"For Whom the Bell Tolls"

Just a quickie today, for I'm in the throes of a solid dissertating day! I thought I'd convey some tidbits of conversations from my last two days at the booth.

1) Currently, I'm here at Copley Square. Directly across the street is the Old South Church, which is quite beautifully framed in my glass windows, and I've always enjoyed looking at it. Last week, apparently, the renovation of the Copley Square T Station caused a crack to appear inside the church, which sits directly above the T station. This has caused a flurry of construction lately...right now, they are testing the bell tower; how do I know this?? Well, they've been ringing the bell for over twenty minutes now...

2) Yesterday, I got into a prolonged conversation with a customer who saw my score opened to Haydn's Op. 20, #2. The conversation started congenially enough, but soon he tried to show off his classical-music savy. He asked me some questions about the quartets, which I quickly parried with deliberately short answers (I did not want to engage this particular type of person, if you know what I mean), but the die was cast: he immediately went off on tangent after tangent, as purposefully as fortspinnung in a Baroque melody; to make matters worse, he peppered his questions with common terms in foreign languages (just as I did in the previous clause)--for example, "Do you think Op. 20 was the first of the dialogee quartetti?" Ugh, you're not impressing me by making up words, dude...

This is what I get for working at work...

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Speaking of work, I got in a solid 45 minutes on the train this morning. Mostly editing, but positive pruning of some really crappy writing. Next, I'm working on the closing section of the chapter--should be fairly easy, but nothing's been easy in this chapter, or dissertation, come to think of it. Back to the grind...