Monday, June 25, 2007:  Harry Potter and the Inevitable Ending

As I am once again sitting all alone in the Lower Library on a Saturday night, I feel that this would be a good time for me to launch a Countdown to Harry, as I expect I'm going to have plenty to say on the subject of the new Harry Potter novel (and all the old ones as well).  In fact, I think I'll probably have at least a small comment to make about Harry every week until the book appears at midnight on July 21.  I'll Rant on other subjects too if other subjects come up, but the end of Harry Potter (will it be the "end" of Harry Potter, do you think?) deserves a lot of Ranting, and so this week, I'm going to concentrate exclusively on the boy wizard who has, for whatever reason, turned millions of children and adults into fantasy-devouring zombies who long to play impractical broomstick sports (admit it:  in the relatively real world, Quidditch would be boring, stupid, and pretty bloody frustrating for spectators), summon glowing totem animals, and run around trying not to be killed by snakey dead sorcerers who speak entirely without contractions.

Don't get me wrong:  I'm a Potterhead.  In fact, I discovered Harry a little earlier than most people--just before the third book came out--and have been devoted to him ever since.  Oh, I recognise his flaws.  He has grown rather bloated in recent years, and he isn't willing to listen to people who suggest, delicately, that he may want to go on a bit of a diet; he has become addicted to subplots that go nowhere and minor characters who do nothing; his element of surprise, which allowed him to spring some delightful red herrings on us early on, is entirely gone.  He needs a makeover, though I doubt he's going to get one.  But there's still something about Harry, and I'm still going to be at Book City at midnight on July 21st to pick up my copy of Book Seven, which I shall then take home and read all night.  I'm a sucker for hero stories; so sue me.

What worries me is that Book Seven is almost inevitably going to disappoint almost everyone who reads it.  The Harry Potter books (the first three, at any rate) are funny, clever, relatively well-plotted page-turners with interesting (if flat) characters, imaginative settings, and some twists and turns of storytelling that make readers rise to their feet and cheer.  However, many readers have built them up into something...perfect?  Unassailably fantastic?  Something, at any rate, that Can Do No Wrong.

They are about to do wrong.  They are about to end.  One of the strengths of the Harry books lies not in what they contain but in what they hint at; each Potter story provides shadowy clues, nudges towards terrible truths and secrets and connections.  In Book Seven, we are going to learn these truths and secrets and connections.  They will not and cannot live up to what we have been imagining them to be.  To write down a story--to solve a mystery--is in some ways to kill it, to turn it from the gold of speculation, of anticipation, to the dross of the written word.  And Harry Seven has been built up so solidly, and for so long, in the imaginations of readers that that dross isn't even going to glitter enough to fool us into believing it to be gold.  It's not Rowling's fault, but no, the last Harry book would disappoint even if it were a peerless work of fiction issuing from the quill of Master Shakespeare.  The collective expectation is far too high.

Sometimes, the best thing an author can do is fail--or refuse--to end a work.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge once claimed to have fallen asleep (well...fallen into an opium-induced stupor) and dreamed a wonderful poem based on a text he had been reading just before he dropped off.  He awoke and immediately began to write the poem down...but it was barely begun when a person from Porlock called and kept Coleridge talking for so long that when he returned to his poem, he had forgotten all but a few scattered lines.  The poem, "Kubla Khan," is thus unfinished, or so Coleridge insisted...but readers and critics have spent two centuries speculating on the meaning of the work and wondering if the ending would have been able to match the exquisiteness of the beginning.  In effect, the lack of closure makes the poem what it is.

Charles Dickens died when he was exactly halfway through The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  The novel deals with the murder of the title character...a murder that is, of course, never solved.  Generations of readers have wondered Who Killed Edwin; one of these readers, Rupert Holmes, has actually turned the novel into a musical whose final act is shaped by the whims of the audience.  Dickens himself muses, in his memoranda on the novel, about his clever solution to the mystery.  If his solution is the one many think it must be--the one posited by the film based on the book--it's really not that clever a solution and probably would have turned Drood into a mediocre sort of novel.  Yet since there is no ending, the solution remains purely in the mind of the reader, and the novel itself remains a good, if maddening, read.

Lemony Snicket possibly has the right idea in his recent thirteen-part sequence, A Series of Unfortunate Events.  The final book in the series is extremely frustrating to read because it does not really solve many of the mysteries that have been dogging Snicket's protagonists for so long.  The book draws to a close, but the ending is almost lost amidst all the loose ends.  Mr. Snicket is a good writer; he has pretty clearly deliberately chosen not to tie everything up neatly.  When I finished reading Book Thirteen--titled, interestingly, The End--I wanted to kick Mr. Snicket in the teeth.  Later, however, I began to realise what he had done.  In many ways, his books are about imagination and related concepts:  stories, words, loss, change...and hope.  In his non-ending is what every reader secretly wants to find at the end of every story:  the beginnings of a hundred other ones.  Not the concrete beginnings, mind you, but the beginnings readers hold in their own minds.  In short, imagination.

If Rowling is as wise as Snicket, she won't try to tie up Harry's story in a neat and impenetrable little Gordian Knot of completion.  Instead, she'll acknowledge the impossibility of giving her tale the perfect ending and let at least a little tag-end of plot hang out of the bundle...not so that she can eventually return and write another sequel (and another, and another, and another, until we end up with a geriatric Harry croaking out spells during his forty-seventh year as Hogwarts' Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher) but so that her readers can write sequels in their heads.  If she tries to tuck everything up all nice and neat, she is going to fail and, at the same time, deny her readers any further private dreams about Harry.  I know from personal experience that it is much more fun to mull over a particular scene again and again, shaping it differently every time (and every time letting it become steeped in the impossible perfection of the unwritten story), than it is to read over the same scene after you have turned it into mere words on a page.

I hope Rowling leaves Harry his tag-end.


Monday, June 18, 2007:  Is That a Comic Strip in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Going to Fall Idiotically in Love With Your High-School Sweetheart?

Lately, I seem to have been talking to a lot of people about For Better or For Worse, Lynn Johnston's twenty-eight-year-old Canadian comic strip, which is venerated by at least three generations for "telling it like it is" and "practically seeing right into our living room...it's that accurate!"  I don't know whether I start these all conversations or whether everybody else is also talking a lot about FBOFW lately and I just happen to be around every time...but at any rate, I've discussed it with something like ten people over the course of the last month.  And no, these discussions have not tended to be positive.

Let me begin by revealing that I used to love this comic strip.  I expect that when I was twelve, many of the more adult jokes (the strip originally had many of these) went over my head, but I liked the story.  Take a look at some early FBOFW some day.  Essentially, the strip is the tale of an unhappy woman who loathes her kids, Michael and Elizabeth, and hardly knows her old-fashioned male-chauvinist-pig husband John; she hates being chained to two snot-nosed brats, has virtually given up her dream of becoming a writer, and can find freedom neither in the constraints of her "happy" family life nor in the lives of her friends, miserable "feminist" Connie (whose "feminism" seems to consist mostly of her single motherhood and her overwhelming need to Find Herself a Good Man) and vulnerable stay-at-home mom Anne.  The strips are cringe-inducing, but they're also sometimes pretty funny because Elly, the protagonist, is always just on the verge of losing it.  She is a whiner, sure...but she is a screamer as well.  Though the early comics are essentially conservative--Feminism Bad, Housewifedom Not Fun But Certainly Less Evil Than Feminism, So Suck It Up, Ladies--they also hover on the cliff-edge of the Abyss of Anarchy.  Dreams, say the early strips, sometimes have to be sacrificed...but dreamers don't bloody well have to go gently into that good night.  Elly knows she has it good (according to everyone else), but she fights her idyll every step of the way.

In an early FBOFW, which I would reproduce her if I were not all conscientious about the whole copyright thing (as it is, know that I'm getting this from page 18 of Lynn Johnston's early collection I've Got the One-More-Washload Blues, New York: Universal Press Syndicate, 1981), Elly is drinking coffee while John works away on a typewriter.  In panel 1, Elly says, "John...if you were out of town, for a long time,...alone, at a hotel..and a very, very attractive woman came along...."  Panel 2 has Elly continuing as John's eyes bug out and a little smile plays over his thin lips:  "And threw herself at you begging you to take her--no strings attached...for one night only...and you had both had a few drinks...would you..."  In the third panel, Elly's coffee cup is in midair, Elly has fled, and John is reaching after her and crying, "Elly!  I didn't mean sure--I meant maybe!!"  Here we have...a punchline.  That's right.  Neither character is particularly likable (Whiner!  Jerk!), but the clash of their personalities (Elly, was that question really a good idea?  John, what the hell did you think her response was going to be?...Oh, I see:  you clearly don't get this woman at all) makes the strip giggle-worthy.  This is not even the grittiest of the early comics.  John and Elly tell each other to shut up...tell their kids to shut up...discuss marital infidelity with their friends...lose their tempers with each other and the kids for no reason at all...and completely fail to connect with each other.  The story of their family is an interesting comment on the idea of marriage as the be-all and the end-all of a woman's aspirations.  Elly may not be a feminist--she actually walks around going, "I'm not a feminist!"--but she is discontented, despite her dentist husband and her two point four children and a dog.  Her personal dreams, whatever they are, have died hard.

