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arcanamundi Mar. 6th, 2009 10:00 pm)
arcanamundi Mar. 6th, 2009 10:00 pm)This is going to be a pretty long entry because I haven't had internet access for awhile but I've been keeping a little offline notebook during the days at the archive. I don't have many pictures, so hopefully my LJ-cut will work - often I have too many tags on too many cuts and embeds and the whole thing just spools out anyway, along with a lot of hanging </div> tags, so we'll see.
On Thursday I saw a very long line of people waiting for something. The line stretched on and on, and even after my bus had passed them I hadn't seen the end of it - but I saw what they were in line for.
They were all in line to see a small Kandinsky exhibition being hosted on the street in its own tent.
I may try to get in to see it this weekend. I like Kandinsky. I don't like him for a value of standing in line for more than an hour, though. I played that game in my head. Who would I stand in line for hours and hours to see? Say 3-4 hours of waiting. Titian. Durer. A few others. More than that? Bosch. Only Bosch. I would stand in line all day long - all day - to see The Garden of Earthy Delights up close. As long as I could stand and look at it for as long as I wanted, without a bunch of touring tally-gun notchers yammering in my ear. People who go to museums to see things that are famous just because they're famous drive me bizzonkers and kill my art buzz with their whining and horrible need to say stupid things out loud while they are observing the art, whatever it is.
I have one big piece of non-archival news: after several days of deliberation and contemplation, I have decided to walk away from The Albatross. I ponied up a chunk of change for a real sweet ride - a four-wheeled, omnidirectional, shiny red Samsonite Sahora spinner. I'm losing a little bit of packing space, but I really don't care. At all. I'm just totally focused on the awesomeness which is how it is like a faithful little android that will follow me anywhere I go, staying on my heel, as long as I have one hand on its sturdy little handle. When I think about how I am never going to struggle and sweat to keep my backpack from slipping off and smacking someone while I bend over and haul and yank on the Albatross to get it around bus and train seats again - I feel real, genuine happiness. I think it was a good call. This is the trip of a lifetime - I'm thinking three months running around Europe isn't happening again any time soon - and I'm not going to spend any more time on the discomfort of the Albatross. I hereby christen my new bag the Radio Flyer. This my little red wagon.
I don't have very many pictures. That is a consequence of spending my whole day someplace where they don't allow cameras. I had a really lovely couple of days in the archives after I recovered from my shock and anger about the change in the reproduction pricing at the BSB. They have become habituated to me as well, sitting in my corner with my giant headphones on, quietly rocking to a private beat while I measure and observe and write and think and query and answer and type, rinse repeat. Really lovely. I still don't like paper. I saved the best manuscript for last - the oldest, the one on parchment. It felt incredibly good to get parchment back under my fingertips, and this is very, very fine vellum. And these are the prettiest copies of De universo I've seen yet, including the manuscripts of Paris. For one, they have miniatures. Miniatures! Let me tell you how often philosophical texts have pretty pictures in them: practically never. It helps that this is such a late vellum codex - it was made in 1409 - so by then William's reputation was well-made and books of his works could be made and sold as prestige pieces. This one certainly may have been - not sure if the near total absence of marginalia is a signal of that, or of people lending some credence to the book curse at the end that I haven't quite been able to make out. It doesn't look like it was written by the scribe(s) who made the book - these are my notes:
Uh, yeah. Hard to say which is worse - the transcription, which I will admit I did in about two minutes without paying really great attention because it's not technically an important part of the codex and I wanted to get to the next volume which had the original binding and I was all set to do some fondling of the 600 year old leather, or the Latin of the guy writing in the book, because this was a later scribble in the back of the book. I swear to you he wrote scribus. I think that's him making scribere passive. At any rate, I think I get the gist of it: the scribe who wrote the book did so justly so that he might write in the book of eternal life, and anyone (maybe that o is a really wack L, and we've got alii) who comes along and corrupts it will not even be written in the book of the dead, not even described. Something like that, anyway. By which I'm sure he means the monastic mortuary rolls, not the book of the dead that Richard Gere read for the audiobook. Or MAYBE...
