Advice.

Dear megastore,

I think I have too many books. Well, they can't fit on my shelves.

Help,

Needs More Shelves

***

Dear Shelves-y,

You probably do have too many books. We can't all live in the Library of Babel, which, as a fictional construct, has an infinity of shelves and thus an infinity of books. You, my dear Shelves-a-lot, are not a fictive construct. Well, maybe you are, but you are not infinite. Well, who knows, maybe you are infinite, but I think it's unlikely, because you're writing to me. Well, maybe you're not actually writing to me.

Okay:

You probably do have too many books, Shelvesford. The problem is, which ones to get rid of. The other problem is, which books not to buy. Have you heard of the public library (not the Babel branch)? The books at that library are, whilst in your possession, only temporary. Temporary books is one solution. Put them on a table, and you avoid the shelf conundrum.

My dear Shelvesmore, of all the things to have too much of, books are not so bad. To have too many of, you see, you see where I'm going, right? It's not like shoes, which are clearly a vanity. Well, sure, books, too, are a kind of vanity. Sure, of course you've read all those different versions of Proust AND Moby Dick.

Shelvesniss Everdeen: just, I don't know. Just put your books in stacks on the floor like a normal person.

And may the volumes be ever in your favor,

htms

__________________

Dear megastore,

How do you say no when people want you to do things that you don't want to do, you don't have time to do, it's wrong of them to ask you to do, and also you're really tired both of being asked and of summoning up your inner strength to think, then say, no?

So, so tired,

Ms. Yessayer

***

My dear Miss Yesmonger,

Like most things, saying no is a matter of practice. Just look in a mirror, knit your brow ever so slightly, and say it. It's easy, just one syllable, the n with its Proto Indo European history of negation vibrating between the tongue and the back of the teeth, the o the universal sound of indescribable wonder. The Wonderful No. Say it.

Come on: say it like you mean it, Mistress Yes-to-all, you aren't getting anywhere if you don't put your back into it.

What, are you afraid people will be mad at you? Are you suffering from the Indispensable Man Complex? wherein you believe at some level of madness that nothing, not one thing will get done if you, the Indispensable Yes Monkey Man, do not show up (saying YES I said yes I will YES) to do it? 

Fine, Yeswhillikers, go ahead. Just say yes to everything. But don't expect me to feel bad for you when you're ranting about your too-much-to-dos or your I'm-so-stressed-out.

Are you ready now, Yesterday's News? It's really the only way. Say it with me now:

No I mean it No I won't NOoooooooooooo.  

Yours in the negation of the negation, whatever that means,

htms

Words to live by.

The historian is proofreading a manuscript.

The historian: Don't ever do anything that requires footnotes.

Me: I won't. As God is my witness.

Some things never change.

A passage from the I Hate to Cook Book, by Peg Bracken (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960, illustrations by Hilary Knight), for your edification and delight:

The Problem of Falling in Love. You often do, when you hate to cook, fall in love with one recipe which seems to have simply everything: it's fast, it's simple, and the whole family likes it. And so, like impetuous lovers since time began, you tend to overdo it. You find yourself serving the little gem three times a week, including Sunday breakfast. Your problems are solved. You're serene. Oh, you love that little recipe!

But no recipe can stand such an onslaught. After a while, it just doesn't taste as good as it did the first time. You begin to wonder what you ever saw in it. Presently, you stop making it. Eventually it's lost in limbo, and that's the end of that love affair.

Two things are responsible for this all-too-common occurrence: first, you overdid it, and, second, you probably started to kick it around. You felt so safe with your own true love that you began taking it for granted, not exactly following the recipe, using vinegar instead of lemon juice, or canned mushrooms instead of fresh mushrooms (because you had some vinegar or canned mushrooms). Soon, without your being aware of it, the recipe has undergone a sea change, and become something rich and undoubtedly strange, all right, but not at all the same recipe you started with.

The moral is this: Instead of going steady, play the field. When you make proper contact with a recipe, don't make it again for an entire month. Keep it warm and cozy, your ace in the hole, in your card file, or checked in your recipe book, while you try some more. Presently, you'll have several aces in the hole, which is a very delectable state of affairs indeed.

When I read this in the car, after having found this book in a great coup of good luck at a flea market, it was as if I were transported from the present day to my teens, when I first read this book. I often think about the role that various cookbooks played in shaping my culinary life, starting with a birthday card my parents gave me when I was about 9, a birthday card that was actually an adorable pink pamphlet comprising several cookie recipes (lost to time, so very sad!). The gender relations embodied in Peg Bracken's book are like a perky version of Mad Men, which makes it an interesting historical artifact.

If you could take a peek, however, at the kitchen diary I kept when I was a young wife, you'd see that the basic advice here--don't cook the same thing over and over--was embodied in my own planning. I often planned shopping and meals for two weeks out (don't ask), with nary a meal repeated, except perhaps spaghetti, which remains a go-to option for me when the cooking seems almost too much to bear (sob, collapse). You don't want to wear out a recipe's welcome. Except spaghetti, which is like a very, very good friend showing up on your doorstep with a covered dish, and in the covered dish is spaghetti, thank God.