Jam yesterday

From William Sherman, "Dirty Books? Attitudes Toward Readers' Marks":

According to his former lodger, the translator and playwright John Henry Jones, Empson was once forced to buy the London Library a new copy of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: when he returned it they found it covered not only with his marginal notes but with the jam from his morning toast. When I cited this anecdote in a Times Literary Supplement review, Jones himself wrote in to elaborate on the nature of Empson's marginalia: "The work in question was W. W. Greg's parallel-text edition of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and the librarian . . . was hardly straining at a gnat in demanding a fresh copy--the book was virtually done to death in Empson's zeal to demolish Greg's argument in favour of the B-text, a process which . . . was maintained throughout all quotidian activities."

Mid-morning update

9:45am (Cayman doesn't observe daylight savings).  Just typed in final edits for first half (parts one and two); it will only now need printing out and a final proof against the marked-up edit where new typing may have introduced new errors.

Second half (part three) still needs a few 'bits'; I will write them on my computer at Cafe del Sol (I have spent many happy hours here working on something or other!), then go back to the condo and print the whole thing out.  Determined to be done by 5pm.  If I finished by 2:30, I could go to yoga at 3, but that seems a bit of a stretch (!)....

Two thoughts in the meantime:

• I overuse the words "as" and "that"
• Though I think that sometimes the effect of elegant variation should be deliberately embraced, it is probably just as well that I have only used the word "confiture" once (there are seven instances of jam)