Barbara and I have a habit that’s become very influential in our lives over the last 20 years or so: estate auctions. First, let me say that if you’ve never been to a proper estate auction, this may make no sense to you. But by merely being here, reading this, I can tell that you’re probably a fan of miscellanies, of amateur forensic anthropology, of details and curious riffling through others’ stuff. You may be able to approximate by thinking of a museum, or a very dense antique shop.

But it’s not the same, unless you have seen the entire physical collection of a human life, spread out on the ground in neat rows, held up one item at a time and explained, shuffled and rearranged by the collective action of sellers and buyers. Reapportioned, split, recombined, revealed and then subsumed.

Go to an estate auction. By “estate auction” I don’t mean a crappy old “tag sale”, nor the consignment auction you may have watched on Cash in the Attic, nor even the fancy-schmancy everybody-sits-in-orderly-ranks-of-chairs-wearing-pearls-and-cufflinks sale from James Bond movies. I mean a real estate sale, where the deceased’s entire household is turned out, one drawer=one cardboard liquor box, one closet=one folding auctioneer’s table, one collection=one tent with collectible-flavored twitchers gathered around pawing the merchandise and bidding each other up to ridiculous prices (prices so amazing in some cases that they could have kept old Grampa alive for a few more months if only he’d realized the value of his associated knickknack collection, and used them to pay his bills).

These sales (by which I mean “auctions”, mind you, and not that sterile pre-screened nonsense aforementioned) are best undertaken in the early summer here in the Midwest. On a country road, in a front or back yard, on a beautiful weekend afternoon. The household can then be spread across the lawn in avenues, and somewhat sorted: furniture over there, boxes of Christmas decorations over there, piles of doilies and fur coats along there, garage and garden items over there, tables full of books over there.

There. Perhaps now you begin to understand.

For Barbara and I tend to frequent estate auctions of bibliomaniacs. We’ve hit, I’d guess, about a dozen good bibliomaniacal auctions in 20 years. The best so far have been in rural Michigan and Pennsylvania farms, with a few in poorer urban households here and there. Inevitably what ties this fun ones together is (1) the auction service has opened the door, (2) seen the maze of twisty passages among the piles of stuff left in the house, and (3) has written an advertisement that ends with, “The preceding is a short list of just the first few feet of what we’ve uncovered. The rooms are filled to the ceilings. Many unopened boxes remain. Come and be surprised!”

As we have a certain shall we say expertise in cluttered households—from the auctions; surely not from the piles of crap in our own house—we’re typically not really surprised at the general state of such collectanea. You learn to watch for certain encouraging cues in the auction listing. In our case, since we’re looking for books for Distributed Proofreading and possibly to sell to support the DP purchases, these include “hundreds old books”, “numerous framed prints”, “albums full of photographs”. And there are also negative cues, like “numerous Longaberger baskets”, “thousands of Hummels” or “loads of twine.” These cues imply certain things about the interests and demographics of the deceased, and insofar as the auction service has done a good job using standard terminology (I can go on about the economic benefits of buying from ignorant or shoddy auctioneers another time), you can predict pretty well what will be there.

Of course it can get more complicated, and there’s always something unexpcted in every household. For instance,”loads of twine” can be a positive, in the right context. It implies a certain sort of widower’s/bachelor’s hoardiness, the kind that means the fellow never threw a damned thing away in his life. One should expect to see baby-food jars full of bolts, and a collection of valuable oil cans, and 45 hammers, and vacuum tubes.

In the case of the old man who hoards books, strangely enough “twine” also implies the present of old porn. Which is our starting point today.

We have three sound data points here, and a cloud of supporting partial observations. The earliest I can recall was the first large estate auction I attended here in Michigan, somewhere in the post-war housing tracts in Lansing. I drove up there on the basis of a “boxes old books” cue in a brief newspaper ad. Indeed, the boxes covered the lawn: there were probably 4000 volumes jammed into the two-bedroom rancher on a slab.

