Spring break, a melodramatic tale, and essay anxiety
1. I'm going to be in Albany from tomorrow night until a week from Sunday. If anyone else will be around and wants to hang out, let me know.
2. A completely gratuitous tale of woe, loss, and libraries: The saga begins two weeks ago, when I started looking around for a copy of Lucan's Pharsalia for a research paper I'm writing. Naturally, I began my investigation in the lovely, well-stocked school library. Success! They have a copy! No, wait, it's checked out. And the due date is May 15. May 15?! How is that even allowed? How come someone gets to check out a book for two months? And how come I can't do that?
Anyway, once I recovered from the shock brought on by this revelation, I set out again in earnest pursuit of my quarry. This time, my hunting grounds were the shelves of Powell's. Powell's has very, very rarely failed me, but alas, this was doomed to be one of those times. In their defense, they did have a few copies, but one was a rather dubious-looking translation and the others were absurdly expensive. More than I was willing to spend, anyway. I had to make do with buying The Odyssey instead, which has absolutely nothing to do with any of my schoolwork this semester, but is one of those books that everyone should own, especially if you study classics and/or literature. Really, me not owning a copy was some sort of academic crime, so at least the Powell's trip served to maintain literary justice.
I still didn't have a copy of Pharsalia, though, so I turned to Summit, which is the inter-library loan system in this area. Summit is a very happy thing, and I have never had reason to doubt it, but you understand that by this time I was wondering just how difficult it was going to be to track down this book. Fortunately, my faith in Summit was well-founded. I requested the book, and a few days later got an email telling me to come pick it up. Just like normal. Except when I got to the library, they couldn't find the book on the hold shelf. Or anywhere. After ten or fifteen minutes of fruitless searching, they sent me on my way, with no book and the vague instruction to come back sometime later. I was rather annoyed by this time, and kind of wondering if this book came complete with a curse, a notion that was only reinforced by the fact that Lucan is completely missing from several websites I know with good collections of Greek and Roman works.
But don't despair! The story has a happy ending. I went back to the library yesterday, and they'd found the book. I don't know what had happened to it, but it's now in my possession, so everything turned out well and now I can laugh at the whole tale of woe. Which was kind of the point of posting it here.
3. The other reason I typed up that whole story is that I'm avoiding writing an essay on a sonnet by Gascoigne, another sonnet by Shakespeare, and the idea of beauty. I'm not sure whether or not it helps that every time I think about Shakespeare's sonnets, I think of the Shakespeare episode of Doctor Who. On the one hand, it's not really relevant to my essay (if it were, I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about this assignment), and as such isn't conducive to productivity. On the other, it makes my mind a more interesting place.
2. A completely gratuitous tale of woe, loss, and libraries: The saga begins two weeks ago, when I started looking around for a copy of Lucan's Pharsalia for a research paper I'm writing. Naturally, I began my investigation in the lovely, well-stocked school library. Success! They have a copy! No, wait, it's checked out. And the due date is May 15. May 15?! How is that even allowed? How come someone gets to check out a book for two months? And how come I can't do that?
Anyway, once I recovered from the shock brought on by this revelation, I set out again in earnest pursuit of my quarry. This time, my hunting grounds were the shelves of Powell's. Powell's has very, very rarely failed me, but alas, this was doomed to be one of those times. In their defense, they did have a few copies, but one was a rather dubious-looking translation and the others were absurdly expensive. More than I was willing to spend, anyway. I had to make do with buying The Odyssey instead, which has absolutely nothing to do with any of my schoolwork this semester, but is one of those books that everyone should own, especially if you study classics and/or literature. Really, me not owning a copy was some sort of academic crime, so at least the Powell's trip served to maintain literary justice.
I still didn't have a copy of Pharsalia, though, so I turned to Summit, which is the inter-library loan system in this area. Summit is a very happy thing, and I have never had reason to doubt it, but you understand that by this time I was wondering just how difficult it was going to be to track down this book. Fortunately, my faith in Summit was well-founded. I requested the book, and a few days later got an email telling me to come pick it up. Just like normal. Except when I got to the library, they couldn't find the book on the hold shelf. Or anywhere. After ten or fifteen minutes of fruitless searching, they sent me on my way, with no book and the vague instruction to come back sometime later. I was rather annoyed by this time, and kind of wondering if this book came complete with a curse, a notion that was only reinforced by the fact that Lucan is completely missing from several websites I know with good collections of Greek and Roman works.
But don't despair! The story has a happy ending. I went back to the library yesterday, and they'd found the book. I don't know what had happened to it, but it's now in my possession, so everything turned out well and now I can laugh at the whole tale of woe. Which was kind of the point of posting it here.
3. The other reason I typed up that whole story is that I'm avoiding writing an essay on a sonnet by Gascoigne, another sonnet by Shakespeare, and the idea of beauty. I'm not sure whether or not it helps that every time I think about Shakespeare's sonnets, I think of the Shakespeare episode of Doctor Who. On the one hand, it's not really relevant to my essay (if it were, I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about this assignment), and as such isn't conducive to productivity. On the other, it makes my mind a more interesting place.