like light at nightfall

Moved

2007-09-03T13:37:00.001-04:00

As resolved at the start of the summer, like light at nightfall has migrated. While tweaking continues, you can now find it here.

Time passes.

2007-08-25T23:30:00.000-04:00

It’s been a year. I miss you, baby girl, every day. I've been looking and there’s not another like you out there. I rolled around on the grass in your honour this morning – it’s not the same without you, love.

Birthday

2007-08-21T14:32:00.000-04:00

It started innocently enough – me reaching into the back of the cupboard to draw out the Baco Noir that had waited in reverent darkness for almost a year. The bottle and I curled up on the porch and watched the cats hunt, the moths bounce off the balcony’s bare bulb, the night pass. My doorbell rang early Saturday morning and the rest of the day I shopped with an old friend, picking up our rhythm like it hadn’t been paused for the past ten months as lives and careers moved us to different countries, time zones. We came home to find a more recent friend climbing my back stairs. He held out his hands – in one a bag of young green shoots poking hopefully out of their training pots; in the other, bacon. More people materialized as the day wore on, some were even found serendipitously on the street. The bar closed its doors as we left and stumbled sideways for poutine.
Morning: coffee, Advil, bacon. Sunglasses before venturing out for the afternoon’s provisions (the market for strawberries and the SAQ for white wine). We sprawled carelessly on the balcony and devoted the actual birthday to our characteristic conversational swings. As dusk dropped we dressed up and pranced prettily through the door of my favourite restaurant. The waiter applauded the alcohol consumption, saying most women would have passed out under the table. We drained an expensive bottle of red upon our return, christening the just-renovated porch with its first set of wine stains.
And now… Stash’s vodka has been roundly depleted, days with the California blonde ostensibly left us with nothing to talk about and yet we couldn’t stop. She’s flown back to San Fransisco, and I'm on a train to London, my black skirt and shoes stowed safely in the overhead compartment.
I knew my grandfather had died. I knew halfway through my parents singing “Happy Birthday” – my father was hammier than usual and off the phone quickly. But for the rest of the evening I pretended, like my parents, that I didn’t know. They called early the next morning and everything has been in motion ever since… rent a car or take the train? Quickly send emails postponing or bowing out of the week’s obligations. Find a cat-sitter to take over my cat-sitting, and get a spare set of keys cut. Slide down to the floor and sob my way through a Cat Power song. Decide train, definitely. Call a girlfriend in London and ask her to make up the spare bed. Do a load of laundry, freeze the rest of the birthday bacon. Water the plants, change the cat litter, just keep moving...
The Tetris-like tension of such details breaks as I'm on the train. The tourists in front and behind me (Eastern European and Australian respectively) are captivated by the postcard scenery. My eyes are just as fixed out the window, but I'm seeing different things. The sunlight drops behind heavy clouds and light rain as the train hurtles further west; I try not to read too much into this. I'm quietly anxious. My brother is picking me up at the train station; until then, I tuck my legs under me, turn up the volume on the iPod, and keep staring out the window.