When you rummage around in a person’s personal belongings, you infer certain things about their life. In my opinion, the better sort of auction buyer is not there for the stuff, but (like us) there for the nanohistory, the insights offered into the human condition, the recognition of patterns. You look at the details, you look at the trends, you look at the appositions and associations. And you play Holmes and infer.

The real pleasure of a good estate auction is the depth and flavor and complexity of unexpected inferences that can arise. A good auction is the one that provides the best insights.

So this Lansing fellow was a 1950s and 1960s Amateur Political Thinker. His volumes includes many Marxist tracts. A few of what could only be interpreted as pro-Soviet works. Many pieces on anthropology, especially the Freudian-infused colonialist primitive cultures claptrap that abounded in the wake of Mead. Lots a nice, clean science fiction—Ace Doubles, first paperback printings of some famous novels, that sort of thing. Geek chic. And he was a car mechanic, so loads of car books.

And boxes and boxes of stroke books. A mix of what you might call “paperback Victorian erotica” and “brown-cover dirties” from the 60s and 70s. Venus in Chains and My Secret Life and Swinger Divorcee Neighbor Lady in Skimpy Negligee type stuff.

Now, for more than a decade we’ve been funding the acquisition of the few personally interesting “I want to have” items through the resale of the other stuff we get in the boxes. In this case, I wanted those Ace Doubles (no, really), and in the process of buying box lots ended up with a sizable stack of the brown dirties. Most we sold in the garage sale we had later that summer—and I should point out, most were bought by the nice Women’s Studies prof around the block. (So there, Ha!)

But not all. Some just didn’t get sold, and you can’t just throw good books away, so they’re sitting around here in the “to be sold” stacks. One just now is sitting here beside me, as I re-list things on Amazon and eBay: Women & Boys as Sexual Lovers.

We’ll return to that in a few minutes.

So. The second dirty old man experience came in the form of a vast and sprawling estate auction held in a barn a few years back, in Morenci. This fellow (summarizing a bunch of psycho-social anthropological musing) was (a) a television repairman for many years, (b) went to college and graduated in the same class as my Uncle Milan, (c) had worked as a youth for the New York Motion Picture Company in their first few years in Hollywood around World War I, (d) was a rather libertine and bi-curious youth, given some entries in his journal/sketchbook, (e) was a manic stamp collector, and (f) subscribed to those “limited edition” erotica-by-mail-order services.

At the sale were stacks of these nice (as in re-sellable) hardcover “numbered edition” volumes, maybe 100 books in all. These days they seem quite tame and National Geographicky: Women of the Orient and Sexual Practices of Primitive Cultures, for example. But there they were, with piles of vacuum tube manuals, a huge fucking stamp collection, rolls of twine (really; twine), piles of old magazines, piles of stroke books. I didn’t manage to buy any there, since there were apparently some book dealers in the audience who shuffled them around and hid them in other boxes. But the data point remains valid.

Most recently — just a couple of weeks back — we drove ourselves and our mothers out to a country road in Indiana where an old high-school teacher and principal’s estate was on offer. Again, “boxes old books” in the advertisement was what drew us. As I recall, the exact wording here was, “A separate ring will be selling the thousands of books throughout the day!”

Old Teach was a fascinating fellow. I have more insight into his life and lifestyle than I do about most of the other Departeds whose physical possessions we explore and ransack, since I wandered into the house at one point just to see the large furniture, and there I met a young fellow straight out of a Mark Twain story. Young Feller turned out to be the 12-year-old neighbor, and was giving tours of the Death Scene. “Yeah, we used to come over all the time, he’d have us over and we’d listen to records on this Victrola thing, and it used to be full of stuff so you could only walk from the door to the chair here, and he kept a gun here by his chair, and this is the bathroom where he died, and in here was the guest room, you could only walk from about here to here, because it was full of papers and boxes, and he kept the books in the garage, stacked up the ceiling, and he had all this art and pictures and stuff on all these walls, covering them, and we had ice cream and he let us cook out in the back yard, and he had a lot of tools, I think his nephew took those….”

