Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2009-04-07 07:17 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2009-04-07 07:17 pm
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HOMG *flail*
So that "The Year 1830" French course I'm taking? In the past few weeks it hasn't been directly engaging my nerd-squee too much, as we'd been covering Balzac and Stendhal and the invasion of Algeria and I have discovered that to get automatic A's on essays in this class all I have to do is claim it's all about Napoleon. HOWEVER, the biggest unit in the class (in terms of importance; Stendhal was probably the longest, fie) is the Revolution of 1830, and we have been ordered to go forth and find a primary-source account of the revolution to talk/write about. We were given a list, but it did not include Dumas père's 100+ page account of the three days he spent running around with a gun building barricades. So I got the instructor's permission and went to hunt down said account in the library.
You guys... I have only been in the French history section of the library. I didn't even know where the French lit section was until today. This is probably a good thing since if I had stumbled upon it on a day when I had less to do, I probably would've sat around there gawping until I hyperventilated and passed out. As it was, I grabbed volume 6 of Dumas' memoirs, yielded to temptation and checked out a copy of George Sand's Horace too, and only spent about ten minutes drooling over the fifteen-foot length of floor-to-ceiling bookshelf packed with every work by Victor Hugo one could possibly conceive of. We're not just talking complete works in the original (including like sixteen different editions of Hernani), we're talking about a huge and ancient copy of Les Misères (!!!!) that was too heavy for me to get it off the top shelf and a gorgeous 19th-century German translation of LM printed entirely in blackletter. It makes me SO HAPPY.
...also, the last time this volume of Dumas' memoirs was checked out was in 1938. (The first time appears to be 1914.) This is both sad and kind of amusing. The girl at the circ desk had to fiddle around with both books for a few minutes because both of them were too old to be in the computer.
Also also, unless someone else got there first I will be doing my final project in Theory of Computer Science on the workings and aborted history of the analytical engine. If someone steals my topic, the backup is Enigma machines, but... come on, what is more awesome than Victorian cog-driven computers? Oh yeah, that's right, Victorian cog-driven computers programmed by Lord Byron's daughter.
You guys... I have only been in the French history section of the library. I didn't even know where the French lit section was until today. This is probably a good thing since if I had stumbled upon it on a day when I had less to do, I probably would've sat around there gawping until I hyperventilated and passed out. As it was, I grabbed volume 6 of Dumas' memoirs, yielded to temptation and checked out a copy of George Sand's Horace too, and only spent about ten minutes drooling over the fifteen-foot length of floor-to-ceiling bookshelf packed with every work by Victor Hugo one could possibly conceive of. We're not just talking complete works in the original (including like sixteen different editions of Hernani), we're talking about a huge and ancient copy of Les Misères (!!!!) that was too heavy for me to get it off the top shelf and a gorgeous 19th-century German translation of LM printed entirely in blackletter. It makes me SO HAPPY.
...also, the last time this volume of Dumas' memoirs was checked out was in 1938. (The first time appears to be 1914.) This is both sad and kind of amusing. The girl at the circ desk had to fiddle around with both books for a few minutes because both of them were too old to be in the computer.
Also also, unless someone else got there first I will be doing my final project in Theory of Computer Science on the workings and aborted history of the analytical engine. If someone steals my topic, the backup is Enigma machines, but... come on, what is more awesome than Victorian cog-driven computers? Oh yeah, that's right, Victorian cog-driven computers programmed by Lord Byron's daughter.
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I keep doing the same thing. I think I've covered all the nerdy exciting things I could possibly imagine in the library and then I find something else. I only just came across the complete correspondence of Rousseau (which takes up two shelves, and which I ache to sit down and read in its entirety anyway.) My most recent discovery has been the shelf of 'history of sodomy' books, which I have not yet looked into much, except for one on homosexuality in early modern France... hurrah, now I can justify my fandom with srs research of a srs nature.
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