In which mouse sighs, content.

The application road has just come to an end, reader. And you may delight in never getting another of these posts, ever again.

Remember my huge enormous like totally embarrassing crush on the coolest kid in school?*

Well, reader, the coolest kid in school just asked me out on a date.

Scratch that. The coolest kid in school just asked me to fucking marry hir. I think ze’s the one, reader. I really think ze’s the one.









*Umm, I hereby rescind any tasteless jokes I may or may not have made comparing graduate education to sexual assault. However, coming from an anti-marriage queer, engagement is really only half a step up. Shall we think of it as a civil union, then? Perhaps a PACS? A friendly accord? Let’s go with friendly accord.

Relief.

Cue the Gloria of Bach’s B-minor, babies.

Your mouse has just got her first offer. From her second-and-very-nearly-first choice.

No more worrying. No more fretting. No more distraction from my beautiful current world.

Acceptance. Validation. And a fuckton of sweet sweet fellowship money.

(I think this anxiety is what’s been causing the blog hiatus — which we may now consider over.)

Exhilaration.

One of my other resolutions: remember to be exhilarated.

This week, reader, I don’t have to remind myself. Exhilaration abounds.

This time last week, I couldn’t see straight and couldn’t imagine it might be even remotely possible to re-start on a high note, to face the new term with the joy and energy with which I am accustomed to face these continual academic startings-over.

Lucky me.

From blank slate to three exciting projects, in the space of a week. The zygote has a midwife (who might die if he knew that term was being applied to him). Both courses have term paper topics, if tentatively (not even zygotes — amoebic little things, really, but feisty ones).

I’m returning to things I love (hello, medieval Wales!) with a fresh mind, and forging ahead into uncharted territories.

The wonderful (and, at less optimistic moments, terrifying) thing about being a student is that you can have three brand-new projects going, and you can take comfort in the knowledge that they are preliminary experiments rather than grand gestures.

This life? It thrills me to my bones.

Open letters

Dear NYPL,

You are not closing at all over the holidays. In this and in all other ways, you bless me by your very existence. I can’t wait to see you again — it has been far too long, my love. I know you’ve been seeing other readers. It’s okay. We said we’d take a break. I haven’t been the most faithful gal in the world, either. But the BL and I? We’re over*. I promise. I’m coming home, love.

Kisses,

Mouse

———————

Dear University of Otherstate,

You want to know who I am. You seem actually to care who I am. For this demonstration of your fundamental humanity, I thank you. For setting an example for how to make graduate admissions a mutually respectful process, I commend you. I sincerely hope we have an opportunity to work together soon. I look forward to hearing from you.

All best,

Mouse.

———————

Dear Zoë Wanamaker,

Marry me.

All my everything and more,

Mouse

———————

*For now.

In which mouse is falling inexplicably in love with pre-war criticism and edition

You will recall that this summer, in Utah of all places, I purchased J. E. Spingarn’s three-volume anthology of seventeenth-century “literary criticism” (cute, huh?), printed at Oxford’s Clarendon Press in 1908. It happened to be a first edition, in not-great shape by the book trade’s standards, which means excellent shape by my standards.

Last week, Brit Uni’s library sold off all its old slough, which means I acquired, among other beautiful things, the second volume of W. P. Ker’s edition of Dryden’s essays (Clarendon, 1900 — another first edition), as well as the first volume of G. Gregory Smith’s anthology of Elizabethan “critical essays” (also cute, Clarendon, 1904 — yep, first edition). Oh, and they were two quid each.

Three points make a collection, as far as I’m concerned.

So I set out to retrieve the other halves of both two-volume works. I secured the Dryden quickly and with no trouble (for slightly more than two quid…), but no one seems to be selling the Smith volumes independently of one another. Oh well, I thought, fun project.

By “fun project,” I mean “excuse to procrastinate.” Some people have Facebook or MySpace, others have more news sources than can possibly be healthy. I now have Abe Books. And a really strange little budding collection.

In conclusion, I never thought I’d say this, but I’ve been salivating over four full volumes of E. K. Chambers.

And other Unmentionables. Why, for example, do I have such a crush on Evelyn Simpson? I have such a crush on Evelyn Simpson.

More on the selection, edition, and criticism itself perhaps later, when I’m not blogging recklessly on no coffee. In the interim, take up a collection and buy me a present!

In which concludes for the nonce a short and beautiful chapter in the Life of Mouse

We turned out the lights and the books all seemed to sigh. My fingers, grimy from dusting and from counting out cash, found in the semi-darkness the dial of the air conditioner; with a more audible, more mechanical sigh, it extinguished itself. I opened the door and the bright, crispening air of a slow Sunday evening crept over us and over the books in the window. I glanced back at the glow from the bright office nightlight and dwelled on the border between the silence inside and the noise of the street. I thought a good-night to the books as I turned on my heel, let the door swoosh to a leisurely close, and turned my key in the lock.

Goodbye, then, to my fierce little bookshop.

I will miss it, and I will also be glad when I think of it there, beyond sight, tucked into its corner, tended by kind and generous spirits.

Nostalgia; forward momentum

This morning, the Conscientious Orientalist asked me a question about available fields of study in early modern literature. You know, “uh, what is it that you want to do?” I listed a few (history of the theatre, Reformation antics, “women’s history” or whatever, (proto-)colonialism, so on). Which led to me talking excitedly about maps and mapping and knowledge and nation-building. Which in turn led to me thinking happily about how much I like talking about those things. The CO is a decent enough sort, and a good enough friend, to listen with genuine interest to my pratter.

Just now, I was re-reading my journal from my senior year in the Petri Dish. I’ve been wishing I’d kept better track of my life in undergrad-thesis-land. I look back with nothing but the purest fondness on the experience, and I keep wishing I had a record of the process of coming to that fondness. I find that there is more recorded history of that time than I had thought there was. Many entries gab inanely about anxiety regarding the difficulty of this or that esoteric and probably trivial point. Some post-advisor-meeting entries read like they were written by a puppy who’d done her very best to please and, to her shock and glee, received a biscuit. Some rage about the abstruseness of Absolutely Everything To Do With The Academy. Some record humorous scholarly soundbytes. There’s much in the way of Stunning Revelations and Unanticipated Setbacks, Infatuations and Disenchantments. And an entry dated only “t- 40 hours” closes as follows: “happy, contented, excited, relaxed, on top of my shit, and generally thrilled. occasionally jumping up and down. bursting into laughter / wry grin. winking at myself.” It’s true. With less than two days to go before the deadline for the most ambitious piece of writing I’ve executed to date, I was utterly delighted, more delighted than I’d thought it was possible to be with work.

That delight as it came rushing back to me, along with the smell of a New England campus in early April and the feel and shape of the afternoon light on the third floor of Beloved Library, provided a tremendous and unexpected comfort. It was as though the girl who walked down the steps, swaggering a little in her cowboy boots through the midday throng and past the chapel and under the trees, cradling one hundred and three printed pages in triplicate like a babe in swaddling, had leapt out of her collegiate spring to smack me on the head and, laughing wildly, tell me to stop worrying and look! look! isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it beautiful?

It is. Or can be. Angle, context, perspective are everything. But something about that beauty, real or nostalgically perceived, is simply true.

I am leaving in a month to do a strange thing: enter a whole new, unexplored world and at the same time and by the same means return to an old, comfortable, familiar and beloved one. It’s the damnedest thing, but I keep forgetting to remember how spectacular, how exciting, how beautiful that prospect is.

I work in a Bookstore (and really, really love it), v. 5

I used to think that the ultimate, perhaps only, proper trope of the bookish life was a gleaming, wood-panelled, gold-lampshaded Victorian reading room, in which a slight young woman sits at a heavy antique table (on which she has irreverently kicked up her cowboy-booted feet) poring one by one through heavy, dust-smelling leather-bound volumes.

Reader, I stand corrected.

I grant that there is less palpable romance stitched into the bookish world of my duties at New Eden Books, that many of the volumes on our shelves range from the uninspiring to the flat-out revolting, and that the bottom-line commercialness of the whole enterprise can be on occasion despair-inducing. However.

You may have noticed that I am fascinated by the materiality of books. I mean this in the simplest, most spare of senses — there is something enormously satisfying about their clunky object-ness, about their corners digging into my arms, my belly, my breasts, as I haul them around, about the way they shed little paper-motes all over my jeans, the clean chemical smell of a fresh, unopened volume, the soft, dry sound they make as they settle in against each other when I array them on a shelf. Most of my days at NEB are shaped by the moving of books – shelving, arranging, displaying, re-arranging, tidying, fetching, replacing, adjusting, hunting down and catching-as-they-fall of books. This constant movement, and the attendant sense of the overwhelming materiality of these allegedly highly immaterial objects, is perhaps my favorite aspect of my work.

In some ways, selling books, making the commercial enterprise function as it should, entirely relies on developing a sense of a book’s object-ness, on learning to relate to books as material beings and learning how to coax out of this basic materiality a saleable product that is more than the sum of its parts.

To depart for a moment from the abstract: the other day I put myself in charge of fixing a problem section. We had moved Classics out of its weird hidey-hole behind the register into a new home befitting the stature of Silas Marner, Leo Bloom, and the Wife of Bath. The satisfaction of this move, from a commercial standpoint, derived mostly from the splendid loveliness of black spines and elegantly designed covers arranged as they should be, with room enough to show themselves off, get themselves adopted into new homes, and to grow. But what left me feeling immensely delighted was the quick efficiency with which Boss Lady and I had muscled new shelves into place, rapidly reshelved the hundred or so volumes that constitute the section, our fingers moving quickly to face out Tess or Joseph Conrad, our shoulders tensing as we reached to straighten Austen or bent to shuffle Wharton and Wordsworth. Books and bodies, discrete material beings, find a kind of interchange in these moments that I find intensely pleasurable.

So there Classics was, all arrayed, and now we had this gap on the side of the unit whose front side housed an amalgam of Reference and meta-books (reading and writing, books about books, miscellanies, a small smattering of theory, and so on). Cheerily tired, we left it for later. The next morning, I decided to make this small problem my own and fix it. I pulled out of Reference all the meta-books that didn’t belong there, arranged them newly by category, and replaced them on the ex-Classics shelves. I pulled Essays out from where they languished with Short Stories in the back, and nestled them in under Meta-Books. A lovely complete Didion found a home displayed atop the unit alongside an illustrated Walden and Maira Kalman’s delightful reinvention of Strunk and White. Chomsky on language got a faceout, as did Anne Lamott’s beautiful treatise of advice to writers. Back in the reference section, The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge spooned with Bartlett and propped up 1001 Books To Read Before You Die. Roget got arranged according to size, and a shelf was moved to accommodate world atlases that had previously slumbered on their backs.

This small project finished, I sat on the floor to admire it, and felt deeply connected to the humming life of our little store. We’ve since started selling a lot more reference books, and people stop more frequently to peruse the style guides. The simple gestures of connection between a bookseller and her books, the physical interaction between body and object, made meaningful by what those objects signify and the ideas it is their job to present, begin to translate into successful commerce. This rhythm reproduces itself on an hourly basis at New Eden Books, and I have come to find it deeply satisfying.