Top of the list of things Margaret Atwood has taught me: you have to protect your five-hole.

I've had Atwood on the brain this week.  The last two first-year classes have featured a comparison of Atwood's "you fit into me" and "Miserable" by the band Lit, as well as close analyses of the intros to Dexter and True Blood as demonstrations of defamiliarization through framing and juxtaposition.  Now I'm gearing up for next time's use of the Avett Brothers to demonstrate metaphor and simile, followed by a hearty romp through Ovid.

Also making an appearance next class: Magritte, Tolkien, Plath, Anglo-Saxon riddles, George Elliott Clarke, the short film "Logorama," and the Beatles.  I seem to remember that when my late college advisor wrote me a rec letter for grad school, he praised the "Coleridgean quality" of my "connective spirit."  This one's for you, Dr. K.

Ugh.  It's been a bruising week.  (My workweek really runs from Saturday to Wednesday, rather unconventionally.)

In Monday, I began my day by striding confidently into work, stepping (in snow boots) into a wet, icy puddle in the front hall, sliding dramatically, flinging my weight to the side in an effort to regain balance, forgetting that I am carrying 30 lbs of books on that side, and taking a huge, banana-peel, silent-movie pratfall.

Hot tea in hand goes flying into the air and down on my face as I stare at the ceiling from the cold, wet floor.  Next thing I know I am surrounded by students from my first-year class: "Oh my god - are you alright?".

Farewell, professorial dignity.

I don't know which was more bruised, my hip or my pride.  (Wait: it's my hip.  Several days on, it and my knee sport fist-sized matching purple-and-gold welts.) The first thing I did after picking myself up, however, was to check to see that I was actually wearing pants.  It could have been, after all, a teacher's nightmare.  Alas, I was wearing pants, and was totally awake.

How many stories have you read today that end with that sentence?

Last year, my first as an emigrée, was also the first year I had ever been apart from my family on Thanksgiving.  It hit me hard.  I spent the whole day wandering about in a ravenous daze, compulsively eating and never feeling satisfied.  It was like something out of Dante's Inferno.

Never again, I vowed.  So this summer I arranged my entire teaching schedule for the year around this one week, making it possible for me to go home on the day before Thanksgiving without missing any class.  Here's what happened:

Rapid exit from my last class of the day, while the students are doing their end-of-term evaluations of me.  (My students are very excited to hear about my travels; one even writes me an email the next day, hoping that I have a good time in Detroit, a city I have no connection to and would not be visiting.  I don't know.) Panicked exodus to airport, where I have arrived absurdly early for a flight I had forgotten was domestic and not international (I'm connecting to my hometown of Washington, DC through Montreal).

Halifax doesn't want to let me go.  Freezing fog.  45 minute delay while we de-ice.

Result?  Panicked run in high heels (still dressed for lecturing, you see) through the Montreal airport.  They have been holding the plane for me, and are just closing it as I hobble up to the gate.  I collapse exhaustedly into my seat with a sigh of triumph, and we begin to taxi to the runway.

An hour later: still taxiing. Right back to the gate.  Unnamed technical trouble.  We disembark into the now-empty airport.

"Mesdames et messieurs, we apologize for the problem that has brought your plane back to Montreal.  Your replacement plane will arrive from New York in an hour; we will groom and then board you.

"The terminal is closed, but you are free to use the restrooms if accompanied by a uniformed escort.

"There is an exercise occurring in the terminal: if you hear dogs barking and people screaming, don't be alarmed."

But the only person screaming was a fellow American passenger who (surrounded by Quebecois travelers who received the news of the delay with Gallic shrugs and jokes about how there was undoubtedly a woman at the root of it) roundly and screechingly cursed the gate agent first in English and then in salty, fluent French.

I just sat there, working my way through Mt. Grademore, thinking, "The closest thing the modern experience has to the ancient Athenian feeling of total subjection to fate is traveling on Thanksgiving weekend.  Well, and the DMV."





Nineteen at our Thanksgiving tables.  Many of them people I haven't seen in a couple of years, because of the Thanksgiving manqué last year.  Documented for the ages (and in Dutch!) by one of our friends, who brought two visitors from Iceland for their first Thanksgiving.  Because the best Thanksgivings are the ones involving strangers as well as friends.

