Photo: Library of Babel

Photo of the interior of New York University's Bobst Library - taken from a few floors up.

Bobst Library, NYU

People say walking the upper floors of the Bobst Library — the main college library at New York University surrounding Washington Square Park — grants a feeling of vertigo. It's true. Also, I get a feeling I am inside the infinite library written about in Jorge Borges's short story "The Library of Babel".

Location: Bobst Library NYU
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Film Clip Analysis: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Library Scene

image credit: © 1989 Lucasfilm

"X marks the spot!"

So, I was at Pier 1 in Brooklyn for their summer night outdoor showing of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. You know, the one with Sean Connery as Daddy Jones and Harrison Ford as Junior? This 1989 installment has its perks: we get to meet the knight who guards the vestibule of the holy grail (kind of like the Wandering Jew, but not) and we get to see the beautiful walled city of Petra in current-day Jordan. Well, amidst the hijinks and Holy Grail seriousness, not at all like Monty Python, there is a brief moment of library silliness that I should add to my post entitled, Libraries and Librarians in Film.

The scene spoofs two hallowed librarian stereotypes: silence and stamping books - as if that is all librarians do all day: shush people and stamp books.

The film pays clever homage to this trope by having Indy clobber his way through a tile in a library in Venice, Italy (X marks the spot) that will eventually take him through a sewer tunnel, and eventually (way-in-the-future-eventually) to the holy grail.

image credit: © 1989 Lucasfilm

Careful not to disturb the silence of the library, Indy takes a library guardrail and pile drives the thing into the floor quick enough not to be noticed! Not very believable, right? The comic relief, though, and the link to our sustained suspension of disbelief is while simultaneously, in clever cut-to-shot, the librarian is quietly stamping books. Every time Indy drives a hit into the marble Venetian tile, the clamoring thud is synchronized with the librarian's rubber book stamping. It's a hilarious sound gag.

After a few deafening blows, the librarian retires the stamp for a new one. Obviously, he illogically thinks his rubber stamp carries a huge sound effect. How is that for post hoc propter hoc? 

Sometimes a cause of X is not always Y. And X does not always mark the spot.

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Memento: When I Was a Benedictine Postulant

A page from my scrapbook that dates from circa 2002

My Life Circa 2002

Taken from a page of my scrapbook dated circa 2002 — I had just entered the monastery of Saint Joseph Abbey as a postulant. I was about twenty-two years old (freshly graduated from college). I had started my scrapbook as a seminary college student. The page in this scrapbook marks a special time in my life. It was a time where I had an enormous amount of free time (ironically, since I was living in a monastery). A postulant is someone who has requested to be a novice in a monastery. It is the waiting period between "moving in" and being officially sworn in as a new member of the community.

In the Summer I Joined the Novitiate

After a few weeks of postulancy, the novitiate begins. That lasts for a year, after which the novice petitions the community to take the first set of monastic vows. During this time, the community of monks which I belonged to had voted on a new Abbot. His name was Justin.

An Explanation of the Pages Of My Scrapbook

On the left side of the book is the card that I had saved from Abbot Justin's installation as abbot of the community. I had written in the space below the holy card, "Justin Gerald Brown's Abbatial Blessing". On the facing page is a card that I had kept when I was a postulant. My name (as it is now) was "Greig". On the top is a postcard of a boy sitting amongst a hilly field accompanied by two pigs. My memory is hazy but I think I had picked up this postcard when I had been a student at the American College of Louvain in Belgium — I guess I placed it in the scrapbook as a memento.

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Photo: Singer Sewing Machines on Broadway

I was shopping on Broadway in Manhattan and I spotted an old-style Singer Sewing Machine in the window.

I was walking on Broadway and look at what I saw in the window.

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Picture: Looking Through the Door of a Subway Car Window on the Pelham Bay Local

I took a photograph of a subway car door's window and posted it here on my website. Check it out and read other fabulous stuff by Greig Roselli.

Greig Roselli Has a Fascination with the New York Subway

If you read this blog, you may notice that I have a certain fascination with the New York City subway. Riding the trains, one gets a glimpse into various bisections of the city that it is nearly impossible to witness in any other setting. New York City is a very segregated town — in the sense that the "haves" do not mix with the "have nots." On the subway, people are forced to commute together — so it is possible to see a stuffed shirt punching away on a laptop sitting next to a rag-a-tag homeless man asking for spare change. It is both disturbing and beautiful, both topsy-turvy and the norm. No one really expects much on a subway ride — but I swear it is the best place for writer types and artists to get a punch of inspiration. I'll just ride the subway for fun, often just staying on the train several stops after my home station — just to finish writing. That's what I'm doing now. The Six train has pulled into the Pelham Bay Park station — so it is time to go back downtown. See ya.

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Essay: How to be Generative Without Having Kids

Learn how my Uncle gave me his set of matchbox cars to me when I was young and how this influenced my understanding of passing something down from one generation to the next.

image credit: Tilt-Shift Photography

   When I was a boy my uncle gave me his complete set of diecast matchbox cars.

   There is a photograph of me as a toddler hanging on to our family coffee table, grinning in the flashlight of the camera’s aim, illuminated – darkening the background where you can see strewn on the carpet a multitudinous display of diecast cars. Not only did my uncle give me his entire set of matchbox cars but he and my aunt would take me on Saturdays to the flea market to scout out hidden diecast cars buried underneath piles and piles of junk. I was especially in love with the Matchbox brand, which started out in England as the Lesney company in the 1940s as a cheap way to sell toys to children during the war. I had Hot Wheels too. And I liked Corgi's models. But, my heart, in the end, was stuck on Matchbox.

    Visiting the flea market was a big deal. My aunt sold fashion for porcelain dolls. When she and my uncle frequented the flea market stalls, they were looking for deals on doll fashions. My aunt instructed me on the first day I tagged along to help them pick out fabrics. "Don't touch anything," she told me. She put her arms behind her back and turned around to show me, saying, "this is how you walk. Hold on to your arm so you can catch it if it tries to grab something on the shelf." She was right. The flea market stalls were filled with items that screamed "tangible!" The musty smelling curtains and chain-smoking clerks, ogling collectors handling precious prints of Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe's and 1950s Hugh Hefner Playboys were for me, a boy's wonderland. I obeyed my aunt, though, and tried not to touch. Besides, I had no interest in handling thin veined china or opaque Depression-era glass. I wanted the toys. While my aunt and uncle felt and measured lacy fabrics, I would look for cigar boxes and glass cases filled with diecast cars, hoping to find the prized Matchbox models that would add to my collection.

A Lighthouse Stamp Illuminates the American College

The American College in Leuven, Belgium is a residence for American seminary students studying for the priesthood for United States dioceses. The facility is operated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C. I lived here in my early twenties when I studied Continental Philosophy at the Hoger Instituut voor Wijesbegeerte, the faculty of Philosophy at the Katholieke Universeiteit Leuven.

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