Unpacking my Library

Following in the well-worn footsteps of Walter Benjamin, I have unpacked my tiny library of books.  To try and find meaning in the selection of books which now sit on one half of one shelf in the studio is a bit hilarious, as what ended up in my suitcase was, but he end of my packing frenzy, virtually a random selection from a stack about three or four times larger.  Some books I eliminated because I found that there were copies in the Academy's excellent library.  Others were too heavy.  And then there are those that seemed to have jumped in on their own; I was surprised to see them when I unpacked my suitcases.  A film version of me packing and unpacking these books would have a Charlie Chaplin quality to it -- books flying in and out, suitcase packed and sealed, suitcase unsealed and unpacked, books being weighed in hand, tossed in, tossed out.

Here's the list, in no order:

Giuseppe Lampedusa, The Leopard

Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory

George Steiner, Real Presences

Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform in Massachusetts

Sabina Murray, Forgery

Donna Leon, Death at La Fenice

Guy Raffa, Danteworlds:  A Reader's Guide to the Inferno

Max Page, ed., Memories of Buenos Aires

Eleanor Clark, Rome and a Villa

Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity

John Varriano, A Literary Companion to Rome

Lonely Planet, Italy

Giovanni Verga, I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree)

Rough Guide, Venice

Aryeh Cohen, Justice in the City: An Argument from the Sources of Rabbinic Judaism

Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine

Robert Huges, Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History

Borden Painter, Mussolini's Rome

Georgina Mason, The Companion Guide to Rome

Robert Kahn, Rome: The Essential Insider's Guide
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The library of an adult-onset Attention Deficit Disorder victim!

Or someone trying -- valiantly?  desperately? -- to bring together thinking about memory, preservation, place and cities together with activism on behalf of unions and public institutions.