One thing struck me this time. I'm used to people confusing me for a grad student, and never take offense; it's like being carded at the liquor store, and anyway I too am still trying to find the most inoffensive way of asking that (my current strategy is "What level are you working at?" and perhaps "where are you at in the System?" might be good, as well, as long as it's said with a sort of wry grin).

But it was rather disconcerting to be talking to the chair of a panel I had attended and had asked a question at and to have him say, "Oh, I thought you were a very precocious undergraduate." Being youthful is all very well, but, I mean, I'm 36, man. Do I have to start wearing a suit? Maybe I need another haircut. Or am I asking puerile questions?

My own panel was the very last one of the conference, late Friday afternoon, and what with that and with concurrent panels and with there being only two papers (one of the presenters dropped out mysteriously), the panel was pretty mellow. It was a respectable crowd of twenty or so, but mostly just all my friends who were in attendance. That's good, because this particular paper (the "Forgotten Fantasy" one) was fun to present, full of pulp magazine covers and references to moustaches and psychedelia, and was very well received in the room, but it was kind of short on innovation. The sporting paper earlier this summer was probably the best thing I've done lately, and probably has more legs.

Seven weeks into reading A Tale of Two Cities in weekly 150th-anniversary installments, I've been keeping the schedule religiously, and enjoying it a lot. I get up on Thursday morning, print off the six pages of the weekly number, and read it over coffee. Reading takes about fifteen minutes, after which I staple the pages of the installment together and put them in a folder with the previous numbers. I tend to forget about the story over the intervening week, but occasionally on Wednesday I think, "Aha! Dickens tomorrow."

Some patterns are emerging. First, there is a real moment of readjustment with the first page; after all, it's been a week since I read the last one, with lots of printed and digital reading in between. This time, for instance, I had a hard time remembering what happened at the trial last week. But Dickens is very adroit at recalling your attention to names and events in sufficiently varied ways without giving an entire synopsis. Someone with more knowledge of rhetoric should do a study of this, because I'm coming to the conclusion that it's an essential part of his contemporary appeal. In line with my own interests in reading communities, all this makes me wonder if perhaps we now admire Dickens for different reasons than the Victorians did. The imprimatur that the Leavises eventually marked him with really marked a shift in the quality, though perhaps not the extent, of Dickens's reputation.

I also find myself reading the page with more care than I usually do. Partly, of course, I'm watching for patterns of narrative recall like the ones above, and reflecting on my own reading experience like a good scholar, but this desire not to miss any words also stems from the fact that the type is very close set. If you miss a couple of inches of type in an Oxford World's Classics paperback, you're not missing much; but if you miss a couple of inches in this one you're skipping over an entire paragraph or more. Is there a possibility that close type like this actually focuses the reader?

Finally, I get the feeling that we're missing out on a lot by not getting the rest of the magazine. I find myself scanning the final page after the end of the installment, reading about parliament, or turnips, or whatever, and thinking that I ought to go to the library and take a look at the other articles. I haven't done that yet, though.

I am gratified to find that the adjective "Scheherezadean" passes MS Word's spellcheck function. Maybe there's hope for civilization after all!

Just as, in reading O'Brien, I find all sorts of natural everyday expressions stemming from nautical terms ("at loggerheads," &c.), I am finding a few such expressions in the culture of the hunt: to "draw a blank," for instance ("drawing" being the action of sniffing out a bushy area or "cover" trying to flush out a fox, and "blank" being, obviously, a failure to find).

Also "painting the town red," which refers pretty literally to the exploits of the Marquis of Waterford and his friends in Melton Mowbray one drunken night in 1837.

Been reading up on the ancient English institution of fox-hunting for my upcoming conference paper, and poring over issues of The Sporting Magazine and The New Sporting Magazine from the early 1800s. It's been fun. What marvellous pseudonyms those old sporting writers adopted: Charles Apperley's immortal "Nimrod" of course, but also "The Druid," and "Sylvanus Swanquill." All redolent of antiquarian taste and bucolic Latinity.

So the other day I was looking through the microforms of, first Bell's Life in London and Sporting News, poring over the entire year of 1833 looking for reviews of William Hamilton Maxwell's anonymously-published Field Book. Bell's Life is particularly charming, all close-set pages, the right margins packed with dodgy advertisements for dog biscuits, guns, smutty books like "The Life and Amours of the celebrated Earl of Rocester, including his Amatory Poems, &c." or "The New Frisky Songster, a prime lot of love songs, for Gentlemen only," -- followed by various venereal ointments.

