I haven’t been using any of the campus libraries near here to study very often.  In Madison, I was proud owner of one of the dim, windowless, claustrophobic, iron-caged study carrels in Memorial Library that strike such fear into the hearts of undergraduates, and — because it was so close to my office, quiet, had three shelves packed with books of various relevance to my dissertation proposal, was a floor away from the 2M South stacks where the rest of the books I needed were stored, and acted as a repellent to itinerant undergraduates — I used it quite often.  Here, though, I’d need to haul all of my materials to campus, my internet access is  limited due to my not having a campus account, and there’s a pretty restrictive food and beverage policy that all collude to make my trips pretty brief.  Besides, it makes me feel much cooler to drag parts of chapters to be edited to the neighborhood hipster coffee shop.

I made one of my quick trips by the local university library here last week while running some errands downtown.  I had to rifle through a book in the reference section, which — annoyingly, because it indexes materials that I access online — is only available in non-check-outable print format.  It was sometime after 4pm, which meant that it was almost completely dark outside, and, as I sat at one of the large tables surrounded by undergraduates and graduates working on their own papers and laptops, I had the strongest wave of sudden nostalgia for Madison that I’ve experienced since we moved almost a year and a half ago.  I miss this, I thought, looking at all of the students spread out around me, feeling a bit sad that there were no colleagues or former students to spot in the bunch, and no familiar expanse of Lake Mendota or Library Mall waiting outside the front door.  But the environment — tables, fluorescent lights, shelves of reference books — made me feel cozy at the same time.  Welcomed, like the dissertation that I slowly type away at was not merely some weird hobby, but tangentially connected to some larger, if obscure, academic enterprise.

So, yeah.  On my list for this winter: more time in the library.

And more overt nostalgia: the home page of Google Books has been advertising their archived collection of Life magazines for some time, so I can bring you The Good Life in Madison, Wisconsin, circa 1948 (ripped pages notwithstanding). Oddly, it still looks very much the same, so apparently my mind’s eye runs about 60 years behind the times.

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