Letter from Cambridge |
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Athletics
On the way to the library one afternoon a couple Saturdays ago, I got sidetracked. There is a university sports field just off my commute bike path, and a hue and cry aroused my attention. The complex has a field hockey “pitch,” as it is called, where I would sometimes watch some matches in winter, the game itself as quick as hockey or lacrosse. Also in the complex are track and field facilities ("athletics" here) and I would sometimes note practice activities such as hurdles or shot put as I rolled into town. Circling around to investigate today’s noise I spied a rare TVR sports car in the parking lot (not a common sight, anywhere) and then a metallic aquamarine Ferrari. What was going on?
It was not only a full blown track meet, but one pitting Cambridge against its ever virulent and treacherous rival Oxford! This I had to see, my library work could wait half an hour, I reckoned. Attendance was not spectacular but made up for its size in noise and hearty patrician cheering. The next event appeared to be some qualifying 100 meter dashes for the women, and my goodness did they thunder down the track in explosive fury. 12.09 seconds for the winner, whose great rippling legs looked like they could have pushed a locomotive. Although wind aided ("4.6 meters a second" intoned the BBC in-training announcer) this was an impressive time. In fact the wind was nasty enough it kept blowing the bar off the high jump rig.
Discus and pole vaulting were happening at the far end of the field, but in close view was the high jump. How do these guys do it? How do you leap higher than you are tall? Amazing. The Oxford athletes were in their dark OUP blue shorts and singlets, their parents and cheering section chromatically aligned in blue blazers and grey slacks on the sidelines. Cambridge appeared to be beating the stuffing out of Oxford and groups of ten year old kids were yelling, "Go Cambridge!" and waving little flags at every sprint.
Lean, handsome & very dashing, the runners in particular were stunning as they blasted around the corners on the longer races. I had all I could do to keep the theme music from "Chariots of fire" out of my head, and was half disappointed when they didn't place half-filled champagne glasses on top of the hurdles for that competition.
I heard one American accent in a group of bystanders, and of course swiveled my head around. Not that there is anything wrong, per se, with an American accent, it just stands out in town as an oddity and amusement. And the American sound does seem more than a bit provincial, too, I suppose. Many times, sometimes twice a week, someone will hear me ask for some asparagus at the market and go "So, where are you from?" Many more are likely too polite to ask, although they are curious. I hear American accents far less in town than spoken Russian, or French.
The rain clouds were dark and ominous in the distance and approaching with some urgency, so I followed my higher moral tuggings to the library with some regret.
Library Items
The University Library continues to retain its bewilderment factor all the way through my stay. The grand array of valuable documents secreted away inside have various levels of protection and regulations which you, the visiting researcher, must decipher and outwit at every step. No grand unified set of rules, printed or otherwise publicized, appear to exist to help you. Although there are many acres of open stacks, where you can browse for books on the shelves, much of the material must be paged. For the reading room you fill out a slip and your items get delivered to a fetch shelf, relatively quickly (never had more than 30 minutes, although sometimes the signs say 45.) I used to be puzzled when things didn’t appear until I discovered a hidden box that had “rejects” in it. You could then look at your carefully filled out card that they had annotated to determine what went wrong with your request. (“in bindery” perhaps, or “a reference book [you dummy, I paraphrase], so look on the reading room shelves.” It turns out that if the catalog record has an “R” in front of the classmark ("call number" to Americans) that just means it is in the reading room on the shelf, no need to page the item. (Even though the catalog record itself says “page in reading room.") Okay, finally got that figured out.
Second level of control is the “West room” and this seems to be a miscellaneous collection which happens to include everything even remotely related to library practice, so I end up there a lot. Different form to fill out, but stuff gets paged, only this time instead of picking your request up at a group collection shelf, you have to beg at the librarian’s desk for the item, where it is handed over to you. This process too, you only find out by asking, but it is a different method than at the main reading room. The librarian gives you a quick glance to evaluate your felonious potential, but nothing compared to the further levels of scrutiny available elsewhere in the library.
Stage three is the Manuscript room, on a different floor. Yes, naturally a different form, but only pencils, no pens, are allowed in this highly controlled room. You go through a gate and are given the once-over from a batch of librarians and staff before you receive your material. Final level (for me at least, I suspect there is a Holy Grail room somewhere limited to Nobel laureates and the like) is the Rare Books room. Pencil only of course, controlled gate, different form. But here you wait until your item arrives, they check your ID carefully (I didn’t know I needed a different security clearance for this room and thus had to redo my ID, providing supporting documents and my university ID from SF State at an official's desk) and you sign for your item, getting a receipt after turning it back in.
The books themselves are naturally treated as divine objects and may not touch the desk but have to be propped up on book pillows or special lecterns. The staff to patron ratio is about 3-7. You feel several pairs of eyes on you every time you sneeze or fidget. But here, an “R” in front of the classmark does not mean the book is on the shelf, it has a different arrangement, as I discovered the hard way. Here the reference books begin with "B." Nowhere is any of this stuff written down, you have to figure it all out on your own. I would just get used to one level of operation and then the rules would shift on the next level up.