I realize that it really isn't Thanksgiving until the tale of my father's groping Jackie Kennedy is told. 

"Was she wearing a corset?", our friends asked.

"Yes.  She was heavily girdled," my father replied, and got a faraway expression in his eyes that indicated that this - this moment in his early twenties - might be the most vivid single memory of his whole life.

"How did it happen?", the Thanksgiving collective nudged.

"I was standing in the hallway backstage at Carnegie Hall after a concert, holding my viola above my head to protect it from the crush, when I noticed huge men standing on either side of me, with hearing aids in their ears and huge bulges under their arms.  Then I realized that there was a small woman with big hair standing in front of me, and I thought, 'This is the opportunity of a lifetime.'"

The rest is history, and Thanksgiving legend.  As my Canadian friend said, "It's important to have traditions." Don't you all remember learning about the first Thanksgiving, when the pilgrims regaled their new friends with tales of their pre-conversion encounters with Anne of Denmark in the hallways of Greenwich?  I do.

We heard the tale that night, and again two days later at the traditional post-Thanksgiving dim sum with all the same people.  What say you, Père Sycorax?  Did I do it justice here?
Some people watch football on Thanksgiving.  I can't get into a sport that is a battle of tactics instead of a drama of character.  So instead I spent Thanksgiving addicting my parents to Friday Night Lights.  It's a hard sell: Texas, sports dramas, beautiful people, American productions, and high school narratives all rank high on the list of things my parents are NOT intrigued by.  All I could do to counteract these demerits was assert that it is really, really good.

I only realized upon my third viewing of the opening season of FNL how exceedingly Canadian Tim Riggins's Texan accent is.  I keep waiting (giddily) for him to be drawn into more conversations aboat Texas, and how he never wants to get oat of his beloved home town.  Texas forever!

I think I am beginning to miss Canada.

Continuing tales from Mt. Grademore:

Best student slip from today's Mt. Grademore?

Agamemnon was blind to his fat, and was only truly able to see his flaws in death.

Best response from a friend to my exclamations over the brilliant Freudianism of this slip?

Well, I don't think they had very good mirrors back then.

My Metatheatre class ended with an extra credit viewing of the brilliant Slings and Arrows (if you haven't seen it, go get your hands on it RIGHT NOW).  My students' response?

Students:     That was better than it had any right to be.

I:     What do you mean?

Students:     Well, I mean: it's Canadian.  And old.

Let's be clear: we're talking about a 2003 show here.  I can feel myself getting desiccated and crotchety even as I listen to them.

I:     Come on.  It's not that old.

Students:     Please.  Did you see those cell phones?  They weren't Will Smith Fresh Prince big, but they were pretty big.

I: [defensively]      OK, well: it's not that old.  But it is Canadian.  Does anything strike you as quintessentially Canadian about the theatricalism here?  Anything that reflects the particular status of theatre in Canada?

     [The air between us fills with the awkward awareness of our generational and national differences.]

Students:      Um, I don't think people our age really think there is a difference between Canadian and American theatre.

And with that cheering assertion of ahistorical universalism, the term drew to a close.



Today's gem mined from Mt. Grademore (from a quiz on Racine's Phèdre):

I am not always in agreeance when people say something is phallic, but, ooh boy, is this phallic.  There is quite obviously a sexual subtext, but I think she'd find being stabbed a lot less satisfying than her rather breathy words make it seem.

Let's hear what Phaedra has to say for herself, shall we?

Here is my heart.  Your blade must pierce me there.
In haste to expiate its wicked lust
My heart already leaps to meet your thrust.

(When my students performed this scene on extra credit performance day, Hippolytus couldn't stop blushing and grinning.  And Phaedra couldn't help but put a, well, textually rich emphasis on the lines, "If you'll not stain your hand with my abhorred / and tainted blood, lend me at least your sword," accompanying the final words with an ambiguous hand gesture.)