Old Teach is a different sort of fellow from the first two single elderly men I’ve mentioned. Upon consideration and discussion with Barbara, I think there wasn’t any evidence he was married; harder call than the others, but lacking even a single photo of his family we’ll have to conservatively say he was also a bachelor rather than widower. Unlike the other two, there was clear evidence that he was a public figure: dozens of people mentioned “having him for English” and said, “He was Principal there when I was in school.”

More interestingly, unlike the other two he was an openly erotic figure. The “many prints and paintings” in this case were almost all semi-erotic original nude paintings, mostly from the late 60s and early 70s, and a few 70s swinger-style large-scale nudes, prints or artwork from Playboy cartoons and illustrations. He cultivated an extensive collection of “figure photography” pin-up manuals from the late 50s and early 1960s—the sort that have Betty Page and more buxom models in them, and point out the benefits of bubble bath and beach lighting. And he collected David Hamilton books: huge piles of them, sometimes in duplicate. Most of his garage full of books were elementary and secondary-level educational stuff, science and social studies and so forth. But a few hundred were expensive artistic erotica. As I said, an interesting figure.

So this was not intended to be about the striking difference between sexual norms among my avowedly liberal suburban neighbors and the the supposedly conservative country folk. It’s not about “dirty old men”.

Actually, maybe it is about the striking difference between sexual norms. But on the face of it what I want to talk about is the implication of selling.

Being an estate auctioneer grants you a certain degree of immunity. There is no sense in which the folks clearing out these three old dead guys’ houses can be cast as pornographers, just because they ended up selling pornography. Hell, if you asked them I bet they’d all say, truthfully, that they just stack it and sell it, and often as not don’t know what’s in the boxes.

But I’m left in a different position. See, I’m trying to sell off all this old junk we’ve consolidated. We have too much. For every item we wanted from a box lot, there were two dozen accompanying things, just jammed randomly into the box.

It’s Discardia soon: time to move it on.

But one of my strongest values (and the one, I suspect, that drives any Old Man Who Collects Twine and Shit Until He Dies) is: Somebody will use this, some day. So to me, Discardia is the time when you gift (or sell; don’t disparage sell) things to the people who want them. Not the time you fill the world up with nascent archaeological finds by dumping it into a hole, or leave it on the curb so somebody else can sit on it for another 20 years.

So for us, this means eBay and Amazon. And a garage sale or two.

As previously noted, we’ve started up the old Grind again, as Corners Bumped Books & Antiques.. We’re shifting a little entropy around in the Universe, and we bought a very nice photographic copy stand over at U-M Property Disposition, and we started opening boxes of books we don’t want and photographing them for eBay, and selling the modern ones on Amazon.

And in Box 28, which has been packed up since we were trying to sell our house in 2004 and quickly jammed 12 book cases into boxes to get them out of the house, I have encountered the aforementioned Women & Boys as Sexual Lovers.

Now this, before you jump to assumptions (Cf. sexual norms mentioned above), is not kiddie pr0n; it’s a little 1970 paperback (“dirty brown”, to name the genre) full of double-spaced lame fantasy writing tamer than most of the old Penthouse Forum stuff one could get when one was a teenager, back before the Internets. I suspect people publish far dirtier stuff to alt.sex.stories every day.

Ah. But can you sell it on eBay? I tried, and before the sale began in the Mature Audiences section I was told, “The auction cannot be started because the title or listing contains prohibited words, phrases or images.”

Now how does that make me feel? What exactly is eBay implying by that? That by offering such a thing for sale (whatever “such a thing means”), I’m a bad guy.

I know, I know. They have to deal with hundreds of local and global municipalities, so they’re forced to take the path of least resistance. They have millions of auctions to police, and can’t afford to let anything illegal come online, so they have to use over-stringent filters. And: Why can’t I sell it somewhere else? And: Their lawyers are corporate scaredy-cats, so of course they’ll prohibit things thoughtlessly to avoid litigation at all turns.

