C
by Alex
“C,” as the Cookie Monster once said, “is for cookie” (Monster 1969a:204). In fact, this is not true. This light tan, almost khaki letter is for ‘civilization’, the ultimate metadatal memorial to the eurocentric filing system that I call home.
I rarely venture to C — the volume which first introduced me to this section was, as I recall, Eric Voegelin’s Order and History (thank god I’m over that). I also seem to remember that some Ancient Near East material is also filed in this section as part of LOC’s construal of ‘progress’ as starting in Jerusalem and ending in Philadelpha. Is this where histories of Europe are stored? I have no idea. The European stuff I read is generally filed under its disciplinary emphasis — sociology of Europe, literature of Europe, and so forth.
One of the great joys of working in Hawaii is the tenuous (albeit omnipresent) grasp Europe has on the place. You see it in the phone book, with burgeoning Y and W sections to accommodate Yoshiharas and Wangs, and you see it in our relatively miniscule C section. Sometimes I wonder whether the Cs get lonely, up there in the back of the second floor of Hamilton, forced to take sloppy seconds and to watch lines of students pass them to the Hawaiian and Pacific offerings in D. But overall I don’t feel too sorry. I figure France is big enough to hold all the books about the French — why not embrace your fate in a world where people are more interested in Pohnpei than Paris?