LP on the move

I'm getting myself together for Tuesday's trek out to Austin, TX, where I'll spend a few days reading some bad Victorian novels (I don't seem to read any other kind, somehow...) at the Harry Ransom Center; then it's off to CA, where I'll visit my parents, read some more bad Victorian novels at UCLA and the Huntington, and see The Merry Wives of Windsor. 

As part of my travel preparations, I've been cleaning out my desk at the university.  In theory, while I'm gone, my battered old metal desk will mysteriously vanish into the ether, to be replaced by a new (metal?) desk of as-yet unknown appearance.  I had left the contents of a couple drawers intact after I inherited this desk from my predecessor, and have now come to the conclusion that he had a mysterious passion for paperclips.  There are boxes and boxes and boxes of paperclips, some of which appear to be decades old.  Butterfly clips.  Tiny metal clips.  No student need ever turn in loose pages again! It's the mother lode of all paperclips, I tell you. 

Comments

[Josh]

OMG, maybe it was Bert!

[Rohan Maitzen]

I'll spend a few days reading some bad Victorian novels (I don't seem to read any other kind, somehow...)

Do you ever find this disheartening? I admit, one reason I shifted research directions was to get out of having to read so much bad writing, even though professionally I would probably have been better off staying in my niche stocked with second-rate stuff.

[Miriam]

Taken individually, the novels are pretty bad, but I'm interested in the "conversation" going on among the novels. So the payoff comes from thinking about what emerges from a group of texts as a whole, which (from a personal POV) makes the enterprise not disheartening at all.