Thicker than water

2007-08-18T01:55:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking my family lately, as my grandfather isn’t faring well and the anxiety reverberates. There are repeated themes that cut across the tales of families I've heard from my friends; there are the interactions I've seen that give me pause. One boy in my past referred to his parents as Mother and Father. Not that strange, I guess, until I noticed that they always called him Son. Never his first name, not once. An incredible distance existed between them, despite their shared history and how much they knew about each other… a pattern that, over time, came to play out between him and I as well. We find ourselves re-enacting what we know. Families – patterns that have sunk in the furthest, remarks with a tenor that cuts the deepest, support that can mean the most.
My mother was not pleased with my choice to go to grad school; her indictment of my decision has surfaced regularly, if passive-aggressively, over the past six years. She and I have very different visions of my future: she sees a handsome, wealthy husband and a handful of healthy grandkids, I see tenure and book residuals and happy pets – or, as she spat vituperatively in front of her friends one day, “That’s all I have to look forward to, a series of dogs” (I was never entirely sure if she meant my canine or male companions…).
When I was home at the end of June I made the rounds of my parents’ social engagements – end-of-term parties, wedding showers for the children that had found the wealthy husband or willing housewife. Smalltalk with my parents’ friends inevitably turned to what I think of Montreal, the requisite appreciative “Ooh, McGill,” numerous polite inquiries into when I think I'll be finished. And in almost every exchange I was told how my mother raves about me, how proud she is of me. Proud. I didn’t what to say. This was something I had never heard before. Part of me was happy, relieved…
And part of me was so angry… why hadn’t I ever heard this before? I have been staring at blank pages that I can’t find the words to fill, at bank statements that balance precariously around overdraft, at dark ceilings in the middle of sleepless nights wondering if I'm only heading down this path because it’s the one I know, and always with the sense that as far as my family is concerned, I'm in this alone. And yet I do believe she’s proud of me, precisely because she’s never told me so. We don’t do emotion in my family. We do quippy deflections and sublimation and can look the other way like few other families you have seen.
Which brings me back to my grandfather. My grandfather is dying. A retiring man, he sits at the edges of the room drawing slowly on his pipe or his cigar (I will always love the thickness of that smell), raising his eyebrows at the conversations going on around him, opening his mouth to say something rumbling and trenchant, and then closing it again. He is an ardent fan of documentaries. His home brew was the first beer I ever tasted, frigid and yeasty, foaming out of the mouth of a cloudy stubby bottle. He took me aside one year at Xmas, pointed to the humidifier he had just given me, and made sure I noted the divot in the top – “You can put weed in it. Make sure it’s a small room and all the windows are closed.” I am counting on our genetic stubbornness to keep him around until the first fall paycheque so I can go to him and say goodbye.
My father has already lost his mother and his brother. My uncle died unexpectedly seven years ago, and that was the first time in my life I had seen my father fall apart. My father keeps his feelings shunted and through a regime of merciless mocking and irascible retorts made sure we did the same. In the middle of his eulogy he bowed his head, shuffled his papers, and I could barely breathe when I saw tears sliding down his stubbled cheeks. He drank so quickly and so heavily that he passed out just over an hour into the wake.
He was silent after my grandmother’s funeral (three years ago this coming October), staring at the doors of the Catholic church that was the centre of her spiritual life, and turning to point at a cluster of trees across the street. “That’s where your uncle and I would sneak out for a smoke during the service,” he told me. “Those trees have hardly grown.” He didn’t say another word for hours.
My brother and I have talked since about my father’s alcoholism. We had wondered, in the brief moments when we could talk freely on the phone, in the first few years after my uncle died. But we’re a family of drinkers – on both sides – and the other family alcoholics are never referred to as such, they’re just “going through something” or “having a hard time lately.” All we knew was that there was a sense of desperation, a determined move toward the relief of stupor, that hadn’t been in my father before. I had made it home earlier than usual for Xmas two years ago, and when it was just the four of us at dinner one night my father filled a conversational lull by saying he thought he might have a problem with alcohol. It hung there, in the silence that characterizes my family’s ability or willingness to confront cries for help and the weakness we were told they imply.
Things have been spiraling ever since, an awful outgrowth of our collective incapacity to bite back our now-instinctive tendency to turn confession into comedy. When I was home my father’s weight loss was staggering, almost as implausible as the amount of alcohol I watched him put away (and my own tolerance is remarkable). He told me, in a tone that both defied and begged me to help, that he quite literally cannot stomach more than a few morsels at a time. My mother confided in me later (emboldened by the few beers she had just had, us being rather comfortable with irony) that she was worried, that she didn’t know what to do, that he wouldn’t listen to her.
And I don’t know what to do either – there is a frustrating hierarchy in my family, he certainly won’t listen to me. The ten-hour distance feels insurmountable at times. I hear that now-familiar tone in his voice when he updates me on my grandfather’s health, of wanting to say more – to admit to being scared, being sad – and not knowing how.
We re-enact what we know, but learned habits are poor justifications. When my brother called to say that he told his girlfriend he loves her his exhilaration came not from the feeling but the telling; he told me because he knew I would recognize the distinction. I make an effort now to talk with my mother about my work. She never asks, but I tell her anyway. I ask my father what he had for dinner, when he is going to the doctor. Change does not come easily and provocation is only acceptable on the provocateur’s terms, tempers flare and silences stretch as the phone is handed to someone else. Even living within the dynamics does not guarantee you a map of the terrain.

Metro prick

2007-08-16T01:03:00.000-04:00

I came across this awhile ago and have been stewing about it ever since.
Where do I begin? How about where he began, with ‘choice’ – that she chose to buy