Perhaps She's On To Us . . .

So, I've been buried the past week trying to finish my paper for Kalamazoo, and finally finished the draft today. It ran long (8,000 words), so the next task is to abridge it for oral presentation.

In the meantime, here's an amusing passage I came across while researching the piece that I thought I'd share:

"Miss Rogers . . . postponed the compilation of her history Degrees by Degrees, which friends and relatives put together from her papers after her death. Perhaps she resembled other dons, both at Oxford and elsewhere, whose high standard of perfection prevents them from ever bringing a work to completion, and thus compels lesser men and women to confront the accusations of superficiality, inaccuracy, and prejudice which publication normally brings. Silence alone preserves the legend of impeccability and omniscience . . . "

--Vera Brittain, THE WOMEN AT OXFORD: A FRAGMENT OF HISTORY [1960], p. 193.


current reading: NO FOR AN ANSWER (Philip Larkin), THE MIRROR OF KO HONG (Ernest Bramah)