A very avuncular day!

I am an uncle now twice over!

Zachary Matthew Anthony Lockett was born this morning at 9:15, weighing in at a quite respectable 8lb, 8oz. Michelle is doing very well and recovering nicely; Matthew is overcoming the new father coronary.

Isn't he perfect?

It makes me very sad that I can't be there like I was for Morgan. I'll be back in TO in a couple of weeks though, so I won't have to wait too long to meet my new nephew.

My brother defies the laws of nature. It still amazes me that this:

Somehow had a hand in the creation of this:

And this:

Sort of makes you believe in the stork all over again, doesn't it? Or at least in my sister-in-law's uber-genes ...

You know you've been watching too much "Hell's Kitchen" when ...

I was out the other night for a job candidate dinner at The Casbah, one of my favourite St. John's restaurants. My usual habit is to order their steak specials -- they do beef very well there, especially the tenderloin. The special that night was a NY striploin with cracked black pepper. I ordered it rare ... and it came medium! I was rather disappointed. I wasn't, in that context, about to send it back, but I kept having Gordon Ramsay flashes ... imagining taking it back to the kitchen screaming "You fucking DONUT! Is this rare?" And so on.

I might have to stop watching that show. Food and rage have never been conflated for me, until now.

It WOULD have been funny, though.

My predictions for Harry VII

Two inane headlines this morning, courtesy of the slackwits writing the MSN news feed. The first: "The Beckhams Bring Sexy Back to Hollywood." Well, I'm relieved. I was getting very bored with Hollywood's dowdiness and frumpy clothing.

And my fave of the day: "Harry Potter Makes Lots of Cash!" At this stage in the game, this is akin to predicting the sun will rise in the east. Not really a story, is it? If the new Harry movie tanked at the box office, now THAT would be a story. Not a very interesting one, mind you, but at least odd and unexpected.

Which brings me to my post du jour: my predictions for the final instalment of the J.K. Rowling retirement fund. It's good to see her scraping by, isn't it?

But yes, I have been an avid Harry Potter reader. Even if I weren't impressed with the series, I'd still be eagerly anticipating the final novel for the simple reason that I'm a narrative junky. I must learn not to get caught up in a fantasy series until all the books are actually in print. At least Rowling has generally managed to crank the books out with some dispatch -- the other series I'm currently hip-deep in is George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, which started in 1996 and, like the Potter books, is a seven-novel series. Unlike the Potter books, Martin has only reached number four (which came out almost two years ago), with number five nowhere in sight. Given that I read the first novel in hardcover, I've been dealing with that particular agony for a long time, all the while praying that Martin doesn't have a heart attack or get hit by a bus before he finishes.

So I'm glad to see the Potter series at its end. In anticipation of the final instalment, I picked up number five again the weekend before last, thinking to spend the two weeks before number seven hit the shelves refreshing my memory as to where we were at. Two weeks idly reading? Ha. I spent most of that weekend sprawled on the couch burning through both Order of the Phoenix and The Half-Blood Prince. Two days.

See, this is what I'm talking about. I think I have a problem. A well-told plot-driven story is like crack to me. Add the absorbing characters, dastardly villains, imaginative flourishes and sense of humour that Rowling provides, and I ain't putting it down. Even as my marxist leanings and innate professorial snobbishness recoil a bit from this populist consumer juggernaut, they just get ploughed under.

So anyway ... when I got to the end of Half-Blood Prince, I was starting to form this post in my head. There has of course been an endless amount of speculation about how the series will end, fuelled in part by Rowling's own rather macabre promise of two deaths. Who will die? seems to be the question on everyone's mind, with Harry Potter being the even money choice.

Well, I don't think so. Actually, I don't think any of the holy trinity will get killed off -- Harry, Ron and Hermione will all survive. At least, they'll literally survive. I wouldn't be surprised if Harry suffers a symbolic death, in the manner of Frodo ... withdrawing from society while his friends go on to illustrious careers, living a quiet reclusive life. After all, his life's work will have been completed by the age of eighteen.

I also don't think he'll die for the simple fact that the prophecy made clear that it's him or Voldemort.

Anyway, I say it's 6-5 and pick 'em whether Harry lives on as a prominent Auror or goes the J.D. Salinger route. I give long odds against his death, 10-1 say.

As for the aforementioned careers -- Rowling has said that the final chapter tells of what all the main characters go on to do with their lives. I think it's even money that Hermione becomes headmistress of Hogwarts, and ditto that Neville becomes Minister of Magic. I don't know about Ron ... which is why I think that, if any of the holy trinity die, it will be him.

