Misadventures of the Monster Librarian

Found this on my desktop while I was cleaning shop. Sometimes I miss the card catalogs of my youth...but I am thankful for the online catalogs of my working library days. Happy Sunday. Looking forward to watching some football and relaxing with the Chicago Boy. If every Sunday could be this relaxing...

Not to the wild west. The midwest. The place of my birth. The mindset which still steers the way I think. Home, not so home anymore. Every time I go home I can't help but feel a little like Jane Austen's Fanny Price in Mansfield Park , sans the Sir Thomas-sending-me-away part. I leave behind a place of comfort and familiarity for the place from whence I came, but which increasingly holds little connection, save familial. I was thinking about this today as I walked home from lunch and enjoyed the cool air on my skin; the cloudy, foreboding sky promising rain; the smell of the apples--fallen from the trees and crushed under foot. I was thinking too that today is a perfect day for a roadtrip. I leave this afternoon, making the 10.5 hour drive to Michigan. To family. To dearest friends. I only wish that, like Fanny Price, I could make my trip in a carriage. Let somebody else do the driving.

It is possible to go to New York multiple times and never retrace your steps. I am sure yesterday was that kind of day. I saw only things that I had never looked on before. We began the day at the Morgan Library where we had planned to see the exhibit on Jane Austen, and upon showing up I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Library also had an exhibit on William Blake’s illustrations from a variety of projects--as an English major I was most familiar with his illustrations for the Book of Urizen, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Jessi and I wandered through the galleries, looking at (among many things) some of Jane Austen’s letters to her beloved sister Cassandra. It was quite wonderful to see writing in Austen’s own hand, to see the handwritten letters which referenced some of my most beloved stories; letters which talked about the possibilities that lie open for Austen’s antagonists and heroines. Magical. The exhibit on Blake was nice, less interesting to me, since he...

I am sitting in my cousin's apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, NYC. Yesterday after work I got in the car and drove over an hour to catch a Metro North train into NYC. From Wassaic, NY I took a train in, transfering once, to Grand Central Station. As I was pushed forward with the swelling crowds--trying to act like I knew where I was going to catch my next train--I marveled at the beautiful architechture of the builiding and the famous image of the building came into my head; the image of the interior of the building with the light streaming in through the ceiling windows. The trip into the city isn't complete without seeing Grand Central; all its people rushing through going to jobs, homes, lovers; such a gathering up of people only to push them out again into the cool November streets. Two hours and three trains later (after getting seriously confused) my cousin Jessi and I found each other at the West 4th Street stop, and another couple of trains and we were walking down the ...