LOC Love Letter

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.

O is the Library of Congress Call Letter for home economics and cooking. Many researchers are surprised to find O dedicated to such a specific topic. However, cognoscenti such as myself know not just the contents of this call number, but the history behind it.

As many of you know, the modernization of the Library of Congress occurred in the early 1880s as a consequence of the provisions of the Great Compromise of 1877 which secured the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the creation of the solid south. While the Great Compromise is remembered largely for the creation of Jim Crow, a key component was also democrat concessions for Northern internal improvements in exchange for Republican patronage. Obviously, most of this took the form of northern capital and managerial experience for the Texas Pacific railroad, key to spurring industrial development in the south. Less well known, however, was the padding of the staff of the Library of Congress with Democratic ‘patronage-men’.

It was the result of this agreement that saw Julius B. Dintwoodie — Samuel Tilden’s cousin — installed as official cataloguer of the Library of Congress. Prior to Dintwoodie’s appointment the Library of Congress was essentially staffed by low-paid volunteers, typically eccentric Boston Brahmins who attempted to piece together what was left of Jefferson’s original founding bequest after its destruction in the War of 1812. These former librarians of congress also served as ersatz acquisitions specialists but, of course, had no comprehensive plans for developing the library’s collections.

Dintwoodie’s position as cataloguer was meant purely as a sinecure, with no actual responsibilities besides enjoying life in the capital and collecting his paycheck. Sickly and affected with a slight hunchback, Dintwoodie was too young to participate in the civil war and was widely regarded as a shut-in by his family. Tilden’s remembrance of his cousin was meant, apparently, largely to assuage the nagging of his aunt.

It was to the great surprise of everyone who knew him, therefore, when Dintwoodie courted and then successfully married Eliza M. Cantwell, the youngest daughter of one of Maryland’s oldest and most established families. Stout unionists, the Cantwells epitomized the Victorian bourgeoisie and Cantwell,  a sort of proto-Jane Addams, met Dintwoodie at the theater and apparently recognized him immediately as a ‘fixer-uper’. A regiment of the usual bizarre Gilded Age remedies followed — hydrotherapy, various diets of raw vegetables and milk, and so forth.

As a result Dintwoodie’s health improved enormously and he also spent increasing time at work, fleeing the tender and yet controlling embrace of his spouse. Active and improving work was the only excuse Cantwell would accept for Dintwoodie’s time away from home. While Dintwoodie’s famous flask of whiskey – originally concealed from his wife in a hidden compartment in his desk — is now on display in the Library of Congress rotunda as a beloved piece of naughty-librarianship, it appears that on the whole he proved remarkably active rationalizing the library’s holdings, slowly creating the system we know and love today.

Or at least this is the official story. Many historians have seen Cantwell’s hand at work in the organization in the LOC — for instance in her stout organization of C, and the subtopics relating to kitchen science in T. O, the most obvious of Cantwell’s impositions, however, is O, which reflects first wave feminism’s concern with rational mastery of the home and bourgeois internalization of Protestant concerns with order and cleanliness. Increasingly today, however, postmodern scholars of archival science have argued that O might have served as a baited trap for Cantwell, distracting her in order to allow Dintwoodie to have his way with the Ps. Even more audacious authors, inspired by De Landa’s rationalization of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblages, have argued that Cantwell had no hand in creating the LOC and that O was an ironic countergesture by Dintwoodie meant to mimic and hence displace the hegemonic voice of his wife, which he had internalized.

And that, boys and girls, is the completely true story of the origin of O.

Oh the horror. I have a strong sense the M is cantaloupe, even though I have no memory of what is in it. Actually that is not true — I think it is art. But then again that might be N. Or vice versa. I am guess that M is art. I seem to remember big books — the kind you store pictures in — in M. And… isn’t Res in M? So yeah. Art.

Banana yellow. And just as slippery. The flavor of that ‘banana flavor’ flavoring that tastes nothing like bananas.

There is an old saying — that I first heard one winter in college uttered by Jack Palance in his his strange baddie role in the movie Cyborg II — that if you want to dine with the devil, you will need a long spoon. I have never understood exactly what this meant until I first delved into the Ls. This is a section with call number. I learned this the hard way when I was looking for a book and jotted down the call number, LB 5000 .G4 figuring ‘how many LB5000 .G4s can there be?’ The answer: fifty linear feet. This call number is insane. It is perfectly feasible to head down to the stacks and search for LM3,247,564 .582752. I kid you not.

L is really also a haystack of a letter. As the ‘education and learning’ section it is difficult to find the needles. I spend a lot of time in this section since I have made a conscious effort to improve my teaching skills but man — you know you think that the anthropologists are way outnumbered by the historians, but they are both but a drop in the ocean that is the people who study education.

