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 ...

Transitioning

While back home in Toronto last weekend, I was speaking to a family friend who asked me about where I was at in terms of the school year. I responded that classes were over and than I had grading to do, but after that I was done. "Oh, and what are you doing this summer?" Well, I answered, I'll be catching up on research that had to be put on the back burner in the winter term, as well as finally turning back to rewrite my thesis.

"It's nice that the university lets you work on your own stuff!" the family friend enthused.

I refrained from correcting her by saying that "lets you" is perhaps better phrased as "compels you" ... because really, on the balance, right now I feel like I've got the best job in the world. Never mind that I just came off a winter term that had me feeling buried alive, or the the work the university is "letting" me do this summer will be crucial come my formal interim tenure review in September ... nevertheless there is a deep satisfaction right now in looking at a summer term free of teaching --a feeling I didn't quite have time to savour this time last year, as I was busy preparing to drive back to Ontario for three months.

I spent today in my office thinking ... just thinking. I organized some books and files, made a few notes and made a library trip, but really today was just about being lost in thought and slowly working through the substance of my summer projects. I've been chomping at the bit to get started these past few weeks, but I resisted the temptation to jump in and run off madly in all directions, having learned from experience that, while productive in the short term, it would ultimately just muddy the waters.

A day of thinking -- I highly recommend it. It's very calming ... and odd, too, that as someone who is more or less a professional thinker, I so rarely have the opportunity.

On not living in fear

I was eating lunch at the student center here on Tuesday, when I was approached by a reporter and a cameraman (from NTV, I later discovered), who, upon ascertaining that I was a professor, asked if he could ask me some questions. I said sure, and he led with "What do you think of the events at Virginia Tech?"

Can I first comment on how stupid and clumsy a question that is? I answered, "Well, other than abject horror, there really isn't much more of a response." Which is true -- what else can you say? I continued, "But I suspect what you're getting at is how those events impact my own feelings of security as a professor here at MUN." He nodded. "I don't think we can live in fear, nor do I think it is wise to barricade ourselves in with heightened security and metal detectors -- not that I think anything like that, in the end, will prevent a determined lunatic from acting like the one in Virginia."

OK, I'm embroidering my answer a bit in hindsight, but that's the gist of what I said. Predictably, in the aftermath of the shootings the second item on the news -- after updates on what we knew about Virginia Tech -- was the question "Are our campuses safe?" replete with man-on-the-street interviews with students. And I'm happy to say that, with only a few exceptions, most responses tended to echo my own. University campuses are no safer or more dangerous than, really, anywhere else, and the prospect of turning them into an armed camp in the hopes of deterring a random psychotic with a gun fills me with dismay.

If it weren't for fear, I think the news media might just whimper and die. Or possibly return to just reporting the news. I see the "are our campuses safe" angle as incredible cynical and indeed irresponsible ... especially considering that civilian deaths in, say, Iraq, in numbers comparable to Virginia Tech, are not tragic bolts from the blue but the daily norm. What are we afraid of?

If ever a lunatic walks armed into my classroom I promise you I will shit myself in terror. But not until then. And were it to happen, I hope I have the courage that one professor had who died trying to protect those in his classroom.

Reason #23 why no one takes Hollywood seriously when they speak of environmental responsibility, conservation or, well, anything ...

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are buying a $268 million yacht which will be 280 feet long, complete with a swimming pool, a helipad and a submarine.

The helipad and submarine are egregious enough, but what really gets me is the swimming pool ... because apparently there won't be enough water for them in, you know, the ocean.

On the other hand, there will be enough space on this leviathan for them to adopt another dozen third world kids. Two dozen, if they don't want to spoil them ...

The top ten reasons I know I'm in essay-grading avoidance

10. I'm thinking seriously about doing my taxes, even though I've still got twenty days, fourteen hours and thirty minutes until midnight, April 30.

