Blog 2.0

This blog has been silent for a long while, embarrassingly so … whenever I end up ignoring it for a long time, I entertain the thought of retiring it. Perhaps it has served its purpose. After all, it began as a means of keeping family and friends apprised of the happenings in my life when I moved from Ontario to Newfoundland. But I’ve been here now for over seven and a half years, and it has been some time since I last posted anything to do with being an Ontarian in Newfoundland. Instead, this blog has evolved into a sort of catch-as-catch-can for my thoughts, rants, musings, editorializing, and trivia. I think this is what they call “mission creep” in the military.

Many times in the past few years I have considered starting a new blog, or a web site more generally that would be devoted more specifically to professional concerns. In a lot of ways, that is what this blog has become—considering that the balance of my posts have tended to involve discussions of books and film, television, the academy, or political questions. But there’s always been a slight dissonance with its original purpose.

Tomorrow (or possibly Wednesday), Nikki Stafford and I launch the first installment of our season three Game of Thrones co-blog. I think that after that is done, I will retire An Ontarian in Newfoundland; I will not take it down, as it is, in many ways, an archive of seven years of my life. But I’ve been feeling for a long time that I need to start fresh. At some point in the next few weeks I will start a new blog, one dedicated to issues of teaching and academia, to discussions of books and media, and hopefully a little more sophisticated than this one has been.

So stay tuned.

Six years

I think part of the project of being a better blogger will mean not feeling compelled to write only weighty and/or lengthy posts. There was a time when I did not suffer this compunction, but then Facebook came along and it effectively became my default forum for my briefer rants, philosophical maunderings, and (hopefully) witty observances about life.

I will change that, even though my audience here is considerably smaller than my list of friends on Facebook. That being said, I notice as I look at my list of “followers” that three more people have joined this humble blog since last I looked. Considering that I haven’t posted in over a month, what drew you? By which I mean: welcome!

I’ve been working on a few posts that have, in the way of my posts, gotten a bit longer than I had planned. I had hoped to put up my it’s-been-six-weeks-since-GoT-ended jittery withdrawal symptoms / thoughtful retrospective post, but it’s busy getting nice and long and verbose. Hopefully tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I am ashamed to say I have missed two milestones. The first was this humble blog’s six-year anniversary. For those who have picked up my online maunderings midstream (and/or haven’t read my little “About Me” blurb to the right), I started this blog as a means to keep friends and family informed about my move to Newfoundland, and how life was unfolding here. Somewhere along the line as St. John’s morphed from extended tourist experience to home, I had less to say about life here and more to say about … well, really anything I was excited, perplexed, or angry about.

This blog’s birthday is July 20th, incidentally; I still remember writing the very brief first post in my newly-empty office at the University of Western Ontario. Less than a week later, I was on the road, heading for my new job at Memorial University and new life in Newfoundland.

The day before hitting the road, however, I became an uncle. My niece Morgan was born on July 25th, and yesterday she turned six years old.

Six years. So long and yet so short. Happy birthday, Miss Morgan!

Bad blogger me. Also, film class! And other stuff.

Hello everyone ... I have been a very bad blogger these past several weeks, and now I am back to repeat the cycle of Energetic Blogging Productionà Tapering Offà Long Silenceà Series Of Lackadaisical Apologies For Long Silenceà Renewed Burst Of Blogging Energy. Hopefully this is the sole Lackadaisical apology, to be followed by a new burst of energy.

No promises, considering this term is rather crazy. I have three courses, all of which are full, and one of which I'm essentially building from the ground up. But I am happy to say they are all extremely enjoyable to teach, and my cohort of students this term is rather amazing—they're all seemingly interested and engaged, and what's more, they laugh at my jokes. Which is good, because I'm so busy with course prep that I don't really have to chance to work up new material.

I'm particularly enjoying my intro to film class, "What is Film?" I was set to teach one of our mandatory surveys, "Major British Authors since 1800," but the department head circulated an email asking if someone would be willing to teach the film class.

