Miscellaneous Archival Thoughts

1. I thought that the woman cleaning the public computers at the Archives was some kind of crazy Obsessive-Compulsive type who couldn't cope with germs and what not.
2. *Fun Fact* Keyboards can have more germs on them than a toilet seat!

Gum Digging looks like a seriously miserable profession

... I reflect while reading a file about gum digging and finding a set of tiny little 1930s photos.

This photo is captioned (on the back):

Also, have been reading some letters from the early part of the 1930s between a soldier-farmer and the Government. These are calumnious to say the least... Either the farmer is a nutter, or the government inspector is an asshole. It gave me hours of entertainment yesterday and I've been saving it for something fun to read this morning. Choice quote:

Perhaps if I had a rare house or motor car or a good police Court record I would be considered. Here is the true position, we have not a dwelling, food, clothes or money, as the Commissioner knows, but looks upon it as a joke. Remember there are six little children. Who won the war?

Indeed.

My Snippiness at Archivists is Over Whelming

No, but, really.

I can't stand dithering or flustering and She-Vernon is both dithery and flusters almost constantly. And doesn't listen to a word that is said to her. And takes twenty years to do ANYTHING. And probably lives with her three cats and talks of nothing else to her equally awful colleagues. Harrumph gr-grump and other snippy noises.

I can't imagine what a person's life must be like in order to lead them to be so obsessively pedantic about - well, just about every aspect of their job. In the limited experience that I have had in the public archives, I have found that archivists are mind numbingly awful and often have a physical anomaly about them. For example, a darkly downy upper Lady-lip, or a distractingly wandering eye. Or food around their mouths. Or a strong resemblance to a teletubby. Unfortunate appearances aside, the biggest issue is of course the depths of their pedantry. Hideous. Nasty. Horrid.

Uncharitable thought

A woman just slammed into me going through a pretty fair sized doorway. She was a fair sized woman but I was RIGHT in front of her - hard to miss me. As I hit her and rebounded heavily off the security gates, she apologised and said that it was all her fault as she had bad eyesight. And I thought "Well, shouldn't you wear dark glasses or carry a white stick so people know?"

Sometimes I surprise myself with how much of a bitch I can be.

Miscellaneous Thoughts at the Archives - It's hard to run with feet of gold

• Vernon is a scary man. And almost stereotypically anal-retentive obsessive compulsive sad. There's something very Eleanor Rigby about him. Only less he's less inducive to empathy, or even, sympathy.
• Sleepy. Something soporific about the reading room. But seriously, I keep almost dozing off.
• Zzzzzzz.
• Guitar feedback does not maketh the song.
• The Lady Sails often sounds a lot like the Urban Tramper. Listen and hear the similarities, for they are great.
• Spirulina is very tasty. Salad is great. I like food.
• The Archives is maybe 100% more geeky than the Lib. Like, its for the really serious research geek types. There are three different referencing systems, none of them are complete. Cross referencing is the hippest happening since temperature controlled archiving was invented, and all the cool kids are doing it. It's HIP to be SQUARE. And such like and so forth.
• Have I mentioned how sleepy I'm becoming? I need some serious fucking stimulants.
• There is an older woman sitting near me, staring into space and waiting for another elderly woman to find something in the card indexes. Doesn't she realise that as she waits her life is ebbing away from her? She should be doing something with it instead of merely frittering it by sitting almost completely still for nearly fifteen minutes now. Like, going to get a coffee and reading the paper would be far more meaningful on the scale of things than just gawking around oneself. She could jump up and look in the filing cabinets of old photographs that are directly behind me. They're fascinating. I'm trying to send her psychic messages about the photos. She's right in my line of sight, over my computer, and it's driving me nuts to see her just sitting there, waiting, purse-lipped.
• {GET UP AND DO SOMETHING WAITING ELDERLY WOMAN!}
• The Seeking Elderly Woman has returned to the Waiting Elderly Woman. I believe she hasn't found anything because she discussed looking in the card indexes again.
• If I ever fritter fifteen minutes away like that, staring into space and not engaging with anything at all (except my own sense of righteous indignation - like the Waiting Elderly Woman) then I volunteer for immediate euthanasia.
• I wonder if the 'Dewey Day Parade' as referred to by Sufjan Stevens in "Jacksonville" has anything to do with the Dewey Decimal system.
• Waiting Elderly Woman is sitting somewhere else now. But she's still lurking, and I can still see her meaningless and impatient Waiting. She's defo Waiting Impatiently. If I didn't have headphones on I'd be able to hear her huffing. Yes, yes, in fact, I think I just saw her huff!
• I wonder why the Government steamer Amokura needed an Angora goat in 1914.
• I just had a phone call from my little bro and he's back in town! And quite excitable also... fun.
• Oh, so tired. Brain feels addled.

Incunabula and Archivists

Yesterday I had a run in at the National Archives with the smuggest, most pompous shit of a librarian I have ever had the misfortune to meet. Ponytailed Trekkie-style and paunchy, he peered over his glasses while he preceded to complicate my simple photographic order as much as he possibly could... insisted on telling me how much it would cost, despite the fact I told him at least twice that I didn't care, and spent half the time flustering about in the back office and confusing his workmates. So much anger I felt after dealing with this dreadful man that it kicked my Newspaper archives sleepiness firmly in the ass - sleepiness that had lead earlier to a self-diagnosis of embryonic narcolepsy. I'm not so sure about the narcolepsy now, but I am suspecting that my habit of reading medical dictionaries is not necessarily productive... may be encouraging me in hypochondria in fact. Today I saw a lecture about incunabula at the Nat Lib... I was the youngest person there by something like fifty years... one old man with those gloriously huge, spongy and hairy old-man-ears kept craning over his shoulder to examine me and look at me pointedly as if to say What Are You Doing Here? I like bindings and brass clips and vellum and vegetable tanning and illuminated letters and recycled manuscripts in the bindings and nineteenth century acquisition notes and collectors, modern and otherwise, who like nothing more than to talk about their collections as much as possible.