Anyway, I had one of those moments of archival joy when, my eyes aching (goddamn microforms), I found precisely the review I was looking for, in the May issue of the New Sporting Magazine. Not only that, it confirmed my reading of the book almost precisely.

Of course, I've since discovered the magazine on Google Books, where I could've just used control-f. But still, it was a very rewarding experience.

A few of us Toronto Victorianists are getting together in cyberspace to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the serialization of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, from April 30th, 1859, to November 12th. We're going to email out the pdfs biweekly, on the correct day, to read it just as the contemporary readers would. Let me know if you want to be one of the subscribers and get yer Victorian on. Unfortunately, although the text is a fine facsimile of the original edition it's only the text of Tale of Two Cities, and not the entire magazine of All The Year Round, which I think undermines the experience a bit, and turns the attention rather too much to the one work of fiction and not to the entire experience of the magazine. But still, it's Dickens in the original.

Interestingly, I've never read Tale of Two Cities, which is surprising, since (medievalist and other) Victorian historical fiction is one of my interests. So this will be a fun thing to do this summer.

The Informed Comment blog reminds us that it's been almost exactly twenty years since the Tiananmen Square protests.

What that also means is that it's been twenty years since I went to China as part of a high school trip (part of a group of teenagers from small white Okanagan towns touring the industrial and financial capitals of the Mysterious East -- can you imagine? Actually, "East" is of course a misnomer when you're living on the west coast of North America, but anyway).

Woo, that was almost as shocking as realizing that my Turkey-up-the-Mediterranean-to-Britain trip was thirteen years ago. I feel old.

A student writes that Arthur "has become a common hero for the Britons, the Anglo-Saxons, the Celtics, the French and many more."

Good to know that the influence of medieval romance extends so generously into the realm of basketball. Maybe there's something to this "medieval popular culture" thing I've been working on after all.

In other news, I've started in on my second-ever reading of Moby-Dick! And it's even better than I remember. But, dear Dickheads, I'm gonna have trouble making it to the next couple of Fridays....

Maybe after that.

It was a pretty big annual Puddle; about a hundred feet long or so, and extending far enough into the bush on either side of the road that you couldn't really get around it.

So, to get across the Puddle, for a few years (I was, I guess, five or six) we would actually leave a leaky canoe there. We'd hike down the road, get in the canoe, paddle across, hike the rest of the way down to the river, cross the river in the canoe, and then take the bus to school or drive to work or whatever.

But then we went to Vernon to see a slide lecture by these Canadians who'd climbed Everest. They had these ladders, see, and they laid them down over the crevasses that they had to cross. Bright idea! So my father felled a tree alongside the road in the right place, and so every spring for the next ten or twelve years we'd lay down a couple of ladders to where the log was, and until the Puddle melted, we'd walk across the ladders to the log, then balance our way across the log, then walk down to the river. Yes, we would also do this at night, with flashlights. Yes, come to think of it, it's totally ridiculous.

Anyway, shortly after I left for university, we finally built a better access road to the river -- a road that was much drier.

My last post reminds me of what happened when the spring melt hit at home. There was this sort of low-land at the bottom of the hill which was always the first to go.

Most of the year, there were just mud puddles and mosquitoes at this low-land, and in winter it was snow, but sometime in March you'd be driving the skidoos down to the river, and suddenly the snow would crack and water would start to seep through. For a few days, you could just gun the skidoo and roar across the water, but eventually it would be too much and you'd be faced with the problem of how to get across the Puddle that would be there for the next month.

Spent today tramping about Toronto in an unceasing unseasonable rain that varied from drizzle to downpour. Reminded me of winter in Vancouver! Huge puddles and streams back up everywhere in the residual ice that forms great big dams and sinks; Bickford Park, a massive bowl, is now a lake.

Only thing is, it's only going to be seven degrees for a few more days; then it's going to freeze. And this town is going to be one great big fuckin' ice rink.

Wake me when it's really spring.

A student of mine has just used "pleather" when I think she meant "plethora."

Not quite as common as "posses" for possess," but far more hilarious.

So today we started in on a selection from the fourth book of Lydgate's Troy Book (the horse, the sack of the town, and Polyxena's death scene).

I asked for a show of hands to see how many students had read Homer. Four!

I'm not disheartened by that. Quite the contrary. I'm delighted that there are now going to be 44 people in the world whose only experience of the Troy story is through a retelling by a fifteenth-century monk.

Well, not quite true. Some of 'em saw the movie with Brad Pitt.

I am always highly, highly gratified when I read a student speaking grandiloquently of a "coup de gras." My only regret is that I can never figure out how to make a tasteful fat-joke out of it.