I don't think I've ever answered an email so quickly. I don't think thirty seconds elapsed between hearing the new message beep and me firing off my reply. YES, I will teach introduction to film, especially if it means I can trade an English survey course for it. Not that I don't enjoy teaching the great swathe of literature since Blake, but come on ... a film course? In which I basically get to choose whatever films I want? Too ... much ... awesomeness ...

Of course, I ran into trouble in narrowing my list down to a maximum of twelve films ... so after finally paring it down to forty-three of my favourite movies, I looked at what I had and broke them up into twelve loose categories. I then posted that as a note in Facebook, tagged a bunch of film enthusiast friends, and asked people to vote for one from each category. Whatever won in each would be on the course.

Sometimes net democracy is your friend—not only for the fact that it took the onus of that final, agonizing decision off of me, but also for the amazing discussion and argument that unfolded in the comments.

Anyway, the final screening list is sort of like a who's-who of my favourite films. We're doing, in the order we're covering them in class, Rear Window, Alien, Dr. Strangelove, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Big Lebowski, Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, Blade Runner, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Moulin Rouge, 28 Days Later and Pontypool. Again: So. Much. Awesomeness. I am concerned that my lectures will devolve into little more than me geeking out a lot. So far we've done Rear Window and Alien ... and, yes, there have been some moments of total geeking out. But to be fair, that's happened among some of my students too (did I mention I have awesome students this term? And I'm not only saying so on the off-chance they read my blog).

I'm particularly concerned about what my lecture for Crouching Tiger will be like, considering that the sheer beauty of that film reduces me to a quivering pulp whenever I watch it. I expect I will show clips and stills and the content of my lecture will be along the lines of "I mean ... come on ... seriously ... isn't that just ... my God ... it's so ... fuck!" But serious. Please look me in the eye and tell me that film isn't gorgeously made and composed ...

OK. See? This is what I'm talking about! I even veer off into digressive geeking out during a blog post. Must. Keep. It. Together.

In other news, I had my second column in FlowTV.org go live this past weekend. Regular readers of my blog will recognize some of the theme and substance, as it's about zombie films and The Walking Dead—but please go peruse it and leave your comments. And I will soon be a guest blogger on my friend Jen/Nikki's site as she continues The Great Buffy Rewatch, revisiting all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Apropos of which, I plan to finally conclude the Vampire Cage Matches—seeing as how her blog gets about a million times the readers as mine, hopefully I can pull in the masses to vote for who, in the end, is the most kickass vamp.

And in the meantime, I'll try not to be such a slagabed when it comes to blogging. Scout's honour.*

*I was never a scout.

In praise of arbitrary milestones

As heralded several days ago, this is the five hundredth post to this humble bog. Given that this blog also recently celebrated its five anniversary, that means that over the last five years I have published posts at an average rate of once every 3.68 days. Not too shabby.

I'd drink champage if I had it. I don't, so I'll settle for a Friday afternoon cocktail. I will sip it and think of you, my readers. Slainte!

Happy birthday, blog

Yup, this humble blog was started five years ago today on the eve of my move out to Newfoundland. My first post was less than spectacular, just a placeholder promising posts to come. Still, it's interesting to go back to those early days and read about the trip out east, setting up the new digs and settling into the new job. The blog was as much of a novelty, and it shows: I posted thirty-three times in August 2005, which is 1.07 times a day for a month!

Well, perhaps that last sentence doesn't quite deserve an exclamation point, but given the long stretches that sometimes happen between posts, that level of blogging energy seems rather unreal.

This is also my 492nd post--which means that eight posts from now I'll be celebrating another blog anniversary. Dammit, I've got to work on my timing.

