Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the delightful magazine that published my short-short “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster,” was just nominated for a Hugo in the semiprozine category. Congratulations to editors and all-around fabulous people Gavin Grant and Kelly Link!

Some days I think I should just call this blog “Genre Snootinesswatch.” In an otherwise interesting, if a bit overly cute, article on annotated editions of novels in (yet again) the NY Times, William Grimes writes:

Extreme devotees of Austen do not simply enjoy the novels, they want to sit in the living room at Longbourn with the Bennet sisters, drinking tea and analyzing Darcy’s behavior. An entire subliterary genre, the Regency romance, exists to satisfy this desire.

Uh, a “subliterary genre”? Not, say, a “literary subgenre”? Or even, perhaps more accurately, a “marketing subgenre”?

Sigh.

I’m doing some research on Anglo-Dutch relations in the mid-seventeenth century. This means, among other things, paging through EEBO results. At the top of the sixth page of results, I found this:

The Dutch-mens pedigree or A relation, shewing how they were first bred, and descended from a horse-turd, which was enclosed in a butter-box. Together with a most exact descripton of that great, huge, large, horrible, terrible, hideous, fearful, … prodigious, preposterous horse that shit the same turd; who had two faces on one head, the one somwhat resembling the face of a man, the other the face of a horse, the rest of his body was like the body of an horse, saving that on his shoulders he had two great fish finns like the finns of whales, but far more large: he lived somtime on land, but most in water; his dyet was fish, roots, … A very dreadful accident befel him, the fear hereof set him into such a fit of shiting, that he died thereof: … Also how the Germans following the directions of a conjurer, made a very great box, and smeared the in-side with butter, and how it was filled with the dung which the said monstrous horse shit: out of which dung within nine days space sprung forth men, women, and children; the off-spring whereof are yet alive to this day, and now commonly known by the name of Dutchmen; as this following relation will plainly manifest.

And that’s just the title.