I wouldn't give up Room 19 for the world. It is ancient,
dilapidated, and remote, but it
is -our place-.
The shadow war is centered around 19C. Between
the English and Anthropology departments, that room is our Korean 49th
parallel, our Federation/Klingon Neutral Zone, our Franco/Prussian Burgundy.
It is disputed territory.
RARE BOOKS
belonging to the anthropology · department have been · removed from this room ·
Please Return to DR. ANITA COOK
She
turns
to
find
herself
surrounded
by
anthropology
professors,
Morlock-like
creatures
of
various
shapes
and
sizes,
some
carrying
yellow
legal
pads,
others
wearing
ceremonial
robes
from
various
cultures,
all
with
dirt
under
their
fingernails.
Cooper-Hertzfeld
READING ROOM
Anthropology Department
Maybe someday after that we'll even reoccupy the place. In any case, the shadow war will go on.
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Everyone:
The shadow war between English and Anthropology has taken a new turn down
here in the bowels of Marist Hall. It occurs to me, though, that I've never
mentioned the shadow war before, so here's some background:
Marist 19 is the basement area where about half of the English grad students
who teach have their "offices." You can't get there from the rest of the
building, because the door connecting it to the rest of the lower level is
always locked. The outside entrance is a hard-to-find door that takes you
to a shadowy corridor; down the hall on the right is first a bathroom and
then a small office, 19D, which some Englishfolk use. On the left is a
larger office that belongs to the anthropology department. From there you
get to the main room, which contains a couple desks, a couch, the Yellow
Chair (which I'm sitting in now), a table, chairs, a microwave, a drinking
fountain, a coffee maker, and a chalkboard. The carpet is Scrappy Orange
and the walls are imitation fake wood panels. In addition to the Locked
Door, there's a door that leads to 19B, the suite of two rooms where me,
Chad, and a number of others have our desks. There is one other door, in
the corner, that leads to another small room that I'll call 19C. More on
that later.
I wouldn't give up Room 19 for the world. It is ancient, dilapidated, and
remote, but it is -our place-. We can meet students here by day, and, as
some do, play instruments here by night. It's a combination office-hangout,
the sort of place to be if you want to get work done but also want to get
interrupted at reasonable intervals.
Technically, only 19B&D belong to the English department. The big office
off the corridor and 19C belong to Anthropology, and the main room belongs
to no one in particular. In practice, though, the main room is the demesne
of Englishfolk, if for no other reason than squatters' rights --
Anthropology people are never there. So one of the desks in the main room
belongs to one of the English TAs, Robert, and the chalkboard sports the
names of all the TAs alongside their answers to the weekly question (another story).
For Englishfolk, life proceeds week in, week out, with little to no contact
with Anthropology people. Once in a while, as some of us are chatting in
the main room, we'll hear someone entering through the outside door. We'll
peek in that direction to see who's arriving, but then we'll hear the
muffled sound of a key and realize that it was one of the Anth-folk slipping
into their big office. None of them have, to my knowledge, made any attempt
to communicate with any Englishfolk, which is too bad, since it seems like
there's at least a couple good conference papers to be written about our
subculture, power structure, eating habits, and mating rituals.
Twice a semester or so, Rita, the Anthropology department secretary, will
come in through the Locked Door with a couple grad students and/or
work-study undergrads in tow. This is always a momentous occasion, not
unlike seeing a bespectacled Centaur nonchalantly opening the Wardrobe from
the -inside-. She gives these people a tour of 19, greeting whichever
Englishfolk happen to be in the main room quite warmly, and pointing out to
her followers 19C and the big room off the corridor (heck, let's just call
that one 19A). She'll indicate that these are the places where Anthropology
people are welcome to go to study, kick back, whatever.
Invariably, though Rita always comes back around, we never see the
tour-takers ever again. Maybe they realize that 19 is English department
territory. Maybe they have higher standards of taste when it comes to
interior decoration. But Rita's tour is the last time they ever set foot in
19. Their true realm must lie elsewhere.
The shadow war that I referred to earlier is centered around 19C. Between
the English and Anthropology departments, that room is our Korean 49th
parallel, our Federation/Klingon Neutral Zone, our Franco/Prussian Burgundy.
It is disputed territory. I suppose the shadow war began the first time one
of us set foot in 19C, out of simple curiosity. This was about 3 years ago.
We had lived next to its unassuming door for a while, noting "Anthropology"
scrawled in pen right on the wood, and thinking nothing more of it. But at
some point, after never seeing anyone come or go, we had to at least peek
inside. I don't know if I was the first to do so, but I remember the first
time I did: A musty odor gushed forth from within, as if I was opening an
ancient tomb. The room had a desk, three or four filing cabinets, a
USSR-era world map, a box full of Mardi Gras beads, and piles and piles of
random paperwork junk.
Englishfolk gradually occupied 19C, once it became clear that Anthropology
wasn't using it. It's not that anyone messed with their stuff, but we had
far fewer desks than actual instructors, and in those weeks during the
semester when half a dozen of us were conducting student conferences, 19 B&D
got awfully crowded. It was nice to have an extra spill-over room to use
when needed. I made use of 19C as a nap-room a few times, too, and
sometimes even as a place to get work done undisturbed. Though we never
officially annexed it, for all intents and purposes, it was our room. My
dream was to turn it into the Room 19 Smoking Room, but the fact that it
wasn't -officially- ours was enough reason never to actually go through with it.
All that changed in the first major offensive of the shadow war. We came
back after summer '98 to find the door to 19C -locked-. There was a sign on it:
RARE BOOKS
belonging to the anthropology
department have been
removed from this room.