Some of the stuff in L is really really interesting and (which is the same thing for me) ethnographic. But a lot of it is… uh… not. And this is not an easy section to browse in. Have you ever seen the section on ‘teaching reading comprehension’? It’s mammoth. And a lot of the literature in education tends not to be very reality-based — abstract taxonomies of learning objectives, fiercely chauvistic lists of Great Books, Foucaultian intstitutional imperatives to drill and grade based on seemingly based in unreflective intuition about what learning is and ought to be or else on submicro level psychological studies of eye movements, extremely obvious things described in monograph form, but mostly just a lot of extremely vanilla institutional prose. This is an area that, like H, saw tremendous growth in the baby boom years, and is full of countercultural technocratic discourse in sans-serif font about how latest science shows chilling out is the way to go, man.

I tend to hang on by latching onto particular authors and presses, but even these are not hallmarks of quality. While there are small presses like Stylus, there are also massive behemoths like Josey-Bass. And then there are all the weird small-timey presses run out of high school printing rooms and university education departments printing primers on idiosyncratic teaching methods with cult-like followings that cost $2.50 each (the primers, not the cults). These are often my favorites.

There is something about education that tends to bring out the most formal in people, as well as to prompt even the least extroverted to share their life philosophy.

Why do I think that law, as a topic, is a pale, pastel pink?

It was when I was at Chicago, taking a course at the law school, that I had this sudden realization that some of the most brilliant thinkers of all time were lawyers. I don’t know why this seemed like a surprise to me. It is not as if — let me put it this way — I thought that anthropologists has cornered the market. I had not thought too much about what lawyers and judges do, but I had thought of about philosophy and I suppose I just sort of figured that that was what all the mind-bendingly brilliant people would occupy themselves with since, in the real world, you cannot start a special private school to train young mutants to use their powers for good. But of course speculation about what it means to follow a rule, or what ‘property’ actually means, or how passing a law does or does not actually change behavior are all questions for legal thinkers. And, of course, all those folks in the Gs and Hs who long for ‘application’ and ‘relevance’ should realize that actually sending to people to prison (or not) and giving them an easement (or not) is application in a very direct sense — no wonder so many smart people do it.

K is an unusual letter for me since it houses many scholarly books which happen to be about law, including a good number of journals such as the Melanesian Law Review, whose early numbers are a hoot (why shouldn’t cannibalism be legal in Papua New Guinea now that we’ve chased the Australian colonizers out in the name of our national culture?) But it is also the letter which houses an absolutely tremendous amount of actual legislation, instructions and regulations, and other professional stuff which is pretty much useless to me. And then there is the tremendous amount of stuff in between which poses a particular problem. I am sure you have had a run-in with this kind of work in your own field: volume after volume that seems really really relevant but which, when you crack it open, some how manages to be totally not relevant and often times doesn’t seem to say anything at all. How does that happen? At first I always feel relieved, but then I know that the real gems are the ones hidden beneath a lot of overburden and I feel like I have to search through all of them just to make sure the one that got away doesn’t get away.

D’Angelo, the law library at Chicago, was a trip. It is not just the library, it is also the faculty offices. Around the edge of the stacks are the professors offices. This fact, as well as my obvious complete and utter alienness when compared to the well-groomed lawyers-to-be who knew where all the books were and what the wireless password was and actually owned laptops instead of an aging Centris 650 yes that’s right that’s how old school I am a Centris 650 dude — all of these facts made me feel pretty out of place in the law library. But at the same time I also felt a certain placed-ness, as if certain volumes had long ago been hidden in the law library so that one day I might discover them. Who else was looking for those rare English translation of Gierke and Jhering? Did any of these tort-obsessed folks really care about Drucila Cornell’s edited anthology on violence and the law that featured both Walter Benjamin and Derrida’s essays on the force of law. So that helped.

At Manoa I visit the law library because of their excellent collection of works on indigenous people and the law, and especially Hawaii. Best of all, books are almost never checked out. It is not that law students don’t read at UH Manoa, but they seem to use the law school more as a study space, and to hit the noncirculating reference material. Or maybe I’m the only one interested in the copies of titles like The Long Interview by Grant McCracken or Kinship and The Unexpected by Strathern which are, for some reason, stored there. Also, and I don’t really know why this is, every time I go in there there is someone using the computer to order prayers from churches — apparently this is something you can do — or reading inspirational literature, blessingoftheday.com, and so forth. Why I am not sure. I think it is people who are not actually in the law school who use the public terminals. Also I like that the circulation desk uses the old, relatively uncomputerized way of checking out books. They are kicking it old school over at the law library.

