Jenny's Choice

Oh, God, this is cruel.

I don’t know if this happens to everyone, but it often happens to me that I will be mildly interested in something – like, I don’t know, code-breaking, or early 20th century science fiction. Then suddenly, upon the smallest provocation, instead of being mildly interested, I will be wildly interested (oo, it rhymes). It's like I leaned too close to the source of contagion, and bam, I caught obsession. After this happens I will be like a ravening fiend for a while, reading more and more and more books about that thing. Oscar Wilde was, of course, a particularly epic example of this.

So recently I have become wildly interested in World War II, specifically the Brits during World War II. I have all these books about them out of the library, and I’ve made a massive list of other books I will want to read when I have finished reading the books that I have already. Including a biography of Edward Murrow, which I really is only tangentially related to the Brits during WWII, but whatever. I cannot get enough of books about the British home front during WWII at the moment.

However. In my innocent attempts to find digital primary sources about Edward Murrow during the war (P.S. This is sweet.), I happened across the Harvard Library’s digital collections, which as you may imagine are not insubstantial. And I thought, Oh, hey, well, I will just glance through these quickly to see what they’ve got, and when I am done with the British home front I will some ideas about what interesting primary documents I feel like reading next.

I realize now that this was foolish. I realize the whole notion of finding primary sources that had been digitized for my viewing pleasure was never going to be quick and simple. I obviously completely forgot what sort of a person I am; viz., an obsessive completist who will not settle for glancing over any single collections of digital archives, and who will now probably spend ages and ages checking out the digital archives of other major universities and having this whole problem much exacerbated.

Be that as it may, you will just not believe what the Harvard Law Library has on their website. IT IS LIKE THEY ARE CALLING OUT TO ME. It is a great big digital collection called “Studies in Scarlet”, and it is a whole bunch of, I swear to God, trial narratives printed in the US or UK from 1815 to 1914, all relating to marriage and sexuality. There’s over 400 of them. Over four hundred Victorian trial narratives relating to marriage and sexuality. I want to French-kiss Harvard Law School. I believe it is possible that Harvard Law School has a crush on me, and has chosen to court me by making these things available and waiting for me to come to it. This is Harvard Law School’s attempt to do a John Cusack to win my heart.

NOW I DO NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO. I cannot decide which obsession I want to go with. It is early days yet in my British home front obsession: I have only read a few books, and although I have made a list, I have not yet acquired all the books on it. I could still swerve away and do the sex trials instead. (There’s one about Lady Colin Campbell.) Britain was so inspirational – but sex trials are fascinating and hilarious.

Anyone have any thoughts? I will be quoting some set of people to you endlessly in the weeks to come, on the phone, in person, via email and IM, probably on Facebook – would you rather it was staunch Londoners who will never surrender, or prissy Victorian judges who think orgasm is a dirty word? (No, but really though – during the Salome libel trial when someone said orgasm, the prosecutor was all “What’s that? What’s that word? Some unnatural vice?”)