George Washington Boyfriend is in town this weekend, so light blogging ahead. I'm hoping also to get started on my revisions to Ch. 1 and get a haircut, but no promises on either of those things.

GWB got in last night, and so accompanied me out to Schmancy today to look at a few things of his own (partly on the principle that it's always worthwhile learning the ins and outs of a different research library, and perhaps also partly because I told him that there's a big ol' portrait of the actual George Washington looming over the room), and it was nice to have the company--we took a long lunch in town and visited a couple of used bookstores, winding up carting a total of at least ten books home. The second of the two bookstores, regrettably, was in the final stages of going out of business, but that meant that everything left on the shelves they were giving away free--in addition to two books in my actual field I picked up a nice copy of Quentin Bell's biography of Virginia Woolf and John Millington Synge's complete plays.

Thinking of playing hookey from Schmancy on Monday to get Ch. 1 under way, though today I started looking at a fantastic book that might actually make me willing to brave the commute. The work is written by a head of state, ostensibly on a matter of public concern, but it includes all kinds of nutty excesses and defensive asides that remind me for all the world of our own head of state (& to make the comparison even better, said long-dead state-head keeps invoking the specter of a particular national disaster as an excuse for his oppressive and paranoid measures as he urges the reader never ever ever to forget That Day).

Anyway, part of this work is relevant to part of my first chapter, but I'm discovering that there's way more that I'm going to want to talk about--maybe this could be my first post-dissertation article??

Well, one can dream.