Other fun sightings in my little corner of the archive: one of CLM 3798’s readers got REALLY excited in the margins of the chapter on incubi and succubi while drawing excited giant fingers in the marginalia and repeating the words inccubi! and succubi! also. All was silent a few pages later. PREDICTABLE! CLM 3798 was getting passed around the monastery with spare shreds of parchment marking "the good parts," just like teenage girls did with their copies of Judy Blume books. If you lived in my neighborhood. V.C. Andrews if you knew someone trashy (or who had a trashy big sister), or one of the more graphic romance novels if you knew someone who had a Mom with "marital issues."
I dropped into a really deep daydream while I was looking at the places on CLM 18516 where the hardware used to be, and saw how clean and white the leather was under it, how clear the embossing was, crisp and clean. It was like looking at a very old person's face and being able to see a small part of it - the corner of the mouth, the arch of the brow, the translucence of the skin - as it was when they were very young, and I fell into that small white space like falling down the rabbit hole, thinking about white leather, and how all of the original bindings of the 14th and 13th centuries that I've seen would have been this white too, maybe a light natural tan - that all of the darkness and shine to their bindings is the work of centuries of hands, polishing it with the natural oils in the skin with every touch. Hundreds of years. Probably thousands of hands.
Libraries of the thirteenth century must have looked like they were made out of quiet light, all those soft white and pale amber leather spines and shining brass hardware. Between the fresh parchment and the newly bound leather boards, libraries would have smelled like the inside of a new Benz with leather interior, with sharp, earthy undercurrents of freshly cut wood, the acrid quicklime that went into cleaning and curing the skin that would become vellum, and the tendons and ligaments that would sew the books together. And there would have been the sour tang of glue, mostly from the pastedowns, and attaching the hide to the boards… And the smell of the pumice dust, powdery and chalky. The tannic smell of the gall ink would have been like a very strongly-brewed tea, not particularly acrid but pleasantly and intensely astringent and dark - ink is an olfactory onomatopoiea, smelling exactly like it looks. A quiet library, say the library of a thirteenth-century bishop of Paris - it would have also smelled of clean candlewax, perhaps even beeswax candles that smell slightly of hot honey. Perhaps the smell of slightly stale wine in a cup on the desk, or the remnant of the brown bread and onion sandwich that he had as a midnight snack the night before.
Snap out of it! Work.
I have an iTunes playlist called Scriptorium. It's my archives playlist. It changes a little bit now and then, gets longer and shorter - but it always has Flowers Become Screens on it, and usually in more than one place. If I don't seed it in there in multiple places, I end up scrolling for it, and hitting repeat, repeat, repeat. It's one of my favorite archive anthems, and I especially like it when I am slogging hard and need a lift.
Every time it gets to 3:25 (2:24 in the embedded video) I feel like I’m taking off in a little prop plane at night, with all the city lights nothing more than pretty little spangles scattered meaninglessly on the floor of the world. It feels like escape and it feels like being perfectly present, all at the same time.
When I was in college I had a friend who flew, and I liked going up with him in his little two-seater plane, especially the time it was for him to (re)pass his safety tests checklist thing and would do stuff like put the plane into deliberate stalls, etc. There was something infinitely more terrifying and fun about being flown up into the air by someone I actually knew, who was my age, who lived in the *dorm* with me. He probably shouldn’t have been taking me up on the days when he was putting the plane into bad situations and getting it out of them, but that was often when he wanted company up there. I suppose he just didn’t want to die alone if it went badly. We were what – seventeen and eighteen years old, respectively? Man, kids are dumb. I was always like YAY LET'S GO!
There is a cafeteria in the BSB! I never found it before because you have to go down a bunch of stairs and around a corner before you even see a sign for it. It’s sandwiches and soup and coffee and a couple of cases of cold drinks. The food is very, very bad. But it is still better than my previous lunch plan which was: not having it. Half a bad sandwich or a cup of horrible soup will still make for a less cranky archival trog princess by 5:00 closing time.
