I've been trying to update more often for a while now -- as it turns out, it's much easier if I'm at home all day (and when I have odd sleeping patterns).

--

Appearances for today have been cancelled, since wee baby had a rather good showing yesterday that ended with a slight over-stimulated meltdown yesterday evening -- she is now refusing to leave her trailer until someone gets her agent on the phone, dammit.

--

So at College of My Heart (and, I assume, other schools as well), there's this phenomenon wherein the anxious student (i.e., all of us) will procrastinate and avoid one class's work... by doing the work for another class. So even though the student is doing the right thing and working her tail off, she still feels guilty for skiving off.

Turns out, this feeling does not disappear after college. Which I sort of knew, thanks to the day job, but I'm being reminded of it right now because I am researching/plotting the sequel to Salt and Silver... while at the same time reading some Val McDermid books to study the style for a project of my own. They're both good uses of my time, but every time I get sucked into the McDermid, I feel hideously guilty. Hurray for anxiety.

(The McDermid is extremely appealing, but the sequel work is actually more pervasive. This includes drawing little diagrams in my notebook, reading a biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, looking up mythological mermaid variants from notes I'd taken several months ago, and actually writing. The mermaid thing might be a dead-end, but it's a start.)

--

Today's oddity: I looked in the mirror today and realized that, huh, I can sometimes be considered reasonably attractive. This is... extremely surprising to me. I was expecting a lot of things from and following pregnancy, but finding myself pretty wasn't really one of them.

I'm feeling itchy around the eyeballs, and I think it's because I want to redo all my icons and change my lj style. Or something. Grar.

College of My Heart has a new social networking toy tool, and I've been playing on that for a bit, but Facebook (yet another tool) has a new photo album feature, and I've been playing for way too long with my entire collection of gmail-saved photo zips. This may be part of my restlessness. Or I may just be suffering from Travel, my erstwhile companion and dreaded foe. I'm never very peppy after travelling.

Which to do? asks my brain. Job-related anxiety dreams, or school ones? Don't have school anymore, but we've got twenty-odd years of practice for that one, and the job thing never gets old. Which to do, which to do...

( Yeah. Dreams. )

I feel like my dreams are like those word puzzles, where you have to figure out how many nouns you can make from the word 'pancakes'. Like, how many issues can you find in one dream sequence? Answers on the back. Turn sideways to view. Void where prohibited.

It's Sunday. This is unfortunate. There is no postman.

...

Yes. The postman. He has a mustache, is slightly balding, and wears those stupid shorts. He has a messenger bag, filled to the brim with (and this is the important part) the mail.

I stalk the postman on a daily basis. I see him coming, and I inch over to whichever window I'm closest to and surreptitiously spy on his collection of letters and catalogues as he flicks them into the townhouse post boxes. I don't give a damn about the man himself, except in as much as he is the Carrier of the Mail.

I love the mail.

In a slightly related story, I more than once contemplated starting a mail-collection business in college. Like, people would give me their combinations, and then I'd collect all the mail and deliver it people at their dorm. I can still feel the remembered glee of collecting both my and Beth's mail.



Yeah, this is weird.

There are some things that require a narrative of odd events that remain utterly unrelated until the final, cornerstone anecdote is set in place -- at which point, with any luck, all the events are suddenly noteworthy and the entire point of the thing becomes clear.

I am not at all certain that this is one of those sorts of essays.

---

To begin: Beth has been trying to get me to read Dorothy Sayers for nigh on three-and-someodd years. I finally succumbed. She is feeling both pleased and somewhat gloat-ish.

---

The professor who gave the final speech at College of My Heart's convocation translated a portion of a 16th century chivalric romance, and read that to us. It was the shortest, and the best, speech of the entire graduation.

Throughout the ages, women have been endowed by nature with excellent judgment and great courage and they are born no less well suited than men to display wisdom and valor, if properly trained and nurtured. And indeed if men and women share the same bodily form and if they are composed of like substance, why should they be thought to differ in their courage and their intelligence?

Many women in history have attained success in military life, outstripping the achievements of many of their male colleagues, and the same still happens when a woman turns her energies to this kind of activity. The same may be said of the professions of letters and of the sciences and of all other activities in which men engage. And there the achievements of women have been and are now such that they have no cause to envy men.