Flash forward to 2007.  Screaming Elly has regressed into Whining Elly; she still screams sometimes, but silently, her exclamations reduced to a series of asterisks and a flailing tongue (har har...that Elly is sure a shrew, isn't she?).  The clueless early John, who clearly didn't understand his wife and was a little afraid of her as well, has retreated into the sanctum of the Hobbyist, but he has also become very lovey-dovey.  He and Elly are constantly gazing into each other's eyes and gushing about how they still adore one another.  Michael is married with children, about to become a published author (and didn't that happen quickly?  His manuscript was accepted a mere month after he finished its first draft), and poised to move into his parents' old house.  Elizabeth's wanderlust, which has led her to Make Bad Decisions About Men (she falls for unfaithful hunks who Belong To Other Cultures rather than sticking to her own white, suburban kind), is subsiding, and if she doesn't fall into childhood-sweetheart Anthony's arms this week (possibly even today), I shall eat my hat with gusto.  The third child, bratty April, has morphed rather suddenly from a pudgy, ordinary-looking fifteen-year-old into a smoking hot sixteen-year-old, and she is busy Learning Life Lessons and slowly quelling her own yearnings for rebellion.  And Grandpa Jim is...well, words cannot describe the tweeness of the Grandpa Jim plot.  If possible, it became even more twee after he had his stroke.  The next time he ogles one of his twenty-year-old nurses (how CUTE!), I am going to leap magically into the comic and strangle him.

In other words, what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a soap opera.  In a way, it has always been a soap opera, but it was once a funny soap opera.  FBOFW has not included a funny punchline or, in fact, any punchline at all since Farley died (the death of Farley can be said to mark the beginning of the end for FBOFW).  More seriously, where Johnston was once tapping her points home with a delicate little chisel, she is now wielding the jackhammer of her messages with the enthusiasm of a fanatic.  ELIZABETH IS A REBEL!  SHE MUST SETTLE DOWN WITH ANTHONY!  MICHAEL IS THE GOOD CHILD!  HE WILL BE REWARDED!  HOME MAY BE WHERE THE HEART IS, BUT THE HEART SHOULD BE WITH THE PARENTS!  CHANGE IS BAD!  BAD, I SAY!  DO NOT REBEL, APRIL; MOTHER KNOWS BEST!  POOR...GRANDPA...JIIIIIIIIIIIM!!!!!!!!!!!
Y'know...any second now, Michael is going to buy his kids a dog.

Shaenon K. Garrity has already written the definitive anti-Anthony rant, on which I could not possibly improve (and here, as well, is T Campbell and Amy Mebberson's interesting graphic take on the Liz situation), so I won't go into a screaming fury about how Anthony represents the death of everything FBOFW used to stand for; however, in company with the disappointingly normal Michael, he really does.  He is the safe choice...the John substitute...the Boy Next Door who will turn Elizabeth into Elly (even their names are the same, you see).  And, in the world of FBOFW, Elizabeth should become Elly.  Michael has, as Garrity notes, fulfilled Elly's lost dream of writing; Elizabeth, like Elly, must give up her own dreams in exchange for safety...normalcy...lack of change.  Even the writing "dream" becomes, in the context of the strip, a symbol of stability, as it allows Michael to buy his old house and settle down with what is essentially the same family in which he grew up (though note that Michael did a Bad Thing when his apartment caught on fire and he went back in for his manuscript; his story/dream, as a firefighter and various other characters implied, was not worth risking his life for).  Follow your dreams and fall into repetition and predictability.  Give up your dreams and fall into repetition and predictability...

I think one of the reasons I'm so upset about what has happened to this comic is that it had the potential to be about dreams (fulfilled, unfulfilled, unattempted, failed, worked at); instead, it is about the death of dreams and the happy acceptance of this death.  The looming happily-ever-after Anthony/Elizabeth plotline is not truly a fairy tale; fairy tales have teeth, and this story arc is all marshmallows and puppy dogs and the squashing of out there in favour of back here.  Elizabeth did go into the world to seek her fortune, and she is about to find that it has actually been with Mommy and Daddy, in a world of unadventurous familiarity, all along.  Michael, with whom I identified when I was a teenager, has been a pod person for years.  Elly's original discontent has been subsumed by the fact that she is living the dream, damn it, and had darn well better like it.

In the fall, when the characters are due to stop aging and become more like almost every other comic-strip character, fans will likely notice hardly a ripple in the strip.  The characters will simply slide seamlessly into the realm of changelessness to which they have been aspiring for so long.


Monday, June 11, 2007:  The Internet Wears No Clothes

Google is actually the devil, isn't it?  I don't mean that it's the fire-and-brimstone, forked-tail-and-pitchfork, hooves-and-horns, glowing-eyed, red-skinned creature of folklore, wandering the ways of the world in an attempt to seduce people to the Dark Side; I mean that it is getting so frighteningly close to owning everything that it doesn't need to seduce people to the Dark Side.  All by itself, it forms a pretty good approximation of the Hellmouth, masticating, swallowing, and digesting anything that gets in its way.  If someone phoned me up tomorrow and informed me that Google had bought my soul from an interested third party, I would not be at all surprised.

And yet...what does Google own, after all?  It is the master of a vast chunk of the Internet, which is, in its turn, a bloated monster consisting mostly of advertising and hope.  You own a six-hundred-million-dollar piece of the Internet, Party X?  Good for you...because there's nothing there.  The Internet is not a tangible product.  It is not a service; it provides the means for many services to take place, but in itself?  What is it?  A gigantic, complicated postal system?  The universe's biggest billboard?  The Power of the Sun in the Palm of My Hand?

Google owns a big fat expensive scoop of wishful thinking.  The Internet is, in many ways, the Emperor's new clothes.  No one wants to admit how little sense it makes that this enormous repository of information, misinformation, and Everything Else Anywhere is a snake biting its tail...a huge incestuous entity that survives by feeding on its own flesh.  If the world as a whole lost faith in the workability of the Internet, it would fall in shreds about our ears...or perhaps prove never really to have worked at all.  The Internet is valuable as a commodity because we believe it is.

This isn't to say that the Internet shouldn't work.  I just spent three days setting up a stats counter for this website (you have to bung the code onto every page by hand, and the alum site has a lot of pages); I obviously believe that the Emperor is dressed in the latest fashions.  However, the continued viability of this resource is a mystery that may not be solved any time soon.  It is quite likely that it shouldn't be solved at all.

If there is a solution, Google probably owns it anyway.


Monday, June 4, 2007:  And Now We Need to Send a Letter to Summer

Dear Sir:

As you know, our company had some difficulties this year with one of your three colleagues, Mr. Winter, when he arrived late to work and then simply would not leave.  We did finally manage to sort out the situation in mid-April, at which time Mr. Spring assumed his own position and worked hard to make up for the chaos created by Mr. Winter's incompetence.

Unfortunately, Mr. Summer, you have yourself turned up an entire month early!  Mr. Spring, still recovering from his confrontation with Mr. Winter, now finds himself unceremoniously ushered from the premises, without explanation or apology, by you.  He has requested that we contact you and remind you of the terms of your contract:  terms that certainly do not allow for you taking on your duties fully in May.

Mr. Summer, control yourself.  You have always demonstrated a tendency towards excess--a tendency perhaps even more marked than that of Mr. Winter--but your insistence upon cranking the thermostat to at least thirty degrees and then sending the humidifier into overdrive has upset many of your office-mates.  In addition, you smoke in the workplace.  We provide, as we feel obliged to remind you, a smoke-free working environment; we are displeased at the recent office air quality and must ask you to indulge in your addiction somewhere else (perhaps Michigan).

We appreciate your keenness, Mr. Summer, and we understand your frustration with Mr. Spring's slow and subtle (but effective) approach to the job.  However, we must ask you to respect company policy and conform to a working method approved by Mr. Spring, who is still our key employee at this point in time.

