The University of the A.C.T. Windswept, dark and dangerous. Located on the very edge of the known universe.
I was late for the first lecture in Library and Information Management. The lecturer glared at me as I sat down on a plastic chair. The chair had its own way of expressing disapproval, but I’d rather not go into that in the way it went into me.
“Cataloguing and indexing.” intoned the lecturer. I didn’t understand a word. Clearly I’d missed something crucial. Librarianship was more difficult than I’d imagined.
“Mr Blogg …”
“Er, Ms. Iris, in fact.”
“Miss Blogg, please stand up and tell us what you know about cataloguing.”
I’d just sat down. I stood, shaking, and dropped my notebook and pencil.
“C-cataloguing – ”
“Please speak up!”
“C-cataloguing – is – classifying – er, books, er – in – ” The sweat dripped into my eyes. The lecturer’s mouth twisted. “- er – in order!” I sat down, triumphant.
“In what sort of order, Mr, er, Miss Blogg?”
Something about her snarl told me I should stand up again.
“Er – in order to find them.”
This weak attempt at humour didn’t pacify her. Her eyebrows met in the middle of her forehead as she leaned forward. It seems I’d sat down again. I levered myself up, heart thundering.
“Order – like, um – Dewey – um , Library of Congress …” Wasn’t this what we were supposed to be learning? I’d never set foot in the University of the A.C.T. before. My main interest was in literature, but I thought I’d like a cushy job as an L1 in the cataloguing section of the A.N.U. Library. Then I could buy that nice retreat in the country I’d always dreamt of.
She harrumphed, and I fell onto the pointier bits of the plastic chair.
As I retrieved my notebook (the pencil had gone for good), I listened to the other students disquisiting like old hands on the subject of Cataloguing. I’d never before encountered so many acronyms collected together in one place. It was, I imagined, like being at a meeting of all the bodies set up by the U.N. – WHO, UNCTAD, etc – except that these acronyms were more impenetrable, and quite often positively repellant, despite the occasional attempt to inject wit into them. There’d have been more point in inoculating the dead.
My clothing and demeanour didn’t please the lecturer either. I have for years cultivated the kind of androgynous ‘image’ that went down well with the poets and other cultural misfits I hang around with at A.N.U. Unfortunately this class was composed of people who looked very much like accountants. I won’t say there was any overt hostility, apart from the lecturer’s, but I felt uncomfortable, and not just because of the plastic chair. I crossed my legs and noticed her baleful eye run down my patterned leggings.
“Mr Bogg – ”
This was too much. I interposed my real name in a brave whisper, but she ignored it.
“Miss Bogg – what is your excuse for being so late?”
I mumbled something about having to park almost three kilometres away. This didn’t satisfy her at all.
“What I mean is that you missed the first lecture altogether.”
I was thunderstruck. Wasn’t this the first?
“Sorry.”
“And the second.” she added, and I did my best to shrink to the size of a smallish maggot on the torturing chair.
“And the third.” chirped up some guy at the back, but I’m sure that was a lie.
“It almost seems that you don’t have any interest in the subject.”
I wanted to say who could, but that wouldn’t have been politic. I wanted that cushy job, after all.
“Oh, yes – yes. I – find the subject of – er, cataloguing – scintillating, really I do.”
I grinned my most disarming grin. I may as well have grinned at a gargoyle.
There was laughter, but she silenced the class with a scowl.
She stood and boomed out, “Your first assignment is due tomorrow. Is anyone having trouble with the topic?”
Yes, me, I thought. I didn’t even know what it was. I tried to guess. Perhaps – ‘Compare and contrast the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress systems of classification’? No, too broad. ‘Explain the following acronyms to a library patron: BUM, POO, FART …’? She glared at me again and I made a show of scribbling in my notebook, trying my best not to giggle at my feeble private humour. ‘How to kill a librarianship lecturer with a plastic chair’, I wrote with my finger.
“Good. Now today we’ll move on.” She scrawled a word on the blackboard. I couldn’t read her writing, but everyone else apparently could. Much later I found that the word was ‘Exhaustivity’, but by that time the lecture was almost over, and even then I didn’t learn exactly what it meant. At this stage I had to guess at the direction the discussion was taking. No one actually mentioned the word, and I didn’t dare ask what it was. For all I knew it was the ineffable name of God, or possible something F-able.
“And so you would say, Mr Bogg, that a search strategy based on this approach would be more efficient than the one Mr Smith has been outlining?”
I quailed. Who was Mr Smith? Not the smartarse at the back? Yes, it was him. A smug look passed between them.
“I think so.” I replied confidently.
Smith launched into a diatribe which reduced me to the intellectual level of a damson fly. The lecturer was pleased. She sat down behind her desk and began shuffling with papers. Was it over? I checked my watch. I was dying for a cigarette and a cup of coffee. These people were healthy nonsmokers who probably lived on that ‘still’ springwater that comes in large plastic bottles and out of taps.
No, another hour to go.
Squirming, I made invisible notes as she droned on and on about various ‘concepts’ which meant no more to me than a recitation of the Mahabharata in Sanskrit.