Between figuring out the bus lines to and from the library and figuring out how to eat in it, and just generally getting my German sealegs, I've been feeling pretty good. Of course I’m leaving it on Tuesday, but it happened eventually. I am speaking rudimentary German and getting by much better, feel like I understand what’s expected of me by the Germans I interact with in my daily life here (breaking the unspoken rules makes things so much harder, and it's so easy to do), and am so much more comfortable now that I’m back in a real city.
I just generally find European cities a lot easier to live in than towns. It’s not that there’s more English in them (because really, there’s not, at least not to any degree of significance that I've noticed). It’s the relative anonymity. When you’re pretty much always in a big crowd, you become more or less invisible as an individual, and it’s very liberating. You can be confused and walking around in circles and nobody's going to notice. As long as you're not sprouting wings or growing tentacles you're pretty much automatically inconspicuous no matter what. This is very nice, especially if you’ve spent the last few weeks being stared at ALL THE TIME. I am walking around with a laptop backpack and a messenger bag on, generally clutching a map and just radiating foreignness. Also, I’m about 5’9 in my shoes, which makes me awfully tall by European standards, plus I’m currently wearing a size 20-22, which is really big here. I am Go-JIRA! RAWR! Stomping puny Europeans under my size nine boots! I am also Hulk! HULK SMASH GAWPING EUROTARDS WITH HER BACKPACK.
In their defense, it’s totally understandable that people would be confused. It’s way not tourist season and seeing a furriner wandering around those smaller towns (Braunschweig, Erfurt, Nuremberg) would be like seeing a flamingo land on your front lawn in the middle of a January snowstorm. I spied with my little eye as I loped through the station today: an Asian kid wearing a huge backpack with all the stuff hanging off of it on D-rings? And I was like "Woah, backpacking in Europe *this* time of year?" So see, I did it too.
In a city, barring the appearance of the occasional space alien, nobody stares at anyone. Everyone keeps their personal bubble, and it includes both being seen or doing the seeing. If you make eye contact with someone you have to let your gaze slide off of them like a bird slides down a glass porch door that it just flew into. Otherwise (with men, anyway) you might as well have just walked up to them and said “Hi! I’m interested in you!” and they will respond accordingly. Here, anyway. I haven't lived in many American cities - but I don't recall eye contact being a big problem in Atlanta, Boston, or Philadelphia.
Oh! In other archive news: I had a squee moment with Dr. Wolfgang-Valentin Ikas, who is at the top of my Christmas wish-list – I went in to the office to make an inquiry about Tergensee’s relationship with Nuremberg and we talked for a little while about binding. I told him about my curiosity re: a Nuremberg-like binding found on a Tergensee book (one, maybe two embossing stamps seem identical to Nuremberg, the rest not) and he said he didn’t know, but had I seen the hearts? I wasn’t sure what he meant and was sure he said “the Hartz” in which Hartz would turn out to be the author of some Briquet-level famous author who made an entire book identifying embossing stamps that I should know about if I was a real archival trog, my failure to know this totally explaining the disbelieving look that he was giving me - feeling myself on the brink of exposure as a total fraud I stuck to my guns: this more than anything else is something I insist on. I will never say I have read a book I have not read. I will not claim to know things I don't know, or say "Oh, I knew that" about something someone just said that in fact is totally new and fascinating information. I will not pretend. That is my solution to the imposter complex: I will never be one. I would rather be an honest klutz and honest idiot and honest ne-er-do-well and honest incompetent. That, at least, is educable. Intellectual dishonesty just galls me. And the French are ALL about it. It is totally hilarious. Even the faculty will say "Oh, I knew that." if you tell them a new thing, even a thing they couldn't possibly have known.