J is the curvy, lime green, evil twin brother of G and H. It is the strange, shadowy inversion of normal social science — that Library of Congress call letter which most resembles a decorous and well-trimmed suburb beneath whose apparent normality lies the fact that you are the only person left who hasn’t yet been taken over by the Pod People.

J covers everything that I study but in a reverse, mirror-image way. It’s all there: social structure, politics, philosophy but somehow… its all strangely deformed. There are rows and rows and relevant books that look incredibly relevant to what I study, but unlike H, which gives you that same sense of dysphoria that Ancient Space Travellers used to get from looking directly into the heart of the warp drive, it makes me feel a bit dirty or betrayed somehow, like the bride of a fairy at a wedding feast who tries the delicious morsels only to realize that they are in reality full of maggots and that her handsome prince is really a goat who lives underneath the earth.

In G we describe moots and leadership. In H, people offer technocratic solutions to ethnic conflict. In J, Madeline Albright and five other famous people share the lessons they’ve learned about how to be a great diplomat. In G we ponder the  amplification of agency by cultural structure, in H they develop elaborate formal models of the structures of elite networks. In J they argue about whether Roosevelt or Churchill was the greatest leader of the twentieth century. Do you see what I’m trying to get at here?

There is, of course, one exception to my general disatisfaction with J, and that is JX — the section that for decades housed dusty Wilson-esque tomes on the league of nations until suddenly in the early 90s it exploded (as the Hs did in 2001) into the ‘globalization’ section of the library. I mean honestly: wth is James Ferguson’s Global Shadows doing being stored here? The best thing about the place is that no other anthropologists think to browse it so you rarely have to engage in recall wars with others.

It wasn’t until I got to Hawai’i and started to broaden my imagination about what constituted an adjacent discipline that I really started hitting up the Js. I think in time I am going to ease into them. But it is hard — J is, like C, one of those old, old letters. The sociology of H is, let’s face it, mostly a post-WWII phenomenon and there have been so few people doing anthropology (and the discipline has changed so much) that G is also still relatively wet behind the ears. But J is full of folks still obsessed about the Kansas-Nebraska act. It’s the secondary literature on Democracy, Truth, Freedom, and Efficient Administration of County Government: Lessons From North Dakota, 1923-1947. This is a deep, deep pool — one you have to share with Republicans who take seriously Jefferson’s legacy as a social thinker. Whoah.

This is, perhaps, the greatest challenge I have faced yet. The darkest hour, the most obscure letter. Have I ever checked out a book from I in my entire life? I can imagine where it must be in Hamilton — all the way along the back wall of the room with the folio collection. Except now that I think about it, maybe it is not, since you hit J before you get to that area.

I I I. I remember looking up a book on diplomatic history once that was located along the edge of the folio room — could I be international relations? Or is it perhaps not actually on the second floor of the Hamilton because it has something to do with information technology and is stored in the addition?

I have no idea. I’m thinking diplomatic history and international relations. But I am also thinking I am wrong. About a quarter of the way through the alphabet and my perfect streak is over. Ah well, we’ll have to see how the next couple of letters go — I think there are only a few rough patches between me and P.

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.

G is, to me, a deep dark green. It is also my home: the anthropology stacks. In the Regenstein you could always tell when a new subject or academic discipline was starting by the long stretches of identically-jacketed periodicals, one after another, forming a visible block on the shelves like the strings of identically coded DNA that tell ribosomes “new gene starts here new gene starts here new gene starts…” I’m not sure why Hamilton doesn’t have this same effect — I think its because back issues of journals are stored at Sinclair and, let’s face it, we don’t have the ginormous serials budget I’m sure the Reg has.

It is not actually until you get to GM and GN, I believe, that you hit the real anthropology. It’s strangely placed. I remember at one point following the Gs all the way along the stack until the anthropology ran out and other subjects began flowing through the library, morphing subtly in ways that both suggested and yet rendered enigmatic what the actual LOC topics were, and what logical string of associations would lead from anthropology to the others. I mean it gets weird pretty quickly. Not too long after ‘culture’ you start getting to ‘entertainment’ — the small literature on gaming that I sometimes take a look at for my WoW research is GV (or GX?). It’s a wonderful little trove of books about chess, edited anthologies by cultural studies people thinking about video games, and passionate, self-published treatises on the philosophical aspects of fantasy role playing games. There is also a section on carnivals, entertainments, and sideshows and even, as I recall, a section of ‘dwarves and their cultural significance”. The Reg’s selection of semi-ethnographic books about sideshows and carnivals from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were somethings I always thought would be fun to dip into.

