The Little Professor

Abridged books

Stephen Moss has the abridgement blues.  But he should be saluted for his new title for an abridged War and Peace: "The Odd, Isolated Skirmish and Peace."  Other suggestions:

• Bleak Hut
• A Tale of One City
• Even Littler Women
• The Ring and the Book-a-Minute Classics
• The Last Thursday at Noon of Pompeii
• Jude the Thoroughly Clarified

Lilian's Story

Lilian's Story (1985), Kate Grenville's first novel, threatens at the beginning to be a historical novel in the vein of Pat Barker's Liza's England or Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries--a narrative in which the heroine's life registers, directly or indirectly, the aftershocks of modernization.  Grenville begins this first-person novel in 1901, "the year of Federation" (3), and ends it in what is obviously the early 1960s.  Moreover, and more heavy-handedly, almost half of the novel is devoted to the collapse of a decadent post-Victorianism: Lilian's increasingly enervated mother is a faded, neurasthenic Victorian lady, all careful propriety ("A lady does not hurtle, Lilian dear" [16]); her mentally ill and abusive father, obsessively working away at his book, is monomaniacally obsessed with facts.  (He is also the subject of this novel's sequel, Albion's Story.)  Lilian fights back against her father by overeating, swaddling herself in fat, while her puny brother desperately yearns to go deaf.  It's no great surprise when Albion sexually assaults Lilian (unsuccessfully?); this is, after all, a novel in which "Victorianism" stands in for a culture of punishing sexual repression, one that explodes outward in unpredictably violent ways. 

Once both we and Lil leave the last dregs of Victorian culture behind, however, the novel almost entirely ceases to notice "history" altogether.  There are quick glimpses of WWI and WWII, of new technologies and new fashions, but Lil's more and more eccentric subjectivity manages to register change in only sidelong fashion.  In part, Lil's eccentricity--or insanity--develops after her long stay in an insane asylum, where her father immures her after his incestuous attack; in part, it derives from her impatience with traditional forms of knowledge and learning.  Remembering one afternoon in a lecture hall, Lil muses, "I was in no state of mind for wisdom and heard nothing that I wanted to write into my own crisp new notebook.  I watched Professor Noble, but his upturned pale face, with its dark mouth hole opening and closing, was as unimportant as a scrap of paper under a desk" (82).  "Wisdom," in this novel, soon becomes as empty as the "ideas" in E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," a placeholder to cover up the sheer meaningless of pigeonholed academic subjects.  Despite his name, Professor Noble comes to resemble nothing so much as a gaping fish, his mouth empty of both sound (conspicuously absent from Lil's description) and sense. 

Lil's own ungoverned speech--she makes a habit of reciting Shakespeare or singing at odd moments in public, in taxi cabs, and on buses--may be a public nuisance, but it stands in stark contrast to her father Albion's inflexible facts.  So, too, does Lil's deliberately excessive body.  Early on, Lil tells a friend that "Books should have toilets in them" (43), and the novel often returns to those aspects of the body normally kept out of "polite" company: the hair in a woman's armpit, urine, vomit, spit, sweat.  Lil's own obese body is frequently cause for consternation and distaste, but it also becomes the sign of her unrepentant thereness, in direct contrast to the carefully coiffed and shy ladies of her childhood.  At times, the novel appears to be aiming for a Whitmanesque attitude to both life and the body:

I fill myself now, and look with pity on those hollow men in their suits, those hollow women in their classic navy and white.  They have not made themselves up from their presents and their pasts, but have let others do it for them--while I, large and plain, frightening to them and sometimes to myself, have taken the past and present into myself. (227)

The novel's title, that is, is not simply descriptive.  By the end, Lilian's Story has become emphatically Lilian's act of storytelling--her proud assertion of the right to self-creation, outside of the conventions that mark the Victorian world of her childhood or even the laxer times of the 1960s. The echo of T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" is, I suspect, deliberate.  Unlike those with "quiet and meaningless" voices, as Eliot puts it, Lil speaks herself into being by simply ignoring all the rules that govern social behavior (the rules later embodied in the sometimes ominous, sometimes comical policemen who try to regulate Lil's more aggravating habits).  This, for Lil, is history: shaping her own story while integrating herself into the stories of others.  As she imagines of one child, "I knew that little Dianne would grow up listening to the telling and retelling of the story of the day she was dandled by Lil Singer, and might tell it herself at last" (214).

