Household Opera

Things I've learned in cataloging class

• There exists a Library of Congress subject heading for "roller disco." Unsurprisingly, when I searched WorldCat for it, eight of the ten results were first published between 1979 and 1981.
• You can also catalog works on roller disco using a combination of the subject headings "Roller skating" and "Disco dancing."
• There's an entire MARC fixed field devoted to identifying whether or not the item being cataloged is a festschrift. No doubt that made sense at the time, but even our professor finds it hilarious.
• If I ever publish a book and put "Ph.D." after my name  (which I'd never do, because it's obnoxious), the "Ph.D." part wouldn't appear in the MARC record for the book. But if I move to England, become a British subject, get named Dame Commander or Baroness of Whatsit, and then publish a book, I'd get to be Dame or Baroness in library catalogs ever after. (Why? Well, they don't call them the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules for nothing.)
• Steve Lawson at See Also... created an LCSH fiction quiz: guess the novel by its subject headings. I always did wonder how on earth you'd create subject headings for #1. (I didn't learn this in class, but I thought I'd link it anyway.)
• I'm still gaping at the fact that people actually wrote entire books about roller disco. Even in 1979.

If you like this kind of thing, I recommend the Wacky and Weird Subject Headings Wiki. Personally, I'm delighted that someone at the Library of Congress decided that "Names carved on trees" merits its very own subject heading.

Today's haul from the farmers' market

• One loaf of bread
• One big bunch of Swiss chard
• One bag of arugula (more than I can eat in salads, so some of it will go into pasta)
• Five strange little cucumbers with yellowish-green skin, each the size of a lemon
• Four tomatoes of various colors
• One bunch of purple basil
• Three donut peaches
• Two little green pears
• Two bitter melons, plus one unidentified hot pepper that the vendor offered me for a nickel because he said bitter melon should always be cooked with some hot pepper

Not bad, eh? I haven't been cooking much this summer, but I've been starting to miss it. Yesterday I tried making carciofi alla romana for the first time ever (not an unqualified success — I'm still an artichoke newbie — but the combination of mint, artichokes, garlic, and white wine was the most interesting taste that's come out of my kitchen in a while). Next week I plan to scale back my ambitions a bit and try braising some fennel, or maybe frying some squash flowers if they're still available. I may be on the verge of a foodie renaissance.

The other great thing about the farmers' market: everyone offers free samples, and you see little kids running around voluntarily munching slices of cucumbers and tomatoes. Plus, some of the farmers have blogs!

What else I've been up to: a list

Wrapping my head around data modeling, particularly entity-relationship modeling, which is bizarrely fun. Also Dialog, a.k.a. (depending on one's perspective) "You're learning Dialog? Oh my God, why?" or "a powerful teaching tool" or "hours of pain, but you'll be better at power-searching databases than anyone else." Even though I persistently forget that S is short for both "set" and "select," I'm actually starting to see the connections between the theory and the practice of database-searching (construction, too), in both classes I'm taking. Which is nifty.

Keeping the invading mice at bay with a combined strategy of traps in the basement, blocking possible access routes, obsessively vacuuming up crumbs, and spraying a peppermint-oil-and-water solution in the places where I've seen them. Traps baited with peanut butter only lured more mice into my apartment, where they then kept getting the bait off the traps without getting caught. This gave me a certain respect for their intelligence, but I'd still rather be able to sleep at night without listening for the scritching of unwelcome little feet. Fortunately the strategy  seems to be working, cross fingers and touch wood.

Reading voraciously on the train and over meals. Latest books I've read: Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, which I initially thought might be too grim for my tastes, but it's a strong contender for my favorite of her novels thus far; Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?, after two years of meaning to read it (very good, I thought); and I just finished Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

Not getting out all that much, thanks to work and school, but planning a few excursions: probably the Philadelphians Against Santorum Halloween cabaret this weekend, and Tosca at the Center City Opera Theater next week. Also, hopefully, Riccardo Muti conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra (Schubert, Hindemith, and Strauss), if I can score a student rush ticket.

Mulling a sort of experimental literary-critical project, which keeps shifting frustratingly out of reach and getting shelved for later.

Getting back into knitting, especially now that I've found people to knit with on my lunch hours and familiarized myself with my nearest yarn stores. Loop, on South Street, even has its own blog.

Wondering whether kids on my block go trick-or-treating, and how much candy I should get in case they do, and whether I have time to carve a pumpkin as fabulous as this one. (Maybe not this year, but some year I want to start carving pumpkins into the likenesses of Edward Gorey's Gashlycrumb Tinies.)

