March weekends

I'll withhold judgement on whether March is going out lion- or lamb-like. The 'earliest Easter since 1913' kinda threw me - I always use Easter as a first weekend of spring kind of date. Not so this year. On the Saturday of the long (yea!) weekend, we went up to the allotment to dig and were blown home by snow, sleet, and a bitterly cold wind. It being Yorkshire, of course, by the time we got five minutes from the allotment, the weather had changed to sunshine that was very nearly warm, so we sat outside and had a pint or two instead.

The library is dead these days - Easter break for my students is four weeks long. I've got next week off, which will be so lovely and undoubtedly entirely productive. That's the plan anyway. Plans plans plans - such a spring thing.

erratum

My mistake - the 'article' is actually an excerpt from a book about organized crime worldwide - McMafia, I believe is the trendy title...

heart-breakers and life-takers

At least it isn't the perenially adorable and always vulnerable harp seal pups this time - no Sir this-an-that to wax on about the barbaric disruption to nature by a bunch of barely civilized, provincial hacks - but my homeland 'strong-and-free' is in the Guardian again. And I kinda like how it's still stuck on some time-honoured phraseology of Canada - 'The Dope Rush'; all we need is a modern day Robert Service and a memorable poem or two about 'The Cremation of Dan the Dope-head' or the 'Ballad of the Border Guard' and were right back in those halycon days of yore.

Ah - "nice, peaceful, dull Canada" - excuse me while I get my true north rage on.

On second thought, never mind. I'm tired, at work, and there is too much pap in this article to be particularly bothered about it. In passing, I'm particularly interested in the depiction of British Columbia as populated entirely by loggers - I'm assuming that, for this reporter, these are the 'ordinary folk of western Canada'. Apparently, they talk little, are good with their hands, and fall naturally from felling trees to organized crime.

I've got to find another daily...

Sci-Fi Chic(k)

Is there a badge or possibly t-shirt out there with the text 'Original Nerd' on it? Cause I want one - just to establish my cred in this new world of 'geek is the new black' [on a side note, I'm intrigued by the seeming interchangeability of 'nerd', 'geek', 'dork' - given their original denotative functions - I don't really see that many Babylon 5 fans biting the heads off of chickens for example...]. I remember when John Wyndham's The Chrysalids was standard reading for the grade 10 curriculum (is it still?) - not to mention short stories by Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury - and they weren't taught as 'genre fiction', but in the same breath as 'quality' writing by Margaret Atwood, Sinclair Ross, and Hugh MacLennan. So it seemed natural to me to follow my interests and, being the inquisitive mind I am, I went ahead and read not only Fahrenheit 451 but also Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine; 'The Electric Ant' was followed quite naturally in my world with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and 'Through a Scanner Darkly'. I liked Greek myths, and Ojibway Nanabush stories, and watched The Last Unicorn until I knew every line - and that didn't go away with adolescence or even adulthood. Maybe my preference for playing alone and fairly uncontrolled imagination (which still leaves me often at the mercy of electric light and sound in the wee dark hours after watching, say, The X-Files or Watcher in the Woods...) made me comfortable with looking awry at the world and quite sure that it was looking awry at me in return.

Of course, sci-fi isn't only the new black, it's the new green: we just saw the premiere of the new Bionic Woman - which is hot on the heels of The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Heroes. Star Trek and its increasingly nauseating spin-offs have always been there; Battlestar Gallactica, Buck Rogers, Knight Rider, Quantum Leap, The Six-Million Dollar Man, Lost in Space, Stargate, Life on Mars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, The Hulk, Lois and Clark, Smallville, Roswell, Kyle XY, Jericho, Xena, Hercules, Doctor Who, Torchwood, The X-Files... However critics cut it, dissect it, rip it to pieces for being 'escapist', 'ephemeral', 'popular' - it appeals and it sells and it' s just damn slick and cool while doing so. It is reductive and, indeed, escapist in itself to maintain the critical perspective that genre writing (and I know I'm discussing television pretty much exclusively here) somehow doesn't matter - that it is junk, cultural trash; pointless at best, actually harmful at worst. It's popularity and disposability (though DVD culture has interferred significantly with television as an ephemeral experience) do not impact on its truthiness (I've always wanted to use that word) - to paraphrase Foucault, just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's not true; I would trust a genre that calls attention to its illusion and disjunction more than one which pretends to 'realism' without ever admitting to a fascistic agenda. Which is not to say that sci-fi or fantasy cannot be put to nefarious use - it's still (and perhaps poetry is ahead of it in this sense - though I use ahead cautiously) written by us and we are still nefarious critters - or at least, unknown and unknowable in a way that I sometimes think is glossed over by transparent cinema and writing.

['Nefarious', in passing, is a beautiful word for a negative (?) quality - like malevolent - I always liked Mellificent just on her name alone.]

I'm also currently fascinated by the gender debates in which shows like (at the moment, tho there are older examples) The Bionic Woman and The Sarah Connor Chronicles are participating. Nas pointed out that the 'evolution' of the terminator for example seems to be from the Mr. Universe-buff Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator to the apparently diminutive, slight, but leathally capable Summer Glau in The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I still have to read Donna Haraway, I confess, but I'm intrigued by the invigorated femininity of the cyborg in current media - in a world of either machines or magic, strength, to paraphrase Morpheus, has nothing to do with size - do we still think that's air we're breathing?

