lumbering kind of guy in the village. There's a whole thing in the Hattian religion where you get turned into a zombie when a Bokor (sorcerer or shaman) blows pufferfish powder on you. You go into a coma, get a fair amount of brain damage, and he digs you up, and then you have to go work on his farm the rest of your life.

"That was pretty much how the zombie thing started out, a small piece of the Vodou religion, but then when Hollywood got a hold of it they started having magic zombies, and atomic zombies, and biological zombies. No going through the whole vodou or loa thing, we'll just have some guy cut up a chicken and then the zombies will come. If you watch "I Eat Your Skin", they almost get it right, but then it gets silly.

"Zombies didn't really start eating people until then. Before that, if you saw "White Zombie" with Bela Lugosi he's just kind of sad, and maybe he strangled people. But zombies didn't start eating people until the 60s or 70s.

I asked her about more recent films where biological viruses change humans and make them scary and zombie-like. Do the dark-seekers in I Am Legend count? Or the virus-ridden humans in the 28 Days Later series. Her answer was a clear no. "They are rage-infected humans, they aren't zombies. Zombies have to be dead and come back to life to qualify, however unlikely the circumstances that lead up to that."

She got a bit into the motifs and themes zombies might represent in movies. More recent ones cast them as the human output of a biological or chemical attack, but earlier films were more classist.

"There might be" Eve says, "a blue-collar connection, or maybe they are representative of slacker ner-do-wells. Zombies represent the masses- they're blue collar- they just keep going. It's like working on a fab-line. Mindless, repetitive action. I think anyone in the customer service industry can appreciate the zombie mentality."

These undead were the impetus for a group Halloween costume she and her friends put together a few years ago. They bought cheap jumpsuits and stenciled "Pittsburgh Department of Zombie Disposal" on the back of them. Add improvised weapons to the mix (The crowbar is Eve's favorite) and the PDZD was born. "I think," she says "that if the PDZD were real they would be a cross between garbagemen and animal control."

A few weeks later, Eve took it upon herself to further stencil her car with the logo. At the time, it was a hunter blue geo prism. This "ZombieMobile Mark 1" was destroyed when it was rear-ended over on Schenley Hill. Mark 2 is the new red one, which she purchased from her mechanic.

Her car is part of a growing trend.

"I think that anyone in the know knows that Pittsburgh is the zombie city. I think right now there is a huge ressurgance in zombies- its a weird culture catching on. All the goths wanted to be vampires, but now they are okay with being less pretentious and emotional."

The big event every year is the zombie walk in the Monroeville Mall. Both this year and last year it made the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest zombie shuffle.

That walk and others are put on by local group The It's Alive! Show. Thousands of people show up in zombie costume, although the most creative zombie Eve has ever seen was one of the zombie bunnies her friend Beth has knit over the years.

When we spoke about the reaction of other municipal departments in Pittsburgh ("Ambulance drivers seem to get a chuckle. Garbage men get a kick out of it too!") the conversation shifted to how Pittsburgh's topography.

The post-industrial landscape makes a huge impact on the genre- most zombie/plague films have been set in Pittsburgh or post-industrial Scotland, a similar landscape.

"Pittsburgh and Scotland share a weird connection- apparently we both have the same slang. Metal industries and the Carnegie connection. Maybe he started it. "I've imported some bog mummies to work in the factories!" and then they busted loose."

She talked about other strange things in our city as well, including the Ogua- giant catfish that date back from Indian times in the three rivers.

"I used to boat around on the river, and I've seen some pretty big catfish. Like, you smack one with a paddle, and they start trying to rock the boat. There are also a lot of weird religious shrines in Pittsburgh: There used to be a huge Indian burial mound downtown, near the Blvd. of the Allies; to Hindu people the Point is hugely auspicious.

"But there's also the parkway Virgin Mary shrine, which is really nice. It seems like every culture that came here brought a lot with them. And then they got into competition- you'll go to a neighborhood and there will be 80 churches. St. Anthony's on Troy Hill has over 5000 relics and reliquaries.

"Taking three lefts here is never the same as taking one right. You end up four neighborhoods over right next to another church.

"Over at the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh they are actually doing research on dogs right now where they pump all their fluids out and stop their hearts and then start them again. It was a Russian experiment in the 1940s, and they are trying it again."

Finally, I asked Eve how the PDZD disposes of the zombies it is called in to take away.

""If it's not too aggressive we might use a have-a-heart trap. We'd bait it with some head cheese. Then of course we would release the zombie into the wild of Monroeville, it's natural habitat behind the mall, where it can live free with its own kind. The zombies haven't been a big problem since the 70s. Its very rare that we have to put a zombie down. Decapitation is always a winner, but my preferred method is a crowbar to the cranial fissure there. And remember children, if you see a zombie, TELL AN ADULT!"

Harding Way, Polish Hill [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Harding Way climbs Polish Hill.

When I say that, I mean it- Harding way starts at the base of Polish Hill, where Herron Ave comes south off of Liberty. It starts as a set of steps that continue Herron's southern direction even as the road swings wildly east. Herron makes a steep U-turn to south, and then further up the hill turns west. Meanwhile, Harding way, at this point a flight of steps, meets the east-west street Dobson. Between Dobson and its southern parallel Fleetwood Way, Harding Way is a small, steep street. Then it becomes steps again, rising from Fleetwood Way up to Herron Avenue, which by this point has turned west. At Herron, again, it becomes a steep alleyway up the hill, past Bethoven Street. It ends abruptly at a wall, along whose side steps rise. At the top of these steps one is on the sidewalk of Bigelow Blvd.

Harding Way continues on the far side of Bigelow- it is a flight of steps to the poorly spelled Ridgway Street, and then slopes down the far side of Polish Hill, the Hill District, alternating again between roadway and steps every few blocks.

According to the Survey Maps of 1937, Harding Street was, well, a Street. It has right-of-way the size of a street, although even on the 1937 map it is staircase between Herron and Dobson, and between Herron and Bigelow. Apparently just at the North end of it a short way called Japan Way was planned- about three houses could be squeezed in to the space made by Herron Ave's hairpin turns. That street does not exist today- it's nothing but steep lot.
Betwen Herron and Bigelow, another short Way, Quarry Way, is on the map, but does not exist today. In its stead is a garage owned by a Pens fan.