Norton Unwieldy Doorstop of English Literature’s Greatest Hits

Guess who’s coming out with a greatest hits album?

Let me rephrase that.

Guess why some insanely elitist music snob is cutting off the part of skin on their arm where they had the Anti-Flag logo tattooed?

And guess why Kathryn made up a music snob that’s elitist to such comically exorbitant measures that they would respond to the release of a greatest hits album in such a way?

Because, rhetoric.

In some circles, greatest hits albums are Not Okay. Usually, they’re Not Okay merely to own, but… I’m exaggerating in order to make a point. Greatest hits albums are for, like, “posers” who only want to listen to the songs that the royal They play on the radio. You know, posers who don’t listen to the whole album that the song originally came out on. Posers who don’t even know about, let alone listen to, the b-sides. Posers who buy albums put out by major labels. Come to think of it, I don’t know why my hypothetical music snob didn’t cut out the tattoo when Anti-Flag signed to a major label for, like, two albums.

My real point has to do with the subject of a covetous post I wrote back in October, a post that was much more concise and focused than this one. But when you’ve had, like, four cups of coffee within the period of twenty minutes, well…some fucks you no longer give. OH MY GOSH, BUT HERE COMES THE REAL POINT:

The Norton Unwieldy Doorstop of English Literature may fall tragically short as a token of English major bravado, assuming English major bravado is anything like English major street cred – bravado and street cred which may have slight nuances of difference, but that’s not the point either. The Norton Unwieldy Doorstop of English Literature, all things considered, is more like the Norton Unwieldy Doorstop of English Literature’s Greatest Hits. It’s not even one band’s author’s greatest hits, either, it’s like the literary canon’s equivalent of Now That’s What I Call Music. And, well, it would be embarrassing to fetishize such a thing, oui? Especially if you were the kind of person who would get all condemning about greatest hits albums.

The works included in the Norton are there because the royal They decided that the works were important and radio-worthy. Not only that, the longer prose and poetry are excerpted. Holding an anthology like the Norton on such a high pedestal would not be something any self-respecting snob would do. The hypothetical snob, or how I imagine the hypothetical snob, wouldn’t just be reading the popular Seamus Heaney poems, but also the b-sides; b-sides that would come in the form of a musty paperback from an independent used bookstore that will be cool next week, but not this week, the week when Hypothetical Snob patronizes it. That’s one of the reasons why the Hypothetical Snob is The Real Thing.

I had another point about the Norton falling short, but it depended on some possibly-bad information I once received, that W.W. Norton is really owned by the Textbook Companies That Own EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD EVER Except For The Independent Used Bookstore That Won’t Be Mainstream-Cool Until The Week After Hypothetical Snob Shops There. (Maybe the buy-out is what made it mainstream-cool?) However, some quick and superficial research has revealed that W.W. Norton is an independent publisher. At least that’s what it says on the heading for their website. There might be some huge conspiracy not even the internet could tell me, but the Hypothetical Snob could.

The again, independent labels can put out greatest hits albums, too.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go pour hydrogen-peroxide on an arm wound I don’t have, because the mere thought of cutting a tattoo out of my skin makes me hurt – and I don’t even have a tattoo, lot alone an Anti-Flag one. But if I did have an Anti-Flag tattoo, I’d get the girl from The Terror State album art on my lower back. Like a tramp stamp from hell.

The art you have to take the sleeve off to see.

Because, you see, I wanted all this to mean something. Or: The Wheel of Halted Progress.

Beloved Blog-Readers, Oh, Cherished Few That You Are, 

Very recently, I discovered that my survey teacher is also an undergraduate adviser for the English department – as, in my experience, survey teachers are apt to be. This taken into account, I’ve been contemplating visiting his office hours. When I imagine how such a visit would go, the opener goes something like this, “Hello, Sir, do you know me? I’m in your 18^th and 19^th century survey class… you once instructed me to slap the sleeping student in the desk that comes before mine and I was delayed in my response because I was lost in my notebook and only partially paying attention.” 

“Yes, Kathryn, I already know who you are,” he might say.

Oddly, this is how professors usually respond when I preface interactions with an explanation of how our lives overlap enough to justify my making contact with them. Somehow, this never ceases to surprise me. Maybe this is because I’m one of those animals who maintains the preconceived and long-outdated notion that if I sit anywhere from the middle to the back of the classroom or lecture hall and keep my head down, the professor (and everyone else for that matter) will somehow remain unaware of my existence, save for the initials scrawled next to my faceless name on the roll sheet. And every time, the recognition is not only unexpected, but mildly disconcerting for some reason.