So this is my badge: this ain't no bandwagon I'm jumping on here - I've got the cherry seat by the window in the back. I am the one you have to pass to use the loo, I know more than you do, and I've been here longer. So entertain me - don't make the mistake of underestimating me.

weather maps

I'm not sure where Leeds is in a whole mystical cartography - but it must be blessed somehow with being just beyond the reach of earthquakes, storms, floods, high winds ... perhaps that is why it never shows up on the BBC telly weather maps, which always seem to take perverse pleasure in showing York, Sheffield, Wakefield, Huddersfield but not Leeds, forcing us Leodeans to approximate the weather (not difficult - it'll likely be wet, best take a cardy and carry a brolly). We don't have any stone circles near us - that I'm aware of - indeed, if there is a candidate for a more prosaic, earth-bound spot in the whole of the UK, I'd like to see it.

lockdown

So Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, claims that the great benefit of ID cards is that people's identities would be 'locked to them'. Is that the ideal? People 'locked' into their identity? And it does beg the question - in my mind at least - what exactly is the identity that Smith feels people are so vulnerable in that need - nay, desire - to be 'locked' into? It is an interesting formulatio nof idenity as as bounded, limited space; something that can be locked: a closet, a box, a room - something, first and foremost, that can belong to one person and must be guarded from invasive fraudsters that would steal it (the 'lock' metaphor does connote the idea of value and thus the desireability of the thing to theives - the curious crime referred to glibbly as 'identity theft').

I've been discussing the concept of the sublime with two of my seminar groups this morning - and I, at least, have a ponderous headache (that is, caused by pondering). They tackled Shelley's Mont Blanc very well and I hope that I didn't add chaos to confusion. I was let down in my pedagogy today by the perverse machines - my friend who studies J.G. Ballard complimented me on the phrase - in the PG common room which refused to open the lovely and genius handout I had made for my seminars summarising the key points and terms of Longinus, Burke, Kant and Wordsworth. They were generous enough to look sincerely hopeful and interested when I promised to email it to them instead - bless ... I'm the doddering old prof already.

Completely lateral references today in seminar: BtVS (1), Star Trek (1), Minority Report (1) - to be fair, the last one came from a student first, I just ran with it...

Calling

I get it - or at least, I get it right now and I'll try to hang on to it for awhile - or I'll re-read this post occasionally: I get why I like teaching. I wrote a reference for a student back in January applying to law school. He was a very good student - quick to respond, willing to engage, and a nice cynicism and critical edge. How true is it that teachers respond best to students that remind them of themselves? Or at least, students that remind them of how they wished they could remember themselves. The point being, he just came up to me at work and told me he got two place offers!

I know I have little to nothing to do with his success - my reference certainly didn't make or break his application - but I'm so strangely proud! Not 'strangely' because I think I shouldn't be proud - but 'strangely' because I usually don't see my students after the last seminar. The way that teaching tends to work here I get them for one semester and might see them in the library thereafter. But I rarely notice when they graduate, and don't know them much beyond the faces they present in my classroom/consultation hour. This was the first reference I've written - the first student who has really sought my assistance after leaving my seminar behind. Maybe it's also cause the sun is shining and it was just a nice thing to hear - a bonus on an already alright day.

And I suppose it makes me aware - fleetingly - of how generous students can be - which is really a positive spin on how draining they can also be. It should be a privilege to teach and it is discouraging and depressing how rarely that is seen as the case. Equally, of course, it should be a privilege to learn - but that's not often in evidence either.

In short, I am really proud of my student who got into law school and I definitely plan on saying, when he is a famous lawyer (human rights or environmental preferably!), that I used to teach him back in the day ...

Lions and lambs

So I can't access my Facebook account right now - site maintenance - and ... um ... it's actually making me kinda anxious -- which in turn is making me kinda anxious about my mental stability. I'm mostly joking - mostly. It reminds me of being back at Queen's and using that ancient email system - I think it was run from the DOS shell - it regularly crashed and I couldn't check my emails which were rapidly becoming the only way to communicate - it was free and most everything else, as my tender young self was beginning to realise, was not.

I've just had a kind of memory flash: I am walking beside the Stauffer library towards the entrance (Stauffer's tomb), and the JDUC is on my left. It must be early spring - later than now - because the sun is shining and I can smell lunch from the Skylight cafeteria. I can picture perfectly the entrance foyer at Stauffer - granite and rich, red wood and steel - there are six email PCs to the right and always a queue for them. It's funny but I've never considered that there was no 'PC suite' in the library - and only about 6 catalogue/email PCs per floor. I loved spring in Kingston.

As I do here - English springs come early - there is an apple tree on the grounds of the mosque next to us already in bloom; crocuses and daffodils are up in Hyde Park. I can't tell if March came in like a lion or a lamb though - last night was a most terrific storm with lashing rain and gusts so strong that walking was like swimming against the current of a river in full spate. The sound of the wind in the trees in Hyde Park was almost deafening - I love that sound. This morning, however, the sun was shining, the air is mild - and I'm waiting for the change. This is Yorkshire; if you don't like the weather, wait 10 minutes - if you do like the weather, don't get comfy - and always pack yer brolly.

Luckily we spent the evening listening to the rain and wind while snug and warm, discussing garden plans with our fellow allotment-holders - nothing better for waiting out a storm.