And what about the deaths? If not Ron, I think one of the Weasleys will have to go, with my money on Arthur -- Ginny if Rowling decides to be particularly cruel.

I do think that one of the two deaths will definitely be Snape -- who will turn out to be a good guy after all. There won't be any reconciliation between him and Harry though. I predict he'll die saving Harry, but will say something really nasty with his final breath.

Inspired absurdity on a rainy Tuesday

This is quite possibly one of the funniest things I have ever seen -- Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. Performing -- wait for it! -- The Scottish Play.



Just one of their many postings on YouTube. They also do Resevoir Dogs, A Christmas Carol, Doctor Who (which includes a lengthy argument over the proper spelling of "dahleks"), Romeo and Juliet and a respectable cover of "Bohemian Rhapsody."

10 things you probably don't know about me

I'm currently kicking around an idea for a blog post about the culture of narcissism, so I thought it weirdly appropriate that I post something right now all about me. This is in imitation of my friend Matt, who recently did the same thing on his own blog. Plus, I've let this blog lag an unconscionably long time; I have a few posts in mind, the aforementioned one on narcissism, plus I'm formulating my own list of predictions for the final Harry Potter novel. Those ones need to simmer for a while still though, so here you are: ten obscure and possibly interesting facts about yours truly.

1. Apparently, I didn’t speak at all until the age of two, when I started talking in complete sentences. According to family lore, my parents would hear me practicing in my crib, but when they’d enter my room and try to get me to repeat what they’re heard, I’d clam up.

2. Further to the previous note: many people assume that my rather professorial (read: pompous) manner of speaking comes from my years of study in English. Actually, I’ve always spoken this way. When I was young I would introduce myself to people very seriously and carefully, saying “My name is Christopher James Lockett” and offering to shake their hand.

3. When I’m having difficulty falling asleep, I think of sword fights, especially the one from The Princess Bride. I find the rhythm soothing.

4. My parents always assured me, through my kindergarten years, that I would learn to read in grade one—a point I was very anxious about. I came home from school after my first day of grade one in high dudgeon because, after one day, I hadn’t yet learned to read.

5. I am never quite so calm or at peace as when I can see water. Even sitting by a creek in the summer is quite recuperative for the soul.

6. Though I am not a morning person, my favourite time of day is early morning, especially in the time just before the rest of the world wakes up. I like being into the office early, especially when it’s still slightly dark, and I can turn on my desk lamp and collect my thoughts in a pleasant pool of light.

7. I talk to myself a lot, especially if I’m out walking. When trying to work through a particular question, I stage imaginary conversations with someone taking a contrary position. I frequently win these arguments.

8. My earliest memory is of five-pin bowling with my paternal grandmother. I remember tottering down the lane, staggering under the weight of the ball, and dropping it with what felt like an earth-shattering crack.

9. The first music I ever spent my own money on was a 45rpm single of “Come on Eileen.” My second purchase was “Jump” by Van Halen. The third was “The Reflex” by Duran Duran.

10. I love fog and mist. One of my favourite sailing experiences was on Lake Ontario when we raced in fog so thick you couldn’t see more than twenty feet in any direction—but the fog also only went about twenty feet up, so we could see the masts of all the other boats in our vicinity. Every so often we would see a masthead approaching, and a sailboat would materialize, pass in front, and disappear again.

More reading

I'm playing hooky today. Just sort of seemed the thing to do -- I woke up, reflected that I really didn't feel like going into the office, then remembered that I didn't have to.

Which rates in my top ten reasons why I love my job.

Well, I'm not totally playing hooky -- just changing the scenery. I spent the morning having my coffee in the living room and reading, and I'm heading downtown momentarily to have lunch and camp out in a coffee shop with my ever-so-slowly evolving Rome article. But it also occurred to me that I hadn't updated my blog in over a week, so here I am. Time to update the "recent reads."

Last summer when Kristen and I were driving from Ontario to St. John's, we listened to Isabel Allende's most recent novel, Zorro, on CD. Lately I'd found myself recalling parts of it I enjoyed. Not really wanting to listen to the twenty-odd hours of its reading, I bought the book and re-read it ... or read it for the first time, I guess.

First of all, I just want to say that if you've never read anything by Allende, you are missing out. A Chilean novelist (actually the niece of Salvador Allende, whose assassination by Augusto Pinochet precipated that dictator's brutal seventeen-year reign), she writes in the manner of such magical realists as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes; her first novel The House of the Spirits (1981) is breathtakingly beautiful in its scope and texture, telling the story of Chile's transition into the twentieth century by way of four generations of the patrician Trueba family.