Sincerely yours,


Toronto


Monday, May 28, 2007:  Ode to a Small Lump of Green Footnote I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning

In (slightly belated) tribute to Towel Day, here is what may actually be the second worst poem ever written, though it is to be hoped that it will not cause your major intestine to leap straight up through your neck and throttle your brain:

O footnote, how you mock me,
sitting there belligerently with your innocent smiling
information wrapped ponderously around the fact of your incorrect margins!

Alas, alas for those margins, for
I cannot change them.  My brain is
full of the inability to make sense of WordPerfect,
which is nevertheless better than Microsoft Word.

Go away, you stupid footnote.  I
don't have time to change you manually, as well as two hundred
and fifty-seven of your little friends, though obviously, I'm going to have to.  Yep.

How you mock me!  You are raising the middle finger of doom before
my tortured eyes, and I do not appreciate it.  I am
pretty sure you are leering at me, though you are a footnote, and the fact that
I am pretty sure you are leering at me probably means that I am hallucinating again.

It took me six
years to finish this hideous dissertation, and now I am being
held up by the margins of my footnotes.  Go figure.

O footnote, I shall not bow before you
or submit to the tyranny of a moronic computer program that thinks it is smarter than I am,
and when I have conquered you,
I shall eat a chocolate doughnut

with sprinkles.


Monday, May 21, 2007:  Into Something Rich and Strange...

Procrastination has layers...like onions (or ogres).  This week, I have had the opportunity to discover just how many layers it has.

Two Thursdays ago, I handed in what I still sincerely hope was the penultimate copy of my dissertation to my supervisor.  I am now waiting for her to finish reading it (this may take a while; it is not a short dissertation and will probably be used as a doorstop by generations of my supervisor's growing family) so that I can get all discouraged by the devastating comments she will no doubt scribble all over it.  At the moment, however, I have no work to do.  There are admittedly a few loose ends in my dissertation, but I can't deal with them until certain library books turn up...and so far, they haven't.

I am a very good procrastinator.  In fact, procrastination may be the only talent I have completely mastered.  I can put stuff off successfully for enormous stretches of time.  In the process, I appear to outside observers to be very, very busy, possibly because I procrastinate by accomplishing things.  I am always "too busy" to write a scholarly article, but I can make time to draw three and a half comics per week, practise the piano for half an hour per day, and juggle very badly every morning.  I "don't have the time" to tidy my apartment, but I can certainly find plenty of diversions on the bottomless hole that is the Internet.  If it's work, I put it off.  If it's not work, I can manipulate the space-time continuum to fit it into my schedule.

This week, I have had no work to do.  Have I written a scholarly article or cleaned my apartment?  Of course not.  I'm too busy.  I don't have the time.  Leave me alone; I'm running behind again.

What I figure has happened is this:

1)  Activity A, The Dissertation, is my priority.  Activity B, The Comic, is my way of putting off Activity A.  Activity C, Surfing the Internet, is my way of putting off Activity B.  Activities D and E, Music and Physical Exertion, have their own unique time-slots and do not eat into the times of the other Activities.  Activities F and G, Writing Something Scholarly and Cleaning My Apartment, aren't even on the chart.

2)  Activity A has been removed.  Activity B has taken its place.  Activity C, however, is not sufficiently productive; if my procrastination is not producing something, I often lose interest in it.  I need something else to fill the gap.

3)  Enter Activity H, Reading Terry Pratchett Novels.  As of the beginning of my "break," I had read all but nine of the Discworld books.  I now have five left to go.  The reason Activity H does not feature largely in my day-to-day life is that once I start a damn Terry Pratchett novel, I can't put it down until it's finished.

4)  Activity H has almost completely subsumed Activity C, and it has made Activity B feel like work.

It is terrible to find that your play has become work, especially when you're not being paid for it or getting a degree out of it at all.  Plus now that I have been immersed in Pratchettland for half a week, I find myself going around making puns in my head and trying to tell where I am by closing my eyes and feeling the pavement through the soles of my shoes.  I also have silent arguments with Mr. Pratchett, who is all about "the little voice in the back of one's head" and would probably entirely understand my need to shout at him, "You can't do that!  You can't just introduce an important plot element that seems to be driving everything happening in the story, then decide you don't know how to deal with it and burn it all down!  Yes, I know the book is too long, but it needs about four more chapters to make sense!  No no no no no!"

Luckily, I have finished all the Discworld novels in my possession.  Less luckily, my supervisor may be handing my dissertation back to me soon.  I shall be able to go back to avoiding Activity A via Activity B and not thinking of the latter as work in any way.

Hurrah...?


Monday, May 14, 2007:  ...*Chirp*

For the Lower Library crowd...to the tune of "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables," from Les Miserables...and with tongue firmly planted in cheek:

There's a grief that can't be spoken.
There's a pain goes on and on.
Empty chairs at empty tables:
Term is done, and you're all gone.

Here you plotted out your essays.
Here you studied and you swore.
Here you wished it were tomorrow.
Now it is; you're here no more.

From the chair I always sit in,
I could hear you chat away,
Sometimes, yes, a bit too loudly.
I can't hear you now!
It's kind of nice, to tell the truth.
But I know, come September,
You'll be back again with me...
Each dawn*...

Oh, my friends, my friends, I miss you,
Though you're sometimes rather rude.
Here's a "grief" that can't be spoken:
I enjoy this solitude.

Phantom faces at the window.
Phantom shadows on the wall.
Empty chairs at empty tables:
Gosh, I just don't mind at all.

Oh, my friends, my friends, don't ask me
To be sad.  Dear lord, what for?
Empty chairs at empty tables:
Too bad it's not like this more.

(Kidding.  I do actually miss you guys.  Most of the time.  Since I don't have any actual work to do at the moment.  Er...right...)

*Fine:  mid-afternoon.


Monday, May 7, 2007:  Thirteen Ways of Ranting on a Sunday

1)  And yet again, I go to bed really late and wake up really early.  This is truly beginning to annoy me.  I'm tired all the time, and I have this terrible urge to bite the heads off goldfish.  Do goldfish have heads?  I suppose they technically do, but since they don't have necks, it's hard to know just how much of a goldfish you would be chewing on if you decided to bite its head off.  I'm probably making this all more complicated than it needs to be.  Perhaps I should just bite the top off a double-chocolate Oreo and leave it at that.

2)  Why can't I throw the balls neatly from side to side in my ardent but largely futile attempts at juggling?  Why do I get the first two throws okay, then start flinging balls straight out in front of me, even when I actually tell myself, "DO NOT FLING THE BALLS STRAIGHT OUT IN FRONT OF YOU"?  Is there something wrong with my brain?  My hands?  The balls?  All three?  I'm never going to be able to do this, am I?

3)  I don't even understand how I managed to rip my pants like that.  Could a tear be any huger without actually exceeding the size of the pants?  And what a good thing I have to do laundry today, so I don't have any other pants to wear...besides the pairs that haven't fit me for years because I weigh ten pounds more than I used to, that is.

4)  Drawing...bricks...

5)  Why is no one online?  Why am I sitting all alone in my apartment early on a Sunday afternoon while my laundry fails to get entirely dry in the dryer and no one is online?  Where is everyone?  Out having fun, I suppose.  Why am I not out having fun?  What fun is there to have?  Why am I paranoid?  Who the hell am I talking to now?

6)  No allergies?  That's--oh, wait, there they are.  Today, oh joy, they are attacking my eyes instead of my nose.  Itchy itchy burny burny.  I want to duck my head in a vat of ice water, but I don't have any ice water.  Or a vat.  Never mind.

7)  How do I always manage to lose at least one handkerchief per load of laundry?  I could make a winter jacket out of all the handkerchiefs I've lost over the years...if I hadn't lost them.  Wherever they are, I'm sure they have many of my socks for company.

8)  Still no one online.  The Internet is a giant graveyard.  Chirp...chirp.  Maybe I should stop whining inside my own head and actually try to accomplish something.  But I'm loooooooonnnnnelllllyyyyyyy...

9)  Freaking...damn...power...keeps going off...and then my computer beeps at me...stop beeping.  STOP BEEPING!

10)  Why do my comics never scan straight?  I mean, you would think that once every five hundred billion years, one might not end up crooked, but no.  Is this worth getting upset about?  No, but I am grumpy and determined to take my grumpiness out on inanimate objects that don't deserve it!  Whine whine whine!

