Welcome to the Octagon.

What I study isn't particularly exciting. I know this. Most people couldn't possibly care less about what Anselm of Canterbury wrote about the Jews or that he is known as the father of medieval scholasticism. And really, that's just fine with me. Sure, when talking with strangers I spend a lot of time talking about movies like King Arthur, Braveheart, Kingdom of Heaven, and occasionally the severely under-appreciated Black Knight. Nevertheless, and perhaps somewhat perversely, on nine days out of ten I find it gratifying to devote myself to learning something so utterly arcane.

But on the other day, that one in ten that finds me sitting in a class on, say, medieval paleography and the professor is droning on and on about whether or not the particular fourteenth-century script we happen to be looking at has looped ascenders and features the pointed 'f' and 's' character, drawing a two-hour class out into a three-hour odyssey, some times even I have trouble keeping my eye on the ball and I find myself thinking of the axiom that one ought to be careful when spending one's time with pedants, lest one become one. Or something like that. In order to try and reverse this (perhaps inevitable) decline into total irrelevance, I try to inject as much drama into my daily routine as possible. Case in point: my study space.

Some people study outside on the grass in the sunlight. Passe. Some people study at home. Tired. Some (single, male) people study in cushy chairs up in the room on the fifth floor where many undergraduate ladies while away their days looking nice and pretending to study. Please. None of those spaces quite captures the Fortress of Solitude vibe I like to channel while reading, which is why I often find myself holed up in a corner of the stacks. Not in the nice, carpeted stacks with the cloth-covered chairs to sit in. No, none of that for me. Give me the crappy stacks any day of the week.

Lack of direct sunlight? Check.
Brutally uncomfortable chairs? Check.
Exposed piping? Check.
Exposed (and possibly cancer-inducing) Insulation? Double check.

Because the (cold, stone) floor doesn't quite meet the walls at every place, there are also some very attractive chain-link fences up in the stacks to keep me, or anyone else from falling to their death. Low ceilings, bad lighting, and the obligatory piles and piles of books round out the most productive space I've been able to locate here.

Studying in the west (or is it east?) stacks is not unlike being locked in a no-holds-barred, intellectual cage match with whatever medievalists I happen to have brought with me that day for as long as I have the will to continue. There's nothing quite like the ambiance in the stacks to make you feel like cranking through another 100 pages of Barbara Fick's essay, Libro de Viajes, is a matter of life and death as well as personal pride. Given the state of my studies at any given time, the life and death metaphor might not be as inapt as I would ideally like it to be. Really, more than anything else, it's the solitary experience of the stacks I prize. Perhaps because they are moderately god-awful, very few people come up there and bother me. This may be compounded by the fact that I tend to sit by the social psychology books, which I understand are filled with total nonsense anyway.

The past couple of days, however, have seen a siege lain about my Fortress of Solitude. It started yesterday when an English postdoc I know snuck up behind

I tire of this. Let's make a deal: How's about you just pretend that I finished this post. Tell everyone how great it was. And then if I feel like it I'll come back some day and give you the exciting denouement that you deserve for slogging through this unwieldy beast of a post. Deal? Deal.