Talking Shop
In this week’s episode, we spend some time talking about parlours and the often-rigid structures that surrounded social visits. But one of my biggest motivators for starting this audio series in the first place was quite a different kind of visiting. When I was away at school, my close friends lived within walking distance of me, and we regularly gathered, often on a kind of rota, at this house or that apartment, curled up on second-hand sofas with mis-matched mugs of tea clutched in our hands, to wile away our free hours talking. Sometimes the conversations were fluffy nonsense - clothes and the latest movie playing at the tiny independent theatre in town, horror stories from our assistant jobs and plans for summer holidays. But best of all were the nights when we lifted the shop-talk ban and let the conversation go where it willed. Sure, we still talked about saving up for a new pair of shoes, but headier subjects joined the mix - Marshall McLuhan, or the sculptures at Orsanmichele, or the British Library’s archives, or the overwhelm upon seeing that doryphoros: no, not that one, the other one.
For me, these late night tete-a-tete’s made my homesickness and the following week’s looming presentation shrink, if for only a few hours. At least in part, The Reader’s Museum is a way for me to recreate those earnest, eager late nights, surrounded by friends and brimming over with dreams, ambitions - hope. Grad school can be a challenging time, but it was also thrilling to find so many people, all in one place, who were just as keen as I was to think about the best way to install a Bauhaus weaving, or who exalted at the upcoming trip to the big city to see that travelling miniatures show. These were my kind of folks - they also went exclusively to museums when they travelled, and spent their time in a gallery at break-neck pace, trying to see just about everything in a collection, sprinting from the special exhibitions to this wing or to that hall and then back through those rooms to see that can’t-miss oil painting, taking a few moments to pay respects to that thing they studied once, with a quick stop off at the gift shop before it closed, an experience I affectionately call ‘the museum marathon.’
Were we insufferable? Of course, most grad students are. But we were also, I think, happy. I certainly was. We were sponges, soaking up as much knowledge and readings and experiences (and items for our CV) as we could squeeze in to what felt at that time like a never-ending parade of books and papers and grading and language credits and seminars and conferences and exhibitions and supervision meetings and deadlines and citations and archives, but was over in the blink of an eye. I miss those days, dear reader. And those late-night chat sessions, where we talked of ‘cabbages and kings’, seem to me like the glue that held it all together, the way we decompressed and prepared to dive back in, the pauses that punctuated what was otherwise a headlong rush towards what we were promised would be bright and shiny futures. In a later installment of the Anne series, one Captain Jim welcomes Anne and her friends by saying that ‘it won’t take long to spend an hour.’ In retrospect, didn’t take long for the years of grad school to slip by, either. So I’m glad for these episodes, and for the Reader’s Museum - in its imagined walls, I’m back on those lumpy sofas, tea in hand, setting the world to rights with my friends.
Jennifer