But no: Wolfgang Valentin Ikas, my heart's true desire, he then pulled out a book from his shelf and opened it and showed me a photograph in it of a manuscript drawing of two entwined hearts which, evidently, is like the Tergensee ex libris. And then he said: “Which is quite funny because they were monks!” And then I said “I’m sure any monk would tell you that it doesn’t change the basic yearnings” and he blushed and looked at his computer. And I got all melty. He is SO CUTE YOU GUYS. If I lived in Munich I would make it my full-time job to marry him some day. And I would work weekends, too.
There is a kid sitting next to me now who is looking at microfilm and keeps trying to sneak pictures of it with his cam phone. I thought of this briefly yesterday, given the givens – that a spy cam would be really super useful, especially the CIA kind that could take super high resolution pictures from a tie tack. I would have to wear ties to the archive then, but that’s OK. Or maybe it could go in a necklace. Or you could take pictures from your laptop cam if it had a good enough camera. But strangely, as I watch this kid and what he’s taking pictures of, it’s like hey: you’re looking at a microfilm. They will make prints for you for 30 cents a page. Either take some goddamn notes or pay for the copies. Somehow my weird bendy ethics think that stiffing the library for a few euros – or even a few hundred – would be chintzy, but when it comes to me having to pay thousands of Euros, suddenly I'm all down with becoming a high tech international medieval data thief.
Anyway, I told the kid to quit that shit and told him how to make his request for printouts, which from the microfilm are all of 40 cents, or suggested that maybe he'd like to do what the whole rest of us in the library were obviously busy doing: writing shit down. He was all sassy and cute and young, but I gave him my professorial eyebrow (which I learned from Adored Advisor) and he said I was right and he put away the camera phone and a few minutes later he quietly left. I probably should have let him just do his thing. I mean hell. What kind of kid wants to take pictures of microfilmed manuscript with his celly? Seriously. I am a cranky old man. GET OFF MY LAWN.
I just totally strained my back picking up a stack of three manuscripts. Didn’t realze they were perg! Those things are HEAVY when they’re parchment.
They were all in line to see a small Kandinsky exhibition being hosted on the street in its own tent.
I may try to get in to see it this weekend. I like Kandinsky. I don't like him for a value of standing in line for more than an hour, though. I played that game in my head. Who would I stand in line for hours and hours to see? Say 3-4 hours of waiting. Titian. Durer. A few others. More than that? Bosch. Only Bosch. I would stand in line all day long - all day - to see The Garden of Earthy Delights up close. As long as I could stand and look at it for as long as I wanted, without a bunch of touring tally-gun notchers yammering in my ear. People who go to museums to see things that are famous just because they're famous drive me bizzonkers and kill my art buzz with their whining and horrible need to say stupid things out loud while they are observing the art, whatever it is.
I have one big piece of non-archival news: after several days of deliberation and contemplation, I have decided to walk away from The Albatross. I ponied up a chunk of change for a real sweet ride - a four-wheeled, omnidirectional, shiny red Samsonite Sahora spinner. I'm losing a little bit of packing space, but I really don't care. At all. I'm just totally focused on the awesomeness which is how it is like a faithful little android that will follow me anywhere I go, staying on my heel, as long as I have one hand on its sturdy little handle. When I think about how I am never going to struggle and sweat to keep my backpack from slipping off and smacking someone while I bend over and haul and yank on the Albatross to get it around bus and train seats again - I feel real, genuine happiness. I think it was a good call. This is the trip of a lifetime - I'm thinking three months running around Europe isn't happening again any time soon - and I'm not going to spend any more time on the discomfort of the Albatross. I hereby christen my new bag the Radio Flyer. This my little red wagon.