9. I keep looking at my bulletin board, thinking that it's time I rearranged everything on it.

8. I'm writing a blog post.

7. It seems to me to be the height of disorganization that ALL my books aren't alphabetized.

6. I'm somewhat disappointed that the coffee kiosk downstairs in my building is staying open for exams, because that means a trip to get coffee only takes a few minutes.

5. I'm surprised that the roulette wheel has never caught on as a means of assigning grades.

4. The overwhelming compulsion to go home and do laundry.

3. The obsessive hour and a half I spent last night making up possible reading lists for my courses next year -- which I don't yet know for certain if I'll be teaching.

2. I really want to go to the gym RIGHT NOW.

... and the #1 reason I know I'm in essay-grading avoidance?

1. I brought a copy of my thesis into the office today to begin rewriting it as a book!

The shallow end of the alphabet

My principal task this morning has been to write a 500-word abstract for a conference, and damn if it doesn't make me want to jump off a bridge. When did writing something so short become so painful?

Anyways ... as is my wont as I sit in front of the computer agonizing over writer's block, I turn my head and stare blankly off in space. As it happens, this has me looking at the bookcase right beside my door, the bookcase I think of as the "Shelves of Theory" ... five shelves of critics, theorists, philosophers and literary historians arranged alphabetically -- the only shelf I have arranged alphabetically, as it happens.

So as I sit here not writing my abstract, staring at the Shelves of Theory, I notice the odd phenomenon that the vast majority of the authors there fall into the first half of the alphabet. Given that A-M is the first half, and N-Z is the second, we don't have that M-N transition (When Alan Nadel picks up the baton from Elaine Tyler May) until almost at the end of shelf #4. Which means that -- taking into consideration that the first half of shelf #1 is taken up with anthologies and essay collections -- the A-M crowd account for three and a half shelves, while the N-Zers have just slightly more than one.

So I'm wondering if this bespeaks a broader trend in surnames to fall into the first half of the alphabet? Or whether something more insidious is at work: that on a deep genetic level, the first thirteen letters make you more inclined to engage in the exercise of literary criticism? Or perhaps there is a secret conspiracy on the part of academic presses giving precedence to the A-M fraternity (in which case, dudes -- I'm an "L"! just barely in the first half, perhaps, but there nonetheless). Mysterious.

Upon reading back over this post, I'm a little leery of offering this insight into the inner workings of my mind while in the throes of composition. Little wonder my writing process is glacial.

I do want to point out however that I'm very pleased with the title of my post, and I think someone should use it as the title of a novel.

Monday cuteness -- an overdue Morgan update

My brother Matt sent me these photos about a week ago. How unreal is his little girl?

A few things:

(1) She's talking more now, with an ever-expanding vocabulary.
(2) I have a name now -- she recognizes me in photos (though not, I'm sure, making the connection to who I am in relation to her), and calls me "Dis." Uncle Dis.
(3) She LOVES the Toronto Science Center. Matt and Michelle take her there every sunday, and apparently she is so excited when they pull into the parking lot that she's practically vibrating.

Hibernation, bad blogging, and the weirdness that is Facebook

Hm. Five entries for all of March—that’s some pretty lazy blogging on may part, if I do say so. Possibly my worst month yet. I don’t entirely know why; I suppose I’ve been busy, but I also really haven’t had much to report. I have only recently felt as though I’ve started emerging from winter hibernation, only recently started feeling energized again as the season slowly (so painfully painfully slowly) sloughs off its skin.

It’s odd: even as I feel utterly spent as far as the teaching and administrative parts of work go, my recent glimmerings of energy are all to do with my own research and writing—stuff long since relegated to the back burner this semester. Actually, saying that my own research has been on the back burner suggests that it has still be cooking away all this time, when in reality I think I’m dangerously close to having removed it, cooled it, repackaged it and returned it to the store.

Can I beat a metaphor to death or what?

So anyway, hopefully this newfound energy translates into more and better blogging.