As for anthropology, truth be told I cannot remember too many of the specific numbers that I’ve read through, because one’s relationship to a library is an embodied, physical thing, not a digital one. I can imagine the books on the shelves as I pass them: the AES monograph series (so important and yet so hard to track down in electronic databases), books on particular anthropologists (the Mead/Benedict/Lowie section), anthropology textbooks (which is GN26, I believe) –

– let’s stop to take a second to talk about anthropology textbooks. When did they get to be so terrible? Kroeber’s Anthropology (1948) is just wonderful, Linton’s Study of Man (1936) is fun, and Goldenweiser’s various popularizations — with their denouncements of colonialism and fictional dialogues in which students debate teachers over the meaning of civlization — are wonderfully kooky and eccentric. I blame the materialists and evolutionists: their humorless obsession with aping the natural sciences are rigid determination to follow the baby-book gravy train down the road of multiple editions of their band-clan-chiefdom-inspired textbooks took all the fun out of anthropology. One of these days I’m going to write a proper Boasian textbook and get us right again… –

At any rate then there are some additional volume on general anthropological topics until you get to the end of the row where the edited volumes on ‘what its like to do fieldwork’ are (106?). Turn around, face the other row, and you get evolution, ecology (with an outcropping of indigenous people), a brief intriguing section of play and creativity, and then the topics — kinship, political anthropology, ethnicity, legal anthropology and land rights… and so on.

Somewhere in there — I think it might be in the normal Gs, it was on the end of one row back in the Reg — is another small outcropping of PNG ethnography: specifically, the stuff that counted as ‘ethnography of the…’ instead of just ‘papua new guinea, people’. The Big Men, Great Men edited volume is there, for instance, as are some A. Strathern productions.

While I wax lyrical about the Ds, I have a more workmanlike relationship with G. It is the garage, not the showroom floor. Since I am now a ‘political anthropologist’ (we didn’t have ‘subfield’ titles where I went to school — I was just an ‘anthropologist’) responsible for teaching students about ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationalism’ I find myself spending a long time sitting on the floor, thumbing through the Gs, doing remedial skimming. Its fun, but G is one of those areas of the library – like H or even the more treacherous J — where your head will explode if you let the intellectual horizons stretch too far out into the distance.

Is orange.

Uh… and… this is central and south America, right? Or is it geography? I think the last time I visited this section was for Clendinnen’s Aztecs: An Interpretation. I think. Have I got that right? It could be that this is first time in this series I’ve been totally without a clue. I guess at the end I will look up F and the other ones I am not sure about (/me shudders thinking forward to I) and see what happens.

Nothing to see here — move along…

Before I started my World of Warcraft research, I would never have known what E was about. Luckily I now know: the US and North America. I don’t know how I managed to get a Ph.D. in a social science without reading anything about the US, which is after all my home country. When I first ventured down there — for a book by David Hollinger — I encountered those ‘American Intellectual Tradition’ books and, even more delightfully, an Australian journal of American studies full of cultural studies interpretations of action flicks.

And second, I know this sounds unfair, I have to admit that I was sort of surprised to find out that Canada has its own section in the LOC. Obviously, they do. Although you wouldn’t know it from our holdings. If ever there was a library for whom the Great White North was not a priority, I’m afraid it’s us. Although I’d expect us to have decent First Nations stuff.

E is an icy, ivory translucent E.

I visit many call numbers, but D is the only one with an address that I come home to regularly: DU 740 .42: ethnographies of Papua New Guinea. Technically the Ds cover a huge range — Africa, Asia (including South Asia, iirc), and the Pacific. Here in Honolulu, most people head straight for the section on Hawaii, and Hamilton’s public stacks are more than well-thumbed — they are downright ravaged. Dog-earned, underlined, well-thumbed (indeed, over-thumbed, if there is such a word as ‘over-thumbed’) copies of classics, sagging shelves where half of the books have been checked out.

But for me it is the DU 740s that have always been home. It is one of few call numbers I remember from Hauser — in the long, old first expansion of the library, in the basement about halfway through, on the right hand side. It’s funny. I remember the lobby to the library, the stairs up to the entrance, the reading room, and then… I can’t remember where the stairs were. Or are, technically. I even remember the DUs from Portland State University, the summer that I took Intro Bio and skipped all the lectures in order to read in their larger library. I remember the shelves being near a corner of the building, near windows… I wonder if I am right?