If you're like me and a fan of the Zorro stories, the combination of those overstated adventures and Allende's gift for storytelling will be stunning. Even if you're lukewarm on the whole Zorro saga, it remains a beautiful novel. It gives us the prehistory of Diego de la Vega, aka Zorro ("The Fox"), from the meeting of his parents in Alta California through his childhood growing up as the child of an hidalgo gentleman, to his education in Barcelona, where the alter ego of Zorro first makes its appearance. It's sort of a Batman Begins for Zorro, but one that takes in a great swathe of American and European history and is set in the context of the political and religious upheavals taking place at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Allende paints a gorgeous historical landscape, and we encounter cameos with some great historical luminaries.

I'm currently about halfway through Jonathan Schell's reconsideration of "power, nonviolence, and the will of the people" (as it says in the subtitle), The Unconquerable World. I've been reading it in fits and starts, which is odd, because every time I pick it up I'm rapt. Schell, a journalist and public intellectual, looks at how warfare has evolved in the modern age and makes the argument (or I think he does -- I'm only halfway in) that nonviolent resistance ultimately has more traction and efficacy than does violent revolution in the modern moment. This book is no pacifist tract: his military history is spot-on, and the first third of the book is a brilliant reading of Carl von Clausewitz's pivotal text On War. Schell tracks the changes in military convention through the industrial revolution and points to the rise, on one hand, of the impervious military juggernaut (the British Empire, the current American military, e.g.) and the rise of the "people's army" (Spanish partisans in the Penninsular War, the Viet Cong, etc) on the other, and the incommensurability of the two. The former can never be defeated militarily by the latter; the latter can never be defeated politically by the former ... a situation we see getting played out all too obviously in Iraq right now.

I'll comment again on this book when I've finished it; suffice it to say that Schell's arguments are compelling and his prose is amazingly lucid. For all the complexity of his argument and depth of his analyses, the book reads very smoothly.

As should be obvious from my many posts on the subject (such as the one just above), in the parallel universe in which I'm still an academic, I'm a military historian -- something that manifests itself in this life as a mania for books of military history and, even more glaringly, a love for historical novels. I'm a devoted reader of all of Bernard Cornwell's various series (especially the Sharpe novels), as well as George MacDonald Fraser's brilliant funny Flashman series. And I've recently started what is perhaps the most loved of British military novels: C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower books. I'm now three deep into the eleven-book series ... having dispatched Midshipman Hornblower and Lieutenant Hornblower, I'm now in the final pages of Hornblower and the Hotspur. What I love about these novels -- which is the same thing I love about Cornwell's -- is the attention to detail, the accuracy of the representation not even so much of the historical sequences and context as the minutiae ... the attention paid to the day-to-day necessities of life aboard ship, the near-slavery of being a sailor in His Majesty's Navy -- from the captain down to the lowliest seaman. And as a sailor myself, I especially love the language of seagoing, the shipboard terminology and the nautical details. It makes me want to be aboard a ship -- though preferably one in which I wouldn't have to dine on salt beef and weevil-infested biscuits.

Of icebergs and glacial writing

I'm sitting in my office, looking out the window at a thick bank of fog that has rolled down the hill over the houses in the distance. Now, I love fog -- but I've got to ask, in some exasperation, What happened to our summer?? The past week, and this weekend especially, was beautiful: twenty to twenty-five degrees, sun, a light breeze ... giving way to misty rain, fog, and sub-10 degree temperatures (though it still manages to be stiflingly muggy inside -- I open and close my window about every twenty minutes, alternating between clammy cold and sweltering humidity). I complain, but am met with stoic smiles: "Ah, that's Newfoundland in June."

My comfort is that this weather can at least turn on a dime. Summer came on us with startling suddenness. Everyone had told me that summer happens all at once ... and they weren't lying! About two weeks ago, over a twenty-four hour period, we went from temperatures below ten to over twenty, but more startling was the fact that the trees went from winter-barren to being totally in bloom in the same period of time.

Anyway, I'm whining about the weather because I'm taking a break from what has become, for me, an agonizing writing process. I think nostalgically of the days when I could whip off a twenty-five page paper in a day or two ... you'd think the writing process would get easier the farther up the academic food chain you move, but not so much. I'm still working on my Congress paper -- the plan being to turn it into an article for publication, which means doubling its length and inserting all the theoretical context and critical history that you leave out of conference papers. And I'm doing what I always do with these things: that is to say, TOO MUCH. I hit critical mass yesterday, and am actually making some progress today -- because today I'm returning slowly to sanity, trimming the fat and streamlining what was threatening balloon into thirty-plus pages into something more manageable.