Though to come to my third subject here, it’s a sign `o the times that I have begun to feel as though blogging has become quaintly antiquated, a charming affectation like parchment paper and fountain pens; Facebook is the new blogging, as well as the new email and the new … well, everything. I wondered a while back why so many of my former students from UWO whose blogs I link to had become so lackadaisical in their posting. I was assuming it was symptomatic of spiritual ennui and moral bankruptcy, until it was pointed out that everyone had simply migrated to Facebook—from whence they carried on all of the activities previously inefficiently separated into different forums like email, conversation, social gatherings and the like. Now we’ve arrived at this spectacularly efficient means of wasting time. We truly live in marvelous times.

I signed up for Facebook largely to see what the fuss was about, and for the first little while was a little creeped out—creeped out by me, that is, because as more and more people (students, generally, both current and former) started linking to me I realized that they were all at least a dozen years younger. I felt as though I had blundered into a social scene dominated by people in their early twenties who collectively wondered who the old guy was wandering blindly around.

Fortunately, I have discovered that the ranks of those on Facebook are not limited to twentysomethings (though they do tend to dominate) and undergrads; a few professor friends, and a lot of grad students now link to me. And what’s even better is that in some cases I’ve reconnected with old friends that I haven’t spoken to in a while. So that’s all right then. And really, I’m relieved, because I’d been running out of strategies for wasting time ….

I'm all about the 1930s crime fighting

I have written several times of my friend Gregg's radio-show exploits -- the two serials he writes, directs, produces and posts online -- the tales of Canada's geatest crime-fighting superhero, The Red Panda, and the hard-boiled adventures of Black Jack Justice.

I can't recommend these wonderful sagas enough. But now you have an even better reason to tune in -- the most recent Red Panda episode features none other than yours truly.

That's right -- unsatisfied with being interviewed about potholes in The Telegram, doing public lectures, and being interviewed about Nick Hornby novels on TV, I've sold out and whored myself out to that most commercial of media: web-based homages to 1930s radio serials.

That's right. I hear you condemning me for selling out. But wait: don't judge me until you've heard the show. You might think it's all about the money and the glamour, but I truly think I've managed, in that Gemorrah of voice-work, to do something truly avant-garde. Playing the part of the gentle but determined Father Michael, I satirize the legions of American actors with crappy Irish accents by doing just that -- you think Leonardo DiCaprio was abysmal in his Irishness in Gangs of New York? Just listen to my cutting critique of his wanna-be accent in my first few moments in The Red Panda. And it doesn't stop there -- though my part in this episode was recorded last May, see how I presciently affect a Danny Williams impersonation after I get going, so very very timely to our sputtering premier's criticisms of the federal budget.

It may be that my genius is only appreciated years and years from now. But you, gentle readers, can appreciate it now ... listen, and understand, and tell your friends. And take note, when others scoff at my embracing of such a crass, commecialized medium, that in the end I go uncredited. Because for me, it's all about the art.

George Orwell: Republican schill?

OK, so normally I generally try to ignore everything that comes out of Anne Coulter's mouth, but this one is too mind-bendingly idiotic to let go. While discussing an anonymously-created anti-Hilary attack ad parodying Apple's infamous 1984 homage to Orwell (the "think different" ad in which the woman throws the sledgehammer into the screen displaying Big Brother's face), Coulter stated "That is an amazingly powerful ad. I don't know how anyone can vote for a Democrat again after that." The problem with this evaluation is that it's a pro-Obama ad. I'm not entirely sure why it necessarily follows that a "powerful" ad promoting Barack Obama makes one more inclined to vote republican, but that's just the palate-cleanser -- the massive "Huh?!" comes a few seconds later when Coulter says "I don't know how anyone can vote for a Democrat after reading Orwell's 1984."

Let's all just think about this a moment. Savour the absurdity, if you will.

Who was it again who introduced the Patriot Act? Suspended habeas corpus? Consigned hundreds of people to the purgatory of Guantanamo Bay, or the hell of Abu Gharib, without recourse to representation? Introduced secret wiretaps to keep tabs on the domestic population? Has rolled civil liberties back to pre-1930s levels? Invoked executive privilege more than the last dozen administrations combined?

