It's official

Once you've marched in the Rural Small Town's Homecoming Parade with the local chapter of NOW, holding a LESBIAN RIGHTS NOW sign, you've earned the title of Big Dyke on Campus. I should make a super-hero cape or something. I intend to use my powers only for good! Got a few cheers from friends, and was otherwise met with a sea of stony glares, so it went well. The parade organizers had NOW marching behind the truck for our Republican congresswoman's re-election campaign, and I can't decide if it was intentionally ironic or not.

I ought to be working on a paper about Anne Bradstreet. She's actually a pretty interesting anomaly, a Puritan proto-feminist poet, quite an "azoological beast" as Graves put it. And what's more, she's actually good:

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits:
If what I do prove well, it won't advance,
They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance.

--The Prologue

Which is more than you can say for her male collegues (seriously, if you can slog through Michael Wigglesworth's "Day of Doom" with out passing out you're a better student than I). I'll either write on "The Author to Her Book" or "Before the Birth of One of Her Children", both of which are pretty unusual. Especially the latter; I was expecting it to be all motherhood romanticism and warm fuzzies, but it's actually a striking death letter to her husband.
But I'll probably spend the day reading Evelina and finishing The Turn of the Screw, which is getting really good. The governess has just had her midnight show-down with the ghost of Peter Quint and it's all very ominous and portentious.