Library, Quotidian 2 comments

On a high note

By on July 8th, 2006

My last day at work isn’t till next week, but yesterday I worked my last couple of reference desk shifts. At the end of the last one, a visiting student came to the desk with a question about a checked-out book she wanted to consult. She wasn’t going to have time to recall it, and she mentioned that she’d be traveling over the summer. So I asked her if she’d ever used OCLC WorldCat (she hadn’t), and I showed her how to find which other libraries had the book. It turned out that a college library in a nearby town she’d be visiting had the book, as did a public library some distance from her home town. "You’ve been a lifesaver," she told me as she left, and I headed off to my cubicle with a big grin all over my face, happy that my very last reference interaction at UVa ended on a high note.

(Okay, technically my very last reference interaction at UVa was a question about the printer queue, but I’m counting the one before it as the last, even so.)

Music 6 comments

Addio

By on July 6th, 2006

Oh, no. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson has died. There are no words; go listen to her here or here instead.

Quotidian, Web/Tech 1 comment

Clever relocation hacks

By on July 4th, 2006

How on earth did people manage to move to new cities before the
internet? Somehow, of course, they did. But, as is the case with a lot
of other things that are much easier with access to e-mail
and the web, it’s hard to imagine. At any rate, one of the perks of moving to a big city is the ready
availability of information on that city. I’ve been browsing PhillyBlog a lot; it’s more a forum than a blog, really, and there are tons of threads about moving, transportation, and life in various neighborhoods. Philadelphia also has a Craigslist, which means more apartment listings than you
can shake a stick at, plus you can search them by price and keyword and get your
search delivered to you as an RSS feed. (This is, hands down, my
current favorite housing search tool. Though I wish pictures showed up
in the feed.)

HousingMaps, which is basically Craigslist + Google Maps, lets
you take the Craigslist apartment listings, narrow them down by price,
and display them on a map. The drawback is that if
the address is entered in a weird format (like "20XX Spruce St."),
Google Maps isn’t smart enough to figure out that it should mark the
20th and Spruce intersection rather than 20 Spruce Street, which is all
the way on the other side of Center City. Still, the visualization is a great idea, because most of us think in terms of location when we think about looking for a new place to live.

Philadelphia is also one of the cities chosen for A9 Maps, a
really nifty integration of a mapping application with block-by-block,
street-level photography. It only covers Center City and a tiny bit of West Philly, but for many of
the Center City addresses I’m looking at, it’s the next best thing to
walking around and getting a feel for the neighborhood. You can tell if
the building you’re looking at is well-kept-up or dilapidated, what the
architecture of the neighborhood looks like, if there are boarded-up
houses or vacant lots nearby, or where the green spaces are. I used it to check whether you can actually
walk across the bridge over the Schuylkill at Spring Garden Street. Also good for checking out potential neighborhoods: the Philadelphia NIS CrimeBase, which lets you map data from the Philadelphia police department in varying levels of detail, down to individual census blocks.

And then there’s Google Earth, which I’ve had installed on my
office computer since I started my current job. The quality of Google
Earth’s aerial photography varies depending on where you’re looking,
but for Philadelphia it’s very good. Neat things about Google Earth:
you can "bookmark" a location with a little pushpin icon and turn on
and off a lot of layers of data. I’ve been trying out the "Grocery
Stores" layer to see where I can get groceries in the neighborhoods I’m
looking at. Other useful information: street names, zip codes, parks,
restaurants, and banks.

How much do I love mapping applications? A whole lot, that’s how much.

Personal 1 comment

On staying connected

By on July 2nd, 2006

In just over three (gulp!) weeks, I’m moving out of my apartment and putting my things into storage. Then there’ll be some much-needed downtime with my family in Baltimore before I move to Philadelphia, with a long weekend trip to Vancouver for a friend’s wedding at the end of July. In between, I have to wind up the last loose ends at work, finish packing, find an apartment in Philly, fill out a ton of change-of-address paperwork, and recruit a few strong people to help me carry furniture and boxes down the stairs. (I’m using a container moving service, which is going to save me money but which requires a certain degree of work.) It’s all rather nerve-wracking, but I keep reminding myself that in a month I’ll be done with Phase 1 of the move and doing the tourist-on-summer-vacation thing, however briefly, in the Pacific Northwest.

