Shame!

I was assigned to read Persepolis, 1 and 2, for class tomorrow. Only the first half is on reserve, and all available copies in the library system are out. Class is tomorrow, two hours of discussion with the professor.

Compelled by the exigency of my situation, I found a copy of Persepolis at the Harvard Bookstore, parked myself in a corner couch, and read the second half of the book while legitimate patrons and store staff drifted around me. Petty, gracelessly cheap, and, worst of all, I felt as if I had violated the sacredness of text and authorship.

On the other hand, the paperback costs $25, so my conscience isn't terribly tortured.

Favorite Books

I'm not well-read, and I have plebeian taste, so this is not meant to be a meaningful excursion into literature. I really enjoy books: the heft of leather-bound books, the crisp smell of new books, the swish of flipped pages, the neatness of thread-bound signatures and whatnot. In fact, my part time job is in the Preservation Department of the Fine Arts Library at Harvard; I fix broken books.

I digress. What we love most about books is reading them, that act of discovery. And some books never really leave us but, instead, become embedded in our memories and our concept of self. So I'm sharing some books that mean a great deal to me:

• The Water Margins: one of the lesser known four great novels in the Chinese literary tradition. Unlike The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is an intellectually challenging discussion of war and strategy or Dream of the Red Chamber, a psychologically complicated work on fate, love, and 18th century Qing social life, The Water Margins lacks depth. It's basically about lawless ruffians that band as brothers, get drunk, and smash a lot of corrupt officials in the face. I love it.
  

• The Redwall Series: A lot of mice and woodland animals live together in an abbey. It's one of the first books I remember reading in English; it introduced me to fantasy (and I mean that here as a state of mind, not a genre of fiction) and made me realize how easily imagination traverses the limits of reality.

• The Joy Luck Club: For me, Amy Tan seems to be the singular figure narrating the Chinese diasporic experience. It's not great literature, and it's not even descriptive of my experience in America. It's the weird distant uncle: I can barely comprehend him, but I recognize him as kin.
  

• Pride and Prejudice: Every girl's fantasy involves a Mr. Darcy.
  

• Random Family (tracing a family in the Bronx over the course of two years) & The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (the struggles of a Hmong family in California with the healthcare system over their epileptic child): For a few years, I read solely nonfiction narratives (other fantastic examples of this genre include Reefer Madness, Savage Inequalities, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families). These books cultivate social consciousness: they made me, living in an upper-middle-class suburb, feel obligated to the poor, the socially underprivileged, the geographically marginalized of the world.
  

• The Picture of Dorian Gray: The character I find compelling in Oscar Wilde's book is not Dorian Gray, the corrupted Adonis, but Lord Henry. He champions moral ambiguity so persuasively that, to this day, I remain highly skeptical of anyone who actually has a functioning moral compass.

• The Shadow of the Wind, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Prep, History of Love: Contemporary literature, it's like candy.

I realize these kinds of lists are self-absorbed to the point of solipsism, so I'll finish here. Won't you share your books too?

Library adventures

I spent several hours this morning on an extended library pilgrimage--an epic adventure that brought me to the very depths of hell (by which I mean Pusey Library) and back!

The day began in Yenching Library, my spiritual homeland.  Although it appears modest, Yenching is the largest academic East Asian collection outside of Asia.  No question, this is one of my favorite places in the world, and I feel quite comfortable here.  I spent a while looking Enchi Fumiko up in encyclopedias of Japanese literature in both English and Japanese, and felt innocent delight that I didn't have to deal with call numbers at all--I'm so familiar with the reading room that I can just walk over to the bookshelf by the window on the right and pluck the 近代文学事典 (or whatever) off the shelf.

At Yenching I picked up six volumes in Japanese about/by Enchi Fumiko (including a memoir by her daughter and the Enchi Genji!), Doris Bargen's book on spirit possession, and a book about Ono no Komachi in literature (Komachi, you say?  intriguing!  it's almost as if you think you might write about Enchi's 小町変相!  but that would be foolhardiness).

My backpack is beginning to become a little heavy.

I then proceeded to spend a fruitless half-hour in Widener Library, Harvard's largest library, with 65 miles of stacks.  I was attempting to hunt down some mysterious monograph by someone I've never heard of that may or may not have been in German, in the interest of thoroughness.  Despite help from librarians, I was unsuccessful; however, I got to visit my favorite part of Widener, so it wasn't a total waste of time.

