A
by Alex
To me, A is red — the bright red color of that strange collection of buses, mailboxes, office supplies, and doors to certain places that the British paint red despite the fact that, as objects, they have nothing in common. My relation with the LOC developed in three libraries with last names: Hauser, Regenstein, and Hamilton (although of course I have dallied in others). Did I know A in my Hauser days? I must have stumbled across it at one point. But I remember meeting A in the Regenstein — second floor, take a right as you enter the stacks and then down down down all the way to the end of the wing, where the Reg’s thin terminal finger looks out over tennis courts and a memorial to chain reactions. I have no idea why I was looking for back issues of magazines — an old issue of Harpers with an article by Geertz in it? Such things do exist after all.
Hamilton does not have those long rows of bound back issues — I imagine they have been shipped off to to ignominy of the unconditioned stacks at Sinclair. But even the Hamilton’s anorexic couple of rows of A have their delights — A is the place for the self-pondering of the humanists, a place which produced in the eighties and nineties a small thin wedge of tomes of the humanities and digitalization, naive volumes wondering what ‘the information network’ and ‘micro-computers’ meant for poetry now that the millennium was just a decade away. It was browsing through these one day that I discovered Aaron Wildavsky’s wonderful little volume of essays reflecting on methodology. “Sometimes,” he wrote, “you have to spend money to buy time.” So that is something that A taught me.