And the word scarcely begun on the lips

I'm so much happier when I'm reading things, rather than only reading things about things. If that makes any sense! Fandom makes it easy for me to maintain contact with naive, passionate experiences of reading, but I also feel really good when I can make that happen with old books. Maybe time to pick up A Room With a View again - the right time of year! But I also have an anthology of British Suffrage lit on my list, and a new read sounds better right now than an old one.

Random Nineteenth-century Ladybook thought: I wonder if part of the reason why those novels work so well as implicitly feminist texts isn't because of the heaviness of their narration - the way it gives weight to their experiences, philosophies, arguments, and literary rebellions. My current seminar on George Eliot keeps trying to criticize her authorial/narrational heavyhandedness as theatricality or self-consciousness, but I don't buy it - she was trying to change the shape, nature, and content of the novel to make it hold a real heroine, and her narrator is her key tool.

Anyway, it's spring here in Indiana, and my windows are open to the wind, and the birds are singing. We'll see how long I can hold on to this good mood. If I can get to writing again, I think it'd help, but words have been hard coming.

all the promises we broke

to do this evening: finish reading The Well of Loneliness, call my senators and fucking beg for the continuance of my goddamn right to bodily sovereignty and, yanno, basic fucking medical care. Excuse the language, but sometimes the irony of my academic field just gets me. Nothing damn well changes. We write and fight and beg and weep and teach and then we lose everything yet again. (background on the whole bloody mess at Jezebel.)

On the plus side, the book is pretty banging. Melodramatic as anything, but in a yummy queer way that I find very pleasing.