P
by Alex
Obviously, it should not be a surprise that libraries collect works of fiction, but I have to admit that it seems strange to me. Libraries, in Alex Golub land, are for preserving knowledge and passing down knowledge — the kind of thing thing that normal bookstores don’t do. Why keep a copy of The Scarlet Letter in a library? When is that going to go out of print?
This is crazy talk, I know, but P has a bizarrely awesome depth with call numbers that stretch away into infinity in the same way that L does. P is like the jungle — you don’t really go in there without hacking your way through and looking for a very particular thing. PC, PF, PR — what is that all about? Occasionally I cut my way through various thickets to reach small clearings of the works of Russel Soaba or Ursula K. LeGuin, and I know there are communities of cultural studies and literary critics who have been hidden away from the rest of us in P, developing on a parallel track and worth a visit to see their exotic visions of social life, so similar to and yet so different from our own. Mostly, I stay away. Since P takes up so much space this means that there is usually at least a quarter of a floor I don’t have to mess with.
Recently the Ps in Hamilton have been declared a no-go zone because of mold that has gotten into the building as a result of the flood and other various dilapidation. They covered large sections of the stack in opaque plastic X Files “I want to believe” sheeting of the sort usually used to hide alien autopsies or deliver things to Area 53 and blocked off the aisles with tape. To get novels from this area you had to go down stairs, give the call number to a student worker, and then like one designated guy would go up — presumably in a biohazard suit — and get the book for you. When he was on shift. I was like: I am too hard core to be denied my Ursula K. LeGuin. I just stepped through the tape and got the book and I’ve not, to date, developed any strange off-world infections. So that made me feel pretty butch. Which is sorta sad.
The beginning of P is, of course, linguistics. This is a topic that I have a sort of love-hate relationship with. There is a lot of good stuff in linguistics that obviously dovetails with anthropology, but man then there is all the other stuff: the books of diagrams that look like they are diagrams for circuit boards but are actually what happens when you let impressionable young grad students read Godel, Escher, Bach at an early age. I think I secretly have linguist envy — a desire to understand their obscure and formalistic prose, their elaborately numbered and hierarchicalized lists. I am not sure that I really want to be a linguist, but I would like at least to understand the secret code language they use in the clubhouse. But as it is the last time I ventured into P was for a paper in an edited volume comparing how Brits, the French, and people from Brittany shake hands. Published in 1982, it was an analysis of the ‘semiotic system’ of handshaking. Ah, the days when people still thought human beings lived lives in code, before the pragmatics craze trended way up. There was a certain innocence of experience back then.
I do not retain a detailed memory of it because I do not want to, but once I read an almost unbelievably hideous text by Judith Butler from which one could extract an intelligent and interesting notion, almost an idea. It was the sort of thing that any of hundreds of persons who occupy P could have expressed in a couplet.
P is a split personality, just like the College of Language, Linguistics, and Literature. The just P call numbers are linguistics, but then all the areal linguistic studies pop up as small islands awash in long shelves full of areal literature and literary theory. I often find myself standing at a shelf perusing some dusty collection of Takelma texts while some literature student glares at me from across the shelves, and I can hear the “you creepy linguistics weirdo” in their stare. They hate us for a myriad of reasons, although we are almost completely oblivious to their presence until startled in the stacks.
Your linguistics envy can be assuaged easily, just take a couple of classes from our department! After a class in phonetics and a class in grammar you’ll know all the secret codewords and fancy Greco-Latin vocabulary that we use to ridicule literary theorists when they try to say meaningful things about language per se. Or just read Language Log regularly.