Back to the Bodley

Although I'd procured my Reader's Ticket earlier in the week, thanks to being a graduate of this place even thirty years before, I hadn't had much in the way of time to go in and re-acquaint myself with what had been my home away from home when I was doing the scholarly thing all those years ago. Today I figured I would at the very least avail myself of the wifi connection for a while, even if I didn't really need to be in there for work-work. There's a bunch of stuff to get used to--newer chairs and tables, fluorescent lights, and gadzillions of Ethernet connections and power outlets. Back in my day... etc.

I went into the Radcliffe Camera and chatted a bit with the porter, and then found a seat and soaked it all in. There's a massive software upgrade that is taking a huge chunk out of July--no books can be recalled from the closed stacks (6 1/2 million out of the 7 million volumes I guess) from 8 to 18 July, but that's sort of no problem for me. After all, I have my hands full just getting my students familiar with the texts themselves, and I don't want to clutter things up too much with secondary stuff. From the look of it, about 1/4 of them might be able to handle critical articles, but the rest would be lost, and would be ventriloquizing somebody else instead of trying to grapple with the works themselves. I should also say that virtually everyone I've stopped to talk to has been incredibly nice, more so than I remember, if truth be told.

I need to get my students fixed up with tours, for sure, and they'll be very disappointed not to be able to take pictures of themselves in some of the most interesting places, like the Duke Humfreys Library, which is where a bunch of Hogwarts library scenes were filmed. The Schola Divinorum, just off the main entrance, is where the Hogwarts Infirmary scenes are based, and they do allow photography there. Pretty amazing ceiling, say I.

More surprising to me almost was a bizarre development, an underground passageway that has just opened, the links the Camera with the Old Library, a good 50 yards or more of airport-style tunnel under Radcliffe Square, and you pop out in the Old Library and go up the stairs to this amazing other part of the library. The smells aren't quite what I remember, and the feel of the place seems different--the bathrooms aren't ghastly and don't have grafitti in Latin and Greek in them--but I suppose all change isn't for the worse!

One feels a little like an impostor, though with this magic ticket and its mag-stripe I can beep myself past all the porters and go and sit and take it all in. The routine is still the same: if you take a book off the shelf, you put a slip in its place, with your name and the number of the seat you're in, and of course you can't remove the book from the library; if you want to photocopy something you have to sign a sheet, and if you want to photograph something you also have to deposit a sheet with one of the Authorities. Still, it's really a lot like studying in a museum, as I thought when I was first here as a 22-year-old on Semester Abroad. Damn, I really am an Old Boy.

So tomorrow I get really stuck into the paper-marking, which is the real work, and blasting through the fourth Harry Potter, which doesn't feel like real work, but I suppose it is.