Showing posts with label Halifax Diary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Halifax Diary. Show all posts

Les mels et les courriels en deux milles onze

Last Monday I took my first French class in over a decade, at the Alliance Française a couple of blocks from my house.  I suddenly realized that, in the time since my last class, the internet happened.  In a big way.  And boy did it produce a lot of vocabulary.  I looked at the page of my workbook and thought, "What the hell is a mel?".


There were deeper problems, however.  I didn't know how to express any date in the twenty-first century because the last time I said a date in French it began with "mille neuf cents."  It had become so automatic that I was paralyzed with indecision when I had to begin a year any other way.

It was also the first time I had been a student in the classroom in seven or eight years, and it's really hard to go back to being a pupil when you are used to being the teacher.  I had to remind myself constantly that when you are the student, you shouldn't be doing more than 50% of the talking in any one class....


Sunday Salon: The Cut Direct and the Puff Oblique

Sunday, January 16, 2011


Internal June, External January




It's snowing again in Nova Scotia.  Having done my dutiful and invigorating round of civically-minded shoveling, I'm burrowing in for a day of reading and course prep.  It's going to be a week of Ibsen and Chekhov and Shaw (leavened by an exploration of the Icarus myth across the ages that I'll link to  a lecture on intertextuality and plagiarism that somehow heavily features the Beyoncé video for "Single Ladies").   My neighbors just rang the doorbell to give me cinnamon rolls as a thank you for shoveling the walkway. Life could definitely be a lot worse.

[There was a moment earlier in the week when the specter of a less than Little Women-worthy society crossed my neighborhood. Leaving the house, I encountered my neighbor on the other side, hanging up her laundry in the freezing air.  I greeted her in jolly tones.  And she gave me the cut direct.   I felt ready to succumb to a fit of the vapors.  This was very un-Nova Scotian.

A friend quickly sent me to this definition of the verb "to cut" from The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811), a book I heartily wish to absorb in its entirety into my everyday usage:
To renounce acquaintance with any one is to cut him. There are several species of the cut. Such as the cut direct, the cut indirect, the cut sublime, the cut infernal, &c. The cut direct, is to start across the street, at the approach of the obnoxious person in order to avoid him. The cut indirect, is to look another way, and pass without appearing to observe him. The cut sublime, is to admire the top of King’s College Chapel, or the beauty of the passing clouds, till he is out of sight. The cut infernal, is to analyze the arrangement of your shoe-strings, for the same purpose.
Ok, I replied, to be honest it might have been the cut indirect.  She didn't cut across the alley to avoid me.  But she was hanging up laundry at the time, and that sort of tied her down.  I would have preferred either the cut infernal or the cut sublime.  (I'll have to start practicing those.)  If she was looking at her clothesline when I said "hello" from five feet away, does that make it a cut sublime?  I certainly hope so.

My mother (who birthday it is today - Happy Birthday!) joined the debate: "This reminds me," she said, "of the description of various forms of PR in Sheridan's The Critic, as expounded by the expert, Mr. Puff: 'puffing is of various sorts: the principal are the puff direct, the puff preliminary, the puff collateral, the puff collusive, and the puff oblique, or puff by implication.'  Maybe you could use one of these on your neighbor to improve relations."

My friend S, a scholar of the Renaissance, brought her expertise to bear with some sobering words: "Better than the lie direct -- that would have led irretrievably to a duel, unless you had thought of an 'if'."

Happily, it didn't come to that.  I don't have it in me to get up at dawn again this week.

In fact, I saw my neighbor hanging laundry again two days ago.  She smiled broadly at me: "Hallo."  "Hallo," I replied, much relieved.  It turns out that there is a very fine line between stone-cold and stone-deaf.)

There's been a lot more activity at Sycorax Pine lately, due in part to my new policy of attempting at least "Lightning Reviews" of a few lines for everything I watch and read.  I'm a few behind right now, but feeling good - come by and take a look around to see the changes.