11)  Oh, golly gee, it's after three, and I haven't accomplished anything but laundry and the scanning of a few crooked comics.  Here come the allergies again.  I shall shoot them dead!  Why is no one online?

12)  My computer has now died completely, and therefore, I am not online.  I love technology.  Where it is concerned, I have the reverse of the Midas touch:  i.e., everything I touch turns to...well, you get the idea.

13)  Okay.  Time to bike to campus and find more stuff there to complain about.  I could head to Robarts and whine about the air conditioning...or I could head to Massey and whine about the summer residents...or I could sit in a random quad and whine because it isn't very warm out.  The possibilities are endless.

Here I go...


Monday, April 30, 2007:  Relatively Useless Skills Are Always More Fun to Acquire

This summer, I am going to learn to juggle.

I am a thirty-two-year-old graduate student struggling to finish her dissertation and get the hell out of the Nightmare Degree from Hades.  I already have about thirteen distinct ways to procrastinate.  And I am going to learn to juggle.  It isn't even that I might learn to juggle, or that I want to learn to juggle.  I am learning.  Right now.  Very slowly and painfully, yes, but it has begun to happen.

The good news is that the juggling practice does not actually eat into my dissertation time; I do it in the morning, when I would otherwise be wasting time in one of my thirteen distinct ways.  Another sliver of good news is that juggling is good exercise when you're just beginning because of all the time you spend bending down to pick up the balls.  My arms feel perfectly fine, but my legs are throbbing.  Who knew?

The bad news is that I expect this sudden juggling mania is the fault of deeply buried psychological issues tied to feelings of inadequacy (etc.).  I could be making that up, but I'm probably actually not.

In a sense, the urge to learn to juggle came on me fairly abruptly at Massey's end-of-year barbecue, where Joe and Ben were giving juggling lessons to a bunch of ten-year-olds and, er, me and Janna.  All my alumni friends vanished without explanation while I was in the Upper Library flinging penny-filled tennis balls around, so when I couldn't find them, I just kept on throwing balls into the air and dropping them.  I did this for hours, long after everyone else had given up, probably because in another sense, I have wanted to be able to juggle since I was about six.  Why?  No idea.  Juggling looks cool.  It's a skill.  It's (probably) even a fun skill.  If I ever have to make it across a pressure-sensitive floor while carrying three thermonuclear devices whose combined weight will set off an alarm if I hold all of them in my hands at the same time, it will be useful to know how to juggle.  Stuff like that.

And when we were taught juggling in elementary school, everyone else found it easy.  All the other eleven-year-olds were casually whirling three bean-bags around their heads while I was still tossing one from hand to hand, trying not to send it tumbling off in entirely the wrong direction.  Practice makes perfect, sure...but when you're the only kid in the room who has to practise, you start getting the sense that there's maybe something a little bit wrong with you.  I kept giving up...not because I didn't understand about practice--I was, and am, a musician, so I did, and do--but because it was clear to me that this was just another of those things--like whistling, for instance--that normal people could handle effortlessly and I wouldn't be able to master in a hundred years.  I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself when I was eleven.

I expect that by returning to juggling at this stage of my life, I am attempting to fight a battle I lost when I was eleven.  'Cause all those other eleven-year-olds grew up and got married and found jobs and now have incomes and children and pets and mortgages, and some of them are probably divorced, and the slowest kid in my class is a plant manager, and all of them could juggle, while I never could...nor am I married or employed or pregnant or even divorced.  I, in fact, have not really entered the adult world.  My acts of defiance against that world take the form of my acquisition of skills--such as whistling (learned when I was nineteen) and juggling--that every twelve-year-old takes for granted.

What I'm going to claim, however, is that I'm learning to juggle because I want to know how.  Why shouldn't I?  I'll never be a great juggler--I have problems with aiming and catching and other such incidentals--but I'm bloody well going to be competent, just because I can.  Maybe it will take me a hundred years to master.  That's okay with me.  I've got a set of juggling balls and a wall that bounces 'em back at me when I lose control instead of letting 'em roll all over the world, and anyway, I need the exercise.

Plus when you're just starting out, it feels as if you have accomplished something if you are able to keep three balls in the air for two seconds.  It may not seem like much, but it makes my day happier.


Monday, April 23, 2007:  Footnote Inadequacy Syndrome

Last week, I found myself having to read a Ph.D dissertation submitted about three years ago by a U of T Medieval-Studies student.  She was clearly a very smart student, and she had a lot of interesting things to say about medieval infancy gospels (don't ask; you really don't want to know).  However, she also wrote like a medievalist.

How, you ask, does a medievalist write?  Why should her prose be any different from--say--that of a modern historian or a student of eighteenth-century poetry?  And am I not myself a medievalist?  Do I not write like one...or, in fact, as one?

No.  I don't.  I thought I did.  I knew I wasn't quite in the same league as many medievalists, as my training in lit-crit was holding me back, but I did think that six years of mental bludgeoning by the medievalists on my committee might have nudged me into the position of at least being able to write more like a medievalist than like, say, an English student, which, as far as I'm concerned, is what I am.  As it turns out, I still do not write like a medievalist and, in fact, may never do so.

You see, medievalists love footnotes.  "Oh," you say, "so do I!"  No, actually...you have absolutely no idea what "I love footnotes" means.  The particular dissertation through which I am now slogging averages three or four notes per page.  Many of them have got to be five hundred words long.  Frequently, the page in question will have five lines of the author's writing at the very top and footnotes filling up the rest.  I cannot comprehend how anyone could ever put so much energy into something so boring.

Every time I have a committee meeting, someone brings up the subject of my own footnotes.  I don't have enough (I average just under one per page, and none of them is five hundred words long).  I don't go into enough detail.  I sometimes write a page and a half of material without any footnotes at all.  As one of my committee members said (very kindly) once:  "I read on and on for two pages, and it's very nice, but it's all Kari."  Medievalists don't appear to be allowed to have their own ideas.  They need to take thousands of pages of other people's material and condense them into a huge collection of footnotes with a few paragraphs of original text scattered here and there throughout the document.  The whole close-reading thingy that us poor, benighted English students were taught in undergrad is too...original?  Unregulated?  Unsubstantiated?  Interesting?

I have now spent years being made to feel shallow and frivolous because I write like a student of literature and not a medievalist.  This encounter with Dr. Footnote has finally convinced me that I will never be enough of a medievalist to satisfy my committee.  If that makes me shallow, it makes me shallow...but I sometimes wish that English professors who happen to belong to the Medieval Centre would not suddenly forget that there is more than one way to skin a cat...or write a paper.  Some of my colleagues finished years before me because they didn't have any footnotes at all.  One young woman explained to me that her dissertation was "not a research paper."  Okay.  How the bleeding heck did she manage to get away with that?

I am (I hope) nearing the end of my programme.  If I hand in my dissertation and my supervisor demands more footnotes, I'm not sure what I'll do, but "burst into tears" is probably a fair guess.  Did I mention that medievalists don't have a word limit?  English students do.  I'm already past it.  No more bloody footnotes.

Now perhaps I should stop Ranting and go back to reading about the infancy gospels, footnotes and all...


Monday, April 16, 2007:  Where Has All the Term-Time Gone?

Remember how when you were seven, the school year seemed to last forever?  You would sit there at your desk in the middle of June, dragging away at figuring out why twelve minus seven equalled five, and every time you glanced at your watch, another half-second would have passed.  At the end of the day, your teacher would say:  "Guess what, class?  Only two more weeks until summer vacation!"

Two more weeks?  Two weeks were a lifetime.  You could grow up, get married, have three children, and send them off to university by the time those two weeks were up.  You knew perfectly well that you would die of boredom several years before the end of the Fortnight from Hell.  The concept of time flying was not one with which you were familiar.

However many decades later, you are sitting here at your desk in the middle of April, dragging away at figuring out the significance of the map of the human genome, and every time you glance at your watch, you've wasted another year of your degree.  What the bleeding heck is going on here?

Yes, I know that many people have mused on the Phenomenon of Time Speeding Up As One Ages.  The whole concept has been turned into poems and metaphors and possibly even blockbuster Hollywood films, plus a monogrammed tea cosy and a pen with a topless woman in the barrel.  Everyone knows that children and adults see time in different ways.  What I don't think anyone has mentioned yet is that neither way is particularly fun.

Would you rather be a small child slaving over a pointless math sheet and yearning for two whole months of summer vacation that were, by virtue of being two weeks away, permanently and tragically out of reach...or a bedraggled, penniless grad student, far too many years into an unending degree that was nonetheless whooshing inexorably past?  Would you rather take a year to get through a minute or a minute to get through a year?  Yes, the child has an enormous two-month summer vacation...but it's a summer vacation that never seems to come.  Yes, the grad student approaches Christmas much more quickly...but then she blinks, and Christmas is over, along with most of the next term and any chance she has of graduating that year.