And if when a daughter is born to him, a father were to have her engaged in the same pursuits as a son, she would not be in any way inferior to her brother in any lofty or glorious enterprise. But because so often girls are given a different kind of upbringing, their abilities often are not rated highly.

The gold that lies buried in the mines is still gold, even if it is buried from sight; and when it is mined and worked, it is as precious and exquisite as any gold; it is as precious and exquisite as any gold.

---

I think I have mentioned at least once that my best thinking time is in the shower. Any puzzle I've kept at bay to gnaw on in a quiet moment comes back to me when I'm in the shower, a time during which I'm completely at a loss for anything more intellectually stimulating than washing my hair.

I've noticed that this sort of thinking can be forced at other times, but it's not usually as easy.

---

Yesterday, Beth made a chocolate cake for a miniature block party we were having today. This morning was the creation of the frosting (peanut butter, to honor the Texan next door who loves peanut butter frosting), and the layering of the cake, and the decoration of the cake once all was covered by a judicious amount of sweet stuff.

My customary job in the kitchen is to be sous chef and cleanup crew. This is largely because I hate to cook, and Beth hates to wash up, but both of us find our individual tasks very much to our liking. This afternoon at, say, one, Beth had finished her side of things and my turn had come. The kitchen, which is peopled entirely with red appliances, red jugs, red notions, and red spatulas, was covered in a fine layer of invisible peanut oil, daubs of melted chocolate, a great many dirty dishes, and the pleasant sunlight that comes from the window above the sink.

(As a side note, Beth's mother and I have agreed that a blue and yellow kitchen is what Beth and I will have; Beth, however, plans to rout us completely and continue the red kitchen tradition.)

---

I had always felt myself a student at CMH. Like highschool continued, albeit in not so hideous an enclosure. I didn't realize there was another feeling I could have about my educational personhood, until I stood in line-- no, wait, no, not entirely true. I was dressed in my black robes and mortarboard, yes, and I was heading to convocation, Panama heels and knee-length black linen skirt, rushing about because I was late, and there were other seniors too, dressed in their antique robes and hurrying along as well, rushing down the halls, and that's when the glimmering of knowledge began. Then I stood in line, and waited damn near an hour for the blasted thing to start, and all the while I stood in my academicals and discussed deans and theses and the problems of the English department and--

And the feeling stole over me, and became the single greatest moment I ever had at CMH: there was the utter knowledge that I wasn't just a "student." I belonged to something greater. I was wearing the Victorian robe of a woman who had stood in this line, studied as I'd studied, and she and I stood a moment in the same spot and rather cruelly dissected the teachings of the methodology course.

I am a woman; I am a scholar; I am not alone.

---

Robert Burton said:

Virginity is a fine picture, as Bonaventure calls it, a blessed thing in itself, and if you will believe a Papist, meritorius. And although there be some inconveniences, irksomeness, solitariness, etc., incident to such persons . . . yet they are but toys in respect, easily to be endured, if conferred to those frequent incumbrances of marriage. . . . And methinks sometime or other, amonst so many rich Bachelors, a benefactor should be found to build a monastical College for old, decayed, deformed, or discontented maids to live together in, that have lost their first loves, or otherwise miscarried, or else are willing howsoever to lead a single life. The rest, I say, are toys in respect, and sufficiently recompensed by those innumerable contents and incomparable privileges of Virginity.

---

On the other hand (and somewhat cheating on my part, as is either apparent already or will shortly be so), Harriet Vane, and consequently Dorothy Sayers, wrote:

Here then at home, by no more storms distrest,
Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west,
Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone in dizzying circles hurled
To that still center where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

I believe the character writes about her being slightly displeased with the way it turned out, but overall content with the general message given.

---

I stood this morning, contemplating the mess, and then went about my business and, as the kitchen was quiet and the sunlight cleansing, I thought back on what I had been reading the past several days. I also thought about Beth, certain folk ballads sung by Pentangle, my rather indignant digestive system, the block party coming up and whether I really wanted to attend, how my black robes had not actually fit in the shoulder, about why Beth was so enamoured of Wimsey and Vane and Gaudy Night, my own preoccupation with Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain and Sharan Newman's historical French nun series, the effect Dorothy Sayers was having on my grammar and word choice, the particulars of gratitude and how I could fit that sort of pathology into a short story, the absolutely ghastly smell of peanut butter emanating from the frosting bowl I was rinsing out, longing thoughts about the stomach medicine awaiting me when I was done with my tasks, the final chapters of Gaudy Night, the existence of the French language, how the light coming through a window and hitting upon a clean and shining sink was one of my very great and very odd pleasures, Beth and love and Oxford, and the slow coming to the conclusion that I had a conclusion to my thoughts that I really ought to write up and keep and savor and think on some more and eventually show to Beth because I suspected it would prove of great interest and understanding to her.