And yet, I found it hard to resist the suspicion that I was being sold a bill of goods.  On the one hand, Grenville effectively suggests how Lil processes the world by absorbing it; even dialogue is rendered in italics, rather than marked off by quotation marks, suggesting that it too belongs as much to Lil's inner world as to the outer.  On the other hand, the novel's reach for the Whitmanesque--or, for that matter, Falstaffian--mode considerably exceeds its grasp.  One character delightedly exclaims that "you are Lil Singer, of course, larger than life" (198), but Lil isn't larger than life.  A little irritated voice kept whispering in my ear that Lil was, if anything, frequently pathetic.  There's ultimately something too pat about the novel's identification of the nonconformist (not to mention diseased and impoverished) social fringe with "authenticity"; if anything, one cannot help wondering on occasion if Lil is truly more liberated than her twisted father.  Nevertheless, despite this rather sloppy romanticism, the book's fragmentary narrative structure is often compelling, especially in the novel's first half. 

All My Alienated Academics: A Soap Opera in Five Installments (3)

EPISODE 3. THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT OFFICE

[We are looking through the doorway of what is—or what used to be—the English department office. Clearly, it was once the local bastion of reason and order: the desk is covered with organizing trays and holders, and the walls are lined with filing cabinets. But now, the office looks like it was hit by a tornado—or, perhaps, a legion of English professors. Papers are everywhere, books (Danielle Steele this time) are scattered about, and the computer lies blinking forlornly on the floor. In the midst of this chaos sits TRENDEE’s secretary, BARTLEBY.]

BARTLEBY [smirking broadly]: Looking for me?

EVANGELINE: We…we…we want to speak to Balder. It’s a matter of extreme urgency.

BARTLEBY: Alas, poor Balder. I’m afraid that he was forced to flee the country; it seems that he’s a bigamist, and his wives didn’t take the revelation at all well. I wonder who could have been so cruel as to lay bare his secret to the world? [Smirks innocently]

CLERVAL: Why, you half-witted excuse for a third-rate scrivener…

[He advances on Bartleby, but halts suddenly when Bartleby whips out a document.]

BARTLEBY: What have we here? [Ostentatiously dons a pair of reading glasses] I do believe that it’s your doctoral dissertation, Mr. Mountjoy. “‘Drink my blood, you fool!’ The Erotic Poetics of Vampirism in the Twentieth-Century Supernatural Romance.” [Sniggers] I can’t wait to sink my teeth into that one. [Laughs hysterically] “Sink my teeth”! Get it?

[Not surprisingly, nobody else seems impressed.]

BARTLEBY [suddenly menacing]: Not laughing, eh? I’ll show you who’s in charge!

[He pulls out a lighter. The next thing we know, CLERVAL’s dissertation is up in smoke.]

CLERVAL: NoooOOOOOOooooo!

[CLERVAL throws himself to the floor, foaming at the mouth. He starts to tear his hair, but then clearly thinks better of it.]

PALMER: Young man, I don’t mean to interrupt this overcooked histrionic display, but don’t you have a copy of your dissertation on a thumb drive somewhere?

CLERVAL [barely coherent]: I…I wrote it out by hand. It was the green thing to do.

[Sound of several hands smacking foreheads in disbelief]

BARTLEBY [sneering]: You think that’s bad? You should have looked behind the door before you came in the room!

