Octavian Nothing

In preparation for Wiscon, I'm rereading Octavian Nothing--with annotations, because apparently I have too much free time--and I'm remembering just how good it is, how much thematic stuff is layered in there.

Like, for example, how vehemently it attacks the notion of science as pure, unbiased, free from base passions.

"We...observed the men dragging their cranked engines up and down the long corridor, twisting fiber into cord. He [one of Octavian's teachers] whispered, 'They walk some ten miles a day along this track, half of it backwards. Note that man there. He is perhaps approaching my great antiquity. If he is, let us say, seventy, and has worked here since he was fifteen years of age, drawing rope six days a week, how many miles has he walked?"

I mean, he's taking an issue of social justice and turning it into a word problem!

I had forgotten that it had any funny bits (except for the word 'fundament,' which is funny because I'm twelve):

"Octavian," said my mother, "stop breaking my crayons."
"I'm not breaking," said I. "I'm drawing."
"'Drawing' is not snapping crayons and hurling them across the room."
I said, "It's the volcano Vesuvius in the very height of its eruption. That's how your draw magma."

(Even there, though-- there's this tension between dispassionate observing and passionate living, between Octavian's pique and jealousy and his denial thereof, which echoes everywhere in the novel.)

This is not extremely subtle. It's not anvilicious, but it's all right on the surface. If it were too much subtler--well, there wouldn't be anything to notice. It would just be business as usual.

Stellar moments in librarianship

Sometimes you'll see a kid who gloms onto you, not because of anything you do, but because they've got a bad home life and, resulting from that, a disturbing lack of boundaries.
This kid brought me a book about mummies and dead bodies and insisted that I read it to her. She was maybe six, seven years old, and she was asking for descriptions for all the pictures.

"Why doesn't this person have eyes?"
"Because he's been dead a really long time."
"What's that?"
"It's a dead baby."
"What's that?"
"It's another dead person."
"Is it the baby's mother?"
"No."
"Why not?"

Personal experience tells me that some kids are just morbid, for varying reasons and to varying degrees, and it doesn't help to treat that as something wrong or shameful or taboo, but looking at pictures of dead bodies with a young child definitely exceeded my Recommended Daily Allowance of skin-crawling.