Unfortunately, I have forgotten what this conclusion was.

---

She laughed suddenly, and for the first time felt confident.

"They can't take this away, at any rate. Whatever I may have done since, this remains. Scholar; Master of Arts; Domina; Senior Member of this University (statutum est quod Juniores Senioribus debitam et congruam reverentiam tum in privato tum in publico exhibeant); a place achieved, inalienable, worthy of reverence.

She walked firmly from the room and knocked upon the door next but one to her own.

---

I admit: I still feel odd calling myself a "woman" instead of a "girl." It feels as if I'm snatching at titles I haven't earned yet. I've been meaning to call myself a woman for some time now, but it just never feels right. Perhaps after I get a job. Or after I have children of my own, thereby necessitating certain relinquishings of Girlness in favor of Motherness.

I suspect I will still be a girl. I will just happen to be a mother at the same time.

I'm rather looking forward to being a mother.

---

CMH is a sore spot in my mind. At first there was the feeling: I'll be going back next fall-- except, no, wait, I won't. For the last week or so I've been brooding in the quiet knowledge that I can never go back, it won't ever be the same and it would only be a disappointment on one level or another to try and make it so again.

(The thought further reads: If I become an alumna who returns to CMH every year for all the major traditions, I will be extremely surprised. And perhaps more than a little disturbed to be rereading my navel-gazing here.)

I hadn't realized that reading Gaudy Night would be like stuffing a sore spot with infection, letting it simmer there for a while, and then applying the lance with extreme vigor.

---

Beth is beautiful. I think I've mentioned this. She's been getting extremely embarrassed by my obvious praise these days, so she may wish to skip the following part. In fact, so may you all. Here: ( I provide a means of escape. )

---

This will not have the sort of ending you're expecting, particularly if you're expecting anything at all.

---

The block party was a success. Despite many rumblings from the vague area of my spleen, and a definite desire to hide and not converse with strangers, I went out and did the pretty. Beth and I murmured and signed to one another slightly throughout. She stood and I moved, I spoke and she nodded, we danced about the social theatre of the thing and kept it all in until we could decipher what we'd found. It was utterly enjoyable.

Just now I have concocted a conversation that didn't happen, but might:

"What are you thinking?"

"About Gaudy Night, and my graduating, and how much I love you."

"Those don't seem terribly connected."

"They are. Somehow. I'm afraid I've forgotten the exact figuring, but it's definitely there."

"Does it have anything to do with cake?"

"Possibly with cake. And weasels."

"Of course with weasels."

"It might have something to do with Gaudy Night reminding me of graduating and my loving you, and-- yes, and why you love me."

a series of notes, pieced together. a cupped hand, with the fingers lightly spread, curled by the chest and then lightly gestured at me.

and then I say 'I love you' back, and we go on from there

I am... done.

Done in? Well, likely not. But in any case. I'm home, I'm reading Dorothy Sayers, and I'm completely finished with schooling until such time as I feel like taking it up again. This means that, for the forseeable future, I no longer have to worry about midterms, finals, grading systems, dorm food, Mexican cockroaches that can grow to a disgustingly large size and eerily pretty color spectrum (which I just looked at fifteen pages worth of Google images in an attempt to find, and am now thoroughly nauseated), the Health Center...

On the other hand, the Labyrinth is gone. The cherry trees are gone. The fountains, the bell. The amazing minds around me. The geese in the morning, the sunbathers in the afternoon, the streakers of the evening functions. My mailbox, with that stupid Peanuts sticker I never got around to removing. The college's patron goddess. The sun.

College of My Heart indeed.

A more thorough review of graduation and the week prior may be forthcoming. In the meantime... I suppose I should get on with the rest of my life.