Unsolved mysteries

I'm formulating something in response to the discussion at Frogs and Ravens and Liliputian Lilith about intellectuals in and out of the university. In the meantime, here are a few of the other (massive and weighty) questions I've been pondering:

1. When did all novels start appearing with the subtitle "A Novel" on their front covers? It seems a relatively new phenomenon. Lately I've noticed that some of these subtitled novels use the subtitle as a means of broadcasting key details of setting or plot before you even pick up the book and look at the blurb. The Stiletto-Maker's Apprentice: A Novel of Intrigue in Eighteenth-century Venice. Under the Sound Stage: A Novel about Hollywood. The Strollers of Park Avenue: Yet Another Novel About New York Nannies.

2. When did publishers start color-coding the covers of paperbacks so you can automatically tell which ones are the Chick Novels? They all look alike, graphic-design-wise. It's disturbingly like walking past the Barbie aisle in a toystore.

3. When did "stylish" become the default adjective to modify "thriller" in movie-review parlance? Everything is a "stylish thriller." Is it just shorthand for "wannabe Hitchcock," or what?

4. When did waitstaff in restaurants start using the phrase "Are you still working on that?" to ask if you're finished with your food? Why does no one seem to notice how depressing this question is? "Working on that," as if eating in a restaurant were a tiresome chore rather than a pleasure. What are you supposed to say in return? "Yes, I'm working on choking down the last of this steak; it's not easy suppressing my gag reflex, but by God, I'm giving it my best shot!"

(Apparently, though, I am not the only person who hates this question.)

5. When did Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" become the default background music for cruise ship and vacation-package commercials? (Not just Carnival; I just heard it in another vacation commercial.) Does anyone else experience really freaky Trainspotting/Carnival Cruise Lines montages in their head as a result?

6. Why does the thought of Unsolved Mystery #5 make me want to rush out and buy the Trainspotting soundtrack right this minute? I have the sudden urge to listen to Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" again. There goes my resolve not to burden myself with more new things before moving.

Things I would rather do than grade papers

1. Clean the refrigerator.

2. Go to the nearest big grocery store, which is two or three miles away. On foot. (Actually, it's a nice energetic 45-minute hike if the weather is good and I'm in the mood for exercise, which I was yesterday. And I take the bus home, because another 45-minute hike with groceries is too much. But still.)

3. Visit my local knitting store and fondle every type of yarn in succession — though, to be fair, I do that on non-grading weekends as well.

4. Obsessively check my e-mail.

5. Obsessively check my referrer stats.

6. Watch cheesy movies starring Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, and CGI aliens on network TV.

7. Check my Bloglines subscriptions over and over.

8. Recategorize the books on my bookshelves.

9. Stare at the wall, humming to myself.

10. Plan elaborate menus for tonight's dinner, involving recipes I probably won't have time to make.

11. Do laundry.

12. Try to win the "Expert" level in Spider Solitaire.

13. Collect and recycle all miscellaneous and non-important pieces of paper in my apartment.

14. If it comes down to it, chew off my right arm so I'll have an excuse for not writing any more comments.

[Y'all know I'm not serious about the last one, right? Actual posting of substance will resume in a few days.]

Score!

Found at my local library's big semiannual used book sale today:

Alice Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry
Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form
Herbert Liebowitz, ed., Parnassus: Twenty Years of Poetry in Review
J. D. McClatchy, ed., The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry

All together, they cost a grand total of $2. Gloat!

And here's a random bit of conversation, overheard at the same venue, that I found funny for some reason:

SMALL CHILD: Mommy, these are nonfiction.
MOTHER: Actually, sweetie, they're mysteries.
SMALL CHILD: Nonfiction mysteries?

Three things that are making me happy right now

1. I've just finished drafting my personal statements for my application for the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship in Scholarly Information Resources. Go me. (Is anyone else out there applying? Please, let there not be countless hundreds of applicants. Please, let them like my application.)

2. I didn't go to this year's MLA convention, and after reading what some of the posters at the Invisible Adjunct's site are saying about it, I'm very glad I didn't.

3. Over the weekend it started snowing, the first serious snow of the season. Sure, the temperature dropped 20 degrees over the course of a day or so, but cold weather with snow is somehow much less depressing than cold weather without snow.

Found poetry from knitting books

Thumbing through Barbara Walker's A Treasury of Knitting Patterns and A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns in search of lace patterns I can actually make without losing track of where I am,* I keep coming across patterns with oddly poetic names. Consider, for instance:

Parenthetical Rib
All Fools' Welt
Tilting Ladder
Crest of the Wave
Dry Bones Cable
Gordian Knot
Homes of Donegal
Dragon Skin
Pillar and Web
Ostrich Plumes
Flying Buttress
Inverted Gull
Crazy Maypole
Anemone
The Cloisters
Candle of Glory
Telescope Lattice
Wings of the Swan
Odin's Eagles
Syncopated Brioche

("Syncopated Brioche" is my favorite, with "Dry Bones Cable" a close second.)

* I'm looking for lace patterns because I found a skein of this yarn in indigo, purple, and green on sale, and there's enough in it for an entire shawl and then some.