Not the effort nor the failure tires*
It is bad enough to have to get up on a Saturday to go to work; it is even worse to get up and find that We Have A Domestic Crisis, i.e. a leak from the front room radiator (yesterday we had the boiler service + radiator check).
This turned out to be less massive a crisis than it might have been (i.e. it was possible to turn the valve so that leakage ceased), however, this involved having to empty and move my filing cabinet and various adjacent stacks of box files and turn the fan heater on the damp patch.**
***
We were not unduly busy with rare materials readers today, though just about enough of them to make one feel justified in being there, and I was able to get on with some Useful Tasks (including getting a jump on various work stuff for Monday).
I have produced a report on an article, comments on a book ms, and found that the proofs of the article for the proceedings from the Belgian conference (which was, I find on looking back, 2005, not 2006) were less intimidating or horrifying than I had anticipated.
However, this latter item is the article concerning which I have, over a period of years, been subjected to enormous amounts of faff from the volume editors, starting with deciding to change the referencing conventions and culminating in the episode last year in which I received an edited version back into which somebody had plonked several clunky passages of theoretical analysis with which I was not in accordance (quite apart from the atrocity of the prose style), resulting in my eventual concession of inserting a passage or two of theoretical analysis which was more or less saying what the piece was already saying (sometimes you have to spell it out and chuck in Some Theorist's Name for people).
Okay then, several versions of the paper down the line, I appear to be correcting proofs based on the version I originally submitted in the aftermath of the conference in the autumn of 2005.
*WTF???!!!!*
Sent editor stroppy email asking are they sure this is the text I am supposed to be proofing? and mutterings that if so, they have wasted precious hours when I could have been watching paint dry.
***
*The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
***
**And as damp patch is still not dry I am sitting here surrounded by piles of stuff and feeling like a cross between The Last Day in The Old Home and Hans Meyrick's projected worka-art (in Daniel Deronda) featuring Mira as Berenice sitting in the ruins of Jerusalem.***
***
***Which made me think about works of art in literature and whether Angus Wilson was right, in the lecture I heard him give, lo, many years since, about the direness of these and how glad we are not to have to look at them, and whether this pertains particularly to the visual and plastic arts.
And get my George Eliot geekery on and wonder whether this particular artwork sounds deeply unalluring because Hans Meyrick is a really annoying young man, or whether she was not that taken with painters anyway (Ladislaw's friend in Rome who paints Dorothea as Antigone and Casaubon as St Thomas Aquinas is fairly creepy, no?), in spite of liking old Dutch interiors (or so we are led to believe by a well-known passage in Adam Bede conveying her own aesthetic agenda).
Have strong sense that music was perhaps more important to her and she liked musicians better****: she does interesting things with Rosamund's ability to mimic a really good teacher in Middlemarch, and a case can be made that Catherine Arrowpoint and Herr Klesmer are the most attractive characters in Daniel Deronda.
****According to an Eliot scholar I was conversing with recently, she and Lewes did not let just anyone among their guests sing at their soirees at The Priory.
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