In more entertaining news, we've had our first icebergs of the year -- I walked up Signal Hill on Saturday and snapped some pictures. It's really quite amazing the first time you see them; even though these ones were relatively small, there's a majesty to them that's quite profound.

Why I think Shakespeare should sue Rebecca Eckler

I have been following the Rebecca Eckler-Judge Apatow saga with great amusement and great exasperation. My friend Jen, aka Nikki Stafford, has published some absolutely hilarious commentaries on Ecky and her ilk generally, and this issue specifically (here, here, and here), and there has been a groundswell of writing in the blogosphere taking Ecky rather sarcastically to task for her narcissism and the generally inane nature of her lawsuit.

(For those unfamiliar with this comedy of errors, the erstwhile National Post and Globe & Mail columnist is launching a lawsuit against director Judge Apatow—he of The Forty Year Old Virgin fame—claiming that his recent film Knocked Up plagiarizes her memoir of the same title. I won’t rehearse the details of her claims here; everything you need to know is pretty much covered in the posts of Jen’s I link to above).

While on one hand this lawsuit doesn’t really deserve the attention it’s getting—a petulant, self-indulgent salvo from a narcissistic, not-very-smart “journalist” on extremely flimsy legal ground—on the other hand I agree with a number of people who worry about the implications this kind of frivolous lawsuit has for copyright law. It reminds me of that woman who took J.K. Rowling to court on the charge that Rowling had stolen the word “Muggle” from her.

Here’s the question I asked then: even if it could be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Rowling had stolen the term, what kind of damages could the court reasonably award? Did this woman truly think that the success of the Harry Potter series hinged on a single word?

There’s an old saying that someone should take the time to educate Ecky, Muggle-woman and others of their ilk about: “Immature artists imitate; mature artists steal.” Now, as an English professor, I’m death on plagiarism, but when we enter the creative realm we’re in different territory: can you imagine how many of our great writers wouldn’t have gotten out of the gate had they had to face Ecky-charges? Certainly T.S. Eliot would have spent all his time in court with the estate of Jessie L. Weston, Richard Wagner, Joseph Conrad and dozens of others. James Joyce would never have made it past the first round with his editor’s lawyers. And we’d be denied the genius of the greatest plagiarizer of all, William Shakespeare.

This of course is not to suggest that Judge Apatow is a great artist, or even a mature one for that matter (certainly The Forty Year Old Virgin would suggest he’s rather gleefully immature). It is however to observe that most, if not all narrative tends to proceed from the realm of common experience. Artists steal: they steal from other artists, from other people’s experiences, from the newspaper and from history books. I was once at a book launch party in Toronto, chatting with a bunch of people I didn’t know, two of whom were apparently novelists. One of the people in the group was telling a particularly funny anecdote about himself. When he finished, one of the writers turned to the other and asked “So do you want that one, or can I have it?”, much to the discomfiture of the storyteller. I once saw a play in the Toronto Fringe written by an ex-girlfriend, one of the characters in which exhibited a number of personality traits I recognized as mine (when I asked her about it after the play, she said airily, “Oh, he’s partially you, but he’s mostly the guy I dated after you”). And then there are those rather accomplished novelists you meet, whose keen glance as you’re talking to them has you wondering uncomfortably if they’re evaluating whether you’d make a good character in a story.

A professor of mine at York liked to claim there were only five stories, and that all narrative literature—as well as a great deal of history writing—are just variations on them. Other structuralist critics would say seven, or four, or ten. Joseph Campbell said there was just one.

The point, again, being that all narrative art, the high and the low, does not exist as hermetically sealed autonomous texts, but presupposes familiarity with certain stories, myths, conventions, situations, ideas, experiences, etc etc. Where do you think genre films come from? Can you imagine Francis Ford Coppolla suing Martin Scorcese for stealing his idea to do a mafia film?

So when Rebecca Eckler claims that her experience of pregnancy and motherhood is somehow singular to her, you can pretty much hear mothers all around the country exclaiming “Whaaaaaat?!” As Jen, aka Nikki says rather eloquently, “This is a perfect example of Rebecca Eckler's self-centredness... she's the sort of person to burn her mouth on coffee and think she's the only person on earth to have done it. But only after she's run outside to tell everyone she's discovered a new substance called coffee.”

(Jen: please notice I put your words in quotation mark and cited you. Don’t sue me!).

My niece the diva

"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille ..."

Fun with Google Maps, or How the CIA Sees St. John's

This was kind of entertaining. Sorry about the writing -- I should have made it bigger.

St. John's, the god's-eye view:


My place:


MUN (or part of it, anyway):

Fall classes

Given that I had to order all my books for the fall term this week, I took this opportunity to rough out a thumbnail sketch of my course schedules. Or two out of three of them, anyway.