I don't know about you, but when I reread 1984, it ain't the Dems I think about. But then, I guess as Anne would maintain, we've always been at war with Oceania.

Of course, I know I'm making a mistake in paying any attention to this at all. For her, saying "I don't know how anyone can vote for a Democrat after reading Orwell's 1984" is approximately on the same level as saying "I don't know how anyone can vote for a Democrat after drinking a glass of milk" or "I don't know how anyone can vote for a Democrat after doing the dishes."

Springtime, for St. John's, and New-ew-foundland!

I may be speaking too soon on that front, given that it was -2 when I got in the car this morning, but at least the feel of spring is in the air. It is perhaps inevitable that there will be more snow before all is said and done; however, winter's back has been broken, I think, and any more blizzards will just be the petulant expression of a season that has overstayed its welcome.

Hear that winter? Get out! Get your lazy ass off our collective couch and go home.

Loving the early Daylight Savings Time. Best idea George W. Bush ever had. Well, the only good idea he's ever had. Quite the epitaph for his legacy.

Anyway, sorry for the long blog hiatus. I'm back and am in fact wearing black. The end is in sight: the last day of exams is less than a month away, and I have that date circled on my calendar. There is much to get through between now and then, of course, but at least I feel more energized than I have since, oh, september. Amazing what a little sun can do.

Doodling

In the first year of my PhD, after one of my classes, a classmate of mine who was an exchange student from Wales came up to me

"I'm on to you, Christopher," she said

"What do you mean?" I asked, taken a little aback.

"Next week I'll be doing my first seminar presentation in this course. And I've realized that if I look down at you and you're intently drawing precise, geometric doodles in the margins of your page, it means you're listening very closely to what I'm saying. But if I look down and you're madly writing away, you're not paying any attention at all, and what you're writing has nothing to with anything going on in the class."

Well, she certainly had me figured out. I've never been much of a note taker -- not much of a multitasker, I guess. I find I miss stuff when I'm writing, especially in a seminar class. But it's a nervous habit -- I like to keep my pen moving. And so in any situation when I'm sitting listening but without the particular need to take detailed notes, these abstract geometrical compositions creep up and down my margins, like fractals.

I'm thinking of this because in the last ten minutes of tidying up my office I happened across about a half a dozen half-filled pages on odd pads of paper ... the remnants of various meetings, I'm suspecting. Anyway, a gallery of doodles:

Snow clearing

Sorry for the post lapse. I've been burning the candle at both ends for the last two weeks or so, and, frankly, haven't had much to talk about or report. Just the same-old, same-old ... and a lot of snow.

One of the hardest things to communicate about St. John's in the winter is the sheer magnitude of the snow accumulation. Because of the nature of the city, with its fairly narrow streets, sidewalks basically disappear after the first big snowfall. So do cars parked at the roadside. The ploughs do a very good job of clearing the streets in pretty short order (most of them), but because there's not a lot of space for the snow to go, it gets heaped up in massive berms and inevitably encroaches on the road to the point where some streets are effectively reduced to a single lane. It's a good thing people are generally polite and courteous: driving along any residential street at this time of year involves taking turns with the oncoming traffic through the bottlenecks.

And then comes the snow removal: a slow, systematic process of closing off streets and reclaiming the streets and sidewalks from the snow. A caterpillar digger scoops the snow out and piles it into a dump truck. The results are rather dramatic: whereonce were unruly mountains of snow are now seemingly precisely machined cliffs ending at the sidewalk, perfectly perpendicular to the ground.

My question is: where does the snow go? Where is it carted off to? Is there a snow landfill outside the city? A snow dump? Or is it tossed in the ocean?

Here's my idea: we should find a cliff on the sea north of St. John's and manufacture our own glacier there ... a small but compact glacier formed by the sheer weight of the snow dumped there. Then, in mid-May, when tourists begin showing up looking for icebergs, we shove this glacier off the cliff, thus guaranteeing at least one iceberg per season. Also, I'll finally get to see an iceberg ... it's a source of some bitterness to me that global warming really seems to have kicked in just in time for me to move to Newfoundland, and the only icebergs I get to see are in postwards.