Let us shake the Fist of Rage at the Powers of Irony for this cruel, cruel trick of time perception.  However, let us not shake it too long.  In the time it has taken me to compose this Rant, I have lost another six months...


Monday, April 9, 2007:  Another Open Letter to Winter

Dear Sir:

As you may remember, we contacted you in January regarding your neglect of your many duties.  Your failure to provide snow, screaming winds, and a daily high of -35 (with wind chill factored in) worried us, making us wonder if you might be an impostor and not Mr. Winter at all.  Shortly after we expressed our concerns, your performance improved.

We remained satisfied with your job performance until just under a week ago, when we received an urgent phone call from Mr. Spring.  It seems, sir, that though your contract with us was up as of March 31, you have not left your post!  Mr. Spring tells us that your enthusiasm is so marked that you are, in fact, interfering with his work.  His buds have been blighted by frost; his robins scratch in vain at the frozen ground.  He also informs us that certain buildings, their heat turned off in anticipation of his presence, have become frigid ice-boxes.  Students are huddling in libraries in winter coats and gloves while children shiver in their classrooms.

Mr. Winter, this will not do.  You must realise that we shall have no more need of your services for the next several months.  You may, as usual, arrive early for your next job, as Mr. Fall is always willing to depart weeks before he should.  However, we do not need you now, and we are shocked--shocked--that you have taken advantage of our hospitality like this.

We are afraid, Mr. Winter, that we are going to have to let you go.

Sincerely yours,


Toronto


Monday, April 2, 2007:  Yes, I Have Been Procrastinating Like This For Years

The great Geoffrey Chaucer--he whose humour lit up the Middle Ages and whose blog is verily a thynge of  beaute and a joye for euere--has issued a challenge to his loyal readers:  he wishes us to pay tribute to his greatness in this, April, his very favourite month.  I have spent the last kajillion years explaining to everyone that Chaucer is really, really fantastic, so I find I must take part in this challenge.

To prove that my devotion is longstanding, I shall here post a parodic song I wrote many years ago (about ten), not long after I had completed an undergraduate course on The Canterbury Tales.  This course did not mark the beginning of my love affair with Chaucer's poetry, but it certainly confirmed that my crush on the fourteenth-century poet was here to stay.  Having just ploughed my way through the CTs, I decided that the best way to commemorate my devotion to them would be to mock them shamelessly.  I thus stole the tune of I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General, a well-known patter-song from The Pirates of Penzance, and rewrote it from the points of view of all the Canterbury pilgrims.  Please note that my ten-years-ago self apparently did not think it necessary to stick slavishly to Mr. Gilbert's famous three-syllable rhyme scheme.  She thus sometimes provided only one-syllable rhymes and sometimes resorted (oh, silly ten-years-ago self!) to truly drasty half-rhymes.  However, seeing as she was parodying someone who felt it was perfectly all right to rhyme "general" with "mineral" and invented the word "animalculous" so he would have something to rhyme with "calculus," I think "excrement/sex-lament" is just barely allowable.  In a manner of speaking.  In this particular context.  But never again.

Therefore, without further ado, I give you:

ALL [sans Parson]: Dance and exeunt.

We know we're not too saintly for your modern sensibilities And merely wish to please you to the best of our abilities. We swear we won't corrupt your minds or cause your hearts to harden.  Er, If you feel sinful afterwards, step over to the Pardoner. We swear we won't corrupt your minds or cause your hearts to harden.  Er, If you feel sinful afterwards, step over to the Pardoner!

Monday, March 26, 2007:  Get Thee Behind Me, Facebook

I am not as resistant to technology as I sometimes pretend to be.  I refuse to own a cell phone, but I am addicted to e-mail, have an MSN account, know the bare minimum about web design, can scan things and alter them at least slightly in Photoshop, and received a digital camera for Christmas.  I have even been known to frequent message-boards and chat rooms, and though I mock blogging, this very document is--let's face it--a blog.

Yet I refuse to join Facebook.  I am almost the only person I know who does.  I'm probably eventually going to cave and spend weeks enduring people laughing at my hypocrisy, but for now, I am definitely anti-Facebook and will continue to be so for as long as I possibly can.

This stance is fairly unreasonable, of course.  I've tried to figure out where it comes from, but I'm still not sure.  I am not automatically against every new trend and fad; I was an early Potterhead, and I have an embarrassingly bloated DVD collection.  Facebook sounds useful.  People praise it for its convenience, its practicality, and the fact that it is not MySpace.  I still can't bring myself to open an account.  I expect that my attitude is causing a lot of people to label me as (more) eccentric (than before).

Perhaps one of the things about Facebook that gets up my...jumper...is that it seems to replicate cliques in a new, improved online form.  I don't like you?  You're not my "friend."  I really don't like you?  I block you from coming anywhere near my page (Hssssssss...rowr).  Of course, I can still post derogatory comments about you on my page...and on other pages...and I can, if I like, start a whole network of people laughing at you behind your back.  Okay, I'm sure many people don't misuse the service like this...but I'm equally sure that others do.  We keep discovering whole new ways to extend high school far, far into the adult world.

I've also witnessed the Facebook mania taking over Massey, and I'm beginning to feel a little like poor Miles in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, running madly down the (information) highway screaming, "You're next!  You're neeeeeeeext!"  As far as I can tell, almost every Masseyite and former Masseyite with whom I am acquainted is a member of Facebook.  These people, many of whom live next door to each other, lead rich online social lives to which I have no access because I won't sign up.  People used to post their pictures publicly and send links to the Massey listserv; now all the pictures are on Facebook.  Yes, I am creating this problem for myself by mulishly abstaining from the Facebook frenzy, but it's still a little frustrating that I have to buy into Facebook in order to interact  fully with my friends.

As well, I simply have no time for Facebook.  I see people spending hours per day dealing with the seemingly endless messages, links, photographs, e-mails...and I am completely amazed.  Don't get me wrong:  I'm not taking a holier-than-thou attitude here.  I procrastinate more successfully than most people on earth.  I just don't have any time for this new and exciting form of procrastination.  If I signed up for Facebook, I would have to stop drawing my comic, and that I refuse to do, for the comic keeps me (relatively) sane as I grind my way towards the end of my degree.

You love Facebook?  More power to you.  I'm glad it works in your life.  It does not, currently, work in mine.  If that means I miss out on some stuff, so be it; I probably don't have time for it anyway.


Monday, March 19, 2007:  My Brain is Broken*

To the tune of "You Are My Sunshine":

My brain is broken
And filled with old cheese,
And I don't know just
What I should do:
This pile of essays
Has made me stupid.
Oh, let me pass them all on to you.

I don't like marking.
I do like eating.
If I mark nothing,
Then I don't eat.
But when my students
Misspell "Jane Austen,"
Then, somehow, hunger seems awfully sweet.

Ooh!  Here's a student
Who's very smart and
Writes lovely papers
That make me smile.
It seems that this time
She is off-topic.
I think I'll bang my head for a while.

I know these people
Are really trying.
I know that mostly
These kids mean well.
I see that this one
Forgot to proofread.
And I suspect I'm living in hell.

My brain is broken
And filled with old cheese,
And I don't know just
What I should do:
This pile of essays
Has made me stupid.
Oh, let me pass them all on to you.

*Any students who stumble across this page should note that I am writing generally.  I have, to my shame, hardly started marking yet.


Wednesday, March 14, 2007 (Because There Was No Alum Site On Monday, March 12, 2007):  Bush's DST Change Can Kiss My Shiny...Metal...

Well, I was originally going to write a diatribe on how much I hated 300, The Film That Treats Heroism So Simplistically That It Makes Me Want To Bite Someone.  However, then Sunday came along, and I turned up for Massey Belles practice an hour late because George Freaking Dubya Bush decided to go for easy environmental brownie points by bumping Daylight Savings Time up a few weeks...not that the newspapers bothered to mention this at all.  My clever little computer obligingly switched times without telling me.  So there I was, lugging an accordion up to the dining hall at what turned out to be 6:00 and not, in fact, 5:00 after all.  Oopsy.

