More specifically concerning: library
01.06.01
1 June 2001, around 8.09.
Friday. Morning in various libraries, reading about the second sophistic. The LRR is shut from tomorrow until October, which saddens me a great deal: my last two weeks in England spent without access to its darkened portraits and harried classicists. Still, there are other libraries available, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I’ve gotten into […]
12.06.01
12 June 2001, around 8.17.
More and still more work in the library, reading about god and trying to comprehend Epidauros, which just leaves me muddled. I find it frightfully confusing that there were at least four different (?) artists called Polykleitos working in the Greek world during the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE; it just shouldn’t be […]
5.09.01
5 September 2001, around 16.54.
Ineffably charming, oozing good humor & politic attention; I listen & ask questions – then run to the library and hide among my friends, their dusty spines bristling at imagined indignities.
20.09.01
20 September 2001, around 20.30.
Williston Library Carrel-choosing at the Library — it seems to be one of the social events of the early fall semester… (Yours truly now the proud resident of of carrel no. 502 – fifth floor, by the window, one shelf away from Greek & Latin poetry, twenty-seven paces from Stendhal.) Up very late reading again.
5.11.01 – Monday
5 November 2001, around 15.55.
I have come to the inevitable conclusion. Running into the eternal interrogative (thinking Forsterian here, can you tell?): the answer can, the answer must, for me at least, be yes. Not the ‘yes’ that means ‘no,’ not the affirmative that scorns, but that quiet ever so blank ‘yes’ which means everything & nothing, offers no […]
12.12.01 – Wednesday
12 December 2001, around 14.06.
Smell of snow and, strangely, dust. Also leaves. Witnessed (a martyrdom indeed!) an incident of performance art in the library foyer, involving a team of ‘dancers’ and books, which received such abuse as dropping & general prop-dom (oh, ignominy!). Also spent the last geology lecture of the year reading essays by Francis Bacon: There be […]
14.01.02 – Monday
14 January 2002, around 17.19.
Returned some few books to the library, thank heavens, and read a few articles I’d meant to peruse in November. Still feel vastly, horribly behind – only the cruelty of my own ambition forces me on (which can be a good or a bad thing, as you will). Speaking of ambition – St. Augustine: hmmm. […]
studium
26 February 2002, around 11.10.
A Footnote (20.07.2002)
20 July 2002, around 13.39.
In what later became a notorious media event, librarian Marvin S________ was found to be breeding bookworms in the library’s basement. When questioned by authorities, Mr S________ declared: It is for the cause of science; and if I am permitted to advance the light of understanding even one inch against the dark of ignorance, my […]
Improbable places (2)
21 November 2002, around 16.37.
The room of maps and diagrams Library, 11:36 a.m.
of Vices and Virtues
1 April 2003, around 18.03.
Library, sunlight, nine a.m. Our breach of hospitality went to my conscience a little: but I quickly silenced that monitor by two or three specious reasons, which served to satisfy and reconcile me to myself. The pain which conscience gives the man who has already done wrong, is soon got over. Conscience is a coward, […]
without books
9 December 2003, around 9.48.
On the whole we may conclude that Casaubon had strained his narrow means in this one direction of expense. Pinched everywhere else, he spent all he could save on books. Book-buying was to him not the indulgence of a taste or a passion, it was the acquisition of tools. While mere bibliomania is insatiable, the […]
fact
21 February 2004, around 9.24.
I call that day good in which I may spend the morning in bed reading Aubrey’s Brief Lives (cf.) and Cornelius Nepos.1 When Oxford surrendred, the first thing General Fairfax did was to sett a good Guard of Soldiers to preserve the Bodleian Library. ’Tis said that there was more hurt donne by the Cavaliers […]
de arte poetica liber
23 March 2004, around 12.18.
To my great embarrassment, I mistook this overview of William Blades’s Enemies of Books (via) for a poem1; e.g.: Bagford the biblioclast. Illustrations torn from MSS. Title-pages torn from books. Rubens, his engraved titles. Colophons torn out of books. Lincoln Cathedral Dr. Dibdin’s Nosegay. Theurdanck. Fragments of MSS. Some libraries almost useless. […] The care […]
a quiet evening
8 November 2004, around 12.15.
Seinsverfassung
10 November 2004, around 12.25.
from the Cowley Image Archive All was sunshine and flowers until the library delivered the wrong book for an interlibrary loan. I don’t care what the critics say, Allen Mandelbaum is no Gavin Douglas.1Brief critical introduction to and biography of Douglas. He also has the dubious honor of being somewhere commended by Ezra Pound. [↩]
commerce
13 December 2004, around 14.14.
Relics of the book trade; but see also a more impressive collection. O. W. Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table: Joyce Kilmer, Trees and Other Poems: ibidem H. W. Auden, Greek Prose Phrase-Book: A. Kiesling, ed. Seneca Rhetor: Newton & Treat, Outline for Review: Roman History: Lord Houghton, Life and Letters of John Keats: […]
return to stacks
2 June 2006, around 16.50.
books, libraries, and necromancy
enemy action
1 September 2006, around 12.21.
Cataloguing one’s home library has its good points. Entering in ISBNs and publication information is a wonderful way to devour time. One also gets a chance really to look at one’s books; one so seldom has the opportunity. One buys the book, sometimes one even reads it,1 and then it goes on the shelf, jumbled […]
27.12.2007
27 December 2007, around 18.35.
Up, coffee, tofu, e-mail, cook lunch, read book about world with no people, bicycle to work in the rain, make rude gesture at driver who runs stop sign at cross street, data entry, knit, drink hot chocolate, data entry, eat lunch, read book about emotionally confused people, shuffle papers, knit, shuffle papers, data entry, bicycle […]
aydqan mard es
22 March 2011, around 21.10.
The more languages you know, the more of a (hu)man you are.
a definite achievement
6 January 2013, around 7.01.
Wittgenstein on organizing one’s library
explicatio
30 April 2017, around 18.00.
Diogenes the cynic, radical pragmatist.