Insomnia and the storm that was

I can't sleep at the moment, so I've decided to try and fatigue myself with an overdue blog entry. I'm not holding out great hopes. But at least I will be a good blogger and get something new in before or at the one-week-since-last-post deadline I unofficially hold for myself

It has been a while since my last post. Has anything of import happened in Newfoundland since then? Hmm, let me think .... Yes, yes, I do seem to remember a giant motherfucker of a storm. Only vaguely, though. I seem to remember glancing out my window into my parking lot and seeing something like this:


And that's after the plough came through. The second time

Yes, as you might have noticed if you watched the national news for more than a nanosecond the last few days, we got hit with one of those storms I'd like to say we get once or twice a winter here -- if it weren't for the fact that we get them a few more times than once or twice. Say, three or four or twelve times.

And poor Kristen seems to have a talent for visiting me just in time to experience them. Last February she came, and had her flight cancelled because of a comparable storm. All in all, we discovered, not such a bad thing! She ended up staying for an extra two days. So when we woke up on tuesday morning to an ongoing blizzard, we were quite delighted ... until we realized that Air Canada was being a bit cagy and not cancelling her flight, only delaying it by degrees. It was supposed to have left by one in the afternoon ... and then two, and then two-thirty, and the four ... so instead of a lovely extra day of visiting, we were left checking the A/C website every fifteen minutes in the hope that the flight was cancelled. Which it wasn't. Arrgh.

That on top of the fact that we'd had to cancel our dinner reservations the evening before because of the storm. That of course didn't stop us from putting a pizza delivery person through the agony of driving through the snow. Gotta love the gumption of the Giovanni Cabot's people. They're the like the Post Office, only tastier.

Anyway, Kristen made it out yesterday (Tuesday), though her flight was delayed four hours. And driving her to the airport was entertaining, to say the least -- both for the occasional terror of the road conditions, and the perennial amazement I have in watching this city dig out from these storms. I wish I'd had my camera on hand to document the anthill-like activity. Everyone will have to be satisfied instead with some pics I snapped on campus this afternoon:



And downtown:

Why 24 has jumped the shark ...

The problem with shows based on a winning formula is that eventually they do become, well, formulaic. And I have to say, 24 has done a fairly decent job in terms of keeping my interest even when this became apparent around say season three, but lately things have become somewhat ridiculous.

To be fair however, the conception of 24 jumping the shark is sort of entertaining in itself -- one imagines Jack Bauer flashing his badge to Quint and Chief Brody, commandeering the great white "on matters of national security," then riding the shark and jumping it (a la Free Willy) over a jetty or something to have it land squarely on top of the lead terrorist and eat him. Betcha didn't see that coming, Fayed!

But I digress.

My problem is that, now that the show is working through the same basic storyline for the sixth time, in order to keep things from getting stale they've turned things up to eleven.

Bored with the relatively few civilian casualties in previous seasons? Let's start this time with a pre-existing state of emergency! Hundreds already dead!

Not satisfied with near-misses from nuclear weapons? Let's set one off in Los Angeles this time!

You think Jack Bauer's been given an easy ride so far? Let's make him the victim of three years of torture!

And wait! Let's have him kill his best friend to save a terrorist!

Enemies not sufficiently dastardly? Let's make the mysterious bluetooth guy from last season Jack's brother!

That not enough of a disfunctional family for you? Let's make Jack's father the evil mastermind! (Paging Dr. Freud ...)

Jack's willingness to torture has become a little wussy? Let's have him torture his brother! (Shall we start a pool betting on how many episodes it will be before he tortures Daddy?)