What’s interesting — and maybe even worth the effort I took to tell the story — is this: In those small communities where the Dead Fellows lived, and where my prejudiced radical professor of an ex-neighbor no doubt assumes they are poised ready to lynch her, nobody batted an eye over the fact of these books. The auctioneer was not sanctioned for selling prohibited materials. Nobody looked askance at me, or the guy who bought the 20 David Hamilton books for $260, or the people buying 6-foot-tall nude paintings of proudly busty ladies.

But online. In the connected world, our newer “flatter” world, doesn’t it look as if the most reactionary social norm wins? I’m not being a libertarian market-monger here; I’m pointing out a limitation of connectedness: social norms don’t scale.

Long Tail, meet Social Scissors.

It’s a distinctive characteristic of online communities that the most vocal people are the biggest participants. Special interest groups, whether project-driven or general-purpose, tend to be swayed most by the biggest complainers. Those people who traditionally represented a minority in vocal, physical culture now play a role as the most influential controllers in online culture.

Now, I can start a small eCommerce site where I can sell whatever I damn well please. For the moment. And my chances of succeeding there are (some would argue) rather limited, compared to selling in a big aggregator website: economies of scale. But at the same time, my ability to (a) command a reasonable fraction of the market’s attention, and (b) exercise my sales under the assumptions of my own social norms, which differ from others’, well… both those suffer in the big aggregators.

This could go on. I could touch on Red and Blue states. I could talk more about my prejudiced ex-neighbor, who talked like she was convinced that people in small towns were all pitchfork-brandishing Republican KKK members out to lynch her because she liked girls (apparently they would just assume she did, because of her hair or something?). I could touch on the spawning of non-eBay venues for non-eBay goods, and what that means about market structure and dynamics. I could riff on fundamentalism, and how it will inevitably spread its infection from the US to the rest of the world (not the other way around) over the coming decades, through the Internet.

Yeah, I think I like the sound of that last one.

Let launch a brief re-examination of those three dead men’s lives. They were people embedded in the Old Unwired World. One fixed cars, and read about unionism and political action, and for all I know he was an influential labor activist. One fixed TVs in a small town, but as a youngster he was involved in the Dot-Com mania of his day, in Hollywood around World War I. One was a respected schoolteacher and principal, remembered by his neighbors and students years afterwards, and he collected menus (thousands, literally) from around the world, and hopefully was able to take naked pictures of a few of the ladies in town; you could tell he wanted to, at least.

And all of them, interestingly, surrounded themselves with books.

They led long lives of rich social import. When they died, it turned out that they had for decades surrounded themselves with physical artifacts, but that these told their stories when spread out on a lawn, explored as a whole, seen as things meaningfully adjacent to one another. These were things fraught with context: for the owners, and even for those of us there to inspect them in situ.

The growing war between the local and the global, between fundamentalism and liberalism, between prejudice and multiculturalism, between traditional media and new media, between journalism and blogging, between a future of permanent long-term war or the same amount of war spread across many small periods of peace… is driven by context.

You’re reading this online. Our current online world of small pieces, loosely joined? It may not outright deny the value of context, but it surely makes it hard to preserve. Without the proper attention to context—on which rests dialog, and understanding, and community, and culture—it makes it easy to see every non-organic farmer as a hick, every Arab a terrorist, every Christian a Fundamentalist, every blogger a hack, every chemical a threat, every copy an act of piracy, every dirty book the sin of the seller.

Every Liberal a threat, every Conservative a threat.

The Internet makes it all this easier. Somehow, distribution and re-aggregation becomes centralization. The most vocal, including your allies and your opponents, can coordinate and post a threat to you and your social norms.

And while the prime mover may be the speed and ease of communication, the accelerant is provided by lack of context. Context is diluted. A thing is all the more just a thing; it has no story. A web page or blog entry is just an entry, not a chapter. A person is just.. one of those people.

You know the type.