When you see this, quote from Shakespeare in your journal.

If hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the great Sun himself a fair hot wench in red taffeta, then wouldst thou be so superfluous as to ask me the time of day?

2.Henry IV (I think)

Hmmm... So I was planning this fall, as I did with the Victorian Novel course, to have an optional out-of-class session at the Fisher Rare Book Library, to look at early editions of the Brontes, Hogg, yellowback thrillers, The Lair of the White Worm, and Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica.

And yet I kind of wonder, if we're going to go do any extracurricular activities for this Gothic Literature class, we might better spend the time going to see The Sisters of Mercy at the Phoenix on October 28th.

Next time I'm in the Alps, I have to make sure to visit the monastic library of Admont.

Haven't voted Green in about ten or fifteen years, but was always very fond of them, especially when my friend Stuart was leading the BC branch of the party.

I stroll past the Greens' campaign office on College at Spadina on my 45-minute walk to Ryerson four days a week (how's that for a green commuting method? Also saves me two dollars and seventy-five cents), and was at first surprised to find that there was almost no movement in their office; it was almost as quiet as the lonely little Conservative office 'round the corner from my house, and always dark.

Then I realized that there were people in there; the door was often open. Of course! they have left the lights off to conserve electricity. It makes them seem not entirely welcoming, and perhaps a little crank, but it was a fine statement of principle. Next time around, though, they might want to rent in a south-facing building.

I have been fighting this nagging feeling of unease every time I have gone in to teach Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho so far this term. Having tried to teach Disraeli to a similar class last year and gotten some seriously disgruntled responses to it, I was thinking "Shit, I have given them this loose baggy repetitive enormous monster of a romance to read, and they must be bored out of their skulls."

But today I realized they are totally getting it, and totally enjoying it. Radcliffe. Who would've known? I guess the moral of the story is, never take students' responses for granted.

I'm here posting on lj because I've got a hell of a lot of other stuff to do. A huge pile of grading, to begin with. But, in haste, here is a video of the Monks (no, not the "Drugs in my Pocket" Monks), in Germany in 1965, doing one of their finest songs:

Complication.

As one youtube commenter puts it, "Absolutely one of the greatest contributions the American military has given the world. "

Class today was on Marshall McLuhan. Which led (inevitably) to me being asked, playfully,

So, do you like hairy armpits on girls?

I was all professional about it (if rather red), and merely answered, "Wow, thanks; I've never been asked that question in a class," before moving on. But, yeah, I've got a few answers to that question.

I used to work at a coffee shop in Vancouver. Okay, I used to work at a bunch of coffee shops in Vancouver (I'm happy to say, never at a big chain, and certainly never at Starbucks [sic]; indeed, all of them were pretty cool places in different ways). I even settled back into the comfort of working in a coffee shop after we got back to Vancouver from St. John's -- until Suzanne scolded me what the fuck are you doing you have a Master's degree, and I went off to teach ESL, which I was pretty good at, too.

Anyway, the fall after returning from Newfoundland, I worked at a coffee shop on Main Street, for young owners who would have fit right in on West Queen West. It was a little slice of Toronto in Vancouver, actually, though I wasn't to know that then. They had probably the best espresso I'd ever had (which is saying a lot); they were exclusive importers from some little family in northern Italy.

They also did fruit smoothies. This, of course, was a recipe for fruit fly infestations, with the little kitchen space endlessly sticky no matter how often we cleaned up. There were clouds of the tiny fuckers back there.

I had a co-worker (not the one who was the granddaughter of Eric Gill) who thought she had figured out a way to deal with the flies. Every time a swarm arose, she'd spray 'em energetically with the bottle of cleaning solution that sat by the sink. Sure enough, the swarm would die down dramatically. She thought she'd killed them off.

But, of course, she wasn't killing them. Their wings were just growing too sodden and heavy for them to fly; when they dried out, they'd just take to the air again and settle on the fruit. Cheerful little flies, with their bodies covered in Windex. Very healthy.

My last post is (unintentionally) reminiscent of a really great collaborative, interactive Lovecraftian fiction played out on Livejournal in 2002, which I just now found out about, and which I would like to use in a science fiction course someday. See this post for an overview. It seems to have deceived at least one reader. Here are the places it played out (read from the beginning, if you have the time):

Arthur Blake's journal is here.

His friend Minty's journal is here.

Their acquaintance Stephen's journal has been partially archived here.

And the posts (from the very moment of the project's conception) of the group who perpetrated the whole thing can be found here. Casts a lot of light on the creative process.