Saturday, April 14, 2007

quietude at the bpl...

Greetings from Back Bay. The Boston Public Library has few hot-spots with electrical outlets -- counterintuitive in this day & age that -- but the front reading room in the old section provides for laptop mavens everywhere. The ambience is pleasant and similar to the scene in Breakfast At Tiffany's where Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard repair to the reading room at the New York Public Library in Manhattan, just for a little quiet after a day on the town.

[Sidebar: I've been to that library as well, while visiting a friend a few years ago. It is gigantic. But what struck me most were the many original drawings of Charles Addams, he the creator of The Addams Family, adorning the walls -- hundreds of them, presumably already published in The New Yorker magazine years before.]

It's a large room here, with high cathedral ceilings -- very colonial/gothic; busts of lettered men, presumably, stand on pedestals at the exits, reminding one that there were indeed men who had achieved in past lives. I sit at a large oak table, one of 40 or 50 in two long columns. Elegant table lamps festoon two to a table. Now I am plugged in, and now I can blather to my pop-cultural heart's content.

But I shant as I have much to ruminate elsewhere, and many papers thru which to sift. The tax man cometh, you see, and Beware ye' Commoners!

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Update: I couldn't find the library scene from Breakfast... via Google, but settled on the two-shot of Peppard & Hepburn above. Photo courtesy of MPTV.net

1 comment:

Naahm Deplume said...

how many papers could there be? You're broke. No need for you to do the separate AMT calculation.

Heck, I did mine in a day. Of course, I do have a freakin' degree in this shiite.