The student was rightfully struck by this scene.  A week later, on his exam, he said this while defining the neoclassical concept of "decorum" (a type of propriety that governs the behavior - amorous and otherwise - of characters based on their class, gender, age, and profession):

Phaedra never actually does anything to Hippolytus sexually, but she eyes his sword more than the average passerby.

One of my students just sent me an email that ended with an order:

Marry Christmas!

Wow, I thought, I think I'll decline.  Based on about four different political principles.

I may very well have experienced a new zenith in my professorial dignity on Monday when, comparing Bel-Imperia's attitude towards romance in The Spanish Tragedy to the TV series The Walking Dead, I found myself uttering these words:

I guess the take-home message of today's class is that, come the zombie apocalypse, love becomes a matter of standing-in, of substitution, of surrogation.

My students somehow felt it was perfectly natural for the noble Bel-Imperia to slot Horatio into his dead best friend's role as her lover immediately upon hearing of the former beloved's death.


"Doesn't that strike you as a very ... utilitarian attitude towards love?", I asked.

"No!", they replied.  "Who else would you want your lover to end up with after you died but your best friend?"

"Hmm," I said.  "So in The Walking Dead we feel perfectly sympathetic with the cop protagonist's wife taking up with his partner when she thinks her husband is either in a permanent coma or zombified?"

"No," some shot back, instantly.  "That's awful.  How could she betray him like that?  And so soon after the zombie mayhem started!!"

"But ZOMBIES have taken over the earth!," others cried.  "We all need to band together however we can! Who can blame her for seeking solace an assistance, someone to replace her husband?  She's just trying to SURVIVE."


"Well, that's how Bel-Imperia feels," I said.  "The disintegration of the system of aristocratic justice is her zombie apocalypse.  But it is still utilitarian - she is just as interested in the role to be filled as she is in who fills it.  Love becomes a tool for revenge, and both love and revenge are entirely based on structures of standing-in."

Pause.

"It was better in the comic," said my students.  "The TV show totally ruined it."

It's hard to illustrate "I've been sunk in grading all week," so I've given you instead this object lesson in why proofreading is important, from the lovely Lunenburg, NS.  Also, check out those amazing seamen top right.

This time of year, the hills are alive with the sound of academics bitching about the tedium of grading. With songs they have sung for a thousand years.  In all seriousness, I am willing to bet that medieval monks rolled their eyes exhaustedly every time a student brought a scratched-over piece of vellum to them for appraisal, and muttered in Latin to each other about the lack of proofreading and cavalier attitude to original texts.  I'm sure that's why Socrates developed his method - to elicit student involvement in such a way that he wouldn't be burdened by huge drifts of scrolls demanding response and correction.

Who am I to buck the trend?  I've been in the throes of grading torment all week, and I only emerged on the other side of my mountainous pile after two solid days of barely sleeping, barely eating, and timing my encounter with each paper to prevent pigritudinous slow-down or obsessive micromanaging in the margins of these essays.

But, frankly, there are always moments, both of brilliance and of inspired error, that conspire to delight and entertain me on the slog up Mt. Grademore.  Here are some of the best from this round:

• A glancing mention of the importance of "the suspense of disbelief" to the theatre.  
• I am fascinated by this slip: it seems to imply that disbelief is always waiting to be proved wrong, the element of hope transforming it into belief (the doubt of doubt, the skepticism of skepticism).  Should I believe?  Should I? Can I?  The suspense is killing me!  
• A colleague hastened to say that perhaps the phrase implies that doubt is more dramatic or suspenseful than belief, rather than that doubt always ends in belief.  I agree.  
• What is most intriguing about it, however, is the fact that suspense is, in essence, a hybrid endeavor, lingering somewhere between belief (I know what is coming next...) and disbelief (...will it actually happen?)
• "Through their melodic vices, the Chorus played the role of an average citizen who would observe and comment."
• I wish my vices were more melodic. Maybe if I got together with some vicious friends they could even be harmonic?
• Just delightful: "In the everyday world, were Oedipus a friend or worse, a relation, you might not find his reactions justified."
• Or: "The Chorus [of Bacchantes] is not content with shrieking about past events or with the simple information dump and dime store piety offered by other Greek Choruses."
• I love how so many of these papers are filled with a wry, teasing affection for the texts we are studying.  Like the average Greek Chorus is their eccentric aunt.
• Earlier in the week I intervened when a student spent a whole paper talking about his intention to "analize" certain aspects of a play.  Finally I wrote in the margin, "Alas, this word (even if it existed) wouldn't mean what you think it means...."
• But maybe I was just underestimating the profound Freudianism of his argument.
• Or maybe, just maybe, I was overlooking his desire to become a chronicler (annalist) of the play for all posterity. That's right - posterity.
• "Alas" is a word that shows up frequently in my marginal comments - more than perhaps in should in contemporary conversation.  It isn't conscious, but when I turn my mind to it, I think it gives corrections a more sympathetic, if wilting, air.  But it does seem to fill my responses with a tone of melancholy lament.

