Day 7

A relatively uneventful day, since I am supposed to be getting down to the business of, you know, starting a dissertation. Whatever that's supposed to mean. The biggest pragmatic difference, so far as I can tell, is that you're usually expected to have read the whole book of secondary scholarship or criticism rather than just the relevant bits. Additionally, I've been spending whole hours in mute confusion looking through the British Library's catalogues only to realize: I don't have to be looking a a manuscript every day. I will look at manuscripts or rare books on many days, of course, but I don't need to justify my presence here by looking at archival material when it would be more productive for me to work elsewhere, on other things. Marx may have written Gundrisse in the British Library, but he didn't have a laptop, the internet, or access to other nice libraries with open shelves.

Anyway, my sole excursion for the day yesterday was a trip up and down Charing Cross Road, looking for a used copy of Augustine's Confessions. Used bookstores, in particular, can be really good for the Loeb classics (I know, I know, I'm never going to become a decent Latinist using facing page translations) but they (the used Loebs) tend to travel in packs and so things tend to be rather hit or miss. Yesterday was full of misses: not one of the maybe half dozen secondhand bookstores I stopped in had a copy of the Loeb or any other edition. I did find a fantastic selection of new copies at Foyle's, but the prices (11.99 for the Penguin classics edition!) gave me sticker shock and I demurred. The better translations of the Confessions, as well as the Oxford edition of the Latin text, are all available online for free.

Yesterday evening I attended "pub quiz" in the bar in the basement of the hall. The procedings will be familiar to fans of any of the innumerable American variations on the basic theme; the notable difference here being that the prizes included a bottle of champagne and a package of milk (true story). Teams were assigned at random, and mine included students, mostly other postgrads, from the US, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, and Luxembourg, a definite asset as the questions were deliberately global in scope. The desire to be a smart-ass (e.g., "What is the tallest mountain in New Zeeland?" "Mt. Doom.") and also, oddly, to provide an answer to every question in a picture round, seems to be universal, even if it means guessing that a photo of what turned out to be the new president of South Africa was "Martha Stewart". Our team performed tolerably well, but not so well as to win either bubbly or milk. Disappointingly, there was no bonus round at the end.

My explorations of British confectionary continue, now with the purchase of a mint Aero bar. It tasted like sugary confusion. The packaging promised "bubbles" within; I have to say I was disappointed, as I suppose I was hoping for a "pop" rather than the "melt" that the packaging suggests. Apparently the filling is also mint chocolate flavored rather than simply mint flavored. Curious stuff.