ADD, Terry Pratchett, and the noble Burton Pond Eagle

Sorry about the brief hiatus—I've been trying to do some writing, and made the reasonable assumption that perhaps I should give the blogging a pass while I did so. However, based on my abject failure to produce anything of substance these past four days, I am brought back to a fairly elemental truth about myself: that I'm more productive when I'm always stepping sideways, as it were, from one bit of writing to another. So I come back to the blog today on a break from other stuff.

I sometimes think I have a mild form of attention deficit disorder. Actually, I'm fairly certain I do. Anyway, I—Oooh! Shiny!

[three hours later] ... OK, where was I? Oh, right. Blogging, etc.

I'll be back to the vampire cage matches tomorrow. The next fight is a fun but difficult one to write—the batshit insane Drusilla of Buffy and the well nigh feral Marlow of Thirty Days of Night. Not sure how to call that one.

Today's topic du jour is Carpe Jugulum, one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, which I just finished reading and which is possibly the funniest one I have yet read. Given that Pratchett is generally one of the funniest writers I have encountered and this is the seventeenth Discworld novel I have read (out of thirty-seven!), that is saying a lot.

I'm not going to embark on a lengthy critique of the novel; I just want to share, over the course of two posts, some of the parts that tickled me the most. The funniest running joke I will leave for part two. Today I want to take use a moment in the novel as an excuse to post some pictures I've been meaning to get to for a while.

One of the best secondary characters in Carpe Jugulum is the royal falconer, an unfortunate soul named Hodgesaargh—whose name proceeds from the fact that the birds of prey he is always training are always attacking him:

[Agnes had] seen Hodgesaargh occasionally, around the edges of the woods or up on the moors. Usually the royal falconer was vainly fighting off his hawks, who attacked him for a pastime, and in the case of King Henry kept picking him up and dropping him again in the belief that he was a giant tortoise.

King Henry, in case you're wondering, is the name of the King's eagle. Which is as good a segue as any to mention the noble Burton Pond eagle, a rather impressive bird that hangs out in the vicinity of Memorial's student residences in the winter and keeps the duck population under control. A former student of mine, who has dubbed him "Lord Talonforth I," snapped some pictures of him some time ago and posted them to Facebook.

To come back to Hodgesaargh, who would almost certainly be victimized by Lord Talonforth, the following passage is a great example of Pratchettian humour for the uninitiated. The fledgling witch Agnes Nitt runs into Hodgesaargh at a royal banquet, who introduces her to his buzzard William:

"This is William. She's a buzzard. But she thinks she's a chicken. She can't fly. I'm having to teach her how to hunt."
Agnes was craning her neck for any signs of overtly religious activity, but the incongruity of the slightly bedraggled figure on Hodgesaargh's arm brought her gaze back down again.
"How?" she said.
"She walks into the burrows and kicks the rabbits to death."

For reasons unclear at the time, I found this passage unutterably hilarious and had to put the book down while I laughed. And then I remembered one of the other pictures of Lord Talonforth, in which he is very determinedly walking towards some ducks, looking for all the world as if he's about to kick the crap out of them.

As Pratchett intuits in Hodgesaargh's comment, there is something inherently comical about birds choosing bipedal locomotion over flight. It's why we laugh at penguins.

So there you have it—the merger of wildlife journalism and literary criticism. Next up: Pratchett hangs Braveheart out to dry.

This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

... actually, no. I did not eat the plums that were in the icebox. But when I wrote out this blog post title, that lovely little W.C. Williams poem came rather naturally into my head.

This is, in fact, just to say that I have posted every day for the past two weeks, which hasn't happened since I first started this blog. At first I thought April 2010 set a new personal record for most blog posts in a month, and then I realized that August 2005 had thirty-three. That was my first month in St. John's, and indeed the first full month of this blog. One day I will look at the prolific stretches this blog has had and compare them to the empty stretches and try and remember what was going on in my life at the time, and see if I can't figure out what combination of factors leads me to blog or not.