[PROFESSOR TRAD and EUGENIE JO MEPHISTOPHELES—TRENDEE’s eighth wife—leap from behind the door, where they were clearly visible the entire time.]

PROFESSOR TRAD: You’re too late, my little chickadees! Eugenie and I have [sudden swell of dramatic music]—

ADAM: No, no, not the music again—

TRAD: --murdered Professor Trendee.

[EVANGELINE shrieks and faints lifelessly into PALMER’s arms—knocking both of them to the floor.]

PALMER [irritably struggling to extricate himself]: Quite the compliment, dear, but 87 is just too old for exhibitionism.

ADAM [cunningly]: But how do you know he’s dead?

EUGENIE: We whacked him over the head with a volume of the OED, then chopped him up with an axe, then cremated him on a pyre made out of his custom-built oak bookcases.

[She holds up a miniature Grecian urn.]

EVANGELINE [temporarily reviving]: It’s…it’s…it’s an urn with Trendee’s name on it! [She faints again.]

TRAD: We’ve reduced him to his component atoms. It’s time for the next phase of our master plan!

BARTLEBY [snickering gleefully]: Henceforth, all doctoral dissertations will be on the lesser-known works of James Whitcomb Riley!

TRAD: And as for you, Evangeline…I’ll get you, my pretty! And your little dog, too!

ADAM: The villain in this script is quoting from The Wizard of Oz?! Damn it, I demand to speak to the writer, now!

[Suddenly, everyone freezes, except for ADAM and PALMER. A few moments later, a LITTLE PROFESSOR emerges out of nowhere.]

LP: Well? I’ve got to get tonight’s installment finished in the next few minutes. 

ADAM: Need I remind you that All My Children has just fired its headwriter? [Threateningly] Just what do you think you’re doing with this script?

LP [glumly]: Permanently ruining my career opportunities as a serious scholar of Victorian literature, that’s what I’m doing.

ADAM: We’re only three episodes in, and you’ve murdered the guy we’re looking for, replaced the department secretary with some refugee from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and turned the villain into a candidate for musicalization by Stephen Schwartz. This is as bad as…as…as…

PALMER [dryly]: Our own show?

ADAM: Well, OK, nothing else can be quite that bad. But it’s at least as bad as the average poem by Eliza Cook.

LP [shrugging]: You were the one who asked to be in this parody. Keep complaining, and I’ll rewrite it as Adam/Palmer slash fiction. [Covers her mouth with her hand] Dear God, did I just admit to knowing what “slash fiction” is? My career, my career…!

[She vanishes. The action restarts.]

CLERVAL [sententiously]: Academic careerism is the sign of an unregenerate petty bourgeois mentality.

[CLERVAL suddenly disappears without a trace.]

PALMER: Damn. Never argue with a woman who has her finger on the delete key.

EVANGELINE: NoooOOOOOoooo! I’ve lost both my dissertation director and the only man capable of proofreading my work! [Faints again]

[Another elderly man enters the room, beaming.]

JOE MARTIN: Have faith, my dear. All may not be as it seems.

ON THE NEXT “ALL MY ALIENATED ACADEMICS”:

VOICEOVER: Is Trendee really dead?

EUGENIE: You can’t be any deader than he is, honey.

VOICEOVER: Can Summerson help?

SUMMERSON: Let me get this straight, Evangeline. You’re blackmailing me to get back at the man who didn’t kill your husband?

VOICEOVER: Will Adam, Palmer, and Joe be of any use?

EVANGELINE: What do you mean, you can’t read a map?!

TUNE IN FOR THE NEXT “ALL MY ALIENATED ACADEMICS.”

All My Alienated Academics: A Soap Opera in Five Installments (2)

EPISODE 2.  THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT OFFICE   

[Like the SEMINAR ROOM, the OFFICE looks elegant at first glance, ramshackle the next. At one end, PROFESSOR TORQUEMADA holds forth to his band of student acolytes; at the other, PROFESSOR MOD does the same with hers. Strangely enough, it’s impossible to tell one student from another. EVANGELINE, ADAM, and PALMER enter.]

