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, © 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.