Ever since that moment, very little has gone right...and not just for me...oh, no.  The whole world seems out of sorts.  The sun is in the wrong place; people are tired and grumpy and tripping over everything; my students spent most of their time staring blankly at me this afternoon.  Had they done their (extremely simple) assignments?  Of course they hadn't!  The alum site was down for three days.  Angela's toilet just overflowed all over her bathroom.  The weather is pretending to be spring-like, but that's not going to last.  I should not have eaten that hot dog for dinner tonight.

Thank you, George W. Bush, for depriving us of that hour.  Thank you for making waking up in the morning ever so much less happy than it already was.  And thank you, Canadian provinces, for deciding it would be a good idea to follow the Americans on this one.  Why did you?  Bush didn't say "Simon says"!  I was listening!  It's all an elaborate practical (political?) joke, and we are the butt of it!

Why do we even have DST, anyway?  Oh, I know why we have it, but why do we have it?  Do we really need it?  Why not just let time be?  I hate feeling jet-lagged when I haven't even been on a jet.  Could we not just live with the whole light-and-darkness thing, please?  I mean...people have been doing it since, well, the dawn of man.*  So it gets dark before dinner-time.  So what?  It also gets dark before dinner-time in December.  And now people are getting up in the dark...so they're using the damn electricity anyway.

If I ever go completely insane, run for Prime Minister, and somehow win the election, I am going to abolish measured time altogether.  Clocks just cause complications.  Let us regulate our days and nights by the position of the sun and stars...and if we live in Vancouver and can't see the sun and stars, let us give up time altogether, build a spaceship, and leave for a planet with fewer politicians and much taller trees.  Let us take the monkeys with us, mostly because everything is better with monkeys.

And let us never speak of this whole DST thing again.

*I would like to thank my undergraduates for providing me with this phrase.


Monday, March 5, 2007:  I Can't Think of Anything to Write...

...so here is the teeny little story I composed for last week's writing group.  I cannot pretend that it is a great story; however, it is writing, and I can genuinely not think of anything else I can use to fill this space.  Our assignment was to write a five-hundred-word story that began with the words, "George found himself awfully embarrassed by the watermelon."  Much silliness resulted.  Here is mine:


Monday, February 26, 2007:  The Thoughts That Went Through My Head As I (Stupidly) Watched the Whole Entire Oscar Broadcast

8:00 p.m.:  Is there anything more stupid than the red carpet?  Why am I watching this?  Besides the fact that I just finished eating the sushi I dropped on the ground earlier because I slipped on a manhole cover hidden beneath the snow and ended up bruising my knee, bursting a blood vessel in my hand, and destroying the styrofoam container in which my soup was held so completely that it all ended up outside the container and inside the bag...besides the fact that I just finished eating that particular sushi and don't feel like popping downstairs for half a useless hour, I mean?  Oh dear lord...breasts!  Breasts are boring!  I do not want to be staring at them!  I hope someone spills something purple on your dress, Kirsten Dunst!

8:44:  Rather tame monologue, Ellen DeGeneres.  Oh, look, it's James Bond.  His ears stick out.  Why do his ears stick out?  What's that that Nicole Kidman has clinging to her shoulder?  It looks like a huge bloody heart.  That's not real hair!

8:59:  Damn it...I can't draw properly when I'm sitting in this stupid chair.  Damn it damn it damn it...

9:27:  Penguins!

9:45:  How odd; the penguins beat Pixar.  I would be sad about this if any of the animated features this year were good enough to care about.  Bring back 2-D animation!  Bring back 2-D animation!

10:45:  Ooooooooh...is Al Gore going to win?  Is he?  Is he?..................He is.  Goodness gracious me.

10:51:  Celiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine DiiiiiiiiooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAARGH--

11:23:  Will this broadcast never end?  I need to negotiate the nightmare that is the Bloor subway line, which currently doesn't include Bay Station; it takes nine or ten billion years to get from St. George to Yonge.  And here I am, watching slinky women singing pointlessly on a stage.  This is stupid.  This is stupid.  This is stupid...

11:41:  That is not a good dress.  It's not as bad as Gwyneth's, but it's still not good.  Er...is Jack Nicholson bald?  (All the way bald, I mean...)

11:52:  Best Actress at last.  Please, let it end soon...

12:07 a.m.:  Yeah, right.  You're only giving the Oscar to Scorsese because you've stiffed him so bloody many times.  You freaking Hollywood hypocrites...why am I still watching this?  Why is George Lucas presenting this award?  Why doesn't somebody punch him?  I would like to punch him.  Shut up, Martin Scorsese.

12:12 a.m.:  Must...catch...subway.  Get this over with.  Give it to The Departed already; you know you want to.  Yep:  you did.

12:15 a.m.:  Blah blah blah blah FREEDOM upload Rant run through snow to subway silly Oscars but obviously I'll be back watching next year...


Monday, February 19, 2007:  Reading Week (Har de Har Har)

At the beginning of my first U of T Reading Week, I contracted the flu.  This was not the pale copy of the flu that everyone is always getting; this was influenza with a capital Ick.  I spent nearly two weeks in bed.  I experienced hallucinations.  At one point, I took turns with myself in the bathroom ('cause there were, you know, three of me).  It took me fifteen minutes to walk to the Grabba Jabba a thirty-second stroll from Massey (it is now closed, alas).  I had a lot of marking to do, but I was not strong enough to lift my pen.  Oh...and I had just recovered from a sprained ankle, which I had incurred just after recovering from a busted knee.  That was not a good month.

My second, fourth, fifth, and sixth Reading Weeks I spent marking.  The second and fourth were especially fun because they involved what my prof called "group marking."  She, the other T.A., and I would arrive at her office at 9:00 a.m., and we T.A.s would mark until 5:00 p.m.  We were discouraged from taking lunch breaks; we had to mark as we ate.  In my fifth year, another prof took over the teaching of this particular course (yep...I T.A.ed the same course four times)...and was given only one T.A. (i.e., me).  I had 240 hours of T.A. work that term.  During Reading Week, I marked--by myself--the same number of midterms that another T.A. and I had marked together the previous year.  However, I did do it in the comfort of my own home.  The next year, thank goodness, there were two of us again...but I did spend Reading Week marking.

I don't remember my third Reading Week, but I am ninety percent sure that I spent it having a cold.  I do know that by the end of my sixth year, it had become a given with me that I would never ever have a fun Reading Week for any reason at all.

My seventh Reading Week was once again spent marking, though this time, I was an instructor and had therefore myself been the one who had gone and scheduled the damn essay to be due just before the students went on break.

I am now beginning my eighth Reading Week.  I have not (touch wood) contracted any illnesses.  I have no marking to do.  I have a whole entire week...

...to come as close as humanly possible to finishing my bloody dissertation.  My eighth Reading Week will be spent at the library.

Just wait till next year...


Monday, February 12, 2007:  Love in the Age of Cynicism

Since I've already established myself as the stereotype of a bitter single person with self-esteem issues arising from a traumatic childhood, I shall veer slightly aside for my second anti-Valentine's-Day rant and speak about not the holiday itself but a tangentially related subject that constitutes another of my pet peeves:  the romantic comedy.

Now, when I denigrate romantic comedies (which I do frequently), people often assume that it all goes back to the bitter-single-person thing:  that, in fact, I am denigrating romance itself.  Not so.  Some of the best stories out there are what we now call "romances" (the medieval romance is a whole different animal; perhaps I shall Rant about that someday too).  Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet?  Sure, it has become a cliche, but it's also a lovely portrait of what happens when two teenagers, told "no" by their parents, decide that they are madly in love, make several incredibly stupid decisions, and--as teenagers are wont to do--crash and burn spectacularly, albeit without the usual chance to learn from their mistakes and try it all over again with different teenagers.  The classical tale of Orpheus and Eurydice?  He loves her so deeply that he follows her to the land of the dead...and wins her back, on the condition that he not look behind him on the long journey back up to the waking world.  Because he loves her--because he is worried about her--he does look back just before they reach the surface.  He looks back...and she goes back, while Orpheus spirals the opposite way into a sort of madness.  The story is simple and tragic and perfect; it has been milked by writers and poets and filmmakers for centuries (for a recent example, see Moulin Rouge).

There are other examples, obviously.  Most of them are tragedies.  "Comic" romances (i.e., those that end with weddings) are common enough, but they tend to be rather forgettable.  They've also always bothered me because they often skim over the whole process of "falling in love" (if you must call it that).  Even Romeo and Juliet, which involves love at first sight, makes more sense:  the kids are good-looking and probably not too bright...they see each other across a crowded room...each represents something forbidden and thus exciting to the other...etc....etc.  Anyway, it all ends in tears.  With a comedy, you have to suspend your disbelief  enough to accept that Alpha and Beta are going to meet under trying circumstances, hate each other for about a third of the story, fall madly and reluctantly in love in a space of about three days, and, after various misunderstandings, kiss in an elevator and live happily ever after.  Yes, I object to such machinations in older literature as well...but Hollywood has turned this kind of improbable plot into an "art"-form.

