Transitory

1.  I am in New York City.  My home airport is Rochester.  My mother, who is meeting me here, called about an hour ago to say that she had been diverted...to Rochester.  We agreed that maybe she should just have visited me in Brockport. 

2.  The Strand now has some of my hard-earned cash.   Also one of my remaining lives, thanks to the gigantic insectoid whatsit scuttling around their basement by the university press section.  (At least I managed not to scream and/or jump on a chair, unlike the time a water bug invaded the Modern Philology office at the University of Chicago.  [All sorts of unimaginable horrors lurk in the U of C basements--and sometimes, they come upstairs to visit.  Stephen King could write a novel.]  I offed it with a Chicago Manual of Style, in case you were wondering.  The water bug, not the whatsit.)

In any event, I picked up several discounted novels (including a few Japanese historical novels--it looks like they had a big shipment of Japanese fiction in translation) and a couple of monographs.  If I have time next week, I may go to the Argosy Book Store, or possibly to Labyrinth Books. 

3.  NYC budget hotel architecture never ceases to amaze. In this room, the entry door is angled in such a way that its doorknob crashes into the bathroom doorknob when you open it.  On the other hand, there's actually space around the beds, which is not to be taken for granted in NYC hotels.

4.  I'll be here for a few days, so the plans include both relatives (my mother, two cousins) and religious fiction at the NYPL (two books in the Jewish Miscellany series released by the JPS in the mid-19th c., including Caleb Asher, and some short Catholic texts).

Comments

[nbm]

I wish we had something to offer you at my library, but I doubt it.

[John Thomas McGuire]

I can vouchsafe for the lack of space in New York City hotel rooms, even those of the "non-budget" capacity. One is lucky to have any space between the beds and television, for example. Thus one must avoid bumping into the usually large television set and possibly causing major injuries to oneself.