Currently Listening Let It Die By Feist see related

Surrealism in the SciLi

I write to you from the mezzanine of the Sciences Library at Brown University. I have a fifteen-page paper to write comparing European Surrealism and the Bauhaus and know that I cannot be productive in my own room where I’m sorely tempted to curl up and sleep into next week, leaving Breton and his cronies lazy-eyed in the pages of my textbook. There is a white noise about me: the dull drone of the building’s massive climate control system, soft and fast typing from the computer, pages turning, mouths chewing on pens, uneasy shifting in leather comfy chairs, whispered discussions about Freud and Lacan, suppressed giggling and the accompanying shoulder-shakes and quiet heaves, electric buzzing from the rows and rows of overhead fluorescent lighting, and a few coughs and sniffles. We are here together until two a.m. when we will be kicked out and forced to make our way to one of the few twenty four-hour study lounges or blow off our myriad tasks in favor of sleep and the dreams that may come.

The person next to me has brown hair and a cowlick that he pets incessantly while he switches back and forth between a lab report on bacteria and checking his e-mail. He snickers to himself every now and then, rereading what I imagine is a terrifically funny correspondence with someone close to him. Perhaps there is a link to a funny online comic strip or they are writing to him with a personal anecdote involving an extraordinarily large mug of coffee that may or may not have spilled all over his or her pants in front of a judgmental, humorless audience. If they have a running joke about spilling coffee on pants in public, I fancy myself a part of it, staring at my own inordinately big cup of coffee moving ever closer to the dangerous edge of the desk at which I sit. If it were to spill, I would hope he would laugh at me and write an e-mail back to his e-pal about the incident. I will be famous: the girl with the green sweatshirt and the red scarf who spilled coffee on herself and cried with laughter pains. Maybe his friend is in another library on campus or across the country and they will laugh, too, as they write their own fifteen-page paper in black and white.

Everywhere people are staring at texts, official/academic and otherwise. A furtive glance around the room at the many books people stare into gives me a veritable who’s-who and what’s-what list of academia. Medical microbiology meets Marcel Proust. I want a little secretary’s bell to tap and ding in an attempt at University Library Speed Dating. I want Mister Proust Reader to get up and sit next to Miss Medical Microbiology and strike up a conversation along the lines of A Remembrance of T-Cells Past. He is wearing argyle socks and I think she will appreciate how they complement her polka-dot blouse. She does not know it yet; she is staring at her book, frantically taking notes and highlighting. He does now know it yet; he is staring at his book, and thinking big thoughts about the nature of life and the texture of memory. They are fated on this night to meet and make friends and move on to the kind of love that bridges the sciences with the humanities. They do know it yet, but I do.

I had a poetry assignment some years ago. In a class of twelve, we were instructed to bring in a variety of texts: books, magazines, letters, advertisement flyers, coffee cups, napkins, mouse pads. We came into the workshop and traded our materials, highlighting golden phrases and then writing them on the board. What we came up with was a poem consisting of random juxtapositions of images and word combinations that proved fruitful for our own writing. I copied the poem from the board down and framed it. My favorite line was “Let Starbucks shine a light on what dreams may come into your purple bedroom of sighs and let Hugh, guided by voices, drink a latte in search of online help and updates about computing.” It made no sense and I was dazzled. After my bell signals speed dating, I want to stand up from my cubicle and clap my hands, shouting, “Oy! Let’s play musical books!” We’ll pass our books from person to person until we hold in our hands something so utterly unfamiliar to us that everything sounds like poetry from Mars. We’ll underline our golden phrases, write them on the blackboard, tickle ourselves with the cleverness of the random. We’ll arrive at some insight thrown together by the words on the back of an art history textbook and Shakespeare, and from the corner of the room, Mister Proust and Miss Microbiology will smile out of their eyes at each other, holding hands under the desk.  And I will start my paper.