Symbolic first box of belongings (including the phrenological head named Phineas) brought to Farfara.

 
We arrived in London yesterday, bleary and Boston-soaked.  I'd been in the Bruins' city for the past two weeks attending a seminar in theatre and performance research, which was, needless to say, rollicking good fun. The days were long and filled with dense theoretical readings and fairly enthralling lectures, and sometimes I came home to a mound of homework (terrible shock that being a professor doesn't exempt me from homework) complaining that Theodore Adorno made my brain leak out my ear.  My hostess (childhood best friend turned oncologist) would reply, "Today my patient's brain herniated down his spinal column," and I would think, "Alright, if it's going to be a competition...." 

Sunset at Farfara

Hyperbole damns me again.

Don't revoke my access to my new Canadian homeland, but I have to admit that I didn't watch any Stanley Cup hockey during the whole of my two weeks in Boston.  This fills me with shame not just because Bostonians are the ancient Maritime brethren of Haligonians, but also because one of the Bruins' star players hails from Tantallon, just down the road from our new house.

Oh, that's right.  Did I neglect to mention that since last I've written on Sycorax Pine, we've become home-owners?  Proud possessors of 12 acres of ocean-view forest we've decided to call Farfara.  Closing and moving and dealing with the thousand shocks owned homes are prey to account for my unusual blog silence of late.  And now we've left Farfara in the most beautiful time of the Nova Scotian year, ne'er to return (until late August).  It feels me with melancholy, and not a little sense of house-betrayal.

At any rate.  Two days ago we made our sad, exhausted way towards London.  Who needs a taxi?, D said when we landed.  What an egregious expense! We've got a mortgage now - it's time to spend more wisely. 

We spent the next couple of hours wending our feeble way towards the London flat on a public transit system that seemed determined to go *absolutely anywhere* but that part of the city, while I struggled mightily not to crow with vindicated smugness. 

So we're here now, and you can expect (I say cockily) a veritable flood of blogging about this year's London adventures.  I'm determined this year: what doesn't get blogged gets lost in the mists of memory, never to be of use to my theatre research.  See?  Blogging = time spent working.  That's the ticket. 

But not right now.  We've come back from a night at the new Bush Theatre, and I'm exhausted.  Tomorrow.  Yes: tomorrow.

• April 15: My student just argued on a quiz that Prospero celebrates Miranda's engagement by 'organizing a costume party and beach volleyball extravaganza.' It's not so far off the mark. (While not being right at all.) And in response to the question about what Prospero promises his last destructive act on the island will be, the student answers, "If I remember correctly, he sets fire to a waste bin in the public bathhouse." If only this student would write anarcho-alternative versions of every Shakespearean play.

• April 17: Best misspelling from today's Mt. Grademore: "cow-towing" for "kowtowing." It's just not the same thing, is it?

• April 20: A student, asked on an exam to define "Verfremdungseffekt," replied: "To use my own words, I would describe this as an obnoxiously long word for a pretty cool term." I like how this answer manages to combine chiding with flattery in perfect measures.

• April 24: Bulletin from the slopes of Mt. Grademore on the subject of feminism (and the paradox of procreation): "The fact that she is unwed gives her an independent heir about her." *

• April 28: Mt. Grademore attempts existentialism and ends up, naturally enough, in sterility: '“Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett was written for people who blindly fallow.'

• April 29: I like to think of it like the Pilgrim's Progress. Mt. Grademore lies very near the Slough of Despond in my own allegorical topography.

• May 4: Mt. Grademore has been summited, but not before yielding it's best EVER nugget: "After reading the poem, one cannot help to get the feeling that mankind at that time was fondling with the breasts of trouble by engaging in behaviour that the Holy bible clearly reads as unlawful."

Me: "Not under 19th C Russian law, I'm thinking. This is about Chekhov's Three Sisters."

Dan: "Stupid Tzarist rule. It ruins all the good puns."