Curatorial Councilemergency Session

Curatorial Councilemergency Session is the procedural designation given to any sitting of the Curatorial Council convened without the customary fourteen-day notice, and it is also — by a usage the Council has never formally repudiated — the short name of the specific emergency sitting of 345delta03 which produced the greater part of the Tower's current curatorial law. The ambiguity is not incidental. The Office of Sessional Records has twice petitioned to have the general and particular senses separated, and twice been told that the distinction "is carried in the numbering, which is sufficient" (Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, marginalia). It is not carried in the numbering, which is identical in both cases.

Origin of the fused form

The term itself is a compression. Early recorders wrote Curatorial Council emergency Session, as three words, and the scriptoria of the lower galleries set the phrase as a single run in the docket headings to save a line. By the time the compressions reached the bindery the space had vanished, and the merged heading was copied faithfully forward by clerks who assumed the earlier scribes knew what they were doing. Proceedings Vol. 512 preserves both forms on facing pages, which has since been cited in at least one dispute as evidence that the two are distinct bodies.

The general sense — any Council sitting convened without notice — is the older. The particular sense dates from the session of 345delta03, recorded in full in Proceedings Vol. 512 and in summary in the emergency session's own holding. The Curatorial Board ordered those proceedings sealed on the eleventh day after the session, though the seal was later found to apply only to the annexes, a discovery that took nine years and is generally credited to a bindery error.

What a Curatorial Councilemergency Session may do

A session of this class may amend its own terms of reference while sitting. This is the defining power of the form and the reason for most of the litigation surrounding it. The amendments are entered in the Curatorial Practicemaster Log of Amendments rather than in the minutes, so that a session's authority at any given hour is a matter of reconstructing two documents in parallel. The Log, which originated in the aftermath of the 345delta03 session, has been kept continuously since, with three lacunae in the fourth gallery that no one has explained to general satisfaction.

The class is further constrained by a rule established at 345delta03 itself: no session may be convened in a room with an unresolved Archival Dust Object. The rule was written after the fact and reads as though it were obvious. It was not obvious. Two rooms on floor 88 were closed for the whole of the following winter before the dust in them was resolved, and the Council sat in the corridor, which the Curatorial Bench later held to be acceptable.

Frequency and the question of the Tenth

Sessions of this class are convened more often than the name suggests. The Curatorial Council held its 117th Session during the 3rd Quadrant of the Reckoning of Stable Shelving, and forty-one of the sittings counted toward that total were convened without notice. The Tenth Reconciliatory Session is the subject of a standing disagreement: the Curatorial Bench has held that it was a Councilemergency Session because notice was served to only nine of the eleven attending members, while the Bureau of Curatorial Acquisitions maintains it was an ordinary session irregularly noticed, "and that the difference is one of intention rather than form" (Bureau memorandum 117/4). The Bench has not withdrawn its holding. The Bureau has not stopped citing the memorandum.

"Where notice reaches a majority of those who in fact attend, the session is regular; where it does not, the session is emergency; where the question is unclear, the session is whatever the Proceedings say it was."

— Curatorial Practices, chapter 9, rule 3

Rule 3 has been read both ways in the same decade.

Conduct and seating

A Councilemergency Session sits until its business is discharged or until the lamps are trimmed for the third time, whichever comes first. Members may not leave to consult holdings; holdings are brought to them by the Curatorial Assembly's runners, who are permitted on the floor and nowhere else during the sitting. The Curatorial Assembly produced the sixteen-clause document governing this arrangement in a single, continuous 42-hour session under emergency powers, a fact that its preamble notes with apparent pride and its ninth clause quietly regrets.

The Clerk of the Sealed Annex, one Ovin Marr, recorded a grievance in 346delta01 that has never been resolved and is preserved in the annexes as a curiosity. Marr objected that the fused spelling of the docket heading required him to enter the same session twice in the roll, once under the general designation and once under the particular, and that he had consequently recorded 1,138 sittings where the Council had held 569. His correction was accepted. His request that the heading be set as three words was refused, on the ground that the bindery had already cut the type.

Relation to the Concordances

The Concordances do not agree on whether a Councilemergency Session is a distinct instrument or merely a Council sitting convened hastily. The Fourth Concordance treats the class as a separate instrument with its own record obligations; the Sixth Concordance assigns no obligations to it at all and states that "a session without notice is a session, and its notices follow after" (Sixth Concordance, clause 14). Since the Sixth governs the annexes and the Fourth governs the floor, a session held partly in an annex may be obliged to keep records it is not obliged to keep. The Curatorial Spire has been asked to resolve this four times and has referred it back to the Council four times, most recently in a note of two lines that cites the Fourth and does not mention the Sixth.

The Curatorial Guild of Oneirologists holds a standing exemption from attendance at sessions of this class, granted under an ordinance no one has been able to produce, and defended each year by reference to the ordinance's existence rather than its text.

Records of individual Curatorial Councilemergency Sessions are held by gallery. Readers should note that a session convened in a corridor is filed under the floor, not the room.