H

H is  charcoal grey to me — maybe because it is, in my imagination, the conservative, less fun version of G. G is the section of the library with the section on Carlos Castaneda. H is where you go to learn how to design survey instruments.

As the section on both business and sociology H has always seemed a little schizophrenic to me. In fact in the Reg you could flit through the Sociology stacks — this was back before they redid the basement — you could flit through the sociology stacks and suddenly come upon a little note that said “looking for HB and all that sort of stuff? Head down to the basement”: all of the ‘you are a brand’ and ‘adding value to your organization’ books were stuck down there. Strangely, certain kinds of economic histories were as well. If you wanted Polanyi — or the numerous Canuck volumes dedicated to him and his thought by his daughter — you had to hit the basement. There was all this Keith Tribe shouldered up against books about how to be a proactive executive. It was eerie.

H is also, of course, the home to sociology — the great doppelganger of anthropology. There are the long stretches of research methods full of books with titles like “sociological theory: a synthesis” published in 1965. It’s a hit or miss area, since a lot of good stuff is here — the ethnographic sociology, the Van Maanen and Metcalf and The Loflands, the endless profusion of handbooks by Denzin and Lincoln seeking to affiirm your own personal choice of research strategy, the small but fascinating literature on unobtrusive observation. It’s a call letter that swelled in the Baby Boom era, it’s Chicago School charms eclipsed by the suffocating weight of Sage Publications Inc, lacking the charms of Gs century-long intoxication with dilletantism and thick, musty books featuring five hundred illustrations of different styles of Native North American Fishhooks.

H is also the home to social theory — not the hardcore Big Thinker stuff you find in the Bs, but the edited collections Pretty Important thinkers — the Tillys and Alexanders, the secondary literature on Foucault and Weber and Simmel and Habermas (but not Foucault and only some Habermas). It is a dangerous place to be for those whose eyes are bigger than their stomachs — the MIT volumes suggested you read tons more Frankfurt School or take Hans Joas really really seriously are here to lure onto the shoals of intellectual paralysis, where you’ll wash ashore unable to do more than mutter ‘too much… to read… so… little… time….’

I love the Hs because they are the home to all sorts of individuals sections. The sociology of deviance and sexuality, the What It Means To Be A Jewish Woman (a small section, but there), small group interaction, ‘communication’ in the sense of that word that requires a university to have a department of it, global connections. I also love H because it has all of these books about ‘how to solve things’. No one in G writes books about how to solve political conflict or ethnic tension. Only the Hs have the gall to grasp the nettle of technocracy.

H is great as well because it is the home to random areas that suddenly expand and contract without warning. In the middle of H there is a long, still-shiny section of books whose new library bindings are still off-gasing complex plastic polymers: the terrorism section. I have this image of acquisitions librarians running frantically to H with their carts on September 12, 2001, desperately preparing a massive reorganization of their social sciences collection to accommodate the massive ropes of still-steaming lava cooling and creating a massive new island of material in the middle of an obscure call number on international relations that no one ever thought would amount to anything in its lifetime.

The other new island, this one old enough for the first few grasses and insects to grow, is the Internet section of H. Its charming — all of the books from 1995 called ‘someday people might even be able to buy stuff online’ and ‘soon the Internet become the permanent home for our cyberselves and our bodies will cease to matter only to the people who have not yet read the latest important work by Frederick Jameson’.

In the past three years I have spent a lot of time in H, and I will spend even more time there in the future. But there is still something unsatisfying about it — as if all of the right books were there, but for all the wrong reasons. There is something about the sections will-to-power, it its default mentality, that make it the most interesting to me when it is the least itself. There is something out of kilter between my brain and H — which is why, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, I retreat back to G.