busy, busy.
Oct. 27th, 2005 02:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
perevisionDead excited about the British Library. Went yesterday and looked up my booklist on the Integrated Catalogue.
THEY HAVE EVERYTHING I NEED. Well, almost everything I need in English, anyway. Mountains of Anna Freud as well--![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
z107m, thank you so much; I would have never had such good material if not for your posts. Downside is that I need to come back on Friday to actually be able to read them, as most of the books are off-site and need to be fetched.
I should have signed up to the BritLib ages ago, if only to get into the reading rooms. That smell of antique books! The calming sussuration of pages! Several banks of desks labeled "No personal computers at this desk"! Delicious. I haven't felt so wonderful for AGES.
Very excited to spend the whole day there on Friday--now THIS is what free Fridays are for. My teacher says it's very good for the project to have several hours of uninterrupted study for at least one day each week, and the rest of the week to do a little each day. We're not allowed to eat in the reading rooms of course, but the Library has a cafe right outside the Humanities I reading room, which is where I'll be working. They also have cafes out in the courtyard if I start to feel all pasty and closed-in. Really it's perfectly designed.
In other news...
Today we went to the Franks House, which is an outpost of the British Museum's Paleolithic department. It's really just a couple of poky buildings. The place reminds me of some of the poorer schools I've been to in the Philippines: horrible beige walls, weak tables, mismatched chairs, dusty offices full of boxes and files. Those schools never had content this interesting though. There were a couple of shelves along the wall, filled with red-bound books marked Register of Antiquities, and occasionally Register of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities. On one of the desks, under a mounted magnifying glass, was an extremely detailed technical pen drawing of some stone-flake hunting knives. I don't mind telling you my palms were itching.
We were allowed to handle some plaster casts of objects like carved reindeer antlers, and also the cast of the female figurine which was found at Willendorf and is now housed in Vienna. (Jill Cook, the lecturer who was looking after us, said that "Venus" is a derogatory term based on Victorian prejudices against their impression of "primitive" sexuality, so she doesn't want people using that term to refer to the female figures.)
We also got to see an original and very famous carving of swimming reindeer which was done from a piece of mammoth tusk. I was even allowed to take a picture of it, and of a horse's jawbone which is only a little newer and carved with a pattern instead of animal or human representations. It was so absorbing. Jill had also been to several caves in southwest France that were closed to the public, and told us that the last cave in one particular series was so deep that there was hardly any available oxygen and one was quite light-headed when one came to it...but there on the wall was a horse staring straight at the viewer. She said it almost seemed to beckon her right through the wall into another world, and in her trance-like state she almost believed she could go through. If it's like that for the viewer, I wonder what the painter felt about it.
But my favorite story this week was from my History of Art teacher. She has a friend who works at the British Museum, and he told her that every week he goes down to the lower levels because a falconer comes in with a hawk to hunt the mice that live there.
Think about this carefully. Once a week, in the lower levels of the British Museum, a hawk hunts mice through the archive rooms.
Who needs other worlds? This one is awesome enough.
THEY HAVE EVERYTHING I NEED. Well, almost everything I need in English, anyway. Mountains of Anna Freud as well--
z107m, thank you so much; I would have never had such good material if not for your posts. Downside is that I need to come back on Friday to actually be able to read them, as most of the books are off-site and need to be fetched.I should have signed up to the BritLib ages ago, if only to get into the reading rooms. That smell of antique books! The calming sussuration of pages! Several banks of desks labeled "No personal computers at this desk"! Delicious. I haven't felt so wonderful for AGES.
Very excited to spend the whole day there on Friday--now THIS is what free Fridays are for. My teacher says it's very good for the project to have several hours of uninterrupted study for at least one day each week, and the rest of the week to do a little each day. We're not allowed to eat in the reading rooms of course, but the Library has a cafe right outside the Humanities I reading room, which is where I'll be working. They also have cafes out in the courtyard if I start to feel all pasty and closed-in. Really it's perfectly designed.
In other news...
Today we went to the Franks House, which is an outpost of the British Museum's Paleolithic department. It's really just a couple of poky buildings. The place reminds me of some of the poorer schools I've been to in the Philippines: horrible beige walls, weak tables, mismatched chairs, dusty offices full of boxes and files. Those schools never had content this interesting though. There were a couple of shelves along the wall, filled with red-bound books marked Register of Antiquities, and occasionally Register of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities. On one of the desks, under a mounted magnifying glass, was an extremely detailed technical pen drawing of some stone-flake hunting knives. I don't mind telling you my palms were itching.
We were allowed to handle some plaster casts of objects like carved reindeer antlers, and also the cast of the female figurine which was found at Willendorf and is now housed in Vienna. (Jill Cook, the lecturer who was looking after us, said that "Venus" is a derogatory term based on Victorian prejudices against their impression of "primitive" sexuality, so she doesn't want people using that term to refer to the female figures.)
We also got to see an original and very famous carving of swimming reindeer which was done from a piece of mammoth tusk. I was even allowed to take a picture of it, and of a horse's jawbone which is only a little newer and carved with a pattern instead of animal or human representations. It was so absorbing. Jill had also been to several caves in southwest France that were closed to the public, and told us that the last cave in one particular series was so deep that there was hardly any available oxygen and one was quite light-headed when one came to it...but there on the wall was a horse staring straight at the viewer. She said it almost seemed to beckon her right through the wall into another world, and in her trance-like state she almost believed she could go through. If it's like that for the viewer, I wonder what the painter felt about it.
But my favorite story this week was from my History of Art teacher. She has a friend who works at the British Museum, and he told her that every week he goes down to the lower levels because a falconer comes in with a hawk to hunt the mice that live there.
Think about this carefully. Once a week, in the lower levels of the British Museum, a hawk hunts mice through the archive rooms.
Who needs other worlds? This one is awesome enough.
