Reading (just come to me through the inter-island library loan system): In Pursuit of Love, and Love in a Cold Climate; prosecuting, that is to say, my in-depth researches in queer history--which is also the reason I ordered (through the same loan system) Rising Tide. The little glimpses that both Mme. Mitford and Mr. Barry give us, through the unsuspecting, though sometimes murderously punitive, close-wrought grid of heterosexual tyranny--in England as in New Orleans--of an underlying gay reality, are slashingly vivid, provocative; sickening in their suggestion of bitter oppression, exhilarating in their glorious, indominatable defiance of what is so unreflectingly considered by the vulgar many to be "the way things are."