I don't have very many pictures. That is a consequence of spending my whole day someplace where they don't allow cameras. I had a really lovely couple of days in the archives after I recovered from my shock and anger about the change in the reproduction pricing at the BSB. They have become habituated to me as well, sitting in my corner with my giant headphones on, quietly rocking to a private beat while I measure and observe and write and think and query and answer and type, rinse repeat. Really lovely. I still don't like paper. I saved the best manuscript for last - the oldest, the one on parchment. It felt incredibly good to get parchment back under my fingertips, and this is very, very fine vellum. And these are the prettiest copies of De universo I've seen yet, including the manuscripts of Paris. For one, they have miniatures. Miniatures! Let me tell you how often philosophical texts have pretty pictures in them: practically never. It helps that this is such a late vellum codex - it was made in 1409 - so by then William's reputation was well-made and books of his works could be made and sold as prestige pieces. This one certainly may have been - not sure if the near total absence of marginalia is a signal of that, or of people lending some credence to the book curse at the end that I haven't quite been able to make out. It doesn't look like it was written by the scribe(s) who made the book - these are my notes:
??¶?Scite scriptor scribe rite ut scribit in libro vite eterne salutionis. ? [A, R, F, N?]oii scribe corrupte tu fortis ne scribus in libro mortus etiam ne [dcipcois = descriptionis?].
Uh, yeah. Hard to say which is worse - the transcription, which I will admit I did in about two minutes without paying really great attention because it's not technically an important part of the codex and I wanted to get to the next volume which had the original binding and I was all set to do some fondling of the 600 year old leather, or the Latin of the guy writing in the book, because this was a later scribble in the back of the book. I swear to you he wrote scribus. I think that's him making scribere passive. At any rate, I think I get the gist of it: the scribe who wrote the book did so justly so that he might write in the book of eternal life, and anyone (maybe that o is a really wack L, and we've got alii) who comes along and corrupts it will not even be written in the book of the dead, not even described. Something like that, anyway. By which I'm sure he means the monastic mortuary rolls, not the book of the dead that Richard Gere read for the audiobook. Or MAYBE...
Other fun sightings in my little corner of the archive: one of CLM 3798’s readers got REALLY excited in the margins of the chapter on incubi and succubi while drawing excited giant fingers in the marginalia and repeating the words inccubi! and succubi! also. All was silent a few pages later. PREDICTABLE! CLM 3798 was getting passed around the monastery with spare shreds of parchment marking "the good parts," just like teenage girls did with their copies of Judy Blume books. If you lived in my neighborhood. V.C. Andrews if you knew someone trashy (or who had a trashy big sister), or one of the more graphic romance novels if you knew someone who had a Mom with "marital issues."
I dropped into a really deep daydream while I was looking at the places on CLM 18516 where the hardware used to be, and saw how clean and white the leather was under it, how clear the embossing was, crisp and clean. It was like looking at a very old person's face and being able to see a small part of it - the corner of the mouth, the arch of the brow, the translucence of the skin - as it was when they were very young, and I fell into that small white space like falling down the rabbit hole, thinking about white leather, and how all of the original bindings of the 14th and 13th centuries that I've seen would have been this white too, maybe a light natural tan - that all of the darkness and shine to their bindings is the work of centuries of hands, polishing it with the natural oils in the skin with every touch. Hundreds of years. Probably thousands of hands.
Libraries of the thirteenth century must have looked like they were made out of quiet light, all those soft white and pale amber leather spines and shining brass hardware. Between the fresh parchment and the newly bound leather boards, libraries would have smelled like the inside of a new Benz with leather interior, with sharp, earthy undercurrents of freshly cut wood, the acrid quicklime that went into cleaning and curing the skin that would become vellum, and the tendons and ligaments that would sew the books together. And there would have been the sour tang of glue, mostly from the pastedowns, and attaching the hide to the boards… And the smell of the pumice dust, powdery and chalky. The tannic smell of the gall ink would have been like a very strongly-brewed tea, not particularly acrid but pleasantly and intensely astringent and dark - ink is an olfactory onomatopoiea, smelling exactly like it looks. A quiet library, say the library of a thirteenth-century bishop of Paris - it would have also smelled of clean candlewax, perhaps even beeswax candles that smell slightly of hot honey. Perhaps the smell of slightly stale wine in a cup on the desk, or the remnant of the brown bread and onion sandwich that he had as a midnight snack the night before.
