School Days

Before the election, Victoria took me to the Literature Faculty of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Each discipline has it's own facultad and they seem to be completely separate entities. They're scattered all over town. For example, the school of medicine is not far from where I live; the lit faculty is in Caballito, a twenty minute subway ride away. The liberal arts model doesn't really exist here. You get your general overviews in secundaria, which is roughly our high school. After that, you specialize.

Here's the unprepossessing front of the building (just wait, it gets even less prepossessing inside.)



The halls and classrooms reflect a chaotic disarray of posters, graffiti, and neglect. Victoria says that some of the other faculties are classier, with well-kept woods and tidy hallways, but literature is a riot of information. Here's the front part of the biggest lecture hall.



Those are names of desaparecidos stencilled in the corner.

The atmosphere is fairly hardcore 70s student radical. Lots of jeans, facial hair, and smoking. I was a little shocked at first, because the place really does feel rundown and the comparison with the well-funded halls of Hamilton is striking to say the least. But once you get used to it, it actually seems kind of healthy to toss around big ideas in a space that feels alive and not particularly sacred. Hell, it even smells alive...

Then we visited the small library and I felt immediately at home.



I miss card catalogs terribly. I know that computer archives are much, much more convenient, but I still got all kerfluggled when I saw these. Images of Ann Walton and me working in the basement of the Shaker Height Public Library, chatting in the "page cage" while putting off reshelving the book cart that was always filled (in my memory at least) with nothing but bulging copies of Watership Down and a vast array of large-print Simenon novels.

A few years back Nicholson Baker wrote an interesting article about the information lost when converting to online catalogs (things like hand-written notes by librarians, bent corners and smudges indicating that some books were referred to more heavily, and so on). As I recall, he wasn't against computer systems, he just thought that the old card catalogs should be preserved. To me, pulling open a drawer and ruffling through cards is a rush, a sort of metaphysical prehandling of each book.

Here's a card for a collection of stories by a terrific argentine writer, Silvina Ocampo. The paper is thin and crumbly, the handwritten lettering is elegant and shaky at the same time.



The Platon (that's Plato to us English-speakers) is the cafe directly across the street, and thus a predictably popular student hang out.



It was utterly untouched since Victoria's days as a student with one literally glaring exception--they had to add a huge plexiglass enclosure sealing off almost half of the cafe for smokers (a fairly strict no-smoking law went into effect this year). I didn't venture inside the aquarium-like smoking den—my lungs already have enough to handle with city's car, bus, and unattributed fumes. From the outside, it looked a lot like a Natural History display depicting "an assortment of literature students in their natural habitat."