Cheap thrills

These two items come from the wine section of today's paper that I was just about to throw on the paper pile! I guess you could call this preemptive decluttering. The Chronicle's Top Bargain Wines of 2005 and an article about the list.

Essay about blogs

At Large in the Blogosphere by Judith Shulevitz. This was written in May 2002, when the popularity of blogs, if I recall correctly, was just taking off. I can't remember why I clipped it. Was the concept of blogs new to me then? Was there a specific blog she mentioned that I wanted to check out? Did she write something I thought especially insightful? The article does seem dated now, but this still made me laugh:

Needless to say, blogs are addictive. They are not, however, the most economical use of your time. To read blogs requires a willingness to wander from link to link in the hope that some mind-numbingly detailed dispute over, say, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Catholic Church's position on homosexuality or an Oscar nomination will resolve itself into a usable insight.

Finding this clipping also reminded me how much I enjoyed Judith Shulevitz's essays, which appeared regularly for a while on the last page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Then one day, her essays were no longer there. Was she fired? Did she retire? Were the editors restlessly seeking the latest new thing? I never did find out.

I can't bear to throw things away

I'm a pack rat, especially with clippings. I often read an article in the newspaper or in a magazine that strikes me as particularly well-written, or inspiring or otherwise useful, or that seems like something I will want to reread in the future or that I will want to have around to jog my memory. So I rip out the article or the story or the advertisement, and I throw it on a paper pile. The piles keep on growing, and the newspaper clippings turn yellow, and the piles become hideously ugly and intimidating and I rarely look through them -- and my carefully hoarded articles become almost as lost to me as if I had thrown them away in the first place.

The clutter experts would say to just throw everything away. I can't bear to do that. But it occurred to me earlier today, while I was forcing myself to go through the piles looking for something, anything, that I might be able to weed out, that since many of the clippings are of articles that are now on the internet, maybe I could turn the paper clutter into blog clutter. I could find the links, store them here, on blogspot, and then I could throw the original paper copies away. I would still be left with semi-random clutter, but at least it wouldn't be yellowing and musty-smelling! And it would be a lot more compact. The only downside I see is that I would lose some of the illustrations which sometimes accompany print articles but not their electronic counterparts.