Fall term will be busy, given that the course remission I receive as new faculty expires this year and I go on to the standard 3/2 load -- i.e. five courses over the year, which unless you want to teach in the summer (I don't, yet) tends to translate into three classes one semester, two the next. And after two years of not teaching the same course twice, I finally reuse some lecture notes! I'm slotted in the Fall to teach 2000 (British Literature to 1800) and 2213 (Twentieth-Century American Fiction, both of which I've taught before ... and in the case of the latter, I'm forcing myself to make minimal changes. My inclination is to completely reinvent what I did this year, which is easy enough -- six novels over twelve to thirteen weeks of a semester doesn't exactly represent a significant chunk of the last hundred years of American fiction, and I could teach this course a hundred times over and never teach the same novel twice. And given my love of building new courses from the ground up, it's a struggle not to throw six entirely new texts on the sylabus. As I'll likely be teaching this course, or variations on it, a lot from now to my retirement, I've set myself a rule for the first few years: only two substitutions allowed each time I teach it, until I have compiled a pretty hefty library of lecture notes. My reading list this past year was:

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying.
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon.
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.

So out of that I'm dropping Ellison and Hemingway, and inserting James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.

I've made even fewer changes to 2000, and those mostly in the form of cutting and streamlining. When I taught it for the first time last year, I tried to do too much. Now I'm breaking it down into seven units: Prosody (the sonnet), Medieval (Sir Gawain), Early Elizabethan (Marlowe, Dr. Faustus), Shakespeare (Othello), Metaphysical Poetry (Donne), John Milton (selections of Paradise Lost -- would that I had time to do it all!), and 18th Century (Pope, "The Rape of the Lock"). This is likely to be the general shape of the course for me from here on in ... about the only thing I'll be switching up next time will be the representative Shakespeare (last year it was Henry V, and next year? I'm thinking either Richard III or Julius Caesar).

I knew I was getting kind of tired and punchy yesterday afternoon when I started giving each of the units "funny" titles that I think were channeled directly from my father's sense of humour -- the nadir being "Moor Jealousy with Othello!"

Shut up.

And finally, I'm doing our grad students' mandatory theory course, which I'm very excited about. Whoever teaches it tends to make it over in his or her image, focusing on a specific theme that allows the students to really dig their teeth into a series of theoretical and critical issues. After some consideration, I've settled on "Theories of Mass Culture and the Role of the Intellectual" -- starting with Matthew Arnold, through Ortega y Gasset and T.S. Eliot, Adorno, Horkheimer, Raymond Williams and the Frankfurt-Birmingham debate, and ending with a consideration of theories of the role of the university, past and present.

Good times.

It just occurred to me that this post is really just me thinking out loud and probably isn't of interest to anyone outside of me or students thinking of taking my course. At least you got an Othello joke, though ...

Congress post-mortem

Well, after an excruciatingly long day yesterday -- left Saskatoon at 9:30am, on a flight that went Saskatoon-Calgary-Halifax-St. John's, landing finally at home at 11:30pm (and to add insult to injury, the in-flight movie was Norbit) -- I'm back, and even back in my office ... though I'm really not intending to accomplish much today beyond shelving all the books I bought at the Congress book fair, and generally getting myself organized for a solid month of research and writing.

And writing a blog post, of course.

So as you can see from the photos above, U of Saskatchewan campus is in fact absolutely gorgeous. I snapped those two photos on the Sunday ... which as it turns out was the last day of good weather. Monday got cold, and Tuesday and Wednesday positively miserable with rain and gloom. Which I guess made everyone more amenable to sitting inside and listening to academic papers; had the weather been like the photos above all week, I imagine my own session attendance would have been much lower.


Congress 2007 highlights:

(1) Seeing a ton of friends, and seeing a broad range of papers in different disciplines. I decided this year that I would make a point of seeing my friends' presentations, and then pick and choose other sessions depending on my mood (which on one memorable afternoon meant eschewing papers entirely to sit on a patio: see below). Because I have friends in a variety of fields, this meant that in addition to English and Film Studies papers, I also got educated on Aristotle's thought experiments (Sean) and conscientious objectors in WWI Canada (Amy). This, for me, is the best part of these kind of conferences: never having been inclined to hoe a single furrow intellectually, I love learning stuff from other disciplines. This can sometimes be tricky at academic conferences when papers get so caught up in their own disciplinary jargon or preoccupations that they can be hard to follow, but when you get good presenters it can be truly educational.

