Long Library days

I spent quite a while reading in the library today. Or so I would like to tell myself. I have had a love/hate relationship with the libraries here. The famous Bodleian library is off limits to the Gordon students during most of the day because of our affiliate student status. Our hours begin around dinnertime. During the past couple of weeks, many of us occupied our days in the Faculty Libraries (faculty being the British term for Department). I technically did not have access to it either, but they did not have anyone checking the doors, and I did not see anything saying I could not just go in and read without trying to check books out. Then the directors of the program found out and decided to damn our souls to the everlasting fires of hell for our unforgivable sin of not respecting bureaucracy. Today they told us that they had not realized that the rules had changed, and that "oh wait," we could indeed use those libraries as reference libraries. Go figure.

So anyway, today I spent my day in the formerly forbidden English Library. It did not go well though. At one point I realized that I had just gone through 5 pages of "The Ideology of Aestheticism" (at a painstakingly slow pace) only to realize that I had not understood a single thing that the author was trying to say. In one ear and out the other... or eyes, I guess. It didn’t help that the paragraphs I did try to pay attention to were filled with the names of obscure 18th century German thinkers that I didn’t understand anyway.

After bashing my head between two tomes of the Oxford English Dictionary to make sure I was still alive, I went for a much needed bathroom break. The bathrooms here are the most telling thing about Oxford. Nowhere else will you find bathroom graffiti quite like this one. Oh don’t get me wrong, there are still the typical comments about how gay such and such a person is; but here they target characters in Old English literature or a Shakespearean play. So an apparently inane comment like "Troilus is gay!" (Troilus being from "Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde") could very possibly lead into a series of responses denying or affirming this very fact with dissertation-long explanations. Oh, and if you use improper grammar then it will invariably be corrected by someone else later on. No joke.

Now I sit here, back at home. Reading some guy's dissertation online, trying to coax my brain into taking in more information and rewarding it with a little harmless output (in other words, this blog) after so much harmful input.