The Little Professor

Success!

Now that I have a new computer (OMG! It has memory! I can have the Robert Elsmere MS and my footnote document open at the same time!), I am continuing my adventures with cut-and-paste while attempting to deal with some mysterious references (from outer space, quite possibly).  One of the mysterious references was a quotation from Etienne Pivert de Senancour’s Rêveries sur la nature primitive de l’homme (1799), which Mrs. Ward translated from the original French.  Freely translated from the original French.   A lot of impolite language--or, as Mr. Spock would say, "colorful metaphors"--ensued as I hunted around in the Senancour for something that bore at least a passing resemblance to the (loooong) quotation.  And lo! This very evening, I finally found the quotation! Victory was at hand!

That is, until I realized that Mrs. Ward had silently combined chunks of text from different places in Senancour.  Random passers-by no doubt heard me uttering further colorful metaphors, which I shall not repeat here as my parents read this blog and might be dismayed.  After much wailing, gnashing of teeth, and, more on point, additional attempts to find likely retranslations of the translation of the original, I located the rest of Mrs. Ward's paragraph...forty-three pages after its "beginning."  Can I just say that Mrs. Ward did not write with the convenience of her future editors in mind? Sheesh.  

Robert Elsmere vs...my netbook

Cutting and pasting footnotes (a meditational activity) becomes ever-so-much more exciting when your netbook sobs, wails, and groans over the manuscript.  That is, when the netbook volunteers to load the manuscript, which it seems to have some compunctions about doing.   As this thing (a Samsung NC-10) has been behaving problematically for some time now, its current misbehavior probably counts as the last straw, or the final nail, or something proverbial like that.  I'm thinking about going back to Acer for an Aspire One, as I really don't want a full-sized notebook to lug around.

In the meantime, I'm about to trek to Santa Barbara, for reasons having nothing to do with Victorian religious fiction. 

 

This Week's Acquisitions

(Sort of a birthday acquisitions week.  I don't remember the name of one of the bookstores...)

• William Boyd, The Blue Afternoon (Vintage, 1997).  Woman discovers long-lost father (or so he says), finds herself adventuring with him.  (Anonymous Store)
• Rosa Chacel, Memoirs of Leticia Valle, trans. Carol Maier (Nebraska, 1994).  Translation of a Spanish novel originally published in 1945, narrated by a young girl whose relationship to an older man and his wife takes a dark turn.  (Anonymous Store)
• Sophie Gee, The Scandal of the Season (Scribner, 2008).  Historical novel based on the events that inspired Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock."  (Anonymous Store)
• Adam Braver, Mr. Lincoln's Wars (HarperCollins, 2003).  Story cycle about--what else?--Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War era.  (Anonymous Store)
• Monica Ali, Untold Story (Scribner, 2012).  Alternate universe in which Princess Diana is not dead.  (Barnes & Noble)
• Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun (Harper Perennial, 2009).  Reprint of Huxley's controversial history, originally published in 1952, of the trial of Urbain Grandier for witchcraft.  (Barnes & Noble)

In which I wander around my alma mater

I spent a little time ambling around UC Irvine this afternoon.  Given that the campus is laid out in rings, "around" is fitting in more ways than one. At the very least, you never get lost.  ("Just keep walking! You'll get back to it eventually!")

Looking in the direction of the new Humanities buildings and the Student Union:

There's some unintended architectural comic relief provided by the interim classroom buildings.  You know, the ones that have been interim for the entire duration of the university's existence (or close to it), and are now sitting across from shiny, gigantic new builds.  These permanent interim buildings were there when I was at UCI from '88-'92:

Incidentally, you know that a college campus was built in the 60s when one of its dormitory complexes has a Middle Earth theme. 

Unfortunately, one of the more distressing aspects of meandering about UCI is the new architecture, which somehow manages to be as ugly as the old architecture (is the campus under some sort of aesthetic curse?), but...more bizarrely.  What is this, exactly?

And while it's great that there's a new science library--visiting the old one was a signally gloomy affair--I can't help noting that it bears a strange resemblance to some sort of insectoid space invader.

Meanwhile, back to buildings that were around when I was around--Krieger (or HOB), the English department's original abode.  I used to hang out and read on a bench in front of the building, but the bench vanished shortly after I graduated.  (Correlation? Causation?)

The refurbished plaza is really not bad at all, although my enthusiasm for the new humanities buildings is...muted.  (Still, they managed to get rid of the interim buildings over on this side, for which I suppose we all ought to be grateful; I think they were the buildings that E. L. Doctorow compared to egg cartons.)

The park at the center of campus remains pretty.

The most traumatic change, though, had nothing to do with architecture: I went into the university bookstore, hoping to spend some money on remainders (because the bookstore has always had an amazing section of academic and literary remainders), but not only were there almost no remainders, there were almost no books.  Sure, there were some books, but virtually the entire upper floor had been taken over by gizmos and shirts and supplies and goodness-knows-what.  It's a bookstore! It should have books in it! Really!