Widener actually has two separate classification systems: the Library of Congress system and the Old Widener system.  This is because the Harvard library collection is actually older than the United States, and they never bothered re-classifying the original collection.  So there are about four bookshelves hidden way in the back of the stacks classified under "Jpn" that contain some unimaginable treasures.  There are just heaps and heaps of ancient, fragile books, bound in knobbly leather and gilded and in all sorts of European languages all mixed together.  It is here that you find the archaic books about Japan by Europeans and Americans that are terribly unsuited for objective academic research but brilliant period pieces.

There are somewhat political books by Baron Suyematsu, the first translator of the Tale of Genji into English!  (I bet you thought it was Arthur Waley, didn't you?)  Here is a particularly delightful quote from a 1903 book entitled Queer Things About Japan:

In matters of taste the Japanese never can grasp the Western standpoint.  The worse the color, the more worthless the material, the better they like it...

FUN FACT:  Harvard's library system contains three books bound in human skin.  Please think about that for a while.

I was attempting to find a copy of a dissertation filed here, at Harvard, only eight years ago.  This was unexpectedly difficult.  A Widener librarian directed me to the Harvard Archives, which I'd never visited before.  They're in a featureless, rather musty-smelling basement guarded by a white-haired elderly lady who warned me that I shouldn't carry around so many heavy books or else I'd feel it in my back when I was old like her.

The archives have even more aggressive library security than other Harvard libraries; you have to be buzzed in and out by the person at the desk, file a form to be allowed to even look at materials, leave your belongings in lockers, and keep all materials inside the library.  This was a bit overkill for me, but fortunately the archives lady was very nice to me and told me that I should go to...

Lamont Library, the undergraduate library here.  Lamont is often open for 24 hours, and it contains both many comfy couches and a newly constructed cafe; it is not an exaggeration to say that many Harvard students routinely spend days on end at the library without leaving.  At all.  Really.  (The bathrooms are also notorious gay cruising spots, but this is unverified rumor.)

At Lamont, I picked up a book for JASC (whoo-hoo!) and four more operas (opera project going well!):

Beethoven's Fidelio

Adam's El Niño

Berg's Lulu

Berg's Wozzeck

Alban Berg's Lulu, an opera about a woman who destroys various men's lives in increasingly improbable ways.

My backpack can no longer contain all of my books at this point.

One of the things that really makes me feel like an old, cranky senior is that they renumbered the floors in Lamont.  One of Lamont's many (dungeon-like) charms is that it is half underground, as is Widener.  You enter Lamont on its third floor.  When I came here, the floors and elevators all properly identified the ground floor as the third floor, the third floor as the sixth floor, and the lowest basement as the first floor.  It was weird and charming.  Now, they've made the ground floor the first floor, the third floor the third floor, and the basements are A, B, and C.  Straightforward and intuitive--for shame!

Anyway, I went to the microfilm research center for the first time, where the two enthusiastic librarians both showed me where to find the tiny pieces of plastic that contained the dissertation, how to use the microfilm machine, and how to scan the microfilm to pdf.  I felt very grown-up using the microfilm, and very satisfied to finally see this dissertation after using several online databases and visiting three libraries to do so.

So that was my library adventure--I emerged unscathed, except for some very sore shoulders (oh no!  the little old lady security guard was right!).  I will be so educated!

Howard Zinn

I'm just starting to read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I took it out from the library for my own edification (I've wanted to read it for years now but always been too lazy), but I'm realizing that it's actually extremely relevant for my roundtable next year.

I still have to clarify my thoughts on this, but at least some of my RT will focus on the conflict between national interests in education and other goals of education. In his first chapter, Zinn discusses the problem of teaching US history:

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It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.

My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians But the mapmaker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.

...

"History is the memory of states," wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen's policies. From his standpoint, the "peace" that Europe had before the French Revolution was "restored" by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation--a world not restored but disintegrated.

My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, maters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

(Zinn, 8-10)

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I will also note that Kissinger was a JASC alum!

Obviously I need to think more. It's a pity, but I don't think I'll be able to finish this book before I leave for Cambridge.