(2) Sunday afternoon on the patio at Louis' pub -- I ran into Sean Mulligan (soon to by Dr. Sean as of mid-June when he defends his thesis -- huzzah!) at lunch, and we migrated to a table on the gorgeous and spacious patio depicted below. The day was amazingly bright and sunny, to the point where I developed rather a nice tan. This was at about one o'clock, and I'd had vague plans to attend some papers in the afternoon, but that resolve pretty much evaporated as we went through four pitchers in three hours (I think it was four).

(3) Seeing former students doing well. I mentioned this in my last post so I won't belabour it, but it was extraordinarily gratifying to see students I'd taught at Western holding their own at Canada's largest academic conference in the humanities.

(4) My panel. As mentioned, I was extremely pleased with how my paper went, and our panel of two papers meshed surprisingly well. Did I say surprisingly? I should say "bizarrely," given that the other presenter was speaking about Irish-language television. And yet we managed a useful dialogue between the two topics.

(5) Having lunch with this past year's Pratt Lecturer, Susan Gingell. Susan, a professor in U of Sask's English department, is one of those amazing academics who manages to be both exceptionally talented and intelligent but really down to earth and human. Suffice it to say, the Pratt committee (on which I served) fell in love with her, and I was told rather sternly by the other committee members that I had to at least have a drink with her while I was there. And a good measure of what Susan's like? In spite of her insanely busy schedule at the Congress, as both organizer and delegate, she make a point of coming to see my paper.


Congress 2007 lowlights:

(1) Spending five nights in a grotty Howard Johnson's. Now, this isn't the Congress' fault, obviously, but mine for having booked late ... but still, it does colour the experience a bit when you feel very strongly that you should avoid touching surfaces in a your hotel room as much as possible. I took comfort in the fact that I was not the only one in this predicament: I think most of the hotel were delegates. Misery does love company.

(2) The dearth of cabs. I don't think Saskatoon was quite prepared for the volume of people who descended on the city for the Congress, in excess of five thousand. By Monday morning, cabs were more or less scarce, and you were looking at an hour's wait if you called after 8am (if you could even get through, which wasn't guaranteed). Thinking I was being smart by calling a cab on Wednesday at 7:15am, I still did not make it up to campus until 8:15 -- by which point the lobby was crammed with delegates. Now, this is sort of the Congress' fault -- a problem that could have been alleviated somewhat by the arranging of campus shuttles to the major hotels, and having airport shuttles leaving directly from campus.

Congress diary part three

Last day ... and I finally delivered my paper. Presenting on your last day at a conference is only a blessing if you're still writing your paper when the conference begins -- and this year I had mine done well in advance (well, I wrote my conclusion last night, but that was all of two sentences). So it was nice to finally make an end, there.


And it went well, I am pleased to say. It was one of those nice conference happenstances where one of the people on my panel withdrew at the last minute, only leaving two of us to present. Given that my paper was pushing the twenty-minute mark and I was prepared to omit my last page and a half (including my hastily scrawled conclusion) if I was running long, it was nice to not have to worry about that and just take my time -- and to have the freedom to make jokes and extemporize.


So for the curious, I presented a paper on the HBO series Rome .... and as per what I was focusing on, I might as well quote my opening preamble:


To frame this paper, and where it comes from: I have become a massive fan of HBO's programming. Beyond my own mere enjoyment however, I believe that it poses a series of questions for the always ongoing mass culture debate insofar as it represents what not long ago would have seemed an oxymoronic concept: intelligent mainstream television, television whose production values--especially in terms of the writing--is of startling quality, and which challenges (or at the very least complicates) a strictly Adornian conception of the culture industry.


I would suggest that this new wave of intelligent, well-written and well-made television poses interesting and important critical questions for film and media studies, and cultural studies more generally, which can in one way be summed up in the question I have posed students in my popular culture classes: Can television be art? And if so, how does that change our perception of art? My consideration of Rome today emerges from an ongoing engagement with such questions: I am seeking to read in the series a subtle counternarrative to the generic conventions of the "historical epic" and the received history of the Caesarian narrative. And to that end, I will be looking at that apotheosis of low cultural expression--graffiti.



Yup, my paper was all about graffiti -- Roman graffiti that is, some of which in the series is really quite filthy and obscene (to which end, I now have the distinction of having used the phrases "giant ejaculating penis" and "Atia fucks everybody" at the Canadian Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences -- truly, I have arrived).

Anyway ... I'm happy to be done, pleased with the reception my paper received, and relieved that I can now truly relax for the remainder of my time here. I will post pictures when I'm back in St. John's ...

Congress diary, part two

Well, our good weather gave out for about half of the day -- gray and rainy this morning, but the sun's trying to burn through. Not that that's too much of a burden: even rainsoaked, this campus is still quite lovely.

