Liiiiibrary, liiiiiiibrary.

  

I spent the day in the library, putting in a full day's work - French style. Which means I showed up at 10:30 with kyliemac (who was kind enough to clamber up a particularly tall and particularly rickety ladder to retrieve a book by Alverny for me, though eventually I got up the nerve to do my own monkeying up the ladders - skirt be damned, not loving of heights be damned, fear of breaking ladder/shelves/own head be damned), leaving for lunch around 1, coming back to the library around 2:30, and leaving around 6:30. After pitching a reasonably genteel temper tantrum when I was told I could not check out any books, not even from the bloody ENC library. I remarked icily that the refusal to grant full library privileges to an international fellow was certainly something that would prevent most if not all doctoral students from bothering to come if they had been apprised, as was only reasonable, that they would be accorded the same library privileges that one would extend to a schizophrenic street person bearing a national identity card: the right to come in. The person with whom I spoke was also the idiot who misinformed me about my ability to get library access at the main Sorbonne library, so he may just be... An idiot. An idiot that all former fellows have believed. And I could cheerfully throttle all of them for never mentioning this key problem to - evidently - anyone at all. Especially, one might add, when one has climbed up and down an infinity staircase five or six times that day, plus all of the other stairwells connecting stacks, plus all of the freaking ladders - to retrieve one's books. Which, I hasten to add, have all been "ingeniously" shelved using an utterly arcane system developed by the library itself at some point predating the existence of the United States, much less Dewey and his decimals, much much less the Library of Congress. I cannot even begin to describe it to you - suffice it to say that they are arranged in a warren of various tiny rooms according not only to their topic, but their size (8o, 4o, etc.) For example, certain books in a given numerical range are shelved in the mezzanine, but books which have one letter in common in that range (the small letter f, god knows what it means, I don't) are in the hallway that leads to the secretariat. Climb, climb, climb. Puzzle, puzzle, puzzle. Punctuated by transitory moments of joy at finally having a desired book in one's feverish little mitts. I will write more indignant emails and I'm sure it will alllll be arranged by the time I am on the plane coming back to the states for the holidays - never to return, I imagine, to the ENC. If I have anything to say about it.

Still, I will not pretend it was not mostly fun as far as book-gathering goes.

You are probably picturing something like this:

    

If only! The shelves are too chockablock together to support this sort of nice wide base. Instead, there are regular aluminum painter's ladders that have hooks that rack on to the original ironwork frame that I'm sure once supported a nice little rolling wooden ladder. What you do, see, is grab on to the aluminum ladder, which is I think 15 feet tall? And if you are me you are 5'8, and running around with the ladder is an exercise in OMFGPHYSICS because it is always trying to assert itself as the boss of you, which it can do pretty easily, because: physics.  The fulcrum is your hands and arms, which might be about four or five feet up. The other 10 feet is kickin' your ass, kids. Then you rack the ladder on the support rail. And if you are me you now perceive it as this:


AIEEEEE!

I have been trying to embed a hulu file of that one scene from The Mummy because that was my secondary fear: losing control of the ladder while in midair and knocking bookcases over and ending up destroying the ENC with my sheer awesome klutziness. But I can't because hulu hates France and won't give me the embed clip for France, and seems to have outsmarted all IP masking superpages.

The reality, of course, was somewhere between these two images, viz:




Here is a little video:

OBVIOUSLY I was insane when I said "25-30 feet?" because clearly not. But 20? Yes, definitely. In this room. Higher than that in others. And much shorter in still others. Some of the bookcases in the grenier (attic) are quite short, munchkin short. And others are mounted above doorways. Which strikes me as ridiculous right now, but I guess they'll be the ones laughing when I finally get so pressed for space at home that I end up doing the same thing.

I also finally got around to climbing back up to the offices to take pictures. Now, the idiot who has been restricting my book access and earning a nearly untold amount of my bilious ire told me I could go back up there any time to take pictures, but I could tell it made K nervous. There were no people up there to pointedly ignore us and thus affirm the liberty. But the view is so worth it:



Of course, the view inside is pretty lovely also:





And here is a page from an index to a Sautman book. It cracked me up.



Miracles, mirror, Jean Molinet, mummies, mountain, Montaillou, Montpellier, biting, death, sudden death, deaths, mussels, mustard.

I feel slightly ill and am staying in tonight: no rhum rhums and awesome ladies or insanely loud screechy jazz music blasting the top of my head off tonight. Instead I am welcoming in the new beaujolais (they came out yesterday) and watching The Wire and ignoring housework, homework, and everything in between. I may pop a pizza in the oven. I may also eat some of the best packaged cookies ever:



Mere Poulard Les Sables de Mont Saint Michel. Think shortbread, but lighter, crisper, thinner, and yet just as melty and delicious. Weirdly, the only picture I could find online was of the line's Japanese packaging. 

Bon weekend to all of you!