What has happened to the idea of the romance?  Not the romantic comedy, but the love story designed to rip your heart out, chew it into bits, and spit it all over the carpet?  Where are the movies that make us feel genuine feelings, not bore us half to death as we grind through predictably trite plotlines in search of some absent Deeper Meaning?  (Okay, okay, I know...they're in Europe.  Sometimes.  But European film has its own problems.)  When romantic comedies are done well--When Harry Met Sally comes to mind--they can be excellent.  I can forgive When Harry Met Sally quite a lot because its two central characters are people, not walking, talking cliches.  It's just that every romantic comedy since When Harry Met Sally has had the same plot, and has, moreover, followed it mindlessly.  Stories are patterns of repetition, yes...but if you're going to tell a story that has been told before, find an angle or a twist or a theme that is different, unique, new.

And once in a while, write a tragedy.  Love is a many-splendoured thing, and it deserves some tears every so often.


Monday, February 5, 2007:  Sith Ech of Hem Recovered Hath Hys Make

Technically, it's a little too early to start ranting about Valentine's Day.  However, I mean to claim that it is actually never too early to start ranting about Valentine's Day and that, in fact, this rant is a belated reference to this year's Valentine's Day, while next week's rant will be a timely reference to next year's Valentine's Day.  Words can actually not adequately express my loathing for this "holiday."  I hate it.  I mean that.

[At this point, I would like to admit that a large part of this loathing doubtless derives from the fact that I have never had a chance to participate in Valentine's Day; I am thus unfairly bitter and vindictive, plus nursing memories of high-school rejection.  I realise that none of this is really the fault of Valentine's Day itself.  Nonetheless, I need to project my feelings somewhere...so the relatively innocuous day of St. Valentine it is.]

The realisation that my attitude is a bad one will now prompt me to force myself to name five good things about VD...er, V-Day...er, whatever.

These five good things are:

1)  Geoffrey Chaucer (may his modern-day doppelganger never stop blogging) is the author of the best Valentine's poem ever.  The Parlement of Foules is a dream-vision in which a clueless narrator finds himself witnessing an anual rite:  every February 14, all the birds in the world come together to choose their mates.  The later bits of the poem revolve around the problems created when each of three male eagles all insists that a single female should love him...and him alone.  Nature gives the female eagle free choice of the males (at her leisure), and the poem ends without any of the males getting any nooky at all.

2)  The fact that almost all Valentine's advertisements include nauseating amounts of the colour pink ensures that said colour does not make all that many appearances at other times of the year, with the dubious exception of Easter (Easter pink tends to be less eye-twistingly bright, anyway).

3)  Valentine's Day gives perpetually single people a good excuse to be bitter.  Ordinarily, single people are expected to shut up and stop whining; on V-Day, they aren't.  Oh, sure, couples are laughing smugly at them and saying, "Remember when we were like that, poopsy-woopsy?"  Yet on Valentine's Day, a single person who accidentally tips an entire box of salt into a smugly laughing attached person's breakfast cereal is actually being cheered on by the Powers that Be.  Remember, kids:  on February 14, going "Nyah-nyah-nyah!" and throwing ice-balls at gooey couples necking in the quad is allowed.

4)  Buying the most sickening Valentine's Day card possible, addressing it, "Fwom youw pwethiouth widdow secwet admiwew...have a gweat Vawentine's Day!  Kissy!", and leaving it in the mailbox of your worst enemy is pretty damn satisfying, actually.*

5)  On February 15, all the leftover V-Day chocolates go on sale.  Do you have any idea what a great freaking thing that is?  I can almost forgive the holiday for existing just for the sake of Sobeys' bin 'o cheap chocolate.  Heck, if we could leave all the nuzzling out of it, I wouldn't mind having another V-Day in March.

Good night...sleep well...and dream of heart-shaped candy boxes on sale for $1.99.

*No actual fake Valentines were sent in the composition of this diatribe.


Monday, January 29, 2007:  Because I Would Not Stop For Death...

I am writing this on Sunday afternoon, two days into the Massey Murder Game.  As I predicted last week, the College has filled with psychopaths.  I seem to be one of them; I was earlier a bit of a stooge for a Junior Fellow, and on Saturday, I lied to all his friends.  He has now made his kill, and his victim officially hates both him and me (under the Murder Game definition of the word "hates").

However, no puppet-masters have emerged yet this year.  There are some small and ever-shifting alliances, but no one participant has enslaved the minds and souls of his or her neighbours.  I don't think anyone has more than four kills...and that honour belongs to a moonlighting alumnus, John Neary.  Though obsessive behaviour abounds, it does not yet seem to have led anyone to spend the night in somebody's bathtub or travel to Mississauga in order to corner a victim.  The 2007 Murder Game is almost...well, not civilised...but less uncivilised than usual.

This is actually quite disappointing.  I'm still waiting for one of the players to do something outrageously cruel.  Where are the bloodthirsty killers of yesteryear?  Where are the mild-mannered classicists who transform into slavering absolute dictators?  Where are the twitching, coffee-fueled paranoiacs who scream and flee when perfect strangers pass them in the street?  Where are the evil stooges who spend six hours a day staking out the rooms of their masters' victims, then turn around late in the game and betray those masters to the highest bidder?  Where, in fact, are the real players of the Massey Murder Game?

Gone.  The psychos of yore have vanished, lost in the landscapes of Academe and Corporate Law.  We shall not see their like again...nor hear the pad-pad of their shoeless feet on the cold orange tiles...nor shrink in terror from the sound of a cold, merciless voice hissing down the telephone, "Hello.  You're going to die today.  See you soooooooooon..."


Monday, January 22, 2007:  Take Me Away From All This Death

As you all know, the Massey College Murder Game takes place in late January or early February every year.  The 2007 version will begin this coming Friday and end on Monday night.  I may just have more to say about it in my next Rant as well, for I work in the Lower Library and am likely going to see a lot of death on the weekend.

For now, however, I would simply like to point out what has always struck me as the most ironic aspect of the Murder Game:  its claim to be a "mid-term stress-reliever" meant to bring a bit of light hilarity to College life...in conjunction with its simultaneous ability to ruin friendships, destroy relationships, and turn the sweetest, most universally likeable Junior Fellows into megalomaniac psychopaths who drive half the Fellowship to hysteria and the other half to something close to actual murderous rage.

The idea of the Murder Game is, in principle, harmless enough.  Despite its name, it is basically a glorified game of tag.  Half of the funny Massey stories in existence revolve around the silly things Masseyites do in order to "kill" each other.  I can still reel off a list of these, starting with Shoeless Iota's* sprint across a snow-covered quad with coffee and Danish in hand (he lost the shoes--and the breakfast--somewhere in the middle of his dash) and including such moments of giddy fun as the Time Kappa Hid Under the Pile of Coats and Scared the Bleeding Heck Out of Lambda, the Time Mu Invited His Killer Into a Lonely Hallway in Order to Discuss a Strategy That Would, For Obvious Reasons, Do Him No Good at All, and the Time Iota Went Completely Mad With Power and Used His Mindless Puppets to Initiate a Great Slaughter in the Dining Hall.  Without the Murder Game, Masseyites would be reduced to telling each other stories about the Time the DVD Player Broke Just As Everyone Was About to Start the Lord of the Rings Marathon.

Unfortunately, at the centre of each of these funny stories is an uptight, extraordinarily intelligent, driven Masseyite...someone capable of spending eighteen hours perfecting a PowerPoint presentation or trying for the bonus marks on a take-home exam.  These people all start the Murder Game by saying, "Yeah, I don't really want to play, but I'll sign up and get killed on the first night."  They promptly go on to try to win by any means necessary.

Nu was a poet.  She had a tiny little voice and a habit of taking teensy mincing steps; she rarely moved quickly and usually thought before she spoke or acted.  She phoned each of her victims in order to say, "Hello.  I'm going to kill you."  After dispatching each victim, she did a little murder dance over the still-twitching corpse.  Near the end of the game, she calmly stabbed her best friend in the back, thus winning decisively.

Xi had a "murder outfit":  black shirt, black pants, black toque, black socks (no shoes)....and pigtails.  She crept around the basement, dispatching people with great ease and ingenuity.  Like Nu, she was a quiet type; also like Nu, she was small and delicate of build.