TORQUEMADA: I am a devotee of Beauty. [Flares nostrils] But it is impossible to understand the Beautiful without first knowing the Truth. [Flares nostrils again] The Truth. The Whole Truth. [Another flare] And nothing but the Truth. [Flares for the fourth time] 

FACELESS STUDENT #1 [adoringly]: And how do we discover the Truth, O great one?

TORQUEMADA: By remarking yourself in my image. By relinquishing every shred of individuality you now possess. In other words, by parroting every word I say in the seminar room.

FACELESS STUDENTS: Yes, master!

[Meanwhile, across the room…]

PROFESSOR MOD: The secret to success in academia is to live on the cutting edge. Not next to the edge, not near the edge, not in close proximity to the edge, not a few miles from the edge, but right on the edge.  No matter how painful the edge proves to be. Never think thoughts already thunk, nor unthink thinkable yet unthunk thoughts. 

FACELESS STUDENT #2: But how do we stay balanced on the edge?

PROFESSOR MOD: By reading every single book and journal article in your field, and avoiding blogs. [Waves hands around in what is presumably meant to be an agitated gesture] There are pictures of cats on blogs. There are even parodies of House and Law & Order on blogs. Blogs are [striking an affected pose] the height of unseriousness. If you read blogs, you will be sentenced to the

Ninth Circle

of academia. 

FACELESS STUDENTS: Ooooohh.

ADAM: Let me see if I understand this correctly. You want to ally yourself with this nest of networking nitwits?

[EVANGELINE is saved from answering this question by the entrance of her husband, CLERVAL ZASTROZZI MOUNTJOY—impossibly tall, impossibly tanned, and (for a graduate student) impossibly well-dressed.]

CLERVAL [speaking with no inflections whatsoever]: Vangie, my darling. [Looks over Adam and Palmer with what is supposed to convey contempt, but seems more like indigestion] What’s with the geezer parade?

PALMER [stretching out his neck and jutting out his chin] I may be 87 years old, but I’m still as successful in the bedroom as I am in the boardroom!

ADAM [with exaggerated patience]: Palmer. No matter how many times you pull that stunt with your chin, you’re still half the height of every other man in the room. I don’t care what your actor’s IMDb entry says.

[PALMER deflates, sulking.]

EVANGELINE: Clerval, I…I…I need your help.

CLERVAL: You mean…it’s time for another passionate encounter in the department’s junk room?

EVANGELINE: Not that kind of help, dear. Unless we find Professor Trendee [sudden swell of dramatic music], my academic career will be [sudden swell of dramatic music] brought to a tragic end!

ADAM [sotto voce]: Dear God, what tone-deaf idiot wrote the score to this blasted episode?

CLERVAL: Well, now that your third husband, Summerson, has laid himself open to blackmail, we can use him to get into Bartleby’s good graces. 

EVANGELINE: Are…are…are you sure? Summerson is completely untrustworthy! After I married him two months ago, I discovered that he had sold three final exams on the black market, plagiarized his master’s thesis, murdered Professor Emeritus, asserted that peanut-butter chip cookies were better than Toll House cookies, and forged the results on his qualifying exams!

ADAM [looking puzzled]: Compared to most of my neighbors, that man sounds like a solid citizen. 

PALMER [still sulking]: We can’t possibly trust a man who believes that peanut-butter chip cookies are better than Toll House cookies! Is nothing sacred anymore?

ADAM: At least he’s killed somebody; that shows signs of strong moral fiber. It sounds like he’s our best option for the present, Evangeline. [To Palmer] And quit sulking.

PALMER [managing to sulk and be irritable at the same time]: I am not—

ADAM: For God’s sake, I am perfectly capable of reading the damn stage directions, and they say that you’re “still sulking.” Knock it off. 