FOR SELF:

Fri. night-- answer phone, fetch dinner, consume, clean room, begin packing, decide if want father's help with later packing, dispose of garbage, assemble clothes for tomorrow, assemble decorations for tomorrow, iron clothes for tomorrow, see Wherdragon's sister, do not embarrass self, sew new eye onto graduation robes, possibly watch "Firefly" with neighbors, skinny dip in fountain, locate table for Garden Party, sleep.

Sat. morning-- bathe, perform personal maintenance tasks, dress self for breakfast with Cass's parents, attend breakfast with Cass's parents, consume, return, give appropriate clothes to Skyfyre, beg LordofChaos to allow downloading of full camera card onto her computer, change self into garbage clothes.

Sat. afternoon-- dress Cass for Convocation, collect LordofChaos and Darkbishonen, go decorate Garden Party (use any extra time here for packing), attend Garden Party-prevent awkwardness, see Prisminawindow's family, lavish attention on Hobbitses, mind parents.

Sat. night-- return home (possibly changing clothes again), travel to John Harvard's for Cass's graduation dinner, attend Cass's graduation dinner-prevent further awkwardness, consume, return home, pack as if no tomorrow, assemble clothes for Graduation, try to see Wherdragon and neighbors more, send all important emails to self, copy (huge number of) mp3s to CD, sleep.

Sun. morning-- scrounge breakfast out of half packed pantry, consume, pack as if no tomorrow, return library books in one fell swoop, feebly attempt to assist parents in car loading process, bathe.

Sun. afternoon-- send father for McDonalds, consume, garb self and Cass for Graduation, attend Graduation, try not to cry, cry anyway, return home, change back into sweats, load car more, pray Aunt is not forced to follow us home in own car just to transport all belongings.

Sun. night-- load car more, say goodbye to Cass's family, say goodbye to neighbors, say goodbye to Wherdragon, say goodbye to College of my Heart, cry.


--tell daddy not to come help me with packing on saturday-it will only annoy him because I won't know when I'm free, try to draft Hobbitses or Bob42 into assisting us with packing and/or car loading, bring kleenex to all events, ask daddy if bringing video camera, ask Cass when she wishes to ring bell, spend some time alone with Cass on Fri. evening to prevent lunacy, ask Cass whether want E at Garden Party, tell mommy that Cass loves her, consider how to make people respond to correct adults at Garden Party-tell Cass.

Page six of ten. This is agony. And I'm tired, a circumstance that I think I can blame entirely upon wishing I was anywhere else, doing anything else, with anyone else. My own company is becoming decidely stupid.

Gah. Okay. Buck up, lass, and pound this out. It isn't as interesting or important as your thesis, but on the other hand, it isn't your thesis. Do what you gotta do, and remember it's all over tomorrow.

...okay, maybe don't remember that. How about remembering that there's still an episode of Firefly you haven't seen?

There we go. That's a good girl.

Today was my last College of My Heart class. Tomorrow will be my last class at College of My Elbow, and I didn't even have a class at College of My [Variable Distant Body Part], and then...

Then I'm out. That's it. The end. No more college.

I have finals, yeah, and there's still the graduating part, but...

But...

That's it.

I'm rather lost, I think.

---

So, naturally, I turn to fanfic: Iron Drabble!

Every person on your f-list [I'm opening this to anyone, actually. Go for it.] gets to request a fic from you. In return, they have to post this in their journal and write a fic for you. Post all fandoms you're willing to write for. Your friends can pick a relationship, a story arc, a missing scene, commentary! Or pretty much anything they want, unless the author has previously mentioned that they will not write it. They comment with what they want, and you write the drabbles fics and post it in your LiveJournal.

Lemme see. Harry Potter's obviously completely open -- I'm also up for Buffy, most of the Star Treks, X-Files, uh, a great number of Canadian children's television shows, JCS, Peter Pan, most queer films, Shakespeare, Marlowe, QE, fairy tales, Equilibrium, I Capture the Castle, Vin Diesel films...

Actually, I'll let you know if I can't write it. Have at.

( Yeah, it's done. The thesis. I rock. )

Now... I sleep as I have never slept before.

The current edited length of the pure academic piece: fifty pages. Gah. Next to come: the additional notes, the bibliography, the appendices, the title page, and the table of contents. And after: proofreading the academic piece in hopes that the damn thing makes sense.