Iota's rampage was funny in hindsight, but at the time, it caused a lot of stress and paranoia.  Iota was a classicist who rarely opened his mouth in public and would sit through entire Massey dinners in silence.  His third year playing the Murder Game saw him gathering together an alliance consisting of  himself, Omicron, and Pi.  Also still alive at the end of the game, after these three had almost finished wreaking havoc, were Rho and the aforementioned Mu, who had formed their own mini-alliance.  Iota was Omicron's killer...Omicron was Rho's...Rho was Mu's...Mu was Pi's...and Pi was Iota's.  If Pi had stabbed Iota in the back, he could have ended up tying for first place; instead, he mindlessly went along with Iota's evil plan.

Just after the bell rang for dinner on what turned out to be the last day of the Murder Game, Iota killed Omicron, with Omicron's agreement.  They wrote the kill up after everyone had gone upstairs to eat; what followed was possible only because Mu and Rho thought that Omicron was still alive.  Halfway through dinner, Omicron, who had placed herself strategically near Mu, convinced the latter that she was tired of following Iota's instructions and was defecting to Mu and Rho's alliance.  She told Mu that Pi was downstairs in the bathroom; he just had to wait outside for Pi to emerge.  Rho would be safe upstairs because Omicron would act as her protection.

Mu was, by this point in the game, mildly delusional; he had been chasing Pi for days and become completely paranoid in the process.  He lost his head and went running downstairs.  Iota killed Rho, then followed Mu, who was by this point standing outside the bathroom, screaming at Pi, "I killed you!  I got you!" while Pi screamed back, "No, you didn't!  I was still in the bathroom!"  The Master wandered by, noticed the confrontation, and said, "Mu, who's still alive upstairs?"

As Mu turned an alarming shade of purple, Iota appeared and killed him, thus winning the game.  Rho has probably not forgiven him to this very day.

Some of you will also remember the recent...interesting situation...in which Sigma and Tau joined themselves at the hip and were impossible to separate until they had ensured Sigma's win...a situation that echoed a similar debacle a few years ago in which a huge alliance committed ritual suicide so that one of their number, Upsilon, could win without expending much effort at all.  Neither of these episodes was quite as sociopathic as the others mentioned above, but they involved a great deal of intense concentration on the part of the participants, none of whom got much work done that weekend.  I have also seen people screaming madly at each other over the definition of a room, trying to smoke a victim out of his residence room by spraying deodorizer under his door, installing an extremely loud motion-detector alarm in someone's hallway, gaining entry to a private law function in order to kill a Junior Fellow there, and hiding in a bathroom all night in hopes that a victim would turn up.  Masseyites take this game very, very, very, very...very...seriously.

As an alumna, I wish them joy of their mid-term stress-reliever and hope that the Weekend of Death brings all the peace and tranquility everyone always pretends to claim it does.

*As with the ghost stories I posted on November 27, 2006, I am here employing Greek letters as pseudonyms for these Junior Fellows.  A lot of you will know who they are anyway, but Google now finds this site fairly easily, so...


Monday, January 15, 2007:  Everyone's Talking About Procrastination

In the past two weeks or so, I have read at least five or six articles about various eminent scholars who have spent years researching procrastination and have come up with airtight theories regarding why certain people continually put off work they absolutely have to do.  I have learned about structured procrastination, chronic procrastination, procrastination on procrastination, and procrastination as a creative stimulus, as self-harm, and as a mark of intelligence, anxiety, or depression.  I have discovered that procrastinators are self-destructive, lacking in confidence, brilliant, psychologically maimed, and perfectly normal in every way.

It is obvious to me that all these eminent scholars have written all these eminent articles because they are procrastinating on their real work.  I mean...writing about procrastination is like writing about chocolate ice cream.  I could go and develop all these theories about why chocolate ice cream tastes so darn good, but I would be basing such theories on my own perceptions of a limited number of brands of chocolate ice cream, all of which would taste slightly different for slightly different reasons and would not strike other chocolate-ice-cream aficionados in the same way they had struck me anyway.  You want to write about procrastination?  Whose?  Which kind?  Under what circumstances?  Construct your pretty theories; I still like the one-litre tubs of procrastination I can pick up cheap at Sobeys.

Besides...why demystify procrastination?  It is what it is.  It is a sort of skewed, backward version of the Force.  It does not need to be broken down into its component midi-chlorians (quite frankly, neither did the Force, but that's a whole different Rant).  Without procrastination, Hamlet would have sprinted directly from his ghostly rendez-vous to a bloody appointment with his uncle, and the play would have been over by the beginning of Act II.  Without procrastination, either Godot would have turned up at the crossroads on time or Vladimir and Estragon would have got tired of waiting for him quite quickly and gone off somewhere for a beer.  Without procrastination, my dissertation would have been done in 2004, but that, again, is a whole different Rant.

Leave procrastination be.  It may do more harm than good, but it has also given rise to a heck of a lot of decent literature, often with ghosts in.  We should celebrate it, not pick it to bits.  I plan to tell the eminent scholars this.

Tomorrow...


Monday, January 8, 2007:  An Open Letter to the Season We are Having Right Now, Whatever It Is

Dear Sir:

We are writing to express our extreme concern at the results of your presence amongst us.  Back in early November, we cautiously welcomed you.  You claimed to be Mr. Winter, and though we thought you much altered, we could see the resemblance (something about the eyes).  We decided to give you the benefit of the doubt and at least allow you to settle in.  When, at the end of that same month, you began to produce flurries and patches of frost, we were reassured that we had made the right decision.

Yet this spurt of industry has since given way to the type of indolence that, frankly, we expect of Mr. Spring.  Though it is now approaching the midpoint of January, we have yet to see you create one decent snowfall.  On Friday, January 5, the high temperature was thirteen degrees Centigrade.  People were walking--and even biking--around in T-shirts and light jackets.  There has been no frostbite.  There have been no happy children taking their first precious toddling steps on the skating rink at Nathan Philip Square.  Canadians who, in October, told temporary residents of their fair country, "This isn't cold.  You haven't experienced cold.  Wait until January; then you'll be cold" have been shamed, unmasked as (unwitting!) liars by your capricious behaviour.  We are shocked and appalled that you have exposed us to such a situation.

Mr. Winter (if that is your real name), we demand some effort on your part.  We engaged you in good faith and have, thus far, been disappointed; do not think that we will be afraid to take legal action if you continue to flaunt the terms of your contract.  If you are not Mr. Winter at all--if you are, in fact, an impostor--we ask that you reveal the location of your missing counterpart and allow him to resume his post immediately.  We shall not tolerate your contemptuous, and contemptible, neglect of your duties any longer.

Please reply at your earliest convenience.

We remain,

Sincerely yours,


Toronto.


Monday, January 1, 2007:  Well, That's Kind of Depressing

I'm writing this on New Year's Eve, the one day of every year on which I generally sit back and reflect on what I have accomplished in the past twelve months.  Usually, it can all be summed up in two little words:

Not much.

I have not brought about world peace.  I have not found a viable and globally applicable solution to poverty, famine, disease, environmental destruction, or telemarketers.  I have not written the Great Canadian Novel or even, you know, the Great Canadian Radio Play.  I am not taken seriously by, well, most people.  Every time I turn around, I develop another minor but annoying health problem.

My dissertation is still not done.

See...the reason people generally go out and get drunk on New Year's Eve is that going out and getting drunk stops them thinking about stuff like that.  The Massey tradition of the New Year's Eve Polar Bear Swim has the added advantage of stopping participants thinking about anything except maybe where the nearest towels are.  It's when there are no parties that you start brooding and feeling sorry for yourself and going, "Damn it, I'm behind again.  Why didn't I bring any work home with me this Christmas?"  And then you read some Terry Pratchett, and things are briefly all right, though only until you get to the bit about the elephants.

Tomorrow, I shall be all cheery and optimistic, and I shall pretend to myself that next year at this time, I won't be sitting on this very couch, reflecting on how much of everything I didn't get done in 2007.  Today, I'm not quite at the point where I can do that, even though I just had ice cream with chocolate sauce on it, plus a very interesting type of fruit cake that I think everyone should probably try someday.  (It had cherries and peaches and stuff in it, and grapes as well, but the grapes weren't alone, and there weren't all that many of them, and...well...down with Massey grape cake!  *Kari runs and hides from Brenda*)

Happy New Year.  May your 2007 be less unproductive than your 2006.  And may there always be ice cream with chocolate sauce on it, plus Terry Pratchett novels.  Except not the bit about the elephants.


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