[Although EVANGELINE, CLERVAL, ADAM, and PALMER have been conducting this conversation in the middle of the room, apparently nobody has overheard them. Until now.]

TORQUEMADA: Fools! [Flaring his nostrils] You’re going about this in entirely the wrong way. I, and only I, know the key to the secret of Trendee’s disappearance.

EVANGELINE: You…you…you do? How ever can I thank you?

TORQUEMADA: Perhaps you would care to spend a few afternoons discussing Beauty? Not to mention Form. And [flare] Shape. There is much to be said about the female nude as the exemplar of Beauty in its purest form…

EVANGELINE [sweetly]: There’s also much to be said about the three sexual harassment charges currently pending against you.

[Torquemada turns on his heel and stomps off.]

CLERVAL: Well, that left us a lot better off than we were before…

EVANGELINE: Nonsense, Cleri-poo. I think I know exactly what he meant [sudden swell of dramatic music]—

ADAM: Oh, for the love of Agnes Nixon, kill the bloody Muzak!

[The music crashes to a halt. Everyone stares.]

Thank you. [To Evangeline] As you were saying.

EVANGELINE [shakily]: We need to consult the oracle.

PALMER: The oracle?

CLERVAL: Balder Hermaphroditus Pocket. The department secretary.

[With a dramatic flourish, Clerval throws open the door to the secretary’s office. Everyone is aghast at what they see.] 

ON THE NEXT "ALL MY ALIENATED ACADEMICS":

VOICEOVER: It's time...

EVANGELINE: It's...it's...it's...an urn with Trendee's name on it!

VOICEOVER: ...to uncover...

BARTLEBY: Henceforth, all doctoral dissertations will be on the lesser-known works of James Whitcomb Riley!

VOICEOVER: ...the Truth!

PROFESSOR TRAD: We've reduced him to his component atoms.  It's time for the next phase of our master plan!

 

Unbooked

Amy L. Wink's post reminded me that I haven't really culled my bookshelves in three or four years--in large part because, right now, there isn't much of anything I feel the need to toss.  Usually, if I decide that I don't want a book occupying valuable shelf space, it's immediately after I finish reading it.  A lot of my purely recreational reading, like SF or detective fiction, quickly disappears to eBay, Amazon, or my department's free book table.  I treat composition textbooks and the like as ephemera, in essence, and tend to dispose of them on a regular basis.  And books that are purely project-specific also have been known to disappear into exile--I haven't even bothered to enter the Anne Boleyn novels into my LibraryThing catalog.

If anything, I've more than once found myself in the odd position of having to re-purchase books I turfed out years ago.  Very frustrating, not to mention uneconomical...

All My Alienated Academics: A Soap Opera in Five Installments (1)

EPISODE 1. A SEMINAR ROOM

[While the SEMINAR ROOM appears luxurious at first glance—built-in mahogany bookcases, cherry desks, plush carpets—a closer inspection reveals that everything is not only fake, but also liable to fall over at the merest gust of wind. It doesn’t help that the bookcases are filled with copies of remaindered novels by Nora Roberts. The room is occupied by two businessmen, one in his sixties and one in his late eighties; the former is poring over copies of Critical Inquiry, the latter is dozing. Our heroine enters, sobbing.]

EVANGELINE ROWENA ULALUME: He’s gone! He’s gone! Now I’ll never be able to write my dissertation on the artichoke as a metaphor for the enculturation of female subjectivity in 1890s romantic fiction!

[EVANGELINE, emoting with all her might, throws herself dramatically to the floor, careful not to disarrange her stylish locks. The younger of the two businessmen rolls his eyes; the older one, now awake, seems more sympathetic.]

PALMER CORTLANDT:  Now, now, sweetpea, let’s not make such a fuss, eh? What can I do to help? Chocolates? Mascara? New iPod? Plane trip to Rio?

