For the past thirty-six hours I have been dreading my Yahoo e-mail. It’s an account I opened ten years ago to handle internet purchases and the various stuff I signed up for in the heady youthful days of the internets. So what could have happened to make me start dreading the messages in this account [...]
Archive for the ‘biblioholism’ Category
18 Mar
Ten pounds of copies!
I’m blogging from a world capital, at an exclusive, top-secret location whose name rhymes with the Schmittish Schmybrary. For shits and giggles (and research) I’ve been in the Music Reading Room listening to recordings and looking at scores, from which I want to make a few copies.
Heretofore I had been enjoying such a charmed trip [...]
20 Jan
My ill-fated, never-to-be alternate career
It’s been a gloriously sunny, chilly day in Funky City. Yet what have I done but spend it in bed, swaddled in flannel, down, and alpaca in shades of lemon and celadon (such a cheery, if unfashionable, color scheme for the dead of winter) while swilling a mug of gunpowder green tea that I’ve topped [...]
26 Nov
Go, litel book
In my experience, “grad school” is emphatically not “college: the sequel.” For one thing, professors don’t care about your little feelings when you’re a grad student. So when I encounter people who went straight from undergrad to grad school, I wonder what is supposed to have happened in the intervening summer to transform them into [...]
16 Nov
Things I have discovered about reading
Call it extreme reader response, or maybe reader reader response, in which I construct the meaning of other readers’ reading, but I’ve been having epiphanies right and left these days about how people read. Of course I’m not so silly to think that everyone reads as I do, but really, folks, I’m getting self-conscious these [...]
22 Sep
Santa Claus is coming to town
I seem to be expending an awful lot of electrons here whining about my job, which I quite like, so I’ll focus on some of the benefits of working at Jumbo Public University, which I suppose hold true for jumbo public universities everywhere.
I mean, I can’t think of another teaching environment in which you can [...]
2 Sep
Mc”Bookstore” rage
I seem to be on a bitch spree these days. How does my little universe irk me? O let me count the ways: (other) department chairs who seem to feel entitled to my time, idiot dog owners who let their dogs assault passersby, that pixelated turd called Blackboard. . .
But what faculty member’s bitching would [...]
9 Aug
In a glittering instant
When I worked at a SLAC where faculty meetings were mandatory, I used to while away the hours by grading papers. When I ran out of those,* I looked around the room and began casting the bored, surly, sycophantic people around me in The Movie of My Life.
Casting this movie became a habit and a [...]
23 Jul
Why? Why-y-y-y-y?
So I get back from my excellent weekend at World-Class Library, and what do I find on my doorstep but this:
When the last installment came out, I was in England, at the best conference I’ve ever attended. Though I say so myself, I rocked my talk. I turned down four (underwhelming: don’t be impressed) [...]
20 Jul
Ungentle readers
For various reasons, it will be a few years before I can begin living my dream of a House Beautiful. Meanwhile, I do what I can to make the apartment I live in a gracious refuge, despite its persistent six-legged population. To effect this transformation, I’ve been slowly replacing my crap grad student furniture with [...]
