Sorry for the hiatus...my computer screen died and so I will no longer be able to use the laptop; might even have to replace it entirely when I get home. It's just two stinking years old, and for those of you in the know, this is the least of the problems I've had with it. Also, end of the term is coming up and everyone looks pale and exhausted from late night paper-writing. I finished my 14-pager, "A man woot littel what him shal bityde: Astrology and Human Ignorance in the Canterbury Tales," and launched immediately into another 15-pager on Metaphorphosis, Change and Exchaunge in "Troilus and Criseyde." This entailed spending three hours in a sweltering library reading Claude Levi-Strauss' "Elementary Structures of Kinship," which is, to put it simply, a lot of sociological jargon about incest taboos. Yup. That's right. (This so I could write about the exchange of female bodies between the Greeks and the Trojans in the Trojan War.)
The Bodleian Library is Oxford University's main library, which since 1602 has received a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom. The catch is that you are not allowed to borrow books. We had to recite and sign an oath before receiving our library cards, which are only used to get into the buildings. No books can leave the library; you must order all books at least a day in advance, and you can't read them anywhere except the part of the library where you specified you wanted it delivered. Since none of the library reading rooms are air conditioned, and most rooms are on the second or third floors, I am often found in the one available basement room in the three-block library system. The chairs are hard wood with spoke-backs, probably the most uncomfortable reading experience I've had outside of airplanes and buses. Gah. Despite that, I catch myself falling asleep there midafternoons in the 90+humidity heat. The kind that makes your legs stick to the chair and your forearms leave sweaty spots on the table. I can't imagine things are much cooler back home, so I'll just go shower again and pray for rain.
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But don't you just remember, This is the Bodleian, sit up, and feel like the most priviledged, if exhausted and overheated, of mortals? Or, contrariwise, feel like the most ungrateful of mortals to be falling asleep in the Old Bod! Where else can you think, Wesley & Bacon & Ockham & Wycliffe & Thomas More & Sidney & Donne & Jonathan Swift & Johnson & Arnold & Hopkins & Lewis Carroll & Oscar Wilde & J. R. R. Tolkien & T. S. Eliot & C. S. Lewis & Dorothy Sayers & Graham Greene & Gandhi & Stephen Hawking & Andrew Lloyd-Webber & Hugh Grant and lots of others all sat with their famous bottoms uncomfortable in these chairs, sweating away at their famous or infamous thoughts?
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