Further to the poetry above, I may as well give this post some substance and make it, in part, a celebration of vividly brief poetry—something at which William Carlos Williams was a master. His most famous, of course, is:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

As much as I generally loathe the poetry of Ezra Pound (which, I will admit, gets complicated with my loathing of Pound the person), he had a couple of gems, usually when he was keeping things brief. He loved haiku—and for a time advocated that kind of short, vivid, imagistic poetry ... an advocacy he sadly abandoned later in his career when he wrote his voluminous and opaque Cantos. But he gets it right with this two-line poem titled "In a Station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

These three poems will always be linked in my mind, because of something I saw while I taking a course on modernist literature in my first year at York. Williams and Pound were both on the reading list, and we studied all three of these poems and many, many more. There was construction at the time being done in the field across the way from Winters College, and on the temporary fence erected around the site, someone—someone, I like to think, taking the same class as me—spraypainted:

this is just to say
so much depends upon
the apparition of these faces in the crowd

I love the memory of that as much as I loved seeing it at the time. Modernism mash-up!

A hatful of HBO

There are many times when I love my job, and right now is one of them. Why? Because this evening I start re-watching The Wire. As research.

As mentioned a few posts ago, I have begun my research term, and believe me when I say I have my work cut out for me, considering I come up for tenure and promotion in September. My writing habits tend to be stress-inducing at times like these, as I tend to jump from project to project, advancing them all more or less in parallel towards completion, rather than working on them serially and knocking them off one by one (as sane people tend to do, or so I am told). As a result, I have a cluster of papers all close to being done and I need to sit down with them over the next month and get 'em finished.

Always Be Closing. That will be my motto for the next four weeks.

Why one month? Well, mainly because at the end of May I am yet again packing myself into my trusty car and trundling off to London, ON to spend the balance of the summer with Kristen. Once there, I want to have the pesky uncompleted articles off my plate so I can focus on putting together a proposal for a book on HBO, and the preliminary writing thereof.

Hence The Wire re-watch. This will be an evening pursuit while I spend my days grinding my current crop of articles to completion. And then Deadwood. And then The Sopranos.

Did I mention that I love my job?

All this is by way of giving fair notice that you'll likely be seeing posts about all this over the next while. This blog has become, among other things, a place for me to think out loud, as it were—as evidenced in the zombies post and the one on Richard K. Morgan that attracted the attention of the man himself. And I've just started drafting something on The Wire and the logic of counterinsurgency.

You have been warned.

Blog as autobiography

For the next installment in my summer reading series, I’ve been working on my response to two books dealing with the so-called “God debate”—on the side of the “new atheism,” Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great, and on the other Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution. Both are powerfully argued and deeply intelligent books, and extremely thought-provoking. In spite of my own status as a lapsed Catholic and occasional atheist, I find my sympathies lying more with Eagleton’s arguments than Hitchens’, for reasons I’ll expound when and if I ever get the post written.

What prompts this post is not those texts per se, but rather the fact that in responding to them and formulating my critique, I found myself offering a fairly lengthy religious autobiography—in part largely because it is a subject that tends to make one want to lay one’s cards on the table and share one’s experiences and beliefs past and present. Why this is the case with religious discussion I am not certain—perhaps because matters of faith tend to be intensely personal and that inflects any broader discussion of religion in culture. It’s hard to say.

The long and short of it is, after writing out an account of my own engagements and struggles with matters of religion, I read it over and wondered if this was something I really wanted to post to my blog. On the one hand, I don’t mind sharing, and it feels somewhat cathartic to write it all through. Should it spark an animated discussion, so much the better. On the other hand, part of me is slightly appalled that I am so blasé about putting what is really a deeply personal narrative out into the public sphere. Is it narcissistic to do so? Leaving aside for the moment the fact that I don’t exactly have a wide readership for this blog, and that most people who would actually read through what I have to say (or who have read this far in this post) already know me pretty well, I do wonder at my compulsion at times to post elements of my life into a forum anyone can read.

