So I talk to myself. So what?

Having a rich inner life, I also have rollicking inner dialogues. I’d been wondering just what kind of announcements I can comfortably make in my classes, and initially was shying away from promoting Al Gore and David Suzuki's keynote address at the upcoming Summit on Climate Change. For some reason I thought it was slightly wrong of me to promote my own political views to a captive audience. And then I laughed (aloud, actually, thus destroying the inner quality of this dialogue) at my presumption that I check my politics at the classroom door. Leaving aside my contention that the popular is always political, I'm always encouraging my students to politicize their cultural consumption. To think about hardboiled detective fiction as a form of protest and to see feminist detective fiction as a significant incursion into masculinist populism; to question the implicit assumptions about the nation-state that pervade nationalist rhetoric of broadcasting policies and to dismantle the seeming benevolence of multiculturalism as an ideal (try Eva Mackey’s House of Difference – fantastic). The notion that the critical imperative of my courses is distant from my own politics simply because I've assigned readings to explain these positions is, well, laughable. My students have multiple occasions to engage with or argue against the perspectives I present – in classroom debates, their response papers, their essays, their weekly seminars. I've learned very quickly just how adept they are at articulating dissenting points, or appreciating these arguments on different grounds. All the more reason for me to promote Gore and Suzuki’s talk – to expand the places and ways in which climate change is discussed. I think I might be one of those darned leftist academics. But hey, my teaching was praised as “fresh and entertaining” at an award ceremony this week, so I must be doing something right.

Sign this!

Destroy The Spectrum and replace it with a Best Buy? Gah. Sign the petition!

Lonely Boy

In my Canadian film and television class this week I'm showing a bit from the NFB’s 1962 Lonely Boy. It's a brilliant anti-Griersonian documentary, a harbinger of the rockumentary, and chock-full of screaming girls with bouffy hair. Watching it again for the first time in years I had to chuckle – it reminds me in very different ways of two guys I’ve dated. One because he kinda resembles Paul Anka (when Anka was young and boyish, not balding) – similar stature, cuts a dashing figure in a suit, and because I suspect this guy always harboured a dream of being an early '60s pop idol. Or at the very least being shot exclusively in black and white. The other one because he once met Anka, working security at Casino Niagara a few years ago (pre-Rock Swings). They chatted for awhile in Anka’s dressing room, and during the show Anka dedicated that night’s rendition of “Lonely Boy” to him. All associations aside, I still love the song. Folks just don’t do melody like they used to.

Mmm... metro...

This is awesome. As if I didn't love the metro enough already.