Snap out of it! Work.
I have an iTunes playlist called Scriptorium. It's my archives playlist. It changes a little bit now and then, gets longer and shorter - but it always has Flowers Become Screens on it, and usually in more than one place. If I don't seed it in there in multiple places, I end up scrolling for it, and hitting repeat, repeat, repeat. It's one of my favorite archive anthems, and I especially like it when I am slogging hard and need a lift.
Every time it gets to 3:25 (2:24 in the embedded video) I feel like I’m taking off in a little prop plane at night, with all the city lights nothing more than pretty little spangles scattered meaninglessly on the floor of the world. It feels like escape and it feels like being perfectly present, all at the same time.
When I was in college I had a friend who flew, and I liked going up with him in his little two-seater plane, especially the time it was for him to (re)pass his safety tests checklist thing and would do stuff like put the plane into deliberate stalls, etc. There was something infinitely more terrifying and fun about being flown up into the air by someone I actually knew, who was my age, who lived in the *dorm* with me. He probably shouldn’t have been taking me up on the days when he was putting the plane into bad situations and getting it out of them, but that was often when he wanted company up there. I suppose he just didn’t want to die alone if it went badly. We were what – seventeen and eighteen years old, respectively? Man, kids are dumb. I was always like YAY LET'S GO!
There is a cafeteria in the BSB! I never found it before because you have to go down a bunch of stairs and around a corner before you even see a sign for it. It’s sandwiches and soup and coffee and a couple of cases of cold drinks. The food is very, very bad. But it is still better than my previous lunch plan which was: not having it. Half a bad sandwich or a cup of horrible soup will still make for a less cranky archival trog princess by 5:00 closing time.
Between figuring out the bus lines to and from the library and figuring out how to eat in it, and just generally getting my German sealegs, I've been feeling pretty good. Of course I’m leaving it on Tuesday, but it happened eventually. I am speaking rudimentary German and getting by much better, feel like I understand what’s expected of me by the Germans I interact with in my daily life here (breaking the unspoken rules makes things so much harder, and it's so easy to do), and am so much more comfortable now that I’m back in a real city.
I just generally find European cities a lot easier to live in than towns. It’s not that there’s more English in them (because really, there’s not, at least not to any degree of significance that I've noticed). It’s the relative anonymity. When you’re pretty much always in a big crowd, you become more or less invisible as an individual, and it’s very liberating. You can be confused and walking around in circles and nobody's going to notice. As long as you're not sprouting wings or growing tentacles you're pretty much automatically inconspicuous no matter what. This is very nice, especially if you’ve spent the last few weeks being stared at ALL THE TIME. I am walking around with a laptop backpack and a messenger bag on, generally clutching a map and just radiating foreignness. Also, I’m about 5’9 in my shoes, which makes me awfully tall by European standards, plus I’m currently wearing a size 20-22, which is really big here. I am Go-JIRA! RAWR! Stomping puny Europeans under my size nine boots! I am also Hulk! HULK SMASH GAWPING EUROTARDS WITH HER BACKPACK.
In their defense, it’s totally understandable that people would be confused. It’s way not tourist season and seeing a furriner wandering around those smaller towns (Braunschweig, Erfurt, Nuremberg) would be like seeing a flamingo land on your front lawn in the middle of a January snowstorm. I spied with my little eye as I loped through the station today: an Asian kid wearing a huge backpack with all the stuff hanging off of it on D-rings? And I was like "Woah, backpacking in Europe *this* time of year?" So see, I did it too.
In a city, barring the appearance of the occasional space alien, nobody stares at anyone. Everyone keeps their personal bubble, and it includes both being seen or doing the seeing. If you make eye contact with someone you have to let your gaze slide off of them like a bird slides down a glass porch door that it just flew into. Otherwise (with men, anyway) you might as well have just walked up to them and said “Hi! I’m interested in you!” and they will respond accordingly. Here, anyway. I haven't lived in many American cities - but I don't recall eye contact being a big problem in Atlanta, Boston, or Philadelphia.
