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So I'm sitting here at the Salem Athenaeum, although it is 5:30 or so on the 13th rather than whatever time in the morning on the 14th this is probably marked. For lo, I can type, but not dialup -- I have borrowed J.'s mighty PowerBook 540 to work on my paper while I sit here. Which I will do. Honest.
Provided no actual library patrons need me to check out books for them or anything.
One every couple of weeks or so I pull a 2-to-4-hour shift here, being one of the substitutes the main librarian calls from time to time when he needs or wants some time off or help during a lecture or other function. This is one of the better situations: the occasional night shift when there's no lecture or book discussion group scheduled; I sit here by myself and study or see what's recently arrived or, conversely, see what's really old. Particularly distracting is the juvenile section right over the main desk; I lost an evening once reading through a book on the history and evils of Communism written for young readers in the 1960s.
But if tradition holds, especially since it threatens to be rainy again at a moment's notice, I will probably not have many "customers." There's been one so far in 45 minutes; that's about average. On the other hand, it is the one day a week where the place is open in the evening for general browsing, so people who have been meaning to return their books but couldn't get here during the work day might show up. But on still a third hand, many of the people who belong to the Athenaeum live nearby and, being the neighborhood that it is, not all of them have that intrusion into their leisure time called work, either because they've retired or their family made a bundle a century or two ago and they haven't managed to spend it all yet.
As an aside, I see that there is an outgoing piece of in-town mail addressed to a woman whose address is given merely by the name of the house (presumably it's a historic structure) and neighborhood, with of course city/state/ZIP. And yet the Salem post office can't find my residence even when we go so far as to have people include the cross street in the address! Our mail gets misdelivered and then reforwarded all the time, and we get other people's mail as well. Part of the problem is that lots of streets are named after the same big families, like the Hawthornes. But other times it's inexplicable. We got a piece of mail the other day for someone admittedly within a five-minute walk from our house, but not remotely on our street. We put it out in the mailbox marked "incorrectly delivered," but we might have correctly added, "it's supposed to go to the street the Post Office parking lot is on." Maybe we'd have better luck if we had our mail addressed to the people who lived in the house a few generations ago, as stuff still comes for them.
Our L.L. Bean catalogs, however, arrive every other day without fail.
Speaking of young readers, which, you may recall, I was a while ago, there's an exhibit in the works here at the Athenaeum on children's books. There are some fine quotations from Milne that the curator of the exhibit has chosen to highlight; my favorites have to be "Just because you hear a buzzing-noise coming from a tree doesn't mean you're going to get any honey" and "When your tail is missing, remember that you have every right to Mope." In glass cases there are several old books opened to representative pages. One seems to be a series of illustrated rhymes about despicable children, like "Slovenly Peter," who never cuts his hair or nails and looks rather like Edward Scissorhands' more colorful but less well dressed medieval cousin, or "Cruel Frederick," who, inter alia, "kill'd the birds, and broke the chairs, / And threw the kitten down the stairs; / And oh! far worse and worse, / He whipp'd his good and gentle nurse!", the latter apparently with some sort of riding crop.
Kids those days. What can you do?
I look forward to the exhibit label text, when it's all done.... The last exhibit, by the same woman, was on Nat Hawthorne's reading habits when he was a member of the Athenaeum, and that was reasonably diverting.
Now to refresh my memory as to what A.J. Marshall has to say of relevance in "Ladies in Waiting: The Role of Women in Tacitus' Histories," Ancient Society 15 (1984): 167-184, and then to write at least some of my conference paper. If I write as much on it as I have just now for livejournal, that will be a good start.
Provided no actual library patrons need me to check out books for them or anything.
One every couple of weeks or so I pull a 2-to-4-hour shift here, being one of the substitutes the main librarian calls from time to time when he needs or wants some time off or help during a lecture or other function. This is one of the better situations: the occasional night shift when there's no lecture or book discussion group scheduled; I sit here by myself and study or see what's recently arrived or, conversely, see what's really old. Particularly distracting is the juvenile section right over the main desk; I lost an evening once reading through a book on the history and evils of Communism written for young readers in the 1960s.
But if tradition holds, especially since it threatens to be rainy again at a moment's notice, I will probably not have many "customers." There's been one so far in 45 minutes; that's about average. On the other hand, it is the one day a week where the place is open in the evening for general browsing, so people who have been meaning to return their books but couldn't get here during the work day might show up. But on still a third hand, many of the people who belong to the Athenaeum live nearby and, being the neighborhood that it is, not all of them have that intrusion into their leisure time called work, either because they've retired or their family made a bundle a century or two ago and they haven't managed to spend it all yet.
As an aside, I see that there is an outgoing piece of in-town mail addressed to a woman whose address is given merely by the name of the house (presumably it's a historic structure) and neighborhood, with of course city/state/ZIP. And yet the Salem post office can't find my residence even when we go so far as to have people include the cross street in the address! Our mail gets misdelivered and then reforwarded all the time, and we get other people's mail as well. Part of the problem is that lots of streets are named after the same big families, like the Hawthornes. But other times it's inexplicable. We got a piece of mail the other day for someone admittedly within a five-minute walk from our house, but not remotely on our street. We put it out in the mailbox marked "incorrectly delivered," but we might have correctly added, "it's supposed to go to the street the Post Office parking lot is on." Maybe we'd have better luck if we had our mail addressed to the people who lived in the house a few generations ago, as stuff still comes for them.
Our L.L. Bean catalogs, however, arrive every other day without fail.
Speaking of young readers, which, you may recall, I was a while ago, there's an exhibit in the works here at the Athenaeum on children's books. There are some fine quotations from Milne that the curator of the exhibit has chosen to highlight; my favorites have to be "Just because you hear a buzzing-noise coming from a tree doesn't mean you're going to get any honey" and "When your tail is missing, remember that you have every right to Mope." In glass cases there are several old books opened to representative pages. One seems to be a series of illustrated rhymes about despicable children, like "Slovenly Peter," who never cuts his hair or nails and looks rather like Edward Scissorhands' more colorful but less well dressed medieval cousin, or "Cruel Frederick," who, inter alia, "kill'd the birds, and broke the chairs, / And threw the kitten down the stairs; / And oh! far worse and worse, / He whipp'd his good and gentle nurse!", the latter apparently with some sort of riding crop.
Kids those days. What can you do?
I look forward to the exhibit label text, when it's all done.... The last exhibit, by the same woman, was on Nat Hawthorne's reading habits when he was a member of the Athenaeum, and that was reasonably diverting.
Now to refresh my memory as to what A.J. Marshall has to say of relevance in "Ladies in Waiting: The Role of Women in Tacitus' Histories," Ancient Society 15 (1984): 167-184, and then to write at least some of my conference paper. If I write as much on it as I have just now for livejournal, that will be a good start.