But I digress. As I am wont to do. *Blogging Stick*

Then the survey professor might ask me if I’ve stopped by to see the painting that he mentioned in class that ties back to a poem we read, or if I had some question or insight about What’s-His-Name Goldsmith’s proto-feminist undertones in She Stoops To Conquer. To which I’d have to say, “Well, no. Not at all. I have worse reasons for being here, stupider ones, and I’d lie if I didn’t mention that I’m also here to scout out your bookshelves because I may not be well read, but I am rather fond of book spines, including but not exclusive to anthologies like the Norton Doorstop.”

“What might these stupid reasons be?” he’d say – a line of dialogue provided here to break up these enormous blocks of text which will, very shortly, grow to unreasonable proportions.

“I have inquiries as to how the gears of enrollment work at this fine institution, because I’m wondering what might happen if I take a semester off…”

And for the purposes of this blogpost, he wouldn’t directly answer my question as he undoubtedly would in Real Life. Instead he would say, “Why would you want to do a thing like that?”

To which I would respond, “Professor Sir, I wouldn’t say I’m at a crossroads, per se, in my tiny, suburban life, but a prolonged moment of stagnation that would be simple and effortless for anyone with half a brain to pull themselves out of. Alas, you see, access to cerebral faculties necessary for accomplishing such a task were rendered unavailable to me after I foolishly removed my brain from my skull, and sat on it, thereby making it go numb. Now when I try and use it, on those few and far occasions I get a response of any kind, it’s all pins and needles.

“Mind you, it’s not the ENTIRE thing that’s gone numb, just the parts that would enable me to pull myself out of this mess. And it is a mess, Professor Sir. Mostly shards of broken martini glasses, because there’s a petulant brat in my brain throwing them against the wall of a garden shed, embarrassing the ungodly hell out of her bourgeois parents at their bourgeois cocktail party in front of their bourgeois friends. She’s screaming the whole time, too, which brings me to repent for the error of painting her as being at an outdoor cocktail party in the company of people: that’s an intermittent delusion. In actuality, she’s in a confined space, and you can tell because when she screams it all bounces back in a horrible, endless cacophony of petty screeches, rants and caterwauls about how life’s not FAIR, and it’s always somebody else’s fault, and how she couldn’t wear the dress she wanted to wear today because it has yet to be acquired and the second-best runner-up is detained at the dry cleaners and for that someone should PAY. And how dreadful to confess that this woman is really me, but at the same time she’s separate enough that I can feel my patience rapidly thinning from having to endure her as I sit in a series of desks, day after undergrad day, with this cacophonous screaming and glass-shattering – it’s the screaming, mostly, that gets to me. Sometimes she’ll use her fists on the walls, too, either ignoring or in direct defiance of the fact that the walls that enclose her are actually the very brain – MY VERY BRAIN – that I’ve been sitting on all these years. It’s bruising and it’s hemorrhaging from her abuse, and it may be too numb for me to feel it, but suffice it to say, I’ve had quite enough. I sit in class and I dissociate with pen in hand because paying attention is hopeless (believe me, I’ve tried), and anywhere is better than here, and she’s everywhere because I’m everywhere, at least as far as my personal human experience is concerned. I’m tired of being insulated in this incessant shit, and I’m tired of standing there in the brain-room with her and being her, sometimes finding myself staring at an open exit and wondering why the fuck I can’t get myself to go through, and why, those times I do go through, it spits me out into the very room from whence I came.

