So, I know I've occasionally complained about dry, boring academic texts, but now I have to say: who could not love a title like this one (by David Schroeder):
Mozart in Revolt: Strategies of Resistance, Mischief and Deception !

Too much fun. I don't know how relevant it will really be to my thesis, but I checked it out anyway because I couldn't resist the title. We musicologists do know that our little scholarly books are, in the main, abstract and uninteresting to most people outside the field--but we do try so hard to make them seem cool!

And in that scholarly vein, I'm going to share my favorite scholarly quote from my recent readings (this comes from Franco Cardini's Europe and Islam, 2001, p.190):

"In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coffee and tea saved Europe from alcoholism and exerted a profound influence over daily life and manners as well as personal relationships. [...] Controversy broke out as some people maintained that coffee was beneficial to the respiratory tract and the digestion, while others were convinced that it was harmful to the internal organs and caused impotence. Francesco Redi, head physician, admitted to a strong preference for wine over the 'bitter and sinful coffee'. When the great statesman Colbert died in 1683, it was rumoured that a post mortem revealed his stomach to have been burned up by the black poison."

This quote made me very happy. I will definitely be referring to my favorite drink, from now on, as 'the bitter and sinful coffee'.

Yes, it's true. I have been an academic for far, far too long.

In other news, I've actually been shockingly productive today (reading 100 pages of thesis stuff so far, washing dishes, shopping and doing laundry), despite the fact that I'm still feeling cruddy. It's amazing how productive I can be when I run out of new novels to read!

And for a final breath of academic life, here's my personal Most Surreal Bureaucratic Pronouncement, which came a few days ago when I went in to Student Accounts to ask where my student loan was (which was due back in August!):

"Ah, yes. Now, that is an interesting thing. All of the postgraduate student loan checks actually seem to have vanished. It's rather odd. I'm actually starting to get a little concerned about it."

!!!!!!

Yeah. Me, too. Ah, the university life.