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watch out for the .303 bookworms
Thursday, 12 June 2008 02:03 pmPeople are very odd. Every now and then someone - a student, a parent, a fellow administrator - wanders into my office and does a complete double take because half of one wall is full of books. This is a motley collection - all my undergrad textbooks, a complete Dickens, a shelf of fantasy/sf and another two each of gothic and fairy tale, a slightly random array of tomes on internet culture and pornography, or both. Most of these wondering individuals don't look at the content, though. Most of them look at me blankly and say "Are all those books yours?!" in tones of awe.
I have to suppress an urge to look down my nose at them and say "This is a university." I suppose it's not their fault that they've been forced to confront an administrator who's more or less a cunning façade for a lit major with particularly bizarre interests, but actually that isn't the problem. The problem is their clearly slightly panicky response to the idea of books in bulk. (And I have to say, my pitiful collection is nothing compared to some of the cluttered, dank and tangled L-space snarls in which lurk, dusty, literate and hermit-crabbed, some of the senior professors). L-space-inducing quantities of books in shelves, piles and herds are so much a given of my existence, it always freaks me out slightly to find people who are thrown by the idea. When the Evil Landlord and I viewed the house we currently occupy just before he bought it, it contained absolutely no books at all - I think there was a pile of glossy magazines on a shelf in the living room, an area I have subsequently derisively filled with the piano. Now, of course, this alarming intellectual sterility is negated by the tottering mounds of literature which bedeck every available space, and then some. I can't imagine living without books. I can't even imagine being able to imagine living without books.
Now I shall head home eftsoons and right speedily, before I actually bite the head off a student and spit the skull through the window with a derisive "ptooey". I think there's been a knock at my door or a phone call every ten minutes since about 11am, and I'm in something of an epic grump. On the other hand, here is an Elizabeth Bear story which manages to make the Cthulhu mythos sad, poignant and rather sweetly sexy, which is quite an achievement.
I have to suppress an urge to look down my nose at them and say "This is a university." I suppose it's not their fault that they've been forced to confront an administrator who's more or less a cunning façade for a lit major with particularly bizarre interests, but actually that isn't the problem. The problem is their clearly slightly panicky response to the idea of books in bulk. (And I have to say, my pitiful collection is nothing compared to some of the cluttered, dank and tangled L-space snarls in which lurk, dusty, literate and hermit-crabbed, some of the senior professors). L-space-inducing quantities of books in shelves, piles and herds are so much a given of my existence, it always freaks me out slightly to find people who are thrown by the idea. When the Evil Landlord and I viewed the house we currently occupy just before he bought it, it contained absolutely no books at all - I think there was a pile of glossy magazines on a shelf in the living room, an area I have subsequently derisively filled with the piano. Now, of course, this alarming intellectual sterility is negated by the tottering mounds of literature which bedeck every available space, and then some. I can't imagine living without books. I can't even imagine being able to imagine living without books.
Now I shall head home eftsoons and right speedily, before I actually bite the head off a student and spit the skull through the window with a derisive "ptooey". I think there's been a knock at my door or a phone call every ten minutes since about 11am, and I'm in something of an epic grump. On the other hand, here is an Elizabeth Bear story which manages to make the Cthulhu mythos sad, poignant and rather sweetly sexy, which is quite an achievement.