“So I was thinking I would skip a semester and fly to the other side of the country, maybe even in an aircraft, to smoke ‘vegetarian joints’ with Igby Slocumb and Sookie Sapperstein in Central Park – have you seen that movie? I rather like it, myself – Come to think of it, this would reinforce insulation, because those people are actually fictional characters and when I would speak with them, I’d really be talking to myself and one thing would lead to another and I’d be back to listening to my own – her own – angry shouts like a boot stamping on a human face forever. And wasn’t Camus right when he concluded that all this philosophical consciousness is the perilous toxin of the human condition, and isn’t it a shame that all of our favorite paperbacks will inevitably eat themselves alive with their acid-paper, and isn’t it a shame, Monsieur Professor Sir, that none of this matters anyway? That the Myth of Meaning was such a seductive lie, just like those of Monogamy and Starbucks. But maybe – just maybe – if I took a break from sitting in these stupid desks and being a slave to the ingrained routines I’ve etched into my everything, I could listen to something else besides all this insolent noise. Maybe I could get that bitch to shut the fuck up once and for all and my ears could be tuned to hear the ocean instead, because that’s what happens when you put an empty beer bottle to your ear, isn’t it? And maybe I could realize that this ocean isn’t something I would drown in but something onto which I could set forth and have adventures like Robinson Crusoe, minus the slave-driving I would hope, which I never read despite you assigning it. And maybe this new noise would be empowering and maybe, in the event I find myself overboard, it would result in a tea party with mermaids and not some horrible drowning sensation that couldn’t be unlike the room I’ve been stuck in, unless of course I was ACTUALLY thrown overboard because the sea was upset from my disobedience and the crew caught onto the fact that I committed myself to their voyage not to live into a divine appointment, but to run from it, and being thrown into the tireless ocean wouldn’t result in tea parties with mermaids – however tea parties are supposed to work underwater – but would result in me sitting in the belly of a big fish until that day that may never come: the day when I come to my better senses and say, ‘Okay, Jesus, I’ll return to Nineveh University and complete the coursework for my already-ridiculously-delayed and subjectively-useless major.’

“So what do you think? Should I take a semester off?”

To which I imagine my professor replying, “Go home, English Major, and do your reading for once.”

Now, for the weather:

Exploding Cannibalistic Babies: A somewhat-complicated cautionary tale on how NOT to approach The Faerie Queene. With lists.

DISCLAIMER: foul language. And technically, maybe spoilery tid bits toward the end.

Back in the day, there was a dude named Edmund who decided that England needed an epic poem. Empires of yore had their own mythologies and epic poetry, so with England being the up-and-coming empire on the block (btw, this was in Elizabethan times), it only made sense for (1) someone to sit down and pen the thing, and (2) that someone to be a total bad ass. After perusing his mental index of bad ass acquaintances, Edmund came to the conclusion that he was, indeed, the biggest bad ass he knew, and that’s how we got The Faerie Queene.

Alas, this post is not about The Faerie Queene – hereinafter FQ. It will not explore biographical embodiment of Elizabeth I in the character of the Faerie Queene herself. There will be no carefully articulated summation of the knight Redcrosse’s journey. It won’t even dedicate sentences to pay homage to the embodiments of Queen Lucifera (pride) and the other Seven Deadly Sins, and it won’t explore the poem’s Chaucerian influence.

No, no, no. This blogpost is about me. Because I live in an empire, too, and our anthem is individualism.

‘Murrica.

My sincerest apologies if you feel led on at all.

Let’s start over.

Back in the day, there was a tutor named Kathryn – hereinafter “I” and “me” – who walked into the back room of the English lab at her local community college to discover her fellow tutors, Anita and Hero, engaged in jovial banter regarding God sex (for the Margery Kempe portion of this program, click here) and exploding cannibalistic babies (that’s FQ). Seeing as I was on another pharmaceutical planet when I took my lower division survey class several years ago, I had no knowledge of FQ’s content despite it being assigned. Without previous knowledge, my brain sculpted its expectations of exploding cannibalistic babies in the following fashion:

1. The poem’s got “faerie” in the title. Therefore, it must be riddled with faeries, and faeries are all… quaint, in the contemporary meaning of the word, and appear on greeting cards and assorted kitsch.

Think: Cicely Mary Barker illustrations.
(click for image credit)

2. There would be blue sky and flowers as tall as the faeries. 

3. The cannibalistic babies in question would have a stereotypically cherubic appearance, but with little fangs (now I’m thinking of Sunny Baudelaire, but the faeries I was expecting were in no way Series of Unfortunate Events-ish, seeing as my FQ palate was more cheerful), and from the little fangs would be driblets of blood, seeing as the babies had been consuming humans.

4. These adorable, cherubic cannibal-babies would glut themselves on people (who also looked like faeries, because it didn’t even occur to me that non-faerie creatures would appear in FQ) to the point that they would explode.