 So today, like most Sundays, will mostly be taken up by class prep and marking a few stragglers that tumbled off Mt. Grademore as I was making my descent.  But what news do I have from the week that's past?  Well:

We had the first meeting of my new book club this week - the first for which we had actually read a book, that is, rather than just chatting, planning, and getting to know each other.  It is an extraordinarily good group; if only my classes had conversations this lively.  Our first choice was my suggestion (although voted on by the whole group): Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.

This was the first Robinson I had ever read, and forty-eight hours before the meeting (which I was supposed to lead) I was only on page 25.  "This is not a novel to be hurried through," Doris Lessing says on my cover, "for every sentence is a delight."  Sorry, Doris: I slammed through it over the next three days, and although that wasn't the ideal method of consuming the novel, which is rich with slow, subtle, elegiac poetry, it did prevent me from bogging down in the marshy liquidity of the prose.  Some of my fellow book-groupers did, and were profoundly turned off by the narrative, which they felt you couldn't get any purchase on.  It slips through your fingers.

Interestingly, I had gone into the meeting with a very strong set of sympathies (for the narrator Ruthie and her eccentric aunt Sylvie, and against her pragmatic and conventional sister Lucille), and prepared to talk about how Robinson manipulates you irrevocably into this sympathetic stance.  But the majority of the group had quite the opposite reaction: they felt that Lucille's harshness about the unconventional ways in which Ruthe and Sylvie "keep house" was a desperate bid for survival, and a necessary attempt to escape the horrors of her upbringing.  I was shocked, and then impressed by the novel's ability to evoke such disparate responses.  "It's like a prism," said one of my friends in the group, "You turn it this way and it produces one reading, and you twist it that way and it produces another."  But it can never produce both at once.

I also finished the Miltonic first season of Justified, and am filled with antsiness about how long I have to wait until the second season airs.  Luckily I have the three final discs of Deadwood sitting in front of my tv, or I might go into Timothy Olyphant withdrawal.  And no one wants to see what that would look like.  Messy.

Lastly, I'm a hair's breadth from finishing George Elliott Clarke's Nova Scotian cycle Blue, and frankly I have been putting off reading the last two poems because I am not yet ready to be done with it.  Perhaps I should pin a copy of his "Marginalia" (a model of pithy advising) up on the wall while I hike up Mt. Grademore, strewing "alases" like wildflowers here and there in my students' margins:

Grace is excellence performed casually.

*

Virtue is like bootleg liquor:
Don't claim you got any unless you got a lot.

*

Ugly don't age
and it don't wear out.

Ugly be thoroughly dependable. (152, excerpt)

If only I had advice this good to give.

Happy Sunday, Saloners....

I'm obsessed with Canadian reality tv show Battle of the Blades, in which (ex-)professional hockey players are taught how to figure skate with top-calibre female ice dancers or pairs skaters.  How could I not be?  I mean, look at it:

First: I defy you not to weep as you remember the tragic beauty of Gordeeva and the late lamented Grinkov.  But look how happy she is now.  Secondly: Katia and her hockey player Val went to the same Russian athletic academy as children.  It is clearly icy fate that has brought them together.  Thirdly, bear in mind that Val has only been figure skating for a month when he performs this.  A month in which all his years of accumulated confidence on the ice were abruptly crushed and then rebuilt.

