Rhyme does pay

I've just finished a 2 hour seminar on medieval literature: Beowulf to Chaucer. It's all the students get on this period in their time here, which saddens me very much, and inevitably there wasn't much chance to concentrate on anything, so we looked at a little Arthuriana (Layamon and Malory) and a short Anglo-Saxon piece ('The Wife's Lament') and that was it. I regret not putting a slapstick miracle/mystery play on there - that would have lightened the Friday-afternoon feeling.

Nevertheless, we managed, and I got my reward (like the Anglo-Saxons, it's here on earth and not in heaven): Ben (not Cynical Ben) and Hilary gave me a Twelfth Night present of what looks like an excellent book, Andrew Piper's Dreaming in Books: the Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (U of Chicago P, 2009). From a brief perusal of the chapter titles, it looks imaginative and wide-ranging.

Then onwards I trekked to the post room and found two parcels. In one was a cassette tape (!) of Decca [Mitford, agitator, aristocrat and muckraker] and the Dectones with Maya Angelou [famous poet], singing 'Right, Said Fred' and 'One Fish Ball'. Also included is a fluorescent orange 'Don't Forget Your Day Job Records' Kazoo, which will go in the kazoo rack alongside my Nightingales instrument.

In the other parcel was another free book via Librarything's Early Reviewer operation. It's an uncorrected proof copy of Frances Stonor Saunders' The Woman Who Shot Mussolini. The woman in question is the fascinating The Honourable Violet Gibson, Anglo-Irish aristocrat who first became a leftwing Catholic Irish nationalist then a lover of Italy. She shot Musso in the nose, and was confined in an asylum for the rest of her life, without trial or review.

Saunders wrote the rollicking history of knightly psychopaths by tracking the career of British thug Hawkwood, but the first book of hers I read was her brilliant examination of the CIA's cultural activities, Who Paid the Piper?. Highly recommended.

So - nicely set up for a good weekend. Have fun.