![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Library
Nov. 14th, 2019 01:02 pmvia https://ift.tt/352duB8
salamanderinspace replied to your post “hot date”
i just made a goodreads to keep track of my library books! do you have one?
I don’t, I’ve never signed up to GoodReads because I tend to read in such irregular chunks. I have meant to sign up there for probably literally a decade and have never gotten around to it. IDK, I’m almost afraid to because I have this veneer of being a well-read person but in real life I honestly almost never read books, except for little spurts where I read near-constantly until I wear myself out, LOL.
wyomingnot
replied to your post
“hot date”
I miss going to the library and wandering around and tangenting around and coming home with a stack of all sorts of random stuff, plus one of the six books I went to get in the first place.
Oh man. I mean, I’ve done that a lot lately, but only with Farmkid, who is in charge of the choosing, and then I have to read a bunch of them to her, and sometimes we leave them and sometimes we take them home.
The Buffalo Central Library is… let’s just say… it’s not anyone’s romantic idea of what a library is like. It is the opposite of cozy. It is a huge open space, for the most part, and… Well, I should just insert a photo of the building here. Like several buildings in downtown Buffalo, it is a famous and textbook example of Brutalism, and it is… oh gosh. Here.
[image, not my own: a completely rectangular hunk of a building illuminated by a dramatic lens flare, viewed from across a marble plaza with a few little trees in it. the building is, I don’t know how else to describe it, just a sideways rectangle, with a lot of vertical lines where four-fifths of it is just vertical-framed windows.]
That’s the view from rather a distance. It is enormous, it is cavernous, and it is also somehow labyrinthine– it has three separate street-level entrances on three different floors because despite Buffalo being pancake-flat, terrain-wise, it is built up on one side so you come in on the third floor through a plaza, and. Anyway. Last night when I got there Dude and I had to text each other like five times because we both came in what we thought was the main entrance only mine was underground somehow?
It’s a huge space, and it was full of homeless people defrosting (which was wonderful, actually; each of them had ensconced themselves in different computer cubbies and were searching for things online and clearly the staff all knew them and they were all chill with each other), and … I mean, it was actually pretty lovely, the staff desk was all baby men (i mean like… soft-faced twenty-two year old boys in skinny jeans and wool vests and ties and glasses, they were so cute) who were so happy to help me and solicitous of one another, and so on.
But I didn’t do much browsing, under the harsh fluorescent lights, because it was just about closing time and the security guy was gently hustling each of the homeless people out of their stalls, and they were all gathering up their things with a well-practiced air, and collecting whatever they’d printed out to take with them, and it was time to move along.
The library page turned up with my closed stacks requests with one minute to spare; she was a young woman, cool and capable and completely unruffled, with her walkie-talkie to let the Baby Boy Librarians know what was going on, and I didn’t get a chance to thank her.
…
Here’s the weird thing about me and libraries: I assumed, my whole young life, that I was going to go to college and then go to grad school and become either an English professor or a librarian, and my junior year of undergrad, I looked briefly at my grad school options, looked at the employment market, looked at my grad-school-applying friends, looked at the grad students in my department, looked at my growing loan balance and my slim resume (I did work-study at libraries for two years in high school and two years at college until they cut my work-study funding and I had to go work in a gas station instead), and decided I was absolutely fucking not going to apply to grad school. But that part of myself never really caught on to what was happening, as I went out into the world, found I was unattractive even for low-level library jobs, and hared wildly off into the private sector. And so there’s a bit of me that occasionally wakes up slightly bewildered and notices that I am not, in fact, an academic or a librarian at all, and doesn’t really know what to do.
I still find myself absently identifying with academics. I am not one, I have not been a scholar in any sense since 2002, and it’s fine. But. I always assumed I would, and haven’t really figured out what I am, if not that.
salamanderinspace replied to your post “hot date”
i just made a goodreads to keep track of my library books! do you have one?
I don’t, I’ve never signed up to GoodReads because I tend to read in such irregular chunks. I have meant to sign up there for probably literally a decade and have never gotten around to it. IDK, I’m almost afraid to because I have this veneer of being a well-read person but in real life I honestly almost never read books, except for little spurts where I read near-constantly until I wear myself out, LOL.
wyomingnot
replied to your post
“hot date”
I miss going to the library and wandering around and tangenting around and coming home with a stack of all sorts of random stuff, plus one of the six books I went to get in the first place.
Oh man. I mean, I’ve done that a lot lately, but only with Farmkid, who is in charge of the choosing, and then I have to read a bunch of them to her, and sometimes we leave them and sometimes we take them home.
The Buffalo Central Library is… let’s just say… it’s not anyone’s romantic idea of what a library is like. It is the opposite of cozy. It is a huge open space, for the most part, and… Well, I should just insert a photo of the building here. Like several buildings in downtown Buffalo, it is a famous and textbook example of Brutalism, and it is… oh gosh. Here.
[image, not my own: a completely rectangular hunk of a building illuminated by a dramatic lens flare, viewed from across a marble plaza with a few little trees in it. the building is, I don’t know how else to describe it, just a sideways rectangle, with a lot of vertical lines where four-fifths of it is just vertical-framed windows.]
That’s the view from rather a distance. It is enormous, it is cavernous, and it is also somehow labyrinthine– it has three separate street-level entrances on three different floors because despite Buffalo being pancake-flat, terrain-wise, it is built up on one side so you come in on the third floor through a plaza, and. Anyway. Last night when I got there Dude and I had to text each other like five times because we both came in what we thought was the main entrance only mine was underground somehow?
It’s a huge space, and it was full of homeless people defrosting (which was wonderful, actually; each of them had ensconced themselves in different computer cubbies and were searching for things online and clearly the staff all knew them and they were all chill with each other), and … I mean, it was actually pretty lovely, the staff desk was all baby men (i mean like… soft-faced twenty-two year old boys in skinny jeans and wool vests and ties and glasses, they were so cute) who were so happy to help me and solicitous of one another, and so on.
But I didn’t do much browsing, under the harsh fluorescent lights, because it was just about closing time and the security guy was gently hustling each of the homeless people out of their stalls, and they were all gathering up their things with a well-practiced air, and collecting whatever they’d printed out to take with them, and it was time to move along.
The library page turned up with my closed stacks requests with one minute to spare; she was a young woman, cool and capable and completely unruffled, with her walkie-talkie to let the Baby Boy Librarians know what was going on, and I didn’t get a chance to thank her.
…
Here’s the weird thing about me and libraries: I assumed, my whole young life, that I was going to go to college and then go to grad school and become either an English professor or a librarian, and my junior year of undergrad, I looked briefly at my grad school options, looked at the employment market, looked at my grad-school-applying friends, looked at the grad students in my department, looked at my growing loan balance and my slim resume (I did work-study at libraries for two years in high school and two years at college until they cut my work-study funding and I had to go work in a gas station instead), and decided I was absolutely fucking not going to apply to grad school. But that part of myself never really caught on to what was happening, as I went out into the world, found I was unattractive even for low-level library jobs, and hared wildly off into the private sector. And so there’s a bit of me that occasionally wakes up slightly bewildered and notices that I am not, in fact, an academic or a librarian at all, and doesn’t really know what to do.
I still find myself absently identifying with academics. I am not one, I have not been a scholar in any sense since 2002, and it’s fine. But. I always assumed I would, and haven’t really figured out what I am, if not that.