And it has a great gym! I was proud of myself that I managed a workout this morning, making it in at 7:15 to do some weights and a short run on the treadmill ... which unfortunately had left me a bit dehydrated, so that I'm dying of thirst by the end of the sessions I've been sitting in on (though the fairly constant beer intake might also have something to do with that).

It's been wonderful seeing people I haven't seen, in some cases, in a number of years ... and also kind of pleasing to see some former students, now doing graduate degrees, presenting quite accomplished papers here. Andrew deWaard and Aimee Mitchell, both of whom took classes with me at Western, are here presenting at FiSAC (Film Studies Association of Canada) ... and if that's not enough to make me fee old, I recognized a woman whom I had TA'd in my first ever year at Western -- ten years ago! Ack. Still, it makes me feel sort of fatherly. Or at the very least, sort of big-brotherly.

More later ...

Congress diary part one

Greetings from Saskatoon! I flew in yesterday morning and have been reconnecting with many many people I haven't seen in ages. It's sort of Old Home Week. So many academics all concentrated in the same place. At Pearson Airport yesterday morning, waiting for the plane to board, I played "spot the academic" in the departure lounge. Conservatively, I think half the plane were Congress-bound types, at least gauging by the number of people feverishing still working on papers.

Not me this year ... I decided that this time I wanted to have my paper done well in advance, principally so I could enjoy my time and see friends. I still have a few sentences to write in conclusion, but that's always the case. I'll talk more about my paper in my next post.

For now: I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised by Saskatoon, and floored by just how beautiful U of Saskatchewan's campus is (I'll try to post some pictures soon). The weather has been beautiful, and they certainly don't exaggerate about the prairie sky.

That's it for now -- just a quick teaser. I'm off to see a friend's paper, and then to lunch.

What's that, Lassie? Tigger's in jeopardy? Down at the well?

Oh ... Tigger's ON Jeopardy, and presumably she's doing well.

Just a reminder, sports fans, that everyone's favourite stage manager and trivia freak will be asking Alex Trebeck questions tomorrow night -- that's Thursday, May 17. And for those who get their Jeopardy courtesy of CTV, you might have to do some creative channel flipping b/c those idiots are showing a rerun of Lost for some reason. The Jeopardy is out there though ... you just have to look!

And a wee preview that Tigger emailed around:

Mutual of Omaha presents ...

Today, a treat for my gentle readers: the first in our series of English Professors Observed in Their Natural Environments: Burrows.

Yes, the burrows of English professors (or "offices" as they insist on calling them) are as varied and idiosyncratic as the individuals who inhabit them. Consider for instance the burrow of the Nancy Pedri (Comparatus Wordnimaginius), a recent newcomer to the hills and dales of Newfoundland:

Note the spare, even Spartan arrangement of space, the careful placement of discrete objects; the Nancy herself sits poised in imitation of the image on the wall behind her to confuse and intimidate possible antagonists.

Conversely, we consider the burrow of the Andrew Loman (Hawthornica Americanus), also a species only recently introduced into this environment. Note the barricading effect of the books and papers that the Loman surrounds himself with, a labyrinthine defense that only the deftest of predators can negotiate:

Tune in next time as our intrepid wildlife photographer attempts to enter and photgraph some of the more dangerous burrows in this remote wildlife preserve.

Cleaning off my desk

OK, so it's not quite as dramatic on film as it is when you have to sit in the midst of it, but I took a good chunk of this afternoon to clean off my desk and organize my office.

Before:

After:

Sorry about the long blog lag. I've been in a headspace where every time I think about writing a new post, I honestly can't think of anything to say -- at least, nothing I feel like writing down. So in the interests of keeping everyone more or less up to date, here's the highlights of the last two weeks:

• I've bought a barbecue. Of course, I have no space for a barbecue, so I'm keeping it in Andrew Loman's backyard for the time being; and the last two weekends we've had bbq parties -- the first one in the midst of snow and sleet, which is a testament to just how desperate I was for grilled food. I'll post some pics from that one when I get them.
• Facebook is getting weird -- or weirder at any rate, at least insofar as I've reconnected with a host of people going all the way back to elementary school.
• One of the friends from grad school I've reconnected with is Jen Hale, aka Nikki Stafford -- a name known to Buffy fans as the author of the book Bite Me. I've posted Jen's/Nikki's blog to the right here. Anyone who's a fan of Lost or Heroes, or really any TV at all should check it out for her hilarious commentaries.
• Independently of Facebook, I've also reconnected with Robert Hamilton, my best friend through high school, undergrad, and a good chunk of grad school. We lost touch when he moved to Japan to teach and then stayed -- but I recently received an invitation to his wedding in August (!!), fortunately to be held in Richmond Hill and not Tokyo -- which means I can afford to go. His blog / wedding lead-up chronicle is also posted to the right here.
• I'm in the midst of my travel plans to head to Saskatoon for this year's Congress of the Humanities, which also means I'm feverishly trying to write the paper I'll be presenting. I'll be stopping off in Toronto and London for a week beforehand.

