All around the houses

Annabel used this expression last weekend in reference to buses with roundabout routes: they go "all around the houses." Perfect for a day like today. We kicked off with an excellent excursion to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which is a cool place to visit. It is a research library and the official book depository for France (like the Library of Congress in US), so visiting is not quite as simple as going into a normal public library. I had booked a guided tour and we got this very nice guide named Edouard who told us a lot about how the library works and about its history. It is comparatively new--built in the 1990s after the BNF outgrew its old space near the Louvre (Bibliothèque Richelieu), but the Richelieu site is still used to house historic manuscripts, the BNF's coins/medals collections, etc. This new building--Bibliothèque Mitterrand--is comprised of 4 towers with a garden in the center and big corridors connecting the towers. It's a little hard to describe but very impressive! We got to see the reading rooms, which instead of being beautifully medieval or beautifully Victorian, are beautifully mid-century modern. We saw two enormous globes, one of the earth and one of the sky, that belonged to Louis XIV (mais bien sûr) and are now part of the BNF's maps collection. We went into the basement to see the system of tracks and receptacles that ferries books between parts of the library. If you have seen the part in Monsters, Inc. where Sully and Mike are flying around the factory among all the bedroom doors, you have an idea of what this system looks like. Each reading room has a selection of books that is open to the public but the vast majority of their holdings are in closed stacks. It takes about 40 minutes to retrieve a book once a patron has requested it. To get books from the closed stacks you have to be a credentialed researcher and even then you cannot leave the library with your books--hence the gorgeous reading rooms. It was a great tour and good material for our discussion of the rise of moveable type printing in British Lit.

I left the BNF with Dr. Guglielmi to get some lunch before a meeting with him and Dr. Kirk. Métro line 6, change at Denfert-Rochereau (not at Raspail which is an easier change but then you double back on yourself) to line 4, out at Port d'Orléans. As we ate salads on a café terrace--fueling my love of café terraces--we noticed the sky darkening and the wind picking up. By the time we hurriedly paid the bill, the paper placemats were trying to escape and patrons' napkins were rolling down the street. The rain started as we dove under the tram station's overhanging shelter. Normally we would not have bothered to take the tram two stops to Cité Universitaire but by the time we got out at Cité it was pouring. We waited for small breaks in the heaviest rainfall and dashed from the tram stop to the Cité entrance. As we waited it out there, Dr. Guglielmi got a call that our meeting was canceled. Dr. Kirk appeared 5 minutes later with an umbrella (smart man). By the time we got the meeting rescheduled, the rain had ended and we all went our separate ways, battered but unbowed.

Between 2:30 and 6:30 I managed to do two loads of laundry (consecutively, not simultaneously), go to the post office, hit the library computers to update my grade spreadsheets and take care of some necessary record-keeping at MGSC, go to the grocery store, and start this blog entry. At 6:30 I was in the "red room" (one of the common rooms at Cité) to help organize this week's pizza night. At 7:00 we had an informal faculty meeting. And now it is bedtime. I feel like I've been all around the houses today!