5. When these babies exploded, they would take off like fireworks and explode in the sky into a glittery mess.

6. Glittery because they were faeries, and where there are faeries, there’s dust.

Got it? Exploding cannibalistic babies.

Alright, so now that those expectations were cemented in my tutor-y brain, lo and behold, I was assigned excerpts of FQ for my upper-division survey course. I dove into the poem with happy anticipation of my expectations being consummated. Which led me to inquire of Hero, the next time I was in the tutoring lab, “Ummm… where are these exploding cannibalistic babies?”

Hero squinted at the bank of fluorescent lights in the ceiling, “Book 1…Canto 1?”

“Really?” I said. “I read Book 1, Canto 1.”

Hero then shanghaied (or maybe she just “took” it. I really wanted to use the word “shanghai”) my copy of Volume B of the emasculated Norton (as opposed to the doorstop), and briefly flipped the pages until, “Oh, yes, here it is… stanza 25…” and proceeded to read me a passage that had nothing to do with quaintness and glitter and my unconsummated expectations of the text, and everything to do with Error.

Error is a half-woman, half-serpent creature who looks too monstrous to put on a greeting card. When the knight Redcrosse goes to slay Error in her cave, she’s got a litter of Error-babies, which are not cherubic. After Redcrosse beheads Error, her surviving litter “flockéd all about her bleeding wound, / And suckéd up their dying mother’s blood”.

Hero then skipped to the next stanza, where, “Their bellies swolne he saw with fulnesse burst, / And bowels gushing forth: well worthy end / Of such as drunke her life, the which them nurst.” (A quick note on the spelling: being a product of his time, it’s how Edmund writes. Not my fault.) That was it for the babies, saving Redcrosse the moral dilemma of whether or not to kill them too, because (1) they were the spawn of evil, and (2) having one’s mother killed right in front of them will mean a world of mental health bills later in life.

The first draft of this post was peppered with outrage. It was disappointing and annoying for the cannibalistic babies to turn out to be nothing like I wanted them to be. However, I’m sure there will be far more outrageous surprises in my life, and I may not live to experience them if I get inconsolably riled up over the likes of literary characters and have a heart attack before I complete my bachelor’s degree in English literature. A lack of blue skies and glitter are not enough to disown the notion of reading FQ in its entirety. The length, however, might be. One must really, really want to read FQ to slog through all of it. I’ve seen people toting copies of FQ around campus, as well as a fat stack of them in my professor’s office, and they’re so epically enormous that they put the full-on Norton doorstop to shame.

God Sex and Religious Weirdoes: a lengthy endorsement of Margery Kempe

WARNING: spoilers, dirty words, suggestions of God having a sex drive, and excessive use of the impersonal “you”

Wednesday before last, when I entered the back room of the English lab, someone’s Norton Unwieldy Doorstop was sitting open on a desk, color-coded Post-Its pasted here and there on the page. Its owner sat in a swivel chair, facing away from the tome, but not far enough away that she wouldn’t notice if I tucked the Doorstop under my arm and fled from the premises.

She (we’ll call her “Hero”, because that requires less explanation than “Stripper”) was chatting with Anita on the subject of God sex. God sex and exploding, cannibalistic babies, to be precise, but the latter is from a separate work, and for the purposes of this post, I’ll be focusing on the God sex.

The story goes that, on the one day she hadn’t done the reading for Early English Lit class, Hero found herself sitting in on a conversation about God and Jesus having sex with some woman.

God first, then Jesus.

This woman, “banging” Jesus in her spiritual autobiography.

Hero flipped a few pages and handed the open Doorstop to Anita. “See? Do you see this?”

Anita began reading aloud, “I take you, Margery, for my wedded wife, for fairer, for fouler, for richer, for poorer…so long as you be buxom…” Then, “Sometimes she heard with her bodily ears such sounds and melodies that she might not hear well what a man said to her in that time unless he spoke the louder”, to which Anita commented, “It sounds like she’s having temporal lobe hallucinations.”

Being English majors all reading from the same canon, I naturally had access to the same passages of The Book of Margery Kempe in my own, albeit emasculated – seeing as its been broken down in three parts – copy of the Norton Doorstop. So, for fun and avoidance of my history paper, I read it.