That's more or less it, aside from the fact that spring is slowly, slowly showing its face here in St. John's after a few tantalizingly false starts. The temperature today is fifteen degrees and sunny, which after the past week feels positively sauna-ish.

And just for variety, here's a couple of pictures I took while walking home from work the other day. It had been a gorgeous day -- the dark clouds in the distance caught up to me about five minutes from home and managed to dump a significant amount of rain on me.

And to end on a cute note, because I haven't posted any pictures of Clarence recently, here he is enjoying a recent discovery of his -- the exhaust fan on the back of my computer. Whenever I've worked in my office at home, Clarence keeps me company ... except now I'm more likely to be presented with his butt while he leans down behind my CPU to feel the fan blowing through his whiskers ...

Herding cats

The way the world thinks of English professors:

The way I think of English professors after departmental meetings:

I can read!

The most glorious thing of this encroaching spring, beyond the sun and relative warmth (it's indicative of this past winter that seven degree celcius feels like the height of summer), is the loosening of time ... the freedom now to start reading that stack of books I've had to ignore these past few months. I have this past week been taking an hour or so in the morning with my coffee to simply read ... and between that and the sun streaming in through my living room window, it has felt positively decadent.

I have spent part of this semester using up the last bit of the startup grant MUN gives new professors; we're strongly encouraged to use it all by the end of our second year. And so, finding myself with somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1200 left, I've been putting mileage on my credit card ordering from Chapters.ca.

I love love love subsidized book-buying.

So anyway, I now have a massive stack of books to work through -- many of them pragmatic purchases in history or theory to fill holes in my library, some of them speculative buys toward possible courses I might propose in the future, but also a lot of texts I've either been meaning to read for some time or simply capricious buys that struck my fancy.

One of the courses I'm toying with proposing is a special-topics course tentatively titled "Postmodern Warfare." I've taught some texts and films under this rubric in the past, and last year presented a paper on the subject at our departmental colloquium. To give credit where it's due, at least part of this idea owes its genesis to Tim Blackmore's excellent book War X (which will certainly find its way onto the reading list), as well as his legendary course "Killer Culture" at Western.

At any rate, one of the books I've read this past week is Tim O'Brien's fiction/non-fiction collection of stories based on his tour of duty in Viet Nam, The Things They Carried. It's a haunting series of interlaced narratives following the members of his squad, their friendship and the inarticulatable experience of warfare. The title is also the title of the first story and refers to the massive amount of weight in terms of gear, weapons, and personal items the soldiers had to shoulder on their missions into the oppressively hot jungle; it also of course refers to the weight of the experience itself that the soldiers continue to stagger under after their tours.

(Also on the list to read is Tim O'Brien's novel In the Lake of the Woods, Anthony Swofford's Jarhead, Michael Herr's Dispatches and Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down ... all of which, should the course ever happen, will explore the blurry boudaries between memoir, fiction, journalism and myth in the representations of contemporary warfare).

I've also recently finished Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men ... and if you've never read McCarthy, you're denying yourself a rare pleasure. He's one of William Faulkner's heirs apparent, with spare impressionistic narratives set in the American South, most frequently along the Texas-Mexican border. No Country seems at first glance a typical potboiler in which a man stumbles across a drug deal gone sour in the desert, where everyone is dead and a case with two million dollars is there for the taking. And while it unfolds predictably in some ways, in McCarthy's hands what would otherwise be a formulaic narco-drama becomes something infinitely more terrifying and profound.

Incidentally, a film version directed by the Coen brothers is set for release in August. Holy crap. If the collaboration of Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers isn't a recipe for something brilliant, then I'm quitting show business.

I'm also almost done Black Dogs by Ian McEwan. It's the story, presented as a memoir, of a long and difficult marriage, recounted by the estranged couple's son-in-law. McEwan is always astonishing, and this book is no different. I hate him for the understated elegance of his prose.

Anyway ... I'm ready to move on, and can't decide what to start next. The choices are:

• Julian Barnes, Arthur & George
• Anthony Swofford, Jarhead
• Norman Mailer, The Gospel According to the Son

Cast your votes! Polls close tomorrow at midnight ...