So, if I have time to venture beyond work today, what will I be doing?  Finishing Betina Krahn's The Husband Test (my first of Krahn's, and a fun gambol). Starting Lady Audley's Secret, which promises to be no less scandalous, and possibly considerably more so. Watching the end of Secretary (I've been on a bit of a Maggie Gyllenhaal streak lately, and I'm not enjoying it at all).  Tuning in for the next installment of Downton Abbey, which I'm really lapping up.  As I said in the comments at Read React Review,
There have been some moments that twinged my anachronism radar, but I really appreciate the multi-level (and relatively unsentimental) treatment of how class functioned in complex and codependent ways in a country house setting. The key moment for me was when the new middle-class heir (who until then I had assumed the modern spectator was meant to identify with) sweeps into town and tells his valet that he has a “silly job for a grown man.” Brilliantly rendered by both actors and the director.
Trying to finish up Geraldine Brooks's March, which hasn't (at the halfway point) impressed me to the extent that it did my book club mates.  I am assured that at some point in the next twenty pages, however, it will become unputdownable.  I do want to forge ahead to the point where Marmee's voice enters the narrative.  Oh, and listening to Nina Simone.  I'll leave you with the lady herself on this fine Sunday:


Through the wardrobe doors

Friday, January 14, 2011

The Cod, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Friday, January 14, 2011


Dear D,

We miss you when it snows.  Can Hawai'i do this?

love,
SP and Halifax


P.S. When it snows, I feel like I live in a Louisa May Alcott novel.  Or perhaps, as my mother suggests, the street-lamped forests of Narnia.

Sunday Salon: On handcuff parties and the nature of the university

Sunday, January 9, 2011


I slept in this morning, and when I made my bleary way downstairs from my dark attic bedroom I was shocked to find a world of white.  There's a particular kind of light that fills my house only during a snowstorm: a sunny day casts a golden glow on all the surfaces, but the reflection off the fallen snow lights my ceilings.  And the light itself is so profoundly colorless: it feels like a film crew has brought a powerful flash and set it off outside my windows, and the whole house is suspended in the moment of the flash.

How was my week?  Well, it mostly revolved around those odd first classes of the semester in which there is little to discuss and much practical work to be done.  I asked one class of students to share (by way of introduction) "the most dramatic thing you've ever done."  Ten minutes later I found myself saying these words: "Dare I ask what - precisely - a handcuff party is?".  

Later that day, I asked my first year students to write and then talk about why we have universities (what purpose they serve for individuals or societies).  Long pause.  Then: "Well, a university degree serves as a filter that lets employers know who should make the first cut in hiring." (It took a long discussion to unpack the implications of that one.)

Then, a second answer: "Universities employ people.  Lots of people around here would be jobless if it weren't for the universities."

"Well, yes," I said, "this is an industry, and it often operates on industrial models."

It wasn't until six or seven answers in that anyone mentioned any intellectual, philosophical, or creative value that the university adds to its community or individual members.  And they might have just come up with those answers to make me feel better.  I probably looked a bit wilted. 

But this is what made the whole conversation so fascinating.  From the point of view of someone who believes in the power of learning to enrich your life in more than just the most literal way, it was pretty distressing, but what struck me was how incredibly clear an economic perspective my students have, even if that economic outlook is (for reasons of cultural context - their generation, their location, etc.) an incredibly bleak one.

Of course, I would prefer my students not see their education as a purely economic transaction - they give money, I give degrees (and thus better jobs).  What is the degree supposed to signify apart from their ability to give money?

We actually got down to this later in the discussion.  A student made a really elegant argument about the place of higher education in both developing and developed countries, and then argued that (as a filter) the university system also serves to filter out people on many other bases than merit or work ethic.  So we spent some time talking about what determines who gets the privilege of higher education. ("How much money you or your parents have." "What your grades are, and what your high school was like." "What kind of scholarship aid you have access to." We didn't even mention "Where you live"....)

Anyway, I just got in from a half hour of spirited shoveling and now I'm settling down to prepare the next three madcap days of classes.  I've got some Ibsen and some Irish Drama to prep, as well as a lecture on the nature of literature and reading as the solving of riddles.  Meanwhile, my book group is coming to me on Tuesday night (I am going to have to sprint to make it back in time from my Tuesday class), so I am torn between the pressures of work, a creeping anxiety about how clean my house may or may not be, and a need to make my way through our chosen book for this meeting - Geraldine Brooks's March, which I am only a few dozen pages into.  

On the blogging front, I have quite the backlog of reviews I want to get written.  (But not today.  No, not today.)  But I've also changed the format of my Reading and Watching Logs on Sycorax Pine: now each listings of a film, book, or play I've completed is accompanied by a micro-review, to ensure that I crystallize my impression of a text before I move on to the next one.  You can always find these logs at the bottom of my new blog design, or by clicking the links above.