EVANGELINE [sniffling, although her makeup remains remarkably intact]: Professor Trendee, my dissertation advisor and my soulmate, has [sudden swell of dramatic music] disappeared! I’m afraid that he’s fallen into the toils of my enemy [sudden swell of dramatic music] Rosamond Ideala Audley! She’s been trying to get him to take her on as his [sudden swell of dramatic music] research assistant! And if he does…then he’ll spend all his time reading the collected works of Jacques Lacan, and will never [sudden swell of dramatic music] pay attention to Pierre Boudieu again! [sobs hysterically]

PALMER [soothingly]: There, there, there, there, there, there. Why don’t you give us a recap?

[Across the room, ADAM CHANDLER rolls his eyes in exasperation.]

ADAM: I know you’re desperate for screen time, but it’s customary to stick to two “theres.”

[EVANGELINE and PALMER ignore him.]

EVANGELINE [taking a deep breath]: Professor Trendee gave Evangeline an assignment. Evangeline warned Rosamond off Trendee. Annabelle and Jane argued about Antonio’s interpretation of Judith Butler’s interpretation of Jane Gallop’s interpretation of Jacques Lacan. Summerson kissed Manfred in the library, only to be discovered by Clerval. Professor Trad refused to write a letter of recommendation for Eustace. Eustace booby-trapped Trad’s first edition of War and Peace. Diana, Barry, and Rosamond confronted Professor Deadwood about their missing term papers. Next week: Professor Torquemada decides which students will be admitted to the Ph.D. program.

PALMER [looking a little dazed]: Well, that’s perfectly clear. I think. [more confidently] Let me tell you, sugarplum, I’ve been a CEO for decades, and you’ve got nothing to worry about. I eat people like Trad, Deadwood, and Torquemada alive—

ADAM [brightly]: —which no doubt explains your dentures—

PALMER [ignoring him]: —and if you’ll just trust me to look out for your best interests—

ADAM: —now you’ve gone and overstimulated the man, young lady, and me without a heart defibrillator—

PALMER [still ignoring him]: —we’ll have Professor Trendee back in no time flat. Now, you just run along and fix up your pretty face.

[EVANGELINE’s face doesn’t seem especially in need of fixing, but she exits anyway.]

ADAM: I should have known you’d mess up my nefarious plan to control all of Pennsylvania! If you aren’t careful, Evangeline will figure out the truth!

PALMER: You mean—that academic life is like a soap opera?

ADAM: Shhhhh! As long as we’re the only characters in this script who know that we’re in a soap opera, we can construct and reconstruct reality by manipulating narrative conventions and subverting the expectations formed by the traditions of serial drama. [Pause] What are you doing here, anyway? I didn’t see you named in this week’s spoilers.

PALMER: Well, I was hoping to pick up a few lines, here and there…

[EVANGELINE returns.]

EVANGELINE: It’s even worse than I thought. [Pauses to toss the aforementioned locks] Clerval, my fourth husband, tells me that Jude, the office assistant carrying on an affair with Professor Trendee’s eighth wife, has been spotted in public with Bartleby, Professor Trendee’s most recent secretary, who has been conniving with Professor Trad, Professor Trendee’s lifetime enemy. [Wipes her eyes carefully, so as not to muss her mascara] 

ADAM: So you’re saying that Bartleby must be the key to Trendee’s disappearance?

EVANGELINE: I would prefer not to. But it’s the only [sudden swell of dramatic music] possible [sudden swell of dramatic music] solution! It’s…payback…for all those times Bartleby had to type up Professor Trendee’s lectures on the Zizekian moment in postcolonial queer theory.

PALMER [irritably]: Either I need a hearing aid, or that last sentence was completely incomprehensible.

ADAM: Those things are not mutually exclusive.

EVANGELINE [hastily]: I think it’s time we forged some alliances with my friends in the graduate program.

