The Lives of Others

This semester has got to be one of the busiest on record. It's up there with my junior year in high school. Like that year, there are these labor-intensive classes alongside personal events - this time, it's this steady stream of visitors, which I am really happy about, but my attempts at planning and getting ahead are somewhat foolish in the face of it. That's why sometimes I just have to halt everything and spend evenings like I did last night. I went to a movie alone, which is something I like but haven't done in a long time. The movie was Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), and while it was sort of depressing (could a movie about the Stasi be upbeat?), it was very good. (My friend Katelyn made the excellent recommendation.) I waited for the last T; Coolidge Corner was very quiet, and I didn't have to bother anyone with my sillinesses.

Anyway. We went on a real live field trip for archives class the other night, to the Massachusetts Historical Society. We got to see the conservation lab, the stacks, the gorgeous rooms upstairs. They just finished digitizing the fifty-one volumes of diaries that John Quincy Adams kept during his life. Apparently, he had several going at once: a line-a-day, a longer one, and one somewhere in the middle. I have to say -- and I know I'm prejudiced because I worked there, and I'm overly romantic/idealistic about the place -- but the Newberry really is my favorite library. It's beautiful, and I love the collections, and their policies are most in line with my fledgling ideas on access, copyright, etc. Or maybe they influenced me in the first place; it's hard to tell.

Okay, one more thing, and that's another passage from Elizabeth Bishop's letters, which has a lot of pages dog-eared in it by now. They're so funny. And maybe other people don't find her stories as amusing as I do, but I'll post them anyway. This one's from when she was living in Brazil, in a house she and Lota (her "companion") were constantly renovating.

"I just locked myself in the studio toilet. Shrieks & screams finally brought Sebastiao, Joao, and Albertinho to my rescue. They have been handing all the screwdrivers in the house through a slit in the shutter to me and I have been taking the door off its hinges, very clumsily. Lota was off helping Mary build her new house -- she arrived just as the door gave way at last. I was imprisoned exactly one hour and everyone had an awfully good time."
-letter to Lloyd Frankenberg, 22 March 1960, from One Art: Elizabeth Bishop Letters, ed. Robert Giroux. New York: The Noonday Press, 1995.

Well. I have to go read about ways of determining the aboutness of an item. I love cataloging class, with a passion, and I'm not ashamed to say it.