Moving

We’re moving from the East Bay to the Wine Country, one carload at a time. I promised Rosie I would bring all her possessions and not try to distinguish between the useless stuff and the treasures. With a little help from my friends I’ve filled an 8-foot Pod (a steel storage container we can load in Alameda and get delivered to Kenwood). Then we filled a 12-foot Pod. Yesterday I ordered another 8-footer. 

My wife is a hoarder — and I’m not devoid of symptoms. I subscribe to the London Review of Books, Harper’s, the New Yorker, and the Anderson Valley Advertiser (which has more good material week-in, week-out than the NYer). I recently canceled subs to the New York Review of Books and the New Scientist. I typically read one or two articles per publication, and when I’d see other pieces I hoped to read eventually, I would throw them in a Sierra Nevada 24-bottle carton (the perfect size, good-looking, strong, and with handles cut in).

One night in Alameda, trying to be efficient, I triaged the three cartons full of articles I hoped to get to. After about an hour I had cut it down to two cartons. Among the pieces I had saved was “Hoardology,” by Jon Day in the 8 September 22 LRB.  I stopped triaging to read it.  

Day’s review was of “Possessed,” a history of hoarding by Rebecca Falloff.  To better understand the subject he had bought and read “Stuff” by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, “Clutter” by Jennifer Howard, “The Hoarding Handbook” by Cristiana Briatotis, “CBT for Hoarding Disorder” a Group Therapy program published by Wiley, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying” by Marie Kondo and “Decluttering at the Speed of Life” by Dana White.  He had printed out academic articles “in which psychiatrists argued over definitions.” His pile of relevant materials kept growing. 

“Pathological hoarding is surprisingly common,” Day reported, “affecting between 2 and 6 per cent of people (with equal numbers of women and men), and surprisingly difficult to define… One solution is the Clutter Image Rating (2008), a diagnostic tool designed by Frost and Steketee to replace vague self-definitions of hoarding with a more objective measure. The CIR consists of images of different interiors — kitchen, bedroom, living room — which are progressively filled with objects.” 

On the 1-to-10 scale, Day considers himself a level 3 hoarder with a “standard amount of household clutter.” He pegs his parents as level 5 (“hoarding that might require some professional assistance”) and level 7 (“which poses significant safeguarding issues”).

“Hoarding disorder” was added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association in 2013 —meaning US therapists can get reimbursed for treating it.  According to Dad, Sigmund Freud “had more than three thousand sculptures covering his desk and shelves. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he describes the way the “shortage of space in my study has often forced me to handle a number of pottery and stone antiquities (of which I have a small collection) in the most uncomfortable positions, so that onlookers have expressed anxiety that I should knock something down and break it.”  

An obvious nut.

Among the salient points made by Day in the piece I’m glad I saved, “A hoard that has been curated can become a collection; a collection that has been labelled becomes an archive (just as a collector is merely a hoarder who has space for his stuff).”  And “Half of all hoarders have a close relative who hoards.” 

A Note From the City, 1988

In another Sierra Nevada carton I found the May/June 1988 issue of “Departures,” a glossy travel magazine produced in London and sent as a perk to American Express platinum-card holders. Alex Cockburn knew the editor and had gotten me an assignment to write (invitingly) about a city I wasn’t in love with. 

“There are people who simply fall in love with San Francisco,” I reported, because it feels so much freer than Kansas they were getting away from. My Exhibit A was Wilkes Bashford.

“The coastal range that runs parallel to the Pacific from Baja California north to British Columbia dribbles down into hills as it approaches the mouth of San Francisco Bay. A few of these hills —Twin Peaks, Mount Sutro, and Mount Davidson— are substantial enough to catch the summer fog pouring off the ocean until late afternoon, when it tumbles eastward like giant balls of cotton, chilling newcomers, tourists, and the generally unprepared. Wilkes Bashford, the Sutter Street haberdasher, once said that his profit margin was created by out-of-towners who had packed inappropriately —bringing clothes that were not warm enough or too formal for San Francisco. 

Bashford is one of those charming outlaw-artists who seem to flourish here. He originally came from Kansas, which in his case was upstate New York. For many years he leased a storefront owned by the city, in which he offered the classiest wardrobe selection and the most attentive service in town (good customers were offered drinks). Since the rent was based on a percentage of his gross income, he allegedly kept two sets of books, one-showing a low gross.  The duplicity was discovered and, after his day in court, he lost his lease and had to move across the street. As punishment, Bashford must now perform public service by staging fashion shows to benefit worthy causes. Herb Caen, whose gossip column makes the Chronicle worth 25 cents every morning, promoted his clothier friend more than ever during Bashford’s ordeal. (What better way to project an image of tolerance than to glorify the charming outlaws?) In the wake of the scandal Bashford moved across the street. Some Japanese investors recently came forward to underwrite a chain of 25 Wilkes Bashford stores.”