And somehow I managed to avoid feeling sad about all the friends I’m leaving behind — until now, that is. The last time I moved, most of the people I said goodbye to were also either moving elsewhere or planning to. It’s somehow different when you leave a place where most of your friends aren’t similarly transient. I’ve promised everyone that I’ll come back and visit, next year, to catch up. I’ve got an e-mail address book full of addresses and a raft of numbers programmed into my new cell phone. And I don’t doubt that I’ll stay in touch; but there’s a difference between e-mailing someone two hundred miles away and e-mailing someone you’ll eat lunch with next week.

There’ve been a couple of threads on Crooked Timber recently about this paper on social isolation in America; one of the authors’ key findings is that "the number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled" since 1985. (They examine responses to the question "Looking back over the last six months — who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?", focusing on the number of confidants that the respondents reported in 1985 and 2004.)

I can think of quite a few people I’ve discussed important matters with over the past six months, but many of them are geographically remote. I have the kind of widespread social network that the authors of this paper describe in their conclusion. It’s certainly likely that some of my closest ties would be closer if we lived in the same city. Still, I’ll take the long-distance connections where I can.

This is why I’m glad that I already know people in Philadelphia and in adjacent states. I hope that wherever I end up going after I finish my MLS, I won’t have to be a nomad.

Commonplaces, Sunday opera blogging 3 comments

Personal anthology: Frank Bidart

By on June 25th, 2006

I’m listening to Zinka Milanov and Jussi Björling singing their hearts out as Aïda and Radames on the Sunday Opera Matinee this afternoon, and this poem popped into my head as suddenly apropos.

For the Twentieth Century

Bound,  hungry to pluck again from the thousand
technologies of ecstasy

boundlessness,  the world that at a drop of water
rises without boundaries,

I push the PLAY button: —

…Callas, Laurel & Hardy, Szigeti

you are alive again, —

the slow movement of K.218
once again no longer

bland, merely pretty, nearly
banal, as it is

in all but Szigeti’s hands

            *
Therefore you and I and Mozart
must thank the Twentieth Century,  for

it made you pattern, form
whose infinite

repeatability within matter
defies matter—

Malibran. Henry Irving. The young
Joachim. They are lost, a mountain of

newspaper clippings,  become words
not their own words. The art of the performer.

— Frank Bidart

I went to one of Frank Bidart’s readings a few years back; I think this was one of the poems he read, though the ones I remember best are "Guilty of Dust" (especially the lines "LOVE IS THE DISTANCE / BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE") and "Dark Night" (which is a translation of San Juan de la Cruz’s "Noche Oscura").  In some registers, he sounds like a metaphysical poet; in this poem, not quite so much, but it’s stayed with me because it captures some of the simultaneous wonder and eeriness of listening to the voices of singers from decades ago.

(Footnote: We used to play the Triumphal March from act 2 of Aïda in my middle school orchestra. To this day I can’t hear it without either humming along or wanting to stand in the middle of the room and conduct. Now I’m hearing it played by the Rome Opera orchestra and chorus, and it’s amazing how much of it I still remember.)

Silly 2 comments

I’ll take that as a good omen.

By on June 21st, 2006

My Free Will Astrology horoscope has this to say this week:

Using your common sense, you might assume you could swim faster through water than through syrup. But research published by Professor Edward Cussler has shown that’s not true. In his paper "Will Humans Swim Faster or Slower in Syrup?", he proved that the breaststroke can be done with equal speed in both mediums. Keep that in mind, Gemini. Your surroundings may sometimes feel dense in the coming weeks–more like syrup than water. But as long as you don’t buy into the fear that life will be more difficult and slow-going, you’ll be able to glide along with just as much grace as you’ve enjoyed recently.