Maybe I’ve been exposed to too many smutty romance novels at Girl Scout Camp*, because the God sex did not measure up to the tittering in the tutoring lab. Mind you, the Norton can only provide excerpts of Margery Kempe, so maybe they craftily sidestepped the more sultry scenes, but what was there fell short of my expectations. I wasn’t expecting long passages of solid, hardcore pornography, however I was expecting to be shocked with something explicitly erotic – as much, if not more, explicit than the details how of her husband, after he “turned childish again” in his old age, “voided his natural digestion in his linen clothes where he sat by the fire or the table, wherever it might be, he would spare no place”.

God telling Margery, “Therefore I needs[sic] be homely with you and lie in your bed with you” and that “you love me, daughter, as a good wife ought to love her husband” is different than the narrator showing us… la di da, you get it (thinking about it now, I’m glad I was spared).

The most detailed description of physical contact we get is when, in one of Margery’s visions, Jesus kissed the Virgin Mary “full sweetly”, but that was different, and not just because it wasn’t Margery. I’m not convinced that particular kiss is meant to be taken in a romantic/sexual manner, nor, therefore, an incestuous/Oedipal one. Sometimes in the Christian tradition, people kiss other people. It doesn’t necessarily happen in the nice, Calvinist venue I pop into once in a while (like most other contemporary church-goers, we shake hands when we pass the peace)… but, for instance, in the film Vision, nuns be kissin priests and other nuns all the time. It’s not sexual. They’re not getting fresh with each other. That’s just how it is.

Mind you, Vision was set several hundred years before The Book of Margery Kempe. I realize that, without the research that I slothfully resolved NOT to do, there is a potential anachronism there. Said realization domino-effected me into another, this time unflattering realization that I may have been recklessly grouping old-timey Christian mystics together into a fascinating, exotic group, potentially condescendingly otherizing them for my personal enjoyment, harkening to mind, in trajectory, crap like Orientalism. If you’re not following, it may or may not make more sense after you read...

WHY I LIKED MARGERY KEMPE

First, a sort-of digression, because there haven’t been enough already: remember when Jesus was at a dinner party and some woman busts in (depending on which gospel account you read, it’s one of the Marys) and pours all this expensive nard (perfume) on Jesus’ feet and starts crying and wiping it off with her hair?

If you’re anything like my mom, that passage probably annoys you, because, well, what self-respecting gentleman would want some crazy woman crashing a dinner party so she could be a big weirdo and put on such a display? On the other hand, every time I’ve heard it at my church**, the Calvinists have thought it’s a courageous act of love.

Margery experienced a farther reaching gamut of reactions,

For some said it was a wicked spirit vexed her; some said it was a sickness; some said she had drunk too much wine; some banned her; some wished she had been in the harbor; some would she had been in the sea in a bottomless boat; and so each man as he thought. Other ghostly men loved her and favored her more.

Because Margery would go into these INSANE crying fits every time she had a vision of and/or was reminded of the Passion (both happened a lot!). It probably doesn’t help that she sees Jesus in the face of every handsome man and young boy. Margery is so overcome with sorrow and compassion that she balls her eyes out to a point where it’s described as “roaring”.

Mind you, the woman in the gospels probably deliberately tracked down Jesus and poured nard all over his feet, while Margery “knew never time nor hour when they [the visions and corresponding crying fits] would come” and couldn’t handle herself. Zero say in the matter. BUT THE POINT IS, Margery cries with sorrow and compassion and ultimately LOVE for Jesus --> Margery is a big weirdo for Jesus, just like Nard Woman is.

And, yeah, if I were walking around with Margery in public for a prolonged period of time, maybe my wretched colors would come out bleeding out of me and I would find her utterly irritating and humiliating, too, however, I’m not walking around with her, I’m reading about her, and from where I’m sitting – safely, here, behind my Norton Doorstop, hella years after the fact – I think it’s beautiful. Hyperbolic and beautiful and weird and strangely appropriate given the “ghostly”, antiquated state of the text.

Frankly, I think it’s touching how much she loves Jesus, and given the anticlimax of the on-the-whole NOT sexual scenes, I don’t mean LOVE in an explicitly physical way. When Jesus is sitting next to Margery while God is asking Margery to marry her (yes, that happened – and, yes, that was weird), and she didn’t know what to say, partially because she was in love with the second Godhead of the Trinity, not the first*** - that was, oddly, fucking adorable.

