Sea of scholarship

Dick is on the right.

Yesterday I went to the UB Music Library where the librarians were nice to me. All of them were! I am thinking this might be because they do not get the weirdos hanging out at UB that they get in the downtown library. Or maybe the librarians at UB get paid better. "Oh, who knows?", as our sardonic friend Dick likes to say. One of these days I am going to describe him. Perhaps Dick will make it into our cast of characters.

The librarians at UB did only one thing wrong: They asked me about Leonard Pennario. They asked me why I had chosen to write about him. Which you do not ask me because I will pontificate for hours. This is not a mistake the downtown library would have made.

I now have roughly a million books on loan, all relating, in some way or another, to my work in progress. "Double Life," the memoir of Miklos Rozsa -- he is the film composer who wrote the music to "Ben-Hur," and he wrote a concerto for Pennario -- turned up under my pillow the other night. I was wondering what was making me uncomfortable and that was it.

The last memory I usually have of ever day is a dim memory of Howard taking the book I have been reading out of my hands. And what he does is drop it onto the floor on his side of the bed. Lastnight when it was time to turn out the light, I guess he decided to clean up, and he started tossing all these books over at me. Artur Rubinstein's "My Many Years" and "My Young Years"... "Priest of Music," about Dimitri Mitropoulos, "Heifetz as I Knew Him," "Wondrous Strange: The Life of Glenn Gould," etc., etc., etc. That was when I realized the extent of my holdings.

Imagine the fines that will accrue when these books inevitably become overdue! Everything is overdue in my life right now including my electric bill and my gym membership.

They will be naming libraries after me.