I Am Lazy
Okay, so I'm sure you're all on the edge of your seats wondering if I got the chapter draft to the Advisoress by Friday the 22nd, as I promised myself in this blog several weeks back. Oh, don't try to act surprised that I didn't. I tried—really I did. Now I have to give a presentation to the IHR tomorrow, and I done, basically nothing at all. Well, okay, I have an outline. It's going to be a long long day. Then a long few weeks before I give the paper on the 16th.
It has in fact been a big week: I finally started working at the British Library, which deserves a long post. It is very different from the Bibliothèque National in Paris—and not entirely better. It is startlingly less efficient, and the computer system is a shambles in comparison. But you can at least do your own photocopying. More on this later. Also more later on Jenny Lind, whom I now know a lot about. (Preview: She was nuts!)
On Wednesday I went to the National Archives in Kew, which until rather recently was known as the Public Records Office Frankly, the National Archive is probably a better name, since it contains photographs and printed ephemera and other things that don't really come to mind when you think of "public records"... BUT, every time I told someone I was going to the "National Archive" I got blank stares, so I finally gave in, and started calling it "the PRO," like everyone else still does. It was a nice place to work, although my research there was a total wash. [I just typed a whole account of what I was looking, and what I didn't find, and then, realizing that this was interesting to approximately no one, deleted it.] Perhaps it's just the time of year, but there were a lot of loud, obnoxious, elderly Americans at the PRO, apparently doing genealogical research about their ancestors. As previously reported, I've really been getting over my weird discomfort over my accent and what-not, but then I hear these people yelling at each other in the reading room of a library, and I, once again, begin to get the urge to quietly mumble at people to disguise my accent.
UPDATE! GARCIA ONLY HAD I THINK ONLY SIX CHILDREN. It seems Albert is in fact his grandson, by his second-oldest son Gustave (the one who was fired from the RAM for incompetence, in the absolute best exchange of letters in the RAM minute books). I was confused because Albert is (I think) older than Manuel's youngest daughter Paula. Would it be weird to have an aunt that is younger than you? (I believe this situation exists among the children and grandchildren of Keith Richards, if I'm not mistaken? Someone like that.) In other Garcia-clan-related news, it seems Manuel lied about his age on the 1881 census. Or, at least, his age was recorded incorrectly. It says 60; he was 76. Several explanations could account for this, but I'd like to imagine that he just wanted to avoid awkward questions about how he happened to have a five-year-old daughter at the age of 76.
I continue to meet homosexuals over the internet including: A cocky medical student! A freelance architectural historian! An old opera queen who makes hats for a living! A British-Jewish lawyer for an evil multinational music corporation! Details to follow... (Please, no comments about how meeting homosexuals over the internet is preventing me from writing musicology, thank you very much.)
It has in fact been a big week: I finally started working at the British Library, which deserves a long post. It is very different from the Bibliothèque National in Paris—and not entirely better. It is startlingly less efficient, and the computer system is a shambles in comparison. But you can at least do your own photocopying. More on this later. Also more later on Jenny Lind, whom I now know a lot about. (Preview: She was nuts!)
On Wednesday I went to the National Archives in Kew, which until rather recently was known as the Public Records Office Frankly, the National Archive is probably a better name, since it contains photographs and printed ephemera and other things that don't really come to mind when you think of "public records"... BUT, every time I told someone I was going to the "National Archive" I got blank stares, so I finally gave in, and started calling it "the PRO," like everyone else still does. It was a nice place to work, although my research there was a total wash. [I just typed a whole account of what I was looking, and what I didn't find, and then, realizing that this was interesting to approximately no one, deleted it.] Perhaps it's just the time of year, but there were a lot of loud, obnoxious, elderly Americans at the PRO, apparently doing genealogical research about their ancestors. As previously reported, I've really been getting over my weird discomfort over my accent and what-not, but then I hear these people yelling at each other in the reading room of a library, and I, once again, begin to get the urge to quietly mumble at people to disguise my accent.
UPDATE! GARCIA ONLY HAD I THINK ONLY SIX CHILDREN. It seems Albert is in fact his grandson, by his second-oldest son Gustave (the one who was fired from the RAM for incompetence, in the absolute best exchange of letters in the RAM minute books). I was confused because Albert is (I think) older than Manuel's youngest daughter Paula. Would it be weird to have an aunt that is younger than you? (I believe this situation exists among the children and grandchildren of Keith Richards, if I'm not mistaken? Someone like that.) In other Garcia-clan-related news, it seems Manuel lied about his age on the 1881 census. Or, at least, his age was recorded incorrectly. It says 60; he was 76. Several explanations could account for this, but I'd like to imagine that he just wanted to avoid awkward questions about how he happened to have a five-year-old daughter at the age of 76.
I continue to meet homosexuals over the internet including: A cocky medical student! A freelance architectural historian! An old opera queen who makes hats for a living! A British-Jewish lawyer for an evil multinational music corporation! Details to follow... (Please, no comments about how meeting homosexuals over the internet is preventing me from writing musicology, thank you very much.)
posted by Grrg at 12:35 PM
2 Comments:
How envious I am. How I would like to know lots about Jenny Lind. Tell us things, but only the entertaining ones.
G
When she was pregnant, she kept making "jokes" about how she was sure she would die in childbirth. When asked about how she prepared for the role of Alice in Robert le diable she said (I paraphrase) "I though he was going to go to hell, and all I could think about was how to save him!" She talked constantly about how she wanted to leave the operatic stage forever starting basically as soon as she had made her operatic debut and continually until she married. Her hagiographic biography has to sort of tip-toe around the fact that she hated her parents and cut them out of her life. One of her show-stopping concert pieces was a Swedish herding song, something like: "oh little heifer (high C) stop your grazing (two-octave run) etc. etc."
Oh and she totally made up lies about her time spent studying with Garcia, but that's not entertaining at all...
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