I also liked how Margery was seeing angels everywhere like glorious dust motes. That was pretty cool. To which Anita might point out the possibility for temporal lobe hallucinations. Which makes it….no less cool.
So, would I recommend Margery Kempe? Yes. If you’re not a hater who’s gonna be like, damn religious people and their rap music. Because when people get weird and religious, it’s kind of easy to be a hater. If you’re like me, and not my mom, you’ll find religious weirdoes much more admirable and loveable in the antiquated sense than in, say, in Flannery O’Connor, where peeps be flat out insane. If you’re like my mom, you’ll hate both, and you should read something else.

I think religious kooks of the universe have their place. They can be wonderful, in their way. Yeah, once in a while there’s a dark-side of it; a money-embezzling, Jew-bashing, gay-hating, heathen-killing part that rears its ugly head from time and time again, but if that makes its way into Margery Kempe, I was certainly blind to it. And if I did see that in her, I wouldn’t be recommending her to others. Religious weirdoes – especially of antiquity – are adorable and worth their weight in nard.

Good on you, Margery Kempe.



* Men penetrating women with wine bottles while in the back of a horse-and-buggy, whoa!

** Mom and I don’t go to the same church.

*** Perhaps could be construed as a wee Marcion-esque depending on how much you’ve been drinking that day (what?), in retrospect, but The Book of Margery Kempe is unlike Marcion in that she neither hates the god of the Old Testament, nor does he write Him off as a tyrannical douche bag.

The Norton Unwieldy Doorstop of English Literature

Carrying around the Norton Anthology of English Literature was (and is) an honor thing. I would hoist the unwieldy tome from the zippered mouth of my backpack, and all those who witnessed (minus the English majors) would gasp, “What the hell is that? You carry that thing around!?”

“Yes,” I’d say. “Yes, I do. I proudly schlep with this unwieldy tome, not because, in a pinch, it makes for a great doorstop, but because I am an English Major, CHAMPION of Anglophonic verse and prose! I gladly offer myself to the task of loading down upon my shoulders the precious, inscribed intonations of Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, and Heaney!”

Mind you, that was several years ago, and I was merely carrying around one of the two volumes that comprises the anthology (I started with the second volume, because I took Late English Lit prior to taking Early English Lit). At the end of the semester, I shelved that sucka. I admired its copious 2 ½ inch wide spine from my bed at night, and wistfully pined for the day I would take Early English Lit so that I could be assigned the corresponding volume, and eventually have it join its other half on the shelf.

Thus, imagine my heartbreak when, the next semester, the prof decided to take ergonomics into account and assigned instead a few smaller textbooks by a different publisher. ...actually, “heartbreak” might not be the right word – not because it would be ridiculous to get heartbroken over such a thing, but because I was prescribed some strange drugs that semester, and at that time feeling something as significantly negative as heartbreak may have been a chemical impossibility.

Nevertheless, it was a disappointment; a disappointment that carried over long after the questionable psychotropic medication was a part of my life. The incompleteness of that one lonely volume on the shelf, sans its partner, niggled at me, but the real twist of the knife came from seeing others’ copies of the Norton Unwieldy Doorstop Volume 1 sitting around the backroom of the English lab. I guess, after I took Early English Lit, future professors resorted back to the Norton.

Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind to just take one of the unattended copies.

But I work there.

And I already gabbed this sob story to enough people, it would probably be no mystery that I was the one who took it.

Now I’m taking an upper-division survey course that requires the latest edition of the Norton Unwieldy Doorstop Volume 1. I did what any American would do, and purchased it with an unthinking point-and-click. What arrived on my porch was not an unwieldy doorstop. It was not like the proud, almost-three-inch thick beauty that currently resides on my bookshelf. Instead it was the emasculated version, which took the first volume and butchered it into three parts. Because… Ergonomics. I don’t know.

I could pour over the what-ifs and should-haves about how if I were thinking I could have gone for an earlier edition, therefore acquiring a doorstop of my very own, but such meanderings of the mind are stopped in their tracks when I am delivered to the tragic, however inevitable, realization that perhaps my English major bravado would be more easily appeased by just keeping up with the reading.

But spine-measuring pettiness is not easily removed in one fell swoop. So, in the meantime, I’ll sneer over the shoulder of one of the tutors taking Early English Lit this semester who has been blessed to end up with the doorstop.

UPDATE (June 9, 2014):  Then someone amazing read this post and gave me one!