Totally in control of this.

--Or what I've discovered some of my paragraphs to be. One of the benefits of cutting up one's work is getting to read chunks of it out of context and discovering whether or not they actually make sense. I have discovered that 1) I use the word "this" to start a truly phenomenal number of my paragraphs, and 2) I have written the following sentence:

It is important that products of the reversion set actually fall into the jurisdiction of the copyright set because that way the reversion set can also reflect a secondary phenomenon that has appeared in the last thirty years with the creation of the fanfiction subculture [...]

I so lose at life. And academia.

On the other hand, it is gratifying to realize that I wasn't just fooling myself about why I wanted to have at my thesis with pointy pointy slicy things. Or if I was, then at least I got something out of it anyway.

A'la Edward Gorey's character Mr Earbrass:

Some weeks later, with pen, ink, scissors, paste, a decanter of sherry, and a vast reluctance, Mr Earbrass begins to revise TUH. This means, first, transposing passages, or reversing the order of their paragraphs, or crumpling them up furiously and throwing them in the waste-basket. After that, there is rewriting. This is worse than merely writing, because not only does he have to think up new things just the same, but at the same time try not to remember the old ones. Before Mr Earbrass is through, at least one third of TUH will bear no resemblance to its original state.

Tonight is the night of the vast reluctance. I sit here with a Sprite, the terribly awful but extremely pretty movie Underworld, a pair of scissors, a roll of tape, and the forty-six pages of undecipherable nonsense known as my thesis. The thing is due Monday.

My kingdom for a decanter of sherry.

Ha! Suck it, Trebek. I've finished the rough rough really fucking rough draft of my thesis, but by God, I've put THE END on the page and I've done so honestly.

And now, to sleep for an hour or so, eat a hell of a lot of candy, and go to Easter Mass.

Boo-YAH, dammit.

ring goes on, ring goes off

As part of my grand timetable, I'll be finishing the roughest of all the drafts of my research thesis this evening. However, certain things are not looking promising.

In America, at least, [insert here an entire explanation of the copyright culture].

Edit at 10:12 PM: I have only just now realized that my entire thesis can be used to prove that there is such a thing as subtext. I wonder if my father, who is notoriously against the idea, is feeling a itch between the shoulder blades...

I just realized that the first complete draft of my thesis is due exactly one week from today.

( Read more... )

I'm in the late night computer lab at my library. Two very loud, obnoxious girls have been in here for the last hour, IMing some poor fools in anonymous chat rooms. Ah! One of them has left, to be replaced by... a girl, sitting beside me, with incredibly loud and annoying hip hop playing through her headphones.

I didn't think it was actually possible for my headache to get worse.

I'm going to go home very, very soon now.


This post brought to you by my uterus. Also, my raging rageful rage.

So, another ten pages of thesis are due this coming Friday.

Technically, it's the last set of ten pages before I hand in the complete first draft, which is supposed to be around thirty pages.

My thesis will not be thirty pages. It will be considerably longer.

I'm sort of panicking about it. On the other hand, that didn't stop me from having a grand time diving into request wars over the books I need at the library. (Ha! Think you'll keep Henry Jenkins from me, eh?)

I should go to work. And then, I should write thesis.

And after all that, I should set fires.

So today has been a day of rest after the travelling of the weekend. I tend to get rather evil when I travel -- or rather, afterwards, when I'm trying to readjust to being back where I should be. But lo, here I am, and quite better for having had a bit of quiet-selfness.

Oddly enough, the sex panel I imagined was far more interesting than the one I actually attended. Well, that's not entirely fair -- it was tremendously interesting, being a discussion of how to keep relationships going after one's characters have had wild monkey shenanigans. On the other hand, the position I put myself into -- as the person who didn't so much write full romances with nicely developed relationships as write hot sex madrigals in the middle of my characters' pants -- didn't really go over terribly well. I put in my piece, but basically let the people with more chops do their thing.

The best panel by far was the one I moderated, no doubt due entirely to my excellent and learned co-panelists. It was also a fabulous opportunity to strut my thesis stuff like I actually had something to say on the subject.

The dealers' room was as lovely as usual, though less tempting to me than perhaps in years past. The real delight was the enormous number of stationery stores available in the mall next door, including one where my family bought for me, as a belated birthday gift, a beautiful Waterman fountain pen with which to gloat over. It is my precious, and lovely in mine eye.