I remember the DUs in the Regenstein, up top on the fourth (?) floor, about in the middle of the floor, all the way in the back. It was amazing hitting graduate school and seeing the rows of ethnographies that dwarved Reed’s puny library. I was shocked by what was available for checkout by any old palooka. At one point I checked out a first edition of Luigi D’Albertis’s account of his ascent of the Fly, a book that must have been almost a century old and looked even older. In the Hamilton it’s on the right towards the back as you come up the stairs next to the circulation desk. In fact, it’s conveniently close to the Gs (more on which the day after tomorrow).

DU 740 .42 is such a home to me that, in fact, it is the only part of the library where I can evaluate the depth of a library’s collection just by looking at DU 740.42. When I visit a university I’ll often just head up there to see how they measure up since — obviously — all institutions of higher learning measure their moral worth by the depth of their Melanesian holdings. Sometimes this leads to outrage. Like the time I visited Duke and got a tour of the library only to realize that they — wait for it — used the Dewey Friggin’ Decimal System. Savages.

Of course over time I’ve expanded out of DU. I love in particular the depth of Hamilton’s holdings, including their kick-ass but confusingly positioned arrangement of having a separate ‘Asian’ collection on the fourth floor with it’s copious D section hanging like the sword of Damocles over A-J (on the second floor) and, even more confusingly, the ‘D East Asian’ collection on the third floor. Knowing which floor your D is on is what separates the boys from the men when it comes to navigating the Hamilton. Actually, since only I see knowledge of the Hamilton’s filing system as a sign of masculine competence and integrity, what I am really trying to say is I take a good deal of satisfaction in knowing which floor holds that obscure history of the Jewish community in Burma, or online communities in Central Asia.

I know this sounds weird and possibly even racist, but to me D is a dark, rich brown, almost a rich burgundy, like the leather on an tufted, upholstered chair or pipe tobacco with the scent of cherry.

“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?

My dearest B,

You are the deepest indigo to me. How do your series’d depths hold truth, revelation, mysticism, and logic within the confines of a single letter? You are the home of the long rows of concatenated completed works, alphabetical ranges authors first German, Gadamer bumping against Heidegger. How often have I gotten lost in these depths, tumbling from magnum opus to the secondary literature leaning against it. The pale, bizarre pastel lavenders and oranges of those MIT hardcovers, denuded by librarians of their dustjackets. The post-psychedelic black covers of Northwestern’s series on existentialism and philosophy whose weirdly distorted images remind one of nothing so much as the photographs included Leonard Nimoy’s epic poem Will You Love Me Tomorrow? The staid blue bindings of Brill and the formal edited volumes of phenomenology produced by unpronounceable Dutch publishers with strangely cartoony logos on their front matter.

But I love B for its small niche sections as well. I once came across the section devoted to philosophical accounts of traits of character — the two books on prudence, the handful of volumes on fear. There is somewhere in that mass of four digit call numbers a section on non-Western religion/philosophy with hybrid volumes on Hawaiian epistemology and the religious imagination in New Guinea. Not too far from the section on witchcraft, if I recall — which says something about the attitudes of the people who came up with the catalog in the first place.

It was not until I got to the Hamilton library that I discovered that Judaica is also in B. The Jewish community in Honolulu is not yet as old as a human lifetime and the pickings here are relatively slim — mostly of the “Choice Told Us To Buy This” variety. But when you’re part of a tradition that helped invent the alphabet there is something liberating about having only a couple dozen linear feet of Greatest Hits to chose from. And an additional advantage is that, let’s face it, just not not that likely that someone else has suddenly developed an interest in Through A Speculum That Shines.

B is that beguiling part of the library that seems the most interesting to me, and also the most far removed from what I’m studying at the moment. If only one could let one’s studies devolve into a cogitation on the possibility of studying the human — but such speculation will not get one’s interviews transcribed. How fascinating it would be to pick one’s way through the radical-seventies covers of the books on the social construction of reality, or finally plow through all the material on king and cult in Ugarit. B is the letter that I return to most often, but also the most avocationally.

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.

In order to keep my blog active (even though most of you are probably reading this through FaceBook) I am going to start what I call the “Library Of Congress Love Letter”. Every day I will extol the virtues of a different Library of Congress call number letter, beginning with A and ending with Z. If I get the timing right on these posts, I should be able to finish just before the birth of my children.

The key is that I will not the the web or any other reference material (or surreptitious trips to the library) to look anything up about the letters that I will be writing about. It will be a test of my knowledge of the Library of Congress system, a testament to the power of paper, and a reminiscence of stacks that I have know. To be perfectly honest, I am not sure I can actually say I’ve visited every letter in the system although I think I have… I guess part of the fun and challenge will be seeing how much I can dredge up out of my own memory.

Tomorrow, the games begin — release the hounds!