“Indexing …” She introduced a new tack.
“We’ll do this in groups.” she announced gleefully. At least I knew what we were to do, though not how. She produced several copies of an exquisitely dreary library publication: we were to provide it with an index (though it already had one). I thought of prisoners of the Nazis or unemployed workers in the ‘30s who had to dig holes and fill them in again.
I looked in vain for a group to join. Everyone had formed themselves into groups of three, as ordered – I was supernumerary.
“Mr Smith, will you please take Mr Bogg under your wing – I know she’ll be a fourth, but – ”
And so much dead wood. Smith was at his smuggest. He waved me into his charmed circle, and I sat beside him, feeling like a hippie who’d fallen in amongst skinheads. The other two were ladies who had no liking at all for putative males (I was born intersexed) who wore stretch pants.
We argued futilely for a while, and wrote down ‘terms’ on scraps of computer print-out. It was like being in kindergarten again. I longed for a copy of Paradise Lost, but all we’d got was Cataloguing and Indexing Monthly. The others, particularly Smith, seemed to enjoy it no end.
Finally, someone mentioned ‘Exhaustivity’, and exhausted I made to pack up my notebook and leave.
“Miss Bogg, would you mind staying back for a moment? There is something I’d like to discuss with you.”
Smith hung around too, chatting to a fellow-genius about ‘Boolean operators’, ‘proximity indicators’, and the wonderful salary he made at the National Library.
I was reconsidering my position. A cottage at Captain’s Flat or Araluen wouldn’t cost that much. I could do it on my present paltry wage as a library clerk. Country livin’! I could smell it now. But the lecturer was approaching like a squall in the west, and my knees started wobbling, as if anticipating a kneecapping.
In full earshot of Smith and his entourage, she declared that my chances of becoming a librarian were nil, and that I could hardly get my first assignment done by tomorrow. I was studying part-time, and it was already 9 pm. I thought with horror of the walk back to my car, lost in a badly-lit University car-park, and saw my stretch-panted self running into a gang of bikies on the way. Smith’s adoring harem giggled pointedly. Smith was a big man, with a bushy beard and an akubra hat; I wasn’t about to tangle with anything like that – but if I’d been a tad more butch I would have punched his lights out.
The lecturer then did something that terrified me, so that I was tempted to hide beneath the plastic chair (the only one in the room) which I’d been forced to endure for what had seemed like days.
She smiled.
It was the sort of smile you might see on the leathery lips of a gecko, though to get matters in proportion one would rather have to think in terms of the iguana or the komodo dragon. Smith saw it too, and even he averted his eyes. His new-found girlfriends were very nearly moved to compassion for me. But then, when I most needed moral (and maybe physical) support, they all walked out.
Under the toothy sway of that rictus I sank defeated onto the plastic chair, jumped up as I felt the familiar sharpness of it, then sank uncaring onto it like a seasoned masochist.
I waited for her to speak.
After an age she did.
“Mr Bogg, I’m sorry, Miss Blogg -” she consulted some papers “- I hope you don’t feel I’ve been harsh with you.”
I shook my mousey head, eager to please.
“Your academic record is quite impressive – an honours degree in English – ” (I detected a sneer but said nothing) “ – but I find myself wondering why you wish to study Librarianship.” She tossed her head in a proud way.
I tossed my head in an ignominious way, not having felt quite like this since I was six years old and sent down a class for the day.
“I – I -” I sounded like a sailor. “I’d like a better job.” I forced out, knowing that it wasn’t done to say such a thing.
That wiped the smile off her face, and I sighed with relief.
“I like my students to immerse themselves in the subject, Mr Bogg. To live and breathe Librarianship. To turn acronyms lovingly on their tongues, to shine at the Schedules, to ache for AACR 2. We want to produce professionals, not people who merely crave a better job. ”
I lowered my head like a Chinese prisoner. I’d thought that professionals were people who had a better job.
“But if you insist – here’s the topic for tomorrow’s assignment.”
She handed me a document. It was like the remission of a death sentence. Already 9.30 had passed – but she still had more to say. Letting her admonitions pass over my bowed head like bitter waves, I glanced at the assignment topic.
Discuss the concept of Specificity in relation to the use of Medline in a special medical library.
What was Medline? What was a special medical library all about? I’d hadn’t seen the doctor for five years. And that was a psychiatrist.
“And I want that by 5 pm tomorrow. If you start as soon as you get home you might be able to do it.”
I was dismissed.
Smith and co. had long gone. I thought of the terrible walk to my car, and the long drive to Banks, at the other end of the known universe. I looked at the topic again, but the words were swimming on the page like fish who’ve leapt from an aquarium. I tried to discipline my thoughts but they floated around me like so many acronyms in skywriting. I saw the smile again, and collapsed on my knees by the Union building.
Ten dollars fell out of my handbag. I looked at it, it seemed to look back at me in a loving way, and I tossed the assignment topic into the nearest bin. Grabbing the ten dollars I gave a mental finger to the Librarianship lecturer, and with a new spring in my step I headed straight for the Uni. bar.