With these thoughts in mind, I’ve gone back and read old posts and realized that while tempted during periods of blogging inactivity to discontinue this blog, I have never done so because I have grown very attached to this. It has become something of an autobiography or memoir, erratic and fractured in nature—the posts don’t unfold a narrative of my life so much as a grab-bag of thoughts, meditations, screeds, and updates—but ultimately something I am glad to have started, and something that has proved a more reliable site and source for my personal history than any private journal I’ve ever started (indeed, my journal more often than not these days contains notes toward blog posts).

And yes, I suppose it is a bit narcissistic to publish on oneself in a public manner. But then, I became reconciled to my narcissism some time ago, and in so doing hope to regulate it somewhat. It is, to be fair, a bit of an occupational hazard.

Posts on the “god debate” to come. Account of personal religious odyssey possibly included.

Still breathing, just lazy

OK, so I haven’t posted in a full month, and I feel properly chastised. I’m in a posting slump, which I hope to pull myself out of. I’ve had a couple of ideas for longer posts running through my head, but haven’t really had the time/energy to sit down and work through them. I have however started writing one, so expect something substantive in the next few days. In the meantime, I’ll catch you up. Here is how March panned out:

• Went to Barbados for a week at the beginning of the month. Yup.

• If I’d been more blog-assiduous, I’d have posted a celebration of Jon Stewart ripping Jim Cramer a new one. Brilliant. If you didn’t see it, here’s the link here.

• While the contrast between Barbados and St. John’s weather was just as stark as you would imagine, the weather for the remainder of March was actually relatively pleasant. Which has me wondering if the other shoe is set to drop in April.

• U2’s new album=yummy goodness. While No Line on the Horizon isn’t the boys’ best outing, there’s a remarkable texture to the songs that has me finding new stuff with each listen. My current favourite track (it changes day to day) is “Breathe.”

• I didn’t teach on April Fool’s day this year, which made me sad. I usually manage to pull one over on my students. Last year I distributed an exam rubric with sample questions that would have confounded Einstein’s literary equivalent. This year I had to settle for convincing a former student now abroad, as we chatted over Facebook, that they’re building a nuclear reactor in Holyrood.

• Speaking of April Fool’s, Car & Driver magazine posted a joke article claiming that Obama was ordering GM and Chrysler to cease and desist any involvement in NASCAR. This in itself wasn’t that funny. What was funny was that Anne Coulter read this and immediately wrote a column attacking Obama for dictating business policy. Mmmmm, that’s good fact-checking.

That’s it. More later.

Things I considered posting these last two and a half months

Oops, there went a week without a post. Did I worry you, my last three or four readers? Well, I won't make extravagant promises about returning to the old frequency with which I posted once upon a time, but I'll try to maintain a minimum of one post a week. Hopefully that will get me back into the blogging habit.

At any rate, my online silence didn't come about for lack of postings. Quite frequently topics presented themselves to me, but as a result of busyness, ennui, or simple laziness -- all coupled with the blog-killing tendencies of Facebook (damn you, Facebook!) -- these posting ideas receded into the horizon of my thoughts, finally becoming old news-enough that it felt odd to waste electrons on them.

So here's the Coles Notes, then -- all the stuff in a nutshell that was on my mind since the beginning of April. There's more than this, actually ... these are just the greatest hits, as it were.


1. Puffins, Icebergs, and my Mom.

My lovely mother visited me for a week in mid-May and was treated, much to my chagrin, to some of the most frigid May weather I've ever experienced here. She was also treated, much to her delight, to the biggest crop of icebergs in recent memory. Everywhere we drove, as long as we could see the ocean, we could see icebergs. To cap it all off, we drove down to Ferryland one day (the weather had mercifully warmed somewhat), and walked the trail past a massive grounded berg; and then drove to Bay Bulls and took the O'Brien's boat tour to get up close and personal with the ice ... and see puffins. Which, I must add, are the most comical of animals, even edging out penguins and ducks. Watching them try to take off from the water and end up skipping like stones while trying to get their speed up counts as one of the most hilarious experiences of my life.