Oh! In other archive news: I had a squee moment with Dr. Wolfgang-Valentin Ikas, who is at the top of my Christmas wish-list – I went in to the office to make an inquiry about Tergensee’s relationship with Nuremberg and we talked for a little while about binding. I told him about my curiosity re: a Nuremberg-like binding found on a Tergensee book (one, maybe two embossing stamps seem identical to Nuremberg, the rest not) and he said he didn’t know, but had I seen the hearts? I wasn’t sure what he meant and was sure he said “the Hartz” in which Hartz would turn out to be the author of some Briquet-level famous author who made an entire book identifying embossing stamps that I should know about if I was a real archival trog, my failure to know this totally explaining the disbelieving look that he was giving me - feeling myself on the brink of exposure as a total fraud I stuck to my guns: this more than anything else is something I insist on. I will never say I have read a book I have not read. I will not claim to know things I don't know, or say "Oh, I knew that" about something someone just said that in fact is totally new and fascinating information. I will not pretend. That is my solution to the imposter complex: I will never be one. I would rather be an honest klutz and honest idiot and honest ne-er-do-well and honest incompetent. That, at least, is educable. Intellectual dishonesty just galls me. And the French are ALL about it. It is totally hilarious. Even the faculty will say "Oh, I knew that." if you tell them a new thing, even a thing they couldn't possibly have known.
But no: Wolfgang Valentin Ikas, my heart's true desire, he then pulled out a book from his shelf and opened it and showed me a photograph in it of a manuscript drawing of two entwined hearts which, evidently, is like the Tergensee ex libris. And then he said: “Which is quite funny because they were monks!” And then I said “I’m sure any monk would tell you that it doesn’t change the basic yearnings” and he blushed and looked at his computer. And I got all melty. He is SO CUTE YOU GUYS. If I lived in Munich I would make it my full-time job to marry him some day. And I would work weekends, too.
There is a kid sitting next to me now who is looking at microfilm and keeps trying to sneak pictures of it with his cam phone. I thought of this briefly yesterday, given the givens – that a spy cam would be really super useful, especially the CIA kind that could take super high resolution pictures from a tie tack. I would have to wear ties to the archive then, but that’s OK. Or maybe it could go in a necklace. Or you could take pictures from your laptop cam if it had a good enough camera. But strangely, as I watch this kid and what he’s taking pictures of, it’s like hey: you’re looking at a microfilm. They will make prints for you for 30 cents a page. Either take some goddamn notes or pay for the copies. Somehow my weird bendy ethics think that stiffing the library for a few euros – or even a few hundred – would be chintzy, but when it comes to me having to pay thousands of Euros, suddenly I'm all down with becoming a high tech international medieval data thief.
Anyway, I told the kid to quit that shit and told him how to make his request for printouts, which from the microfilm are all of 40 cents, or suggested that maybe he'd like to do what the whole rest of us in the library were obviously busy doing: writing shit down. He was all sassy and cute and young, but I gave him my professorial eyebrow (which I learned from Adored Advisor) and he said I was right and he put away the camera phone and a few minutes later he quietly left. I probably should have let him just do his thing. I mean hell. What kind of kid wants to take pictures of microfilmed manuscript with his celly? Seriously. I am a cranky old man. GET OFF MY LAWN.
I just totally strained my back picking up a stack of three manuscripts. Didn’t realze they were perg! Those things are HEAVY when they’re parchment.
I spent entirely too much of my Friday afternoon mooning after the broad and besuited shoulders of my much-admired objet petit a, Dr. Wolfgang-Valentin Ikas, my number one archival trog crush of all time. OMG YOU GUYS: I found a picture of him online because I am a stalker and a psycho! Well, not really. I just wanted to show him to you. He's the one who looks like Colin Firth with German glasses and German hair. See how much I wasn't lying about that? Man, he is so cute. And you should see the way he walks. I bet you can totally imagine how he walks. I'm so in love.
Bis spater!