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!