Perhaps the best part of the convention was having a nervous young woman come up to me after my first panel and talk to me about her YA novel, and whether query letters were acceptable at certain houses, and giving me a little summary of her work, and it read like fantasy but was really SF, and she hoped that wouldn't cause any problems... It made me feel all special and validated and perhaps even a tiny bit like I belong in this silly profession.

The most entertaining/prosperous part of the convention was ending up in the bar Saturday night, writing huge amounts of notes to myself concerning whether or not I could actually have God become a young homeless female prostitute with the hots for my Michael the Archangel character without getting a peeved message from Himself in the form of plagues of class readings or phone bills -- and writing all this next to someone who I would soon discover was an ex-monk SF fan who did AIDs, autism, and peace research, used to work at Powell's Books back when there were only ten workers there, and had no idea an SF/F con was going on that very minute. We ended up talking for about two hours, avoiding the drunk mundane who kept trying to get my poor fanboy to sing in Italian, and I went back to my room feeling nicely cheered by the entire evening.

Finally, after much travel and so forth on Sunday, I arrived home at around 12:30 AM to discover that the perpetrators of the Samantha doll prank had left me some unknown number of tiny, yellow post-it notes on the majority of my possessions that say "I licked this". So far, I've found the obvious ones on my television, computer, paintings, clocks, light switches, and mirrors, but new ones crop up regularly (including under my mouse, inside my phone, up the lampshade, in my bed, pointing to a picture of Beth, and on items in my underwear drawer. Concerning the last one, my orally fixated compatriots made the delightful error of putting a post-it on the contaminated underwear. Heh). I haven't even checked the sewing room yet -- I hesitate to see what they've done to my 'fridge, let alone my poor Samantha.

I suppose the thing to do now would be to go to bed, but I'm really not feeling that urge. Maybe... maybe I should write more of the thesis... mmm, thesis...

I have to say that aside from being (oddly) helpful for my thesis, doing the readings for my "Topics of Medieval History: The Inquisition" class has been a trip and a half when it comes to finding academic snarkiness lurking about in articles. I mean, I thought the cat fights that showed up in Milton journals were certainly entertaining, but none were half so clever as these.

From Leonard Boyle's "Montaillou Revisted" (which is in its basic construction a giant bitchslap to the research, articulation, and final results of LeRoy Ladruie's normally well-received Montaillou):

It goes without saying that the indexing [of an Inquisition register] should be accurate and complete. Thus the lapidary phrase, "There is no other age but ours," (R 2. 132), if indexed incautiously, may suggest, as it does to Le Roy Ladurie (F 430, E 282) in his chapter on time and space, that the Montaillonais "lived in an island of time," devoid of past and future, but, if indexed with precision, it will be clear at once that what the suspected heretic Raymon de l'Aire, a peasant of Tignac, confessed to was that he had once said "quod anima hominis moritur mortuo corpore,...et quod non erat aliud saeculum nisi presens", meaning, surely, that there was no life after death, and that the only world he recognized was the present visible world.

...to today's reading of Mark Pegg's "On Cathars, Albingenes, and good men of Languedoc," which tosses out random stabs at fellow historians past and present with such comments as:

'Cathar' (apparently first used in the middle of the twelfth century by a group of heretics from Cologne, or so Eckbert of Schonau wrote in his Sermones contra Catharos of 1163) is, and always has been, deeply misleading and applied in such an indiscriminate way by modern historians as to make it, for all intents and purposes, a useless term. The word is thrown about as though it were Cathar-confetti, brightly decorating all sorts of individuals and groups accused of heresy in the Rhineland, England, northern France, northern Italy, Catalonia, and Languedoc, from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, whose connections with one another, though worth pondering, are at best problematic.

and

Occasionally, these occult fantasies are grafted onto the related, and just as anachronistic, need to see the good men and good women as Protestants before their time -- like the irrepressible Conybeare, whose gift for seeing the Cathars wherever he happened to look that day, allowed him to observe in his portrait of the 'Anabaptists' for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica that their sixteenth-century zeal clearly had 'an affinity to the Cathari and other medieval sects'.

... there is much cause for genuine giggling coming from my carrell in the library.