Filed under: Book, China, Culture Clash, Industrial Design, Law school, Library, New College, Wonder
My walk this evening landed me in the main library. Understand, I’ve only spent time an appreciable amount of time in four college libraries: The New College Library, a two story behemoth sports a whopping 267,000 volumes; the music library at the University of Florida, where I spent a couple of days reading and photocopying Scarlatti scores; Zhejiang Normal University library, which was an incredible building that opened while was teaching in China and featured mostly books in Chinese and about 40 copies of MacBeth and Jurassic Park (somehow I don’t believe the homepage when it says they have 226,890,000 books); and most recently the Emory Law School library, which has the best natural light in town, but is mostly useless for browsing (those ALRs and regional reporters just don’t do it for me). That’s it. So imagine my surprise when I ended up in the stacks at the Robert W. Woodruff library (there wasn’t any difference between The Stacks and the rest of the library at new college). Ten stories of wall to wall books. They have so many books the shelves are on tracks so they can move together and fit more shelves in each room. These tracks work with the push of a button, which freaked me out when I pushed on for fun and then realized that I hadn’t checked to make sure no one would be crushed to death (the law library has movable shelves, but ours are manual, with big wheels a the ends each shelving system). There are over 3,000,000 books in the library. And that’s not including the eight other libraries on campus.
The part of the library where people hang out and do work (the computers have giant 20-some-odd inch screens!) is an amazing marble building. Students are everywhere studying late into the night (open 24 hours!) and goofing around. It reminded me of an episode in the first season of Felicity where they’re staying up late studying for finals in the library and everyone keeps shushing them (which my friend does at the law library when people are being loud; it’s awesome). There’s a wonderful reading room with big leather chairs and dark oak desks. But the stacks are in a monstrous building from what I guess is the ’70s. The ceilings are low and the light isn’t good. It’s incredibly claustrophobic, but that’s OK because it’s miles of books. More books that you knew existed. I originally wanted to look at some Peanuts comics, but found myself quickly lost and roaming from Virgil to Erasmus to books in German and French and Sanskrit (he says as though he’d know what Sanskrit looks like). I even got suck on an elevator trying to get up to the ninth floor to find some books on the philosophy of art (I eventually made it and got two for winter break). It was quite an adventure. This library is so high tech I was able to do a self-checkout for my books. It was like shopping at Smith’s again (I’ve been missing New Mexico lately, but more on that some other time).
To complete my suspiciously authentic university experience I went to one of the dining halls (yup, they have more than one, including a cafe in the library that’s open 24 hours) to get french fries at 10:30 at night. When I was an undergrad, if you wanted to eat after 9:00 (when the C-Store closed) you had to get in a car and drive to Perkins (oh, Perkins who I miss you and your pot roast at 2:00 AM on a Tuesday). Then I walked around the quad and breathed in the night air.
I might have written about this before and I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself.
I can’t stand hearing about “evil.” Osama bin Laden is evil. The virginia Tech shooter is evil. Doctors who perform abortions are evil. What does evil even mean? Doesn’t it mean amoral without reason? It means even more than that. Horrible without reason. Horrible to be horrible. The Virginia Tech guy wasn’t disturbed or upset, he was evil. Terrorists do the things they do because they’re evil and evil people hurt others. What a silly, reductionist way of thinking about the world. It’s not even silly, it’s destructive.
The problem is that outside of action movies “evil” is at best nonsense. It doesn’t describe anything. Evil is just something that evil people are. Evil people do evil things. You define the word by using the word. It’s nonsense. This is all well and good for comic books, but in the real world it moves past benign nonsense and becomes dangerous.
When we call the Virginia Tech shooter and bin Ladin evil we get nowhere. We pass them off as some sort of inscrutable enemy. There’s nothing to understand beyond their evil and therefore there’s nothing to do but fight them and hate them. We need not ask why the US has a higher rate of mass shooting than other nations because the Virginia Tech shooter is evil. We only ask whether we should have recognized his evil, not whether there’s something we might change about our society. We don’t need to try and fix Iraq, we just need to stop the evil insurgents and sectarian militias.
What a stupid way to think about the world. We’re too lazy and afraid of what we might uncover if we try and understand the world, so we just give things empty labels and call it a day.
