Last night I dreamed that I returned to the Columbia Slavics Department (located on the 7th floor of Hamilton Hall, which was recently seized by protesters prior to being liberated by NYPD).* Of course the physical appearance of the dream department looked almost nothing like the place in real life.
When I got there I saw there was a short line of people standing there waiting to be serviced by someone behind a desk like one might have in a library or old-fashioned bank. Naturally I got in line and waited my turn. Of course I knew some of the people in line, including Sasha Mihailovich, who had actually TA'd a section I was in at Yale, not at Columbia, and had been on the ACTR trip I took to the Soviet Union back in '87. It was very nice to see him.
When I got to the front of the line I asked if I could have a look at my Permanent Record. "Your Permanent Record?" asked the young woman behind the desk, apparently unaccustomed to fielding these kind of requests. "Yeah," I said. But she didn't hesitate much, she pretty much turned around and pulled my Permanent Record -- an accordion file stuffed with a wide range of papers -- off of a shelf and handed it to me. I took the file to one of the tables in a decent-sized reading room and started going through it. I was surprised to see that it contained stuff going back as far as elementary school and started to take pictures of the stuff with my phone. Then I woke up.
* Note that the only bound copy of my master's thesis -- which looked at installations by Ilya Kabakov as well as Life: A User's Manual, by George Perec -- is located in the Slavics Reading Room up there on the 7th floor. I do hope it's OK.
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