The Book as a World Rocker.

Today, in Chicago, I cannot find a single cloud in the sky. This would make the average person super excited. But me? It scares me a little. I have no idea why it scares me, but it does. At any rate, I will confess that I think that a cloudless sky is extraordinarily beautiful. Especially when the western sun swipes the side of an off-white brick high-rise against the sky, while crows circle the top of the building. That is what I see right now, when I look to the northeast, from my left window.

The past week has been intense here at the Newberry. I can already sense that I won't be writing here every two days, as I had planned. We handed in our second papers at noon today. Tomorrow, we will discuss the introduction and opening chapter of our third book! (Third book! And classes just started, really, last Tuesday.) It is nothing short of fantastic. The seminar that I'm taking is Community and Memory: Texts, Images, and Monuments. I will generally approach the seminar from the themes of Memory and Text, while being sure to dive into issues of Community, I suspect. I am being consumed by the awesomeness of the texts we are reading already.  I definitely appreciate how loaded words like "community," "text," and "memory" are these days. I thought that I appreciated them before, but now I see them in an entirely different light.

I start my job in Special Collections at the Newberry Library tomorrow. It is a closed-stacks library, but one of the perks of my job is being one the people that goes into the stacks (all five floors of them!) and handles the manuscripts, books, and maps that can date all the way back to the thirteenth century. The stacks look a bit like the Department (or Hall? I cannot remember.) of Mysteries in the Harry Potter movies. I am utterly amazed by what goes on in this research library. In the best of ways. For this program, we were able to take a look at different job descriptions and "interview" for those jobs. I am so happy that I am going to be working for special collections! I can't wait!

My project? I have a new development in that area, and after reading this section you will be the first to know besides the professor that I had to meet with today. We went to a presentation today on the "Book as Object" and it ROCKED MY WORLD. I had never thought very much about books as objects, and about the issues and decisions that go into the printing, publishing, and distributing of them. For the past few hours, that has been all I have been able to think about. I could not even force myself to take a nap because my brain would not turn off. That is the kind of learning that I love. But I also love to take naps, so I hope that I learn to control my thoughts. I will be working with slave narratives, and for the first time I will approach them from a history of print, or history of the book point of view, I think. I want to figure out who published slave narratives, and under what circumstances. What types of people were these publishers? What kinds of audiences might they attract? How much did this complicate what the slaves were able to write? Where slave narratives bound, and taken care of? And, if so, with how much detail? Did these publishers face any opposition? Did they stick to the manuscripts they were given? Or were there stipulations? Right now, I am full of questions, but this idea should develop more fully by Thursday. It actually *has* to develop by Thursday. We have to present three proposals to our professors this Thursday for feedback. We basically have to convince them that what we want to pursue is worthy. It should be interesting.