To be fair, the expectations game in television is a hard one to play ... shows that hit on a winning formula become understandably reluctant to tamper with it, even when it's painfully obvious that it's becoming tired. Television is a conservative medium in the truest sense of the word insofar as it fears change -- which is why almost every sitcom since The Honeymooners is essentially the same story, with just the characters, fashion and sexual vocabulary changing from year to year. I am in fact enjoying 24 this season, but I have to wonder where it's going to go from here -- what are they going to do next season to up the ante?

And there's the rub. This season we're already starting to venture into the absurd. What happens next?

When Jack was kidnapped by the Chinese at the end of last season, I got excited about the prospect of a 24 that would break all its own conventions and have as its story arc a daring rescue mounted by rogue CTU operatives in Manchuria ... away from their usual setpieces, away from LA, eschewing the comforts of home. Have Chloe set up in a remote trailer with jury-rigged equipment on a Chinese mountainside while Bill and Curtis (RIP, poor Curtis) and whoever else was still walking at the end of last season infiltrates the prison camp. Meanwhile, have the president, upon finding out what's going on, have to choose between running interference for his guys and risk an international incident or giving up his people.

That would have been cool. It would have been a departure. And it would have forestalled the shark-jumping for a season or two.

Happy corporate-manufactured kitschy heart-and-Hallmark day!

I was very pleased with my Valentine's Day entry last year, and don't quite have the brainpower today to top it ... so, like so many people do when inspiration fails them, I'll let Savage Chickens express my feelings for me:

Ender's vindication

There’s an interesting article in the current Harper’s about “The Coming Robot Army,” dealing with the increasing presence in the American military of unmanned vehicles. The article’s author, Steve Featherstone, narrates his experiences at a handful of “industry” shows—where engineering firms, large and small, pitch their products to the military. Everything from tank-sized robot weapons platforms to tiny spybots (both airborne and ground-based) is on display, along with promotional videos featuring Full Metal Jacket’s R. Lee Ermy and MacGyver himself, Richard Dean Anderson.

What struck me was the frequent recourse the prostheletizers of robot warfare had to the language of video games when relating the user-friendliness of their machines. “If you can operate a game boy, you’re good,” says one representative. R. Lee Ermy, in full drill sergeant mode in his promo video, screams “The next time you start thinking about telling kids to put away that video game, think again! Some day they could be using those same kinds of skills to run a robot that will save their bacon!”

This made me think of Orson Scott Card’s excellent SF novel Ender’s Game, in which, in which gifted children are recruited early into the military and taught the art of warfare. Ender Wiggin, our protagonist, proves talented beyond the dreams of his mentors and graduates into a specialized form of training, in which he plays simulations of space battles, networked to other children trained at the same academy he attended.

(Warning for those who have not read the novel: I’m about to give away the ending, so if you want to read it—and I recommend that you do—stop reading now).

The simulations get increasingly difficult, with increasingly greater odds against them and an enemy increasingly familiar with Ender & co.’s tactics. Ultimately they face the enemy at their homeworld with a pitifully small fleet against vastly superior enemy numbers. In desperation, Ender sends his fleet in a suicidal attack that destroys the entire alien planet.

The twist is that what Ender took to be a training simulation for when he would command actual fleets from a distance was in fact real—that the ships he and his cohorts commanded were not simulated but actual; and the final, total destruction of the enemy was an actual genocidal (or “xenocidal,” I suppose) massacre.

The point here is that every time I play an online first-person shooter game, I get killed rather a lot—and I suspect that many of the people killing me are all of about twelve years old, kids raised not so much on as in computer and video games, whose intimate familiarity with these virtual environment is second nature … while for me, having grown up with the archaic technology of Space Invaders, ColecoVision and the Commodore 64, the extra split second it takes to be aware of things in those sophisticated virtual worlds is the difference between virtual life and virtual death.