Last night, Beki and I went to Camel Rock casino to see Pancho Sanchez. We arrived and stood in line just inside the casino and just outside of the slot machines. I hadn’t bee inside of a casino since I was nineteen and my cousin and I walked over the Niagara river to check out the Canadian casino in Niagara falls. In that visit I lost a couple dollars at black jack while Sky won enough to buy us both pizza and beer. I haven’t felt a desire to go back to a casino and as I walked amongst the slot machines on my way to the men’s room, the smell of stale cigarettes starting to cling to my jacket, I remarked that slot machines don’t look fun. Then, as I was trying to dry the toilet seat enough to allow me to apply the thin layer of protective paper, I realized that slot machines are supposed to be fun. They’re supposed to be addictive. I walked back through the slots to get back in line, counting the number of women playing alone and smoking who looked over sixty. I got eighteen, but I must say that the neon and flashing lights made counting difficult.
Twenty minutes later Beki and I had finished our discussion about whether a black Don Imus would or should have been put under as much pressure as the white Don Imus. The line began moving and we filed into a large room that’s more suited to conferences than concerts. The room was filled with chairs and we took our seats about six rows from the stage. Even though we’re in New Mexico seeing a latin jazz band in a pueblo, most everyone in the audience was between forty-five and sixty and white. There were big hairdos galore and I knew I was in for an evening of middle-aged dancing and awkward cat calls.
To my left was Beki; to my right was and empty chair. This chair was promptly filled with a woman in her early forties, but only after she sat on me. She tried to readjust herself, but sat on me again. She never actually acknowledged that she sat on me, she just kept shifting herself as though she just couldn’t get comfortable. I never received an apology.
Like all non-classical music performances this one did not start on time. Beki and I played some word games and then I turned my attention toward eavesdropping. The partner of the mad sitter was a middle-aged man (I probably don’t need this qualifier any more) who was telling stories about what sounds like a gambling addiction. He talked about the different casinos in Vegas and which are best and which are most expensive. He told stories of going back to his room to get more money from the safe and walking in on his parents becoming intimate. He talked of making friends with women so gorgeous they have to wear wigs to disguise themselves (I’d like to think they were actually men in drag). The highlight of his storytelling was the one about taking his parents and girlfriend to Vegas on holiday.
Our hero got great orchestra seats for Siegfried and Roy because he was having an affair with one of the dancers in the show. He takes his parents and girlfriend to the show and his father turns to him midway and says that one of the dancers is giving him the eye. Joking, father tells son that he should invite this beautiful woman to dinner. Little does the father know that this dancer is the person that got them the great seats and has already been intimate with the son. The story ends with the girlfriend splitting her dress trying to climb on stage after being selected as a volunteer. It is unclear whether or not they are still together.
Eventually Sanchez and his band took the stage. The band was Pancho on vocals and bongo, a trumpet player, a sax player, a trombone player, a drummer, a pianist, a percussionist, and a bassist. The bassist had an electric stand-up, something I’d never seen before. The band plays pretty straight forward, but excellent, latin jazz. They’re very tight and have great energy. The trumpet and trombone players were particularly good. Pancho had at least one inspired solo.
I’m always conflicted when I see music like this. On the one hand I want to just listen to the music, but on the other hand I feel an obligation to dance. This is, after all, dance music. Isn’t moving your body crucial to understanding and experiencing this kind of music? It seems especially necessary to dance when you’re in public. But when I dance I often miss lots of the music. I find myself focussing more on the dance rhythms than the solos and I don’t have as nice a listening experience. I made a compromise. I’d listen just listen and tap my foot for a while and when everyone else got up to dance I’d get up too. There were, of course, some folks who danced from song one. The aisles and wings were littered with women in bad jeans and men in bad shirts shaking their butts. These folks are a godsend because they are the one giving off the best energy to rest of the crowd and the band. They’re also great to watch.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t a salsa that eventually go everyone up, but Pancho abandoning his bongos for the mike and belting out a straight-ahead Stax sounding Memphis horns tune. The slightly foreign rhythms of latin dance music were abandoned and the red-blooded Americans of the audience got up to get down. Unfortunately, this was the next to last song and Sanchez killed the energy by not going right into another piece, but instead giving a very long introduction of everyone in the band. Everyone sat down for the introductions and it was only with great reluctance that they got back up for closing number.