2. My Father, the (Not-so-Ancient) Mariner

While my mother was visiting the Rock and bundling up against the cold, my father was in St. Maarten in the Caribbean preparing to sail with some friends to New York City. A friend of my parents, a member of the same yacht club as them, has been tooling around the Caribbean with his wife on their 36-foot sailboat for a few years. Unfortunately, the wife's health has deteriorated, precluding further shipboard life ... leaving the husband with the task of bringing the boat home. Enter my dad and two other sailor friends, who agreed to help. For somewhere in the neighbourhood of four weeks they sailed north, with a stop in Bermuda, braving everything from Coleridge-esque doldrums ("Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, / 'Twas sad as sad could be, / And we did speak only the break / The silence of the sea") to a few genuine Atlantic gales. Said my father when all was done, he was happy he was able to do this ... and now, he'll never do it again.


3. The Endless Democratic Primary

Yeah, I'm not saying any more than that. I'm just happy we're on to the next stage.


4. My First Time as External Examiner

Back in, oh, April I think, I got an email from Kristen saying that Tim Blackmore -- a friend, and professor of Media Studies at Western in the faculty she works in -- had been casually asking her about when I might be visiting London this summer. I had just booked a flight for late June, but she couldn't remember the dates exactly, so she suggested I email him directly. This I did, telling him when I'd be in town. And received this response, in I think minutes (those who know Tim will recognize his markedly calm and retiring manner): "AHA AHA!!! I want to borrow you, son, for a verrrrry important, important I say, defense! (Some Foghorn rolled in last night)."

The long and short of it was, Tim needed someone as an external on a Masters thesis he had advised, and given that there is no money available for Masters' externals for travel &c, the fact that I would be conveniently in town anyway rocketed me to the top of the list (hey, it's an honour just being nominated).

I was, needless to say, quite delighted to be asked -- it was my first external examination, the thesis looked cool, and I was happy to do a favour for someone I hold in high estimation both professionally and otherwise. The thesis in question, "Augmented Ability, Integrated Identity: Understanding Sapienism, Adaptive Technology, and the Construction of Disability," was written by a quite remarkable student named Jeffrey Preston, whose muscular dystrophy has confined him to a wheelchair since a young age. Did I say confined? I mean he has been liberated by his wheelchair, a technological device that gives him a freedom of mobility he would not otherwise have. His thesis very thoughtfully reconsiders the cultural values and stereotypes attached to disability, and focuses on the way in which dystopian narratives of technology actually contribute to the negative perception of such devices as wheelchairs. Suffice it to say, it was a remarkable piece of work for someone that early in his academic career.


5. Rachael Ray: Terrorist

This one's my favourite.

You are probably familiar with that annoyingly saccharine Food Network personality Rachael Ray; what you might not know is that she's a terrorist sympathizer. In addition to her other (too many) appearances on television, Ray has been schilling for Dunkin' Donuts. In an ad for some iced coffee product or other, she is wearing a patterned scarf. Conservative pundette and blogger Michelle Malkin -- who now has the dubious distinction of being slightly more insane than Anne Coulter -- posted on her blog that the scarf in question is in fact a "keffiyeh" of the sort routinely worn by Arab men (Yasser Arafat would be the most obvious example here). OK ... I can see the resemblence ... but Malkin, making with the insane, goes further to note that this is an example of "jihadi chic" and "hate couture," and that she hopes Ray's fashion choice "was spurred more by ignorance than ideology."

Seriously? Seriously. Malkin later defended her comments by claiming that western designers have deliberately marketed such scarves as statements of solidarity with Palestinians. Even if this is true -- and I deem it highly suspect -- the easy conflation of Arab=terrorist, or sympathy with Palestine=support of Hamas is rhetoric of the worst, and laziest, kind. As one person commenting on this idiocy mildly observed, "what about all the Arab men who wear the keffiyeh who aren't terrorists?" Let me dig that particular ration out of my notes .... (Incidentally, once of my students wore a nearly identical scarf to class this week. I congratulated her on bringing America one step closer to destruction).

