from the library, at 10PM on a friday night.

I'm really not feeling Bobst Library at all. Earlier I made reference to its panopticality, the sense that anywhere one goes to study, one can be seen and surveilled easily. The great thing about SML (and there are many not great things about SML, like that manager who was in all the TV commercials) is that it's very easy to hide, which makes it also very easy to find places to write and read in relative tranquiity. Bobst has ridiculous amounts of open space and not too many actual books. It looks like a corporate headquarters more than an actually used library, a monument to the corporate university rather than an enclosed paean to an equally enclosed historical vision of universities as repositories and seminaries of the human and humanist, although Bobst's supposedly democratized corporatism is ironically or not so ironically harder to access - in fact impossibly so, to access if one lacks an ID card than Yale is. The lack of books, the massive amount of opens space, and the glaring flourescent lighting make the library more a center of a certain kind of nervous asociality and insanity (the man loudly yawning on the 4th floor reading room today, to the consternation of everyone else there, the two undergrads talking very loud just now in one of the study carrels about nothing in particular before returning to whatever they interrupted) and of being watched than of doing work. It feels empty and lonely and dead and it scares the shit out of me. But perhaps i just havcen't found the right areas to work in yet, like back when i used to try to write papers in the SML music library and drove myself nuts.

It's been a decent week. I'm excited about at least one of my classes, I'm getting less afraid and more excited about organizing again, I'm happy that my brother's in New York for the next week or so, and I like the folks in the department and the union i've met thus far, and I'm excited, if a bit overwhelmed and decisive about trying to figure out an intellectual project for the next few years.

Back to A Nation Under Our Feet.