Wednesday, March 25, 2009

3/25: "To start, you must begin."

-After a few class periods of being listless and quiet in Annabel's class, I not only was the only kid in the class to pick up on Peter Lewis in To The North being gay, but cited a way more obscure and awesome passage proving it than Annabel did. It went something like this.

A: Can someone tell me why Lady Waters isn't concerned that Peter and Emmaline would be involved. (Silence) Russell?

R: He's gay.

A: How do we know?

R: Um, Havelock Ellis!

A: [puzzled muttering]

R: He was an early British sexologist who pioneered the study of homosexuality; it's mentioned that Lady Waters asks him about Havelock Ellis at tea.

A: ...I'm not sure you could draw that conclusion from that evidence.

R: [kind of screechy insistence on the legitimacy of queer coding in literature, plus more textual support from the novel]

A: ...[PWNED]

Some of the kids, and Annabel, were also all "they could have just been talking about it because it was in the news/pop science"; I really wish that I'd remembered to point out that Ellis was working 50 years before the book was published. What good is a vast and absurd knowledge of queer history if you can't whip it out and bother people?

1 comment:

erica said...

I hope this is not the last time I commend you like this: way to whip it out!

chances are, it's not the first, either. also the antecedent may have been something like your mad baking skillz.