ON THE NEXT "ALL MY ALIENATED ACADEMICS":

VOICEOVER: Prepare for lust...

CLERVAL: You mean…it’s time for another passionate encounter in the department’s junk room?

VOICEOVER: ...departmental politics...

PROFESSOR MOD: If you read blogs, you will be sentenced to the Ninth Circle of academia.

VOICEOVER: ...and the deadly secrets lurking behind the department secretary's door.

[Shot of Evangeline, Clerval, Palmer, Adam, and sundry others staring into an as-yet unseen room.]

In which the LP proceeds to permanently destroy her reputation for "seriousness"

This is a Serious blog.  (Except, of course, when it features cats or ducklings.)  Nevertheless, there are times when I succumb to serious bouts of unseriousness--and subject my innocent readers to, say, parodies of Law & Order.  I regret to inform you that for some months now--even while I was in the trammels of Reformation theology and Victorian anti-Catholic sermons--I have been desperately attempting to fend off a particularly virulent form of the disease. 

It all began when a thought randomly coursed through my idle brain (and you know what they say about idleness):

"Academic life is like a soap opera."

You can guess where this is going.

In any event, after several months of research into this hypothesis (research which was good, if nothing else, for comic relief...), I am about to plunge into serial drama--blog-style.  Somewhere between grading papers, finishing Anne Boleyn, revising a committee publication, working on my book proposal, prepping for classes, reading, and thinking about some conference proposals, I have allowed myself to be Unserious; the results of this unseriousness will be appearing on this blog at about 8:00 PM every night this week.  Will Evangeline discover the whereabouts of Professor Trendee in time to finish her doctoral dissertation? Or will the evil Rosamond get to him first? And what nefarious plans do those characters from a certain soap opera have in mind for our heroes? [The music swells] Tune in for love, murder, sex, and the occasional mention of Slavoj Zizek.

(If all else fails, I can console myself with the knowledge that my "script" can't possibly be any worse than the real soap opera that lurks behind it.  Hoo boy.) 

Ewwww

Some of the comments to this post over at Pharyngula brought up the issue of --gasp!--first-cousin marriage.  Of course, if you're a Victorianist, your students frequently ask you what's up with all those first-cousin marriages in Victorian fiction ("isn't that, like, incest?").  Speaking of incest, if you really want to make your students squirm, ask them what they think Heathcliff's relationship to Mr. Earnshaw is.  (Not that you can prove it from the text, one way or another.  Nevertheless, EB certainly left room for...some interesting inferences, there.)

Sundry academic scattered musings

• Anne Boleyn is now officially finished.  Hooray! Now she starts on her long, slow journey through the refereeing process--hopefully emerging reasonably intact (the article, that is, not the queen) at the end.
• Now it's time for me to start thinking more carefully about jeremiads, as that's what a number of my Victorian anti-Catholic sermons are.  (Incidentally, George P. Landow argues that "Victorian sage" rhetoric is partly indebted to the jeremiad.)  Given that my original chronological structure for this article has vanished without a trace, thanks to the actual nature of my evidence (amazing how that works), I think I'm going to do a big thematic overview followed by a series of case studies.  The Reformation tercentenary sermons, delivered in 1835, are particularly interesting; they were delivered as part of an international commemorative project that stretched over a couple of years.   
  
• Speaking of Victorian anti-Catholic sermons, I've just inflicted a long list of requests on one of the now-beleaguered rare books librarians at the Union Theological Seminary's Burke Library.  Everything is now set for my trip down to NYC during spring break, so once again I'll be camping out amidst Lutheran seminarians. 
• My signature has long since degenerated into a combination of squiggles, slashes, and dots, so I suppose that it's completely unfair of me to be annoyed with whatever Victorian affixed an unreadable signature to a tract in my collection.  Really, I'd like to know who owned it. 

Signs that grading is getting to you, #4329

While sitting in your office between classes, you start belting out choruses from "Conjunction Junction."