What makes matters worse is that, in an act of cowardice that makes the Lion in The Wizard of Oz look like John Wayne, Dunkin' Donuts pulled the ad. I wish we had one in St. John's so I could boycott it.

Falling back into bad habits

OK, so I fell off the wagon blog-wise over the holidays this year. It was inevitable, though, given the huge volume of nothing I was managing to do while back in Ontario ... inactivity of that scale and scope really takes concentration.


So to sum up my holidays: Christmas? Excellent. Santa? Generous. Weather? Cold. Fireplace? Warm. Booze? Plentiful. Food? Yummy. TV? Lots. Family? Lovely. Niece? Adorably hilarious. Nephew? Laughing. Girlfriend? Beautiful. New Year's Resolutions? Yeah, right.


That's about it. I'm currently dotting my t's and crossing my i's for my first few classes and so will cut the first post of 2008 short, but not without posting this brilliant photo of Morgan posing with my brother's new Guitar Hero hardware.



Morgan, we who are about to rock salute you.


Happy new year, everyone!

The Reading Sickness

I'm glad I re-launched the blog today, because now I can post this little gem ... starring two of our grad students, Tom and Kyle. I was absurdly gratified that the book Kyle's reading is what we're doing next week in my course, though I suspect it was chosen for the title.

Breathing space

This semester has been a perfect storm. And while I might blame Facebook for its depradations on the blogging world (and mine in particular), the fact of the matter has been that I quite simply haven't had the time and/or brain power to be a particularly good blogger. Or even a passable one.

I make no promises that this will change much, but I do promise to try. I miss my old blog here, truth be told. As do some people who have told me so in no uncertain terms. So I'll get myself back on something resembling a regular regime: I'm thinking once a week won't break the bank, especially now that I feel like I'm finally on the downslope of the semester.

The hump I had to get over was this past weekend: I was in Montreal for the annual Canadian Association of American Studies (CAAS) conference, an organization I renewed my membership in at last year's conference in Kingston. Unlike last year however, when I was just a participant, I found myself this year in the thick of organizing the conference ... which meant a significant amount of work smoothing out details, increasing (exponentially, it seemed) the closer we got to the actual conference (which incidentally included the writing of my own paper). This conference, I might add, would not likely have happened this year at all without the long-distance work done by a handful of some of my truly amazing colleagues. As it turns out, not mentioning any names, the one person we were relying upon to organize stuff in Montreal turned out to be a little bit of a tool. And when I say "a little bit of a tool," I mean the Platonic form of human-toolness. Normally I wouldn't be so impolitic as to vent such professional grievances in my blog, but this was an extreme case and I kind of hope the individual in questions stumbles across this entry. Not likely, but entertaining to imagine.

The upshot being that there was a lot of frenzied running around and brushfires to be put out by the conference committee, and from wednesday through sunday I think I got a cumulative total of twelve hours sleep -- between the going out with colleagues in the evening, and the insomnia that had me up at 4:30 most mornings.

That being said, the conference went off quite well, and I was privileged to see a significant number of truly amazing papers. I was also pleased to see that a lot of the good presentations were delivered by grad students, including at least one former Western student.

And now I'm back, and staring at a stack of marking that has come to feel like a really bad credit card debt, one for which I'm paying interest on until the end of term. But without the conference looming over my head, I feel as though I can breathe a bit more.

Facebook killed the radio star, um, blogger ...

OK, OK ... So much for a more active and updated blog. I will eventually get back onto a regular posting schedule, I swear! But for now everyone will have to be patient, at least until I get the Intertubes connected at the new house.

