Blogs

BLOG: San Francisco Bay Area, Dec. 2006

Saturday, December 2

William Zeitler performing on the glass armonica in Campbell, CA

In my researches, I come to find out that some of the rare resources I need for my book on the armonica are available in the San Francisco Bay Area (not available in Southern California at all).

Funny, we get a call to do a performance up in the Bay Area. Essentially I can get some research done for free!

Sunday, December 3

Stanford library

I do the gig on Saturday. Sunday I go to Stanford. One of the nicest libraries I've been to. Not just because they had lots of money to spend on it, it just feels well designed and, well, 'ergonomic'. Naturally the resources I want are down in the 'basement'. (Picture below). They actually have a huge basement library connecting two 'above-ground' libraries.

And they have a very reasonable policy for letting someone like myself—neither student nor faculty—access the stacks. (Naturally I can't check anything out.) I'm allowed to use the library at no charge for 7 days a year. After that it's $5/day. Heck, you can't go watch a bad movie at the theater for that! VERY reasonable. The University of California is essentially paid for by the taxpayers, so it seems reasonable to me that a taxpayer like myself should be able to access its resources. But private universities like Stanford —I don't take their graciousness for granted.

Basement of Stanford library

As I'm walking down this one (of several) aisles in the basement library, I'm thinking of how much work has gone into just the ONE book I'm writing right now. Some books would need more research/time, some less. (Until having done one myself, I never really appreciated how much unremitting cooley-labor writing a book requires.) As I look at the ocean of books receding off into the horizon, I'm struck by how many person-hours of work that represents. Let's see—let's say mine takes 1000 hours. (A very conservative estimate). The Rivera library at UC Riverside (in my neighborhood) has 2 million books—the Stanford library certainly considerably more than that. But even 2 million books times 500 hours = ONE BILLION person hours—certainly a very conservative guess-timate. There at my fingertips. All I have to do is walk over, pull out a book, open it up, and accept the author's gift to me. I am humbled.

By this point I've long ago acquired all the 'easy' resources for my book—only rare/difficult ones are left. One of the Stanford reference librarians spends over an hour working with me to try to track down one of these resources—ultimately we aren't successful on that particular one. (Success on seven others.) She knows I'm completely unaffiliated with Stanford, but good reference librarians are like that, and they are invaluable! She determines in an instant whether Stanford has a given resource, and when it doesn't, the challenge is to figure out who on the entire planet does have a copy, or if perhaps it really is in the Stanford library filed under something else. I learn a lot (and take notes!) as I watch her 'sneaky tricks' to track them down. She's a master!

Here's the title page and a couple sample pages of a resource (which Stanford had and I hadn't expected to find): the "Musical Almanach for Germany in the year 1782":

Musicalischer Almanach für Deutschland auf das Jahr 1782

The bottom half of the middle page above lists current armonica players—a short list—all two of them: Frick[e] and Röllig. Another longer section elsewhere talks about the history of the armonica in Germany—by someone there in 1782! Good stuff!

Sunday night I drive down to visit my friend Madeline in Monterey—we've been friends for 15 years. She's 72 now, and somehow since I last saw her she's evolved into a Crazy Wild and Wise Old Woman (CWWOW). She tells me CWWOW stories. It's wonderful! She is amazing!

Monday, December 4

UC Berkeley

Monday it's UC Berkeley. Let me tell you, parking is a pain here. Especially since what little parking they have set aside for 'visitors' like myself is in parking structures with clearances too low for my van. After about an hour of just driving around the perimeter of the university hoping to get lucky, I find a little hole-in-the-wall parking lot where a little church is trying to make some cash. Great! Have some of mine!

The UC Berkeley library is rather a disappointment. They have four or five resources listed in their catalog that I'd love to access, but because their holdings have greatly outstripped the physical library space to house them, they now keep much of it (everything I want) offsite. You have to request a resource, and come back in 'two business days'. But I have to head back to L.A. tonight! Oh well. I did at least pick up a resource that I hadn't yet tried very hard to find in L.A.