Outside Looking In

I tried to get on EEBO this morning, only to find that our institutional subscription has run out. I hadn't heard anything about it, and surely if the library decided to cancel the subscription, one of the librarians would have emailed about it, no? Because in reality, libraries don't make decisions, librarians do, and ours seem to be thoughtful, smart people.

But we have a budget crunch around here and it's pretty overwhelming looking at the numbers. So maybe someone decided that a few folks in the English department don't really need that database? (No one in the history department does England much.)

I'm hoping it's just an end of the year glitch about re-subscribing.

So in my panic, I screwed around on the web, reading some blogs, and ran across a blog I haven't read previously. It's one of those blogs that clearly has its own world going, and its commenters are part of that world; they seem to know each other in non-web ways.

So this blog is just a totally different world, a world of luxury, easy travel, time to travel, drinking tea here and there, chatting about the stuff this or that important person owns.

It's a totally different world.

And it's a grad student blog, a lit grad student, a lit grad student whose undergrad place apparently gives hir free access for life to things such as EEBO. There's discussion of the lattes at fine institutions of research.

It's a far cry from wondering if my institution can afford the c. $4-5K a year subscription fee.

Growing up, I was never really aware that there were people like this student. I mean, I read books about princesses and stuff, but they weren't real. Reading a blog though, makes me think about their reality, though. And it's a totally different reality, though we're nominally in the same line of work.

I wonder if out there, somewhere, is someone reading my blog and looking at my level of privilege with the same sort of alienation? It's easy to imagine.