The thing about doing a degree in early modern studies, reader, is that your life swiftly goes all early modern, all the time. I’ve no cause to complain — that is, after all, why I’m here, to bury my head in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and rarely to escape them. To attempt to dwell there.

The other day, loitering and smoking, I spoke with a nice young American man who told me he was studying in the Netherlands and urged me to travel there. I told him I had heard Antwerp was nice. He told me that Antwerp is in Belgium. I gave him a sweetly perplexed smile and said that it’s all the same thing, isn’t it, and anyway it belongs to Spain.

These things happen.

Another thing is that this term has organized itself, quite by accident, to be profoundly unqueer. One of my term papers is about Thomas More, for chrissakes.

I happen to like Thomas More. And I love things that are old. But I miss things that are queer, and I miss things that aren’t old.

This afternoon I went to a beautiful talk on Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil poems in the New Yorker — reader, it was so squeakily modern! Modernists speak differently than their dustier counterparts do — they use a lot more theory-inspired jargon, for one, and they are relatively un-self-conscious about it. In a pleasant, refreshing way. They speak in longer sentences, and more abstractly.

The various programs within English, not to mention the various disciplines, tend to break down into territorial little groups here, so every time I attend a seminar not in early modern English things, I feel like an invading outsider. People look at me, going “who’s that?” They all know each other, they all speak the same language. It’s like observing a species kin to me, yet far removed in space and time.

Today, they were breathtaking, reader, these modernists. They were all so hip and pierced! Some of them weren’t white! Some of them were even American!

One woman with a beautiful accent spoke rapidly and fluidly about Marx and postcolonial economies, smiling through her wild grey hair and over her elegant scarf. They weren’t afraid of sentiment and they weren’t afraid of abstraction. A fight erupted over our positions as self-congratulatory readers looking back at “the past” through the lens of difference. The 1950’s, “past” and distant! Reader!

The print on the handout was in fonts and layouts I grew up with. The New Yorker, reader! It still exists! It takes its very life from a robustly industrialized, incipiently globalized capitalistic consumer society! It even spells things the same way I do! Shiny! Modern! Oh, brave new period!

Wow.

I need to get out more.

Now back to … uh, back to Marian production of the works of Thomas More. Right.