Signs of life

Around campus, the floors have been polished to a waxy gleam, and they're putting down new, pebbled sidewalks. It's subtle, but you can feel the energy shifting. Students will start arriving in the next week or ten days, and faculty are already trickling in.

The behemoth of a new library is nearly complete now. I've spent a fair amount of time there already because of several weekly meetings with staff. I've already had a few unpleasant scrapes, but this morning I wandered the stacks alone and experienced some poor design that will likely perplex many in the coming months.

I was looking for The Sun Also Rises, but the numbering in the stacks on the second floor were nowhere near the range I needed. Feeling rather silly, I talked to a mumbling student worker downstairs, who informed me I needed to go up to the third floor, which could only be accessed by a side stairwell. Turns out the sweeping main stairwell, centerpiece of the design, ends on the second floor. You're stranded with no apparent way to continue, except by walking to the opposite end of the stacks to pick up the other stair. Really great traffic flow.

Still, I am impressed with the building. The opulence is so over the top, you can't help but be wowed. And there will be a Starbucks.

Also, today I noticed some of the interesting furniture in the sitting areas. Up in the stacks, there's a big arrangement of black leather chairs, and long, angular black fabric couches devoid of cushions (you kind of bounce when you sit down, like on a tight trampoline). Combined with the skull-punching points on the chandeliers, their effect is nothing short of a scary Victorian mansion as drawn by Edward Gorey.

But, I digress. As much as we bitch about students and their careless ways, it's exciting to have them back. There aren't many professions where you get the illusion of a fresh start every year. Even if I never go to a single lecture or concert this year (and I think I made it to a single concert last year), it's exciting to know they'll be going on, and if I happen to walk past the right open window one evening on my way home, I'll hear music or applause wafting into the cool air just as I did ten years ago when I was a student here.

Cool air, of course, is the other happy realization--fall isn't too far away!