All the Blog Entries I Meant to Write, Part One

I'd intended to end the whole research gig with a trip to the library. Not quite the first library for my postsecondary schooling - that was in Camrose, AB. The old stacks at Augustana were classically college: lots of titles, lots of old titles that hadn't been read to pieces but hadn't been deaccessioned, lots of old carpet with old stains, lots of odd corners, and lots of old wooden tables. It was great fun for the papers I was doing in first year, but I'm sure I'd be harder on myself than my profs were on me. (Well, one was critical of one paper that rested too heavily on one source... that took a bit of adjustment.) Still, it had a pine outside the front windows that caught the snow, and I loved it. When compared to the library at DeVry - which I looked at my postsecondary tour in grade 12, and discounted when I realized that there were probably only 1/20 of the titles that my high school library had featured - Augustana had been heavenly.

And it's not like the library I was going to could even claim to be the site I'd spent the most time in study, since Weldon at UWO easily outstrips the competition for time spent in research and/or study. Granted, I did have a study there, and close to a good friend who was going through the same comps process, and a tonne of books to read... but the sheer volume (noise, not titles) in that library, especially on the first few floors, was simply stupifying. And I simply don't have the funds to make a ritualistic flight to London; at least, not at this juncture.

No, the return - one final return, in all that cliched effect - would be to the Koerner library at UBC. Koerner was one of the first buildings I heard critiqued in a scholarly fashion - something about part Seawall, part False Creek condo, part postmodern cathedral, and only partly complete (which is still the case, if I recall properly) - and I got to spend a lot of time there, though mostly in the basement. It had a lot of great features - a spiral slide for a book return, a big concrete courtyard suitable for APEC protester road hockey games in the fall of 1997 (which I didn't participate in), and nice big carrels where I could immerse myself in periodicals, monographs, readings, or comic books (I distinctly remember reading the end of the "Onslaught" special there). And its elevators still have that oiled machinery odor of high school shop class.

But it's not even true to say that this was the official ending. After all, there was an even more convenient option for book returns - UBC Okanagan's library, just down the valley in Kelowna. And I had gone there to return books... and came back with one. It's hard to go cold turkey, I suppose, and something about Barbara Ehrenreich's Long March, Short Spring called out for further reading. So 27 books were returned in one fell swoop, and one remained. The plan was simple - read that book, and return it to Koerner when I visited Vancouver at the end of the month.

Ah, but then there's distractions from reading the book, other thoughts to work with, other things to read... and so I was scrambling to read it the night before I returned it.

It's not a bad book - not as scholarly as I'd hoped, entirely focused on 1968, but still interesting on the whole. Some of the German and Italian bits were decent, though the real revelation was in the midst of the chapter on Columbia. While describing the occupation of the Dean's office - with the Dean kept as a virtual hostage, if memory serves - Ehrenreich notes that a group of students spent their time playing "Diplomacy" around the clock.

It's one of those startling bits that just leap off the page and insist that you turn to the source material and see who these game-minded activists were. Again, nothing much there other than a note on sources. What really struck me was the range of possibilities for this little fact: for the first time in ages, I thought "This could be an excellent short story... or play!"

So the book didn't get returned. The official research is done and over, regardless, but the possibilities for that historical detail remain... and I'd like to play a little.