Hence, the insistence of military engineers’ on the Playstation-esque qualities of roboticized warfare makes me think that Orson Scott Card’s dystopian vision was pretty spot on. One of the principal criticisms of the novel was its lack of believability (always a dubious thing when talking about SF, but that’s another discussion), insofar as some readers couldn’t accept the premise of twelve-year-olds exhibiting the kind of expertise as those in the novel. I’m not so sure. In the CGI industry, firms don’t hire computer programmers and train them to be artists—that would be futile. Rather, they hire artists and train them to use computers, because a talent for art is not something that can be taught. If warfare ever does come down to the remote operation of machines from computer terminals, who then becomes the best candidate—the twentysomething soldier relatively new to the intimacies and nuances of cutting-edge technology, or the ten-year-old prodigy who wipes the floor with people twice his age at computer game competitions?

And would the generals let him know those are real people he’s wiping out?

The week that wouldn't end

Normally weekends don't make much of a difference in my life, nor have they for a long time. I frequently work half- or full days on Saturdays and Sundays, either at home or at the office, and my weekly schedule is open enough that if I'm totally overwhelmed, I can take some me-time midweek. It's one of the reasons I love my job.

But all I could think this week was "My god, is it Friday yet?"

I'm not sure what it was, but this week seemed to last forever. Part of it -- or much of it, I guess -- was simply the intersection of a variety of tasks and concerns. We're hiring two new people for next year, a postcolonialist and a Shakespearean, and we saw candidates for both; as I'm on the search comittee for the former, monday and tuesday were taken up with the interview and squiring the candidate around campus to her various meetings. We had a department meeting on Wednesday (always fun), a candidate for the renaissance job thursday and friday, and we hosted a poetry reading last night -- which, being on the Pratt Comittee, I was partially responsible for organizing this week.

Oh, and there was that teaching thing I do as well. On tap for this week was Alfred, Lord Tennyson in my second-year class, and The Human Stain by Philip Roth, the film Dark City and some apparently blood-pressure raising writings by erstwhile neocon Francis Fukuyama. Good times.

And marking essays ... though I did not get as much to to attend to that as I would have liked, as my second-years can attest. Monday, guys, I promise!

All in all, not exceptionally mind-blowing ... I hear my computer network-guy brother tell of his not infrequent 36-hour (or more) marathons getting a new network up and running, or of the all-nighters he pulls when a network goes down somewhere, and it makes me feel positively lazy. I think part of my problem this week was just frustration with the glacial progress of my own research. Considering that I come up for a formal interim tenure review in September, I'm getting a bit anxious about getting some writing out there. I have three articles on the go, two relatively close to completion and a third a little more of a ways off, but what they all need is a few days of focused attention. Would that I were that enviously hated species of academic who can devote the odd half-hour of free time that surfaces in a day to productive writing. But no ... I'm one of those who requires a certain amount of momentum, and that first half-hour is usually taken up in necessary screen-staring.

However, as Danine pointed out to me yesterday in a much-appreciated reality check, I'm actually in pretty good shape for the review, and when it gets down to it I can use the summer to devote uninterrupted time to the articles. (Given that the ideal plan however is to finally perform major surgery on my thesis this summer -- a task I look forward to as much as I would to, well, major surgery -- I'd really rather have them out of the way).

OK, enough of me whining about my week. Given the administrative circus I've been engaged in this week, I would like to provide my non-academic readers with one occasional glimpses into the machinery of academia offered here on this humble blog. The topic du jour: the academic job interview.

I bring this up in part because of course I'm involved this year for the first time in the hiring process, but also because of a question raised by a student. I had let my second-years go a little early on Monday because I was heading directly from class to the two-hour interview with this week's candidate. One of my students commented, as we walked from class, "A two-hour interview? Wow, that's pretty intense." To which I responded: "That's just a fraction of the interview, actually."

You see, not satisfied with the various fiery hoops through which we have to jump over the course of a graduate degree -- comprehensive exams, ball-breaking scholarship applications, the thesis, the thesis defense -- universities impose a particular species of hell on prospective faculty members in the form of the day-and-a-half interview. First of all, there's the process of application, in which you send your CV, letters of reference, teaching dossier, and writing sample (the assembling of which represents a week of work in and of itself), which the search committee pores over with excruciating minuteness.

