Friday Night Musings
Dear British Library,
You know I love you. You make me blissfully happy and wonderfully sated with knowledge. I walk into your hallowed atrium and smile. The King's Library makes me drool. We know all this.
I've even gotten slightly used to the fact that, since your exhibition on sacred texts, I have to have my bag searched. Every single time I pass through the doors. You've now made that a permanent policy and I'm doing my best to comply and not sneer at the guards when they see me, recognise me, and then ask me for the umpteenth time if I have anything sharp in my bag. "No. Nothing." As usual. Except for that pencil I'm about to drive into my eye since I'm obviously a suffering academic and not a terrorist.
But now you have this new thing, beyond the clear plastic bags and no pens in the reading rooms and the forbidding of water or cough drops. Now you ask me to open up my laptop whenever I leave the reading room, because you somehow think I'm a smuggler.
And, having dealt with this for the past few months, I have something to confess...
I *AM* TRYING TO STEAL THE MAGNA CARTA BY STUFFING IT BETWEEN THE COMPUTER SCREEN AND THE KEYBOARD!!!!!!!
The jig is up. You got me. Good for you. Now can I please go and avoid the full body cavity search that I know you have planned for me next week sometime???
[I would like, however, at this moment, to thank the one lovely guard in Hum 2 who recognises me after three years of going to that reading room nearly every week. He sees me, smiles, gives the see-through bag a proper glance, and then lets me go and have a cup of tea without any extra hassle or having to sign away my first-born child to be a minion in the basement stacks. Bless you.]
I'll see you next week, BL. Until then.
Yours truly,
One of the 99.999% of British Library Card Holders who isn't a criminal
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
On another note, I found this today. All I can say is that I wish to God I had written it first:
Of all the father-obsessed films of the era, the most obsessive was a blockbuster that was Hollywood's first over attempt in years to valorize militarism and affirm its positive connection to masculinity. The George Lucas Star Wars trilogy attempts to construct a legitimating oedipal narrative out of the father-son schism by creating an epic model of the son who, after a journey toward an Eastern/New Age sort of wisdom, can confront the abandoning force of the Dark Father and succeed in the oedipal redemption of male subjectivity anyway -- all of which necessitates replacement by a second, fairy godfather of sorts who mystically appears to endow the son with the emblem of warriorhood/phallic authority, to which the originating father has lost moral entitlement.
A story that predicates the son's recovery of masculine authority on the militarism of joining the force to go fight for your galaxy, Star Wars reached through the screen in 1977 to offer an allegorised resolution to a silently building cultural crisis that was subconsciously being carried into every theatre by every American audience. In the Lucas allegory, Luke Skywalker's education into manhood can only begin when, directed by the surrogate good father, he turns away from the antiwar position in which he was raised and seizes his destiny to be a national warrior hero.
[Linda E. Boose, "Techno-Muscularity and the 'Boy Eternal': From the Quagmire to the Gulf" in Gendering War Talk, (eds.) Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)]
If this can be written about Luke Skywalker post-Vietnam, I so have a case for examining the masculinity of Leslie Howard, Ronald Colman and Basil Rathbone in the films of the inter-war period and the early years of WWII, not to mention the manliness of Harrison Ford roles at the end of the twentieth century.
Two words: Boo. Yah.
You know I love you. You make me blissfully happy and wonderfully sated with knowledge. I walk into your hallowed atrium and smile. The King's Library makes me drool. We know all this.
I've even gotten slightly used to the fact that, since your exhibition on sacred texts, I have to have my bag searched. Every single time I pass through the doors. You've now made that a permanent policy and I'm doing my best to comply and not sneer at the guards when they see me, recognise me, and then ask me for the umpteenth time if I have anything sharp in my bag. "No. Nothing." As usual. Except for that pencil I'm about to drive into my eye since I'm obviously a suffering academic and not a terrorist.
But now you have this new thing, beyond the clear plastic bags and no pens in the reading rooms and the forbidding of water or cough drops. Now you ask me to open up my laptop whenever I leave the reading room, because you somehow think I'm a smuggler.
And, having dealt with this for the past few months, I have something to confess...
I *AM* TRYING TO STEAL THE MAGNA CARTA BY STUFFING IT BETWEEN THE COMPUTER SCREEN AND THE KEYBOARD!!!!!!!
The jig is up. You got me. Good for you. Now can I please go and avoid the full body cavity search that I know you have planned for me next week sometime???
[I would like, however, at this moment, to thank the one lovely guard in Hum 2 who recognises me after three years of going to that reading room nearly every week. He sees me, smiles, gives the see-through bag a proper glance, and then lets me go and have a cup of tea without any extra hassle or having to sign away my first-born child to be a minion in the basement stacks. Bless you.]
I'll see you next week, BL. Until then.
Yours truly,
One of the 99.999% of British Library Card Holders who isn't a criminal
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
On another note, I found this today. All I can say is that I wish to God I had written it first:
Of all the father-obsessed films of the era, the most obsessive was a blockbuster that was Hollywood's first over attempt in years to valorize militarism and affirm its positive connection to masculinity. The George Lucas Star Wars trilogy attempts to construct a legitimating oedipal narrative out of the father-son schism by creating an epic model of the son who, after a journey toward an Eastern/New Age sort of wisdom, can confront the abandoning force of the Dark Father and succeed in the oedipal redemption of male subjectivity anyway -- all of which necessitates replacement by a second, fairy godfather of sorts who mystically appears to endow the son with the emblem of warriorhood/phallic authority, to which the originating father has lost moral entitlement.
A story that predicates the son's recovery of masculine authority on the militarism of joining the force to go fight for your galaxy, Star Wars reached through the screen in 1977 to offer an allegorised resolution to a silently building cultural crisis that was subconsciously being carried into every theatre by every American audience. In the Lucas allegory, Luke Skywalker's education into manhood can only begin when, directed by the surrogate good father, he turns away from the antiwar position in which he was raised and seizes his destiny to be a national warrior hero.
[Linda E. Boose, "Techno-Muscularity and the 'Boy Eternal': From the Quagmire to the Gulf" in Gendering War Talk, (eds.) Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)]
If this can be written about Luke Skywalker post-Vietnam, I so have a case for examining the masculinity of Leslie Howard, Ronald Colman and Basil Rathbone in the films of the inter-war period and the early years of WWII, not to mention the manliness of Harrison Ford roles at the end of the twentieth century.
Two words: Boo. Yah.