Please Return to DR. ANITA COOK
Needless to say, none of the Englishfolk had taken the books. I was,
admittedly, guilty of swiping some of the Mardi Gras beads to twirl around
my finger, but that was the worst of it.
Our first thought, on reading the sign, was that it was pretty stupid to
have left rare books in an unlocked office. Our second thought was the
realization that, however subtly, we were being implicated in this robbery.
Why leave a sign unless you actually believe that the perpetrators of the
crime are going to return to the scene to see it? There was no accusation,
of course -- just a vague insinuation, an aura of suspicion compounded by
the fact that the door was locked. Anthropology continued to not-use the
room, and as a result, for the past couple years, it's been used by no one
at all -- a dead zone.
All that has changed, thanks to Mary. Mary is the stalwart woman on the
custodial staff who is in charge of the bottom two floors of Marist Hall,
including Room 19. She has the unenviable task of cleaning up an
overcrowded, over-used basement of questionable structural integrity, but
she does so with a contagious smile and a hefty dose of maternal concern for
those of us who spend our time down here. I'm sure she can't keep all of
our names straight, but we all know hers. Last week, she came through the
Locked Door with a handcart. She was a woman on a mission. All that crap
had been sitting in 19C for years, and no one had ever done anything with
it, and frankly, she was sick of it. As she hauled box after box out of
there, dropping it off somewhere under the anthropology department's nose,
she repeatedly voiced her opinion that they should just give that room
to -us-, since we (the Englishfolk) are there all the time and Anthropology
is down there never. No one could appreciate that fact more than Mary could.
She cleared all the crap out of 19C, and, in an act of custodial fiat,
bestowed one of its desks (a sturdy metal one) on Robert, who had been
putting up with a crappy wooden one in the main room that was so ramshackle
that its top formed a smiley face instead of a straight line. Having
properly eviscerated the room, she left, leaving it -open-. All that
remained were three chairs, a corner desk, and another desk standing on its side.
For the past few days we've been enjoying the heady freedom of being able to
get inside 19C once again. It's been worth a few peeks, but so far, there
hasn't been any big swath of conferences requiring any of us to actually
make use of it. And things might have continued this way without
incident -- maybe even for the rest of the school year. Except for the new sign.
I can picture the scene: Mary has just unloaded the last hand-cart full of
crap from 19C in the Anthropology department's basement hallway. She turns
to find herself surrounded by anthropology professors, Morlock-like
creatures of various shapes and sizes, some carrying yellow legal pads,
others wearing ceremonial robes from various cultures, all with dirt under
their fingernails. Their baleful eyes glare at her, but they do nothing,
because in their hearts they know that she is in charge of Lower Marist, and
when she wants a room to be cleaned out, come hell or high water, it -will-
be cleaned out. Perhaps one of them is the infamous Anita Cook, or perhaps
Anita Cook has been dead for twenty years or so, and her name is used now
only for incantatory effect, as a shibboleth.
Mary speaks defiantly: "Y'all should let English have that room. They down
there all the time, they got students to meet, and y'all is never there."
The Anth professors glance at each other, but none of them respond. Mary
shrugs and elbows her way past them, for 19C is only one of her many
concerns; she's busy. The profs watch her until she disappears around the
corner, and then, in formation, they enter their department's office, where
Rita looks up somewhat apprehensively.
"We must take action," one of them (possibly the chair) intones.
"It shall be done," Rita replies.
I don't know if that's how things actually happened. The only things I know
for sure are that Mary -did- mention to some anthropology people that she
thought that English should have 19C (she told me so), and that
something -was- done. Namely, a new sign appeared on the door to 19C. This
sign is a slab of wood, sturdy, nailed to the door (they had Mary do that),
inscribed with the following in orange and yellow letters:
Cooper-Hertzfeld
READING ROOM
Anthropology Department
Mind you, the room's contents haven't changed. The one desk inside it is
still standing on its side. This is their gesture -- in lieu of actually,
say, having people -use- the room, they've put a sign there, an
official-sounding sign, in order to unambiguously stake their claim.
Robert, God bless him, has retaliated in his own wry way. His new metal
desk sits right next to the door to 19C, and above it, he's posted the
following sign on a piece of English department stationary:
The Courtright-Herzfeld
Reading Desk
(Donations gratefully accepted)
This very morning, Rita was back down, showing Father So-and-So, an Eastern
European grad student, around 19A & 19C. They were in and out in a few
minutes, and the only thing that I'm sure of is that, if history is any
precedent, I will never ever see Father So-and-So ever again. Shortly after
that Mary came by and commiserated with us about the new sign and what it
implies about Anthropology's territorial policy.
Which brings us to right now. If they hadn't bothered with the new sign, I
don't think I would have given much thought to 19C, and I certainly wouldn't
be writing to you about it. But that sign is nothing if not a challenge.
So we (myself and Lee & Chris, fellow Englishfolk) are going to retaliate
the best way we know how -- we're going to go in there, and dammit, we're
going to -smoke-. We're going to sit around the sideways desk and puff
contentedly at djarums, as if it's a parlor room and there's a fireplace and
we're wearing smoking jackets. It's going to be lovely. We'll clean up
very carefully after ourselves -- our beef is with Anthropology, and we'd
never do anything to anger Mary -- and maybe, someday, if they insist on
maintaining this reading-room charade, we'll do it again. Maybe someday
after that we'll even reoccupy the place. In any case, the shadow war will go on.
That is All
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