In visiting the college libraries I have had very uneven experiences. One day I had an appointment at Jesus College, where the old library dates from 1640. Beautiful building, wonderful folks who wheelbarrowed me up the stairs in some high tech contraption, answered my questions and let me paw through catalogs from about 1705 on. Second visit that same day was to Trinity College, whose librarian I had contacted back in the fall. Sure, bring your university ID and supporting letters she said then. Well, the tune changed completely when I mentioned a wheelchair. Sorry, the building is inaccessible, end of discussion. Trinity is a large and powerful college, wealthy with famous graduates, and have a Christopher Wren designed building from the late 1600s. Then the librarian basically handed me off to another colleague, and after finally setting up an appointment stopped answering my emails altogether. The colleague I did meet was erudite and knowledgeable (a well published bibliographer with an international reputation) but when I asked about seeing some of their documents I had found in my searches, I was given firm discouragement.
“Oh, Pip (Gaskell, a former librarian at Trinity) has already been through all that. Nothing new there, all been mined already.”
I had been lead to think that getting a look at some items in the archive, even though I couldn’t actually enter the building, wouldn’t be a trouble.
The implication was that there was nothing little old me was going to find that hadn’t been examined by far smarter people, much earlier.
The message was clear and I tried half-heartedly
to find my way around into the documents by the back door. No luck. I was
taken out of my game enough that I departed from my list of specific
questions and just tossed up general queries, which he politely but not
all that helpfully responded to.
Stung, I went away in quiet rage, dismissed as a lightweight. It
reminded me of my interview at Stanford University some *# years ago. It
was not about what Stanford was going to do for me as a student; it was
about what I was going to do to further Stanford’s reputation that
was important. Here Trinity saw no need to advance someone else's agenda
if it posed some trouble on their part and the rewards seemed minimal.
Needless to say, Trinity does not rank high on my college list
here.
I recalled some comments made by Rudolf Erich Raspe, who would later write Baron Munchausen, sometime around 1780 when visiting a continental library (important to note that he had been a librarian himself) when he was denied access to some books he wished to consult:
Librarians have very often happened to keep the most instructive manuscripts in darkness for various reasons; either in consequence of their partiality to particular sciences and opinions, or by an effect of their torpid ignorance, or of their more mischievous and shameful jealousy. I might tell some singular stories of that kind.... But would it cure the impotence or jealousy of these literary eunuchs?
The dense warm, unaerated product known on this
island as beer
Some of you are aware that I have a fondness for a pint at the end of the day (actually, come to think of it, the middle of the day is usually okay too), a vice or pleasure, depending on your point of view, passed on from my father.
England is a land with a long-standing admiration for beer, and I have appreciated their pub culture, which in the US is usually only matched by the various micro-breweries that have come along in the last twenty years to enliven the American scene. Even the smallest town without a post office will have a pub, where people come to drink and socialize. Kids are often welcome and even the rough-looking ones do not have the seedy, disreputable feel that is apt to be present in small town American bars.
Cambridge and surroundings have an astonishing number of pubs, over a hundred I believe, and unfortunately my funding does not extend long enough for me to get to all of them. In fact, many are tough to get into, period, and are apt to have one or more steps up from the street or narrow 17th century doors. So, as a scholarly service for those who come after me, who might appreciate some advance intelligence on accessibility, I have assembled a guide to a handful of Cambridge pubs, my Cambridge Pub Roll.
There is another, much more comprehensive work Cambridge Pubs available for other visitors, and there is a national organization devoted to regional ales, CAMRA which publishes a good guide to pubs and beer around England.
It turns out that CAMRA also hosts a Beer festival in Cambridge every year, and luckily for me, it occurred during my time here. A huge section of Jesus Green was roped off and given a large tent, and then stocked with some 160 varieties of regional English ale for sampling. This went on for five nights, so for almost a week I had my post-library entertainment planned out. I struggled to come up with a proper metaphor for the experience. “Kid in a candy store” seemed trite, and somehow inappropriate. “Heroin addict in a poppy field”? That didn’t seem to work either. I gave up on the metaphor business and just ended up trying all manner of unusual ales and chatting with local and American expatriate ale lovers.
In other matters...
On Sundays, with the library closed, I am apt to take long trots into the countryside, seeing neighboring towns and areas. The town of Grantchester a few miles to the south was a haunt for a number of Cambridge folks in the early 1900s: Wittenstein, Russell, Keyes, Forster, Woolf and others. A bike path takes you along the upriver stretches of the Cam, the fields at this time of year filled with cow parsley, whose white flowers make it look like a recent snowfall. Histon, to the north, is a Lake Woebegone place, a little town in Cambridgeshire that time forgot. I picked out my retirement cottage on the village green, where I will be able to creak out of bed in the morning and feed the ducks before breakfast. The cricket game in town was leisurely even by British standards, and when someone hit the ball into the surrounding forest, while one of the fielders went to look for it (only one ball?) everyone sat down for a break, with no apparent need to resume play anytime soon.
Lucy, Aaron and Heather will join me shortly, for the rest of the summer, which will be grand. My stay runs out in another six weeks and I cannot quite believe the time has gone so quickly. There is still a lot to do and it is clear that I will not do it all.
Good summer to you
Ned