That being said, here's a short update on my life the past few weeks:

• I have moved into the new house, though because the school year has started in earnest, I'm still more or less living out of boxes. Why did I think the beginning of September was a GOOD time to buy a house?
• Classes are good. This being my third year, I now go up to a full teaching load -- so I have three courses this term. Though two of them are courses I've taught before (FINALLY, I get some repeats) so at the least the prep routine is not dire.
• The third class is a graduate seminar, which is my second now. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.
• Clarence spent twelve hours being utterly freaked out by the new living space, then discovered my narrow, steep stairs. Tearing up and down them at full speed is his new favourite thing, and I've nearly died when he's been underfoot several times.
• The faculty union and the administration have a tentative agreement, which means we won't be going on strike, and we're looking at an actual substantial pay raise (there's also something in there about needing to publish five books to get tenure, but I didn't really read past the $$$ bit). Woot, indeed.

That's it. Don't I lead the most spectacular, exciting life? I'll post pictures of the house once I've cleared out the boxes ... so, some time around May.

Also, I'll add something just for fun. In my grad seminar yesterday, we were talking about bad poetry, and it turns out my students had never heard of the illustrious James McIntyre, the famed "Ingersoll Cheese Poet." McIntyre, a resident of southern Ontario in the late nineteenth century, turned his finely honed poetic sensibilities on many topics, but had a peculiar affinity for cheese-related themes. On break, I went to my office and printed out his masterpiece, which I then read to the class. I nearly made it through, but lost it on the final verse. So close ...


Ode on the Mammoth Cheese

We have seen thee, queen of cheese,
Lying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze,
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.

All gaily dressed soon you'll go
To the great Provincial show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.

Cows numerous as a swarm of bees,
Or as the leaves upon the trees,
It did require to make thee please.
And stand unrivalled, queen of cheese.

May you not receive a scar as
We have heard that Mr. Harris
Intends to to send you off as far as
The great world's show at Paris.

Of the youth beware of these,
For some of them might rudely squeeze
And bite your cheek, then songs or glees
We could not sing, o' queen of cheese.

We'rt thou suspended from balloon,
You'd cast a shade even at noon,
Folks would think it was the moon
About to fall and crush them soon.

More of McIntyre's brilliant verses can be found here. I think McIntyre made that common mistake in interpreting the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the cheesemakers, for they shall be called the Sons of God."

WTF happened to August????

And so I find myself clawing onto the very last day of August so that I will not have let the entire month go by without a blog entry.

I do apologize to my reading faithful, who could be forgiven for assuming my untimely death these past five weeks. Apologies especially to my anonymous ex-student who recently commented on my last post to testily state that he/she was still waiting for my thoughts on the final Harry Potter instalment, having taken my pop culture class when I taught Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Sorry -- I did in fact offer my two cents, but it was in the form of my own comments on a friend's blog here.

So. Big month! I offer no lame excuses for my bloggish inactivities, other than the fact that Kristen was here for a week and a half at the beginning of the month, and then I followed her back to Ontario for a week and a half after that.

I was home in part to attend the wedding of Robert Hamilton, who was my best friend through high school, undergrad, and a good chunk of grad school as well. We lost touch when he moved to Japan to teach English -- and then stayed. He first went out there, if memory serves, in 1999 ... and now teaches Japanese university students about Japanese culture and history. Cool, eh?

Anyway, not having spoken to me in some time and not knowing where I was at, Robert sent a wedding invite to my parents' address, who dutifully forwarded it to the Rock. Was I going to miss one of my best friends ever's wedding? I don't think so.

Also, I bought a house.

Yup. I am now among the ranks of the mortage-carrying, debt-ridden bourgeoisie. My parents have been visiting these past few days, helping me with the closing and with getting the place ready for the move. The way things worked out, I have my apartment until the end of september, while taking possession of the new house yesterday. So I can move incrementally, and take a weekend or two to paint and prep the place. Here are some pictures of what the place looks like prior to any modifications:

Again, more detailed posts soon. I'm looking at the clock, and midnight approaches. I want to get this online before then so that I have at least one August post.