I may even have used it as a way to explain defamiliarization to the students of my theatre class during our discussion of Brecht the other day.  The same class featured a preliminary analysis of this week's episode of Glee as theatricalist television (I swear to you, one of my students said, "What's Glee?".  Three of her classmates immediately responded, simultaneously and before a single beat had elapsed, "The best show EVER."  Really: they all used exactly the same phrase.  It was eerie.), an account of my brief appearance as an extra on the now-defunct Joan of Arcadia to demonstrate the anxiety that results from reversing the spectatorial gaze, and a moment in which I held up a long strip of sour fruit ribbon candy and compared it to Brecht's concept of "culinary theatre," or theatre that sells you an ephemeral experience of emotion without arousing critical distance, intellectual engagement, or the desire to change the world.  I could just hear their internal monologues: "She brought us candy, which is awesome, but then she turned it into a metaphor for Brecht, which is not.  How could she do this to us?".

Anyway, our minds soon turned to the question of Verfremdungseffekt (imprecisely translated into English as alienation or estrangement, words which have an unwarranted tinge of hostility to them, since Brecht is actually advocating for Verfremdung as a goal of socially conscious art).

"You may have heard about this in your other literature classes under the name 'defamiliarization,' which is what the Russian Formalists called it," I said to my students, all the while chewing, cow-like, on my strip of culinary theatre, "Defamiliarization is an experience of reversal and realization: when something you thought you knew (and had stopped examining closely) is made unfamiliar, and you look at it with new eyes.  The idea being that what art does is defamiliarize the world, forcing us to slow down and reconsider our assumptions and take pleasure in the overlooked."

(My colleague would later remind me of the lovely quotation from Viktor Shklovsky's 1917 essay "Art as Technique": "Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war... And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.  The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar'... to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.")

"Or from Brecht's perspective, the Verfremdungseffekt forces us to recognize the ideologies that govern aspects of society that we think of as 'natural' and unchangeable.  You might think," I went on, feeling from the stoniness of their stares that perhaps I was succeeding in increasing the difficulty and length of my students' perception of Brecht, "of Battle of the Blades."

Incredulous titters.  I power through.

"Defamiliarization is a hockey player who, after decades of confidence on the ice, puts on a pair of figure skates and suddenly not only realizes the difficulty of simple skating techniques (he hasn't been this clumsy since he was four years old, and what the hell is this toepick?), but also begins to question the nature of his self-confidence, the way he has grounded his whole personality on his skating abilities, and the ideologies that undergird his celebrity, his disdain for other ice sports, his sense of masculinity, his devotion to technique and hard work and training, or the way he relates to his own body."


Oh, Georges Laraque, how I adore thee.  Be sure to watch to the part of the video in which they detail how he was injured in practice doing the most demanding trick of the routine and immediately came back to perform it again.  Also note the peculiar character of the judging is a Verfremdungseffekt: there is always at least one judge who is a former hockey player on hand to comment disbelievingly that someone who once regularly bludgeoned the #^%$ out of him is now so graceful on the ice.

The player who was eliminated after this night's show asked the host if he could say something, after it became clear he was going home.  Here's what it was, in all its defamiliarized glory:

"In Canada, we prejudge and stereotype figure-skating a lot.  And what we've learned in the last little while, or I have, is, uh, all the hard work and dedication that these people have, but it's going on in every rink across Canada.  So from all the hockey guys, we tip our hats to every kid taking this - it's an amazing sport, and we've learned a lot."

My god, I am not sure I even know.

It has been a couple of hectic weeks in which I ... attended the Pumpkin Regatta to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving ... taught up a storm (somehow this managed to involve showing a lot of videos of fake phallus props to my students while we were studying Aristophanes*) ... hosted four houseguests (all family, all delightful)... started a hunt for my first ever owned home ... and officially entered my fourth decade of life.

All of which I have wanted to talk about at some length, but there never seems to be sufficient time in the schedule for a good, substantial blogging session.  So I just wanted to pop in and assure you that I am still, at the very least, in the land of the living.  Even if I am experiencing The Five Stages of Grading.




*I didn't show this one to them, but can't resist sharing it with you.