Well, I certainly hope so. There are few conditions more likely to make one feel like swimming in syrup than moving.

Quotidian 3 comments

Tasks accomplished since Saturday morning

By on June 19th, 2006

Farmers’ market: visited.
Flowers, tomatoes, and greens: acquired.
Plastic covers for moving my mattress and box spring: found.
Short-sleeved lacy sweater to wear to friend’s wedding in July: acquired (on sale, yay).

Laundry: done and put away.
Intractable pile of paper clutter: tackled, wrestled into submission, sorted into "file" and "throw out," eliminated.
Bathtub: cleaned.
(Bath: taken.)
Lower half of refrigerator: also cleaned.
Assorted groceries: acquired.
Several more boxes of books: packed.
Beef stew with cinnamon: made, with leftovers.
Trash: taken out.
Dishes: done.
Nine zillion apartment listings: looked at.

Possible Philadelphia part-time job #1: applied for.
Two extra-sturdy book boxes: found.

Current status: oof.

Books Comments turned off

P.S.

By on June 16th, 2006

Happy Bloomsday! This time next year I want to go to the Joyce readings at the Rosenbach Museum. Or, at the very least, the ceremonial pre-Bloomsday pub crawl.

Academia, Career, Personal 8 comments

My big news

By on June 16th, 2006

As you may have surmised from the hypothetical location question I posted recently, I’m moving. And now that plans for the move are officially underway, I’ll spill the beans. I’ve decided to go for my master’s in library and information science, and I’ll be starting as a new MLIS student at Drexel University in the fall. So I’ll be moving to Philadelphia at the end of the summer, assuming that all goes well, I can find an apartment, and my stuff doesn’t get lost in transit. (You know, the standard moving worries. Having gone through the process within recent memory, though, I’m a lot less nervous about it than I could have been.)

Two years ago, if you’d asked me whether I wanted to add another set of letters after the end of my name, I’d probably have looked at you with a squirrely expression and said "Er…" I was gun-shy about further education at that point, and I wasn’t sure I’d want to keep on the path I’d started on. Two years later, I’ve had a chance to confirm that yes, I do want to be a librarian when I grow up, and that compared to the six-year-long Ph.D. haul, a master’s degree program of a year or a little over a year looks eminently doable. I’ve had enough time to decompress that I’m actually aflutter with anticipation: I get to go off and learn new things! Whee!

Working at UVa has been fantastic in terms of getting my foot in the door and getting to work with a lot of really fabulous people in the process. I’ll miss them all. (Including the ones who are reading this. Hi, all of you! I promise to send postcards!) I’ll miss Charlottesville, too, especially the glimpses of the mountains that you see everywhere you go, and the Downtown Mall, and the architecture. But the prospect of living in a big city again is making me all gleeful. I’m already deep into thinking about neighborhoods to live in, navigating SEPTA, finding part-time work, and squeezing in the occasional flying trip to New York on the Chinatown bus.

So: Starting in September, I’ll be chronicling a whole new set of adventures. Wish me luck along the way!

Music 2 comments

Now I know what I’ll be doing early next May.

By on June 8th, 2006

Oh my stars. Just look at this:

The superb mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson makes one of her very
rare operatic appearances as Orpheus in Gluck’s early masterpiece. Lisa
Milne is Euridice, whom Orpheus rescues from the underworld, and Heidi
Grant Murphy sings Amor, the spirit of Love.

The virtuoso Mark Morris directs and choreographs, and Allen Moyer (Twelve Angry Men and Reckless) designs the evocative sets in this first new production of Orfeo ed Euridice at The Met in over 35 years.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson! Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing Gluck! Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as Orfeo!

And, what’s more, I think I’ll be able to make it to New York to see her.

[keels over in a faint]

(Psst, Sarah! Want to come visit the States next spring?)