(Seriously -- I was quite amazed at the level of detail with which we examined the applications. When the cut comes down to a handful of comparably impressive candidates, any mistake or inconsistency can sink an applicant. It made me somewhat incredulous that I ever made it to the interview stage).

Some universities then perform a series of phone interviews with a long list, and on the basis of that narrow it down. Mercifully, we skipped that step.

Then, if you're called in for an interview, you fly out to wherever the university is (we had two candidates come in from the prairies, which made for a lot of travel time), and you a subjected to a series of meetings with a variety of administrative types -- the Dean of Arts, Dean of Graduate Studies, Vice-President Academic, Faculty Relations, Faculty Union, and of course the Head of the Department -- all of whom ask you questions that are variations on the same theme: namely, Why Should We Hire You?

You also deliver a half-hour or so lecture to the department to demonstrate your research chops, followed by a half-hour question period. And then of course is the interview with the search committee, which here lasts two hours.

Also on the roster: an open lunch to which all members of the department and graduate students are invited, and dinner with a three or four faculty members. And if there is one thing drummed into you -- if you come from a university nice enough to train its graduate students in how to interview well -- it's that there is no time during this process when you are not being interviewed. So in other words, limit yourself to one glass of wine with dinner, and keep your game face on. More than a few promising candidates have sunk their chances by saying something off-colour after one glass of wine too many.

The basic idea behind all this is partially to test the candidate's stamina. This is an exhausting process, even if you're gregarious and like to talk about yourself (as I do). I can't even begin to imagine the seven types of hell endured by people who are shy. At MUN, we're actually comparatively humane -- spreading it out over a day and a half gives the candidates a breather here and there, and our faculty is generally very friendly and courteous. Some universities however make a point of cramming it all into one endless day ... starting at 8am, leaving no time between meetings, and basically trying to run the candidate off his or her feet. Also, some people, even if they're otherwise very nice, will be difficult or even hostile in the job talk question period, or the interview -- principally to see if they can rattle the candidate, to get him or her to drop their guard.

Yes, we're all really rather mad here.

I'll take oddly-named stage managers for 500, Alex ...

Answer: Tiggers are wonderful things.

Question: What is the wonderful thing about Tiggers, Alex?

So this falls into the realm of the ultra-cool: one of my dearest friends will be a contestant on Jeopardy! The Lovely and Amazing Tigger Jourard -- Trivia Geek, Theatrical Martinet and Stage Manager Extraordinaire -- flies to sunny LA to tape her episode on February 7. And I'm betting that the only way she won't be kicking serious ass is if they decide to bring back Ken Jennings. Even then, Mr. Smartie-pants better bring his A-game.

Read about it all here.

For those who don't know Tigger, she and I were joined at the hip for all four plays I've directed ... and let me tell you now if you're thinking of dabbling in the directorial end of the theatrical pool, you need to find yourself a Tigger to be your stage manager. It helps that she was actually a professional stage manager for eighteen years, before finally leaving theatre for sanity reasons. I met her in winter of 2000 (well, I'd met her before, but only really got to know her at this point) when she agreed to come out of retirement as it were to stage manage a production of Joe Orton's Loot that a friend of hers was acting in. I was playing Hal (the last time I acted in a play, incidentally), and we hit it off immediately. That summer I made my first tentative foray into directing with UWO's Summer Shakespeare ... and I asked Tigger if she would be willing to stage manage.

The conversation went something like this. Tigger: "What play do you want to do?" Me: "Richard III." Tigger: "OK. What story do you want to tell?"

At first I thought the question was a bit wacky. What story? Richard III, of course! But then as I thought about it, it made increasingly more sense, and I realized the depth of this woman's wisdom. And the rest is history.

Here's Tigger relaxing with her hubby Bryan. Please note the Macbeth shirt he's wearing.


Answer: all our love and best wishes.

Question: What are we sending with Tigger to LA, Alex?

Break a leg, sweetie!