Transgressive

Another day at the library, because they were repaving our street today, and also demolishing the post office adjacent to Eastgate World Headquarters in Watertown, which was likely to be distracting.

At Swarthmore, we fantasized about how nice it would be to be able to just read, without all the classes and exams, papers and deadlines. That’s what these library days are like: ten hours of reading. History of linguistics? Check! Half of a recent book on how ancient libraries worked? Check! Chasing down the starting reference on the Tower of Babel? Well, that was a bit tricky.

I remember my Uncle Mike, an erudite fellow, showing us all his just-arrived first volume of the Anchor Bible. This edition of Genesis costs $50 from Amazon. What I need is the commentary on I.11 — the Tower of Babel. Naturally, Widener has it! Widener has everything. Except it has Malachi and Kings, but not Genesis. No worries: there’s a copy in Lamont! So I go over to Lamont, the undergraduate library. But my alumni ID doesn’t get me in to Lamont. I can order the book to be sent over to Widener, but that seems sort of a stretch. So I go back and find that the book is available electronically. But I have to read ebooks in the Hall Of Shame, the room that used to be the card catalog. Anyway, I grabbed the electronic copy; E. A. Speiser didn’t have much to say, but I checked the box.

Again, the reading rooms were quite busy, especially in the late afternoon. That’s new.

(Most of this is for the next book, but the history of linguistics, and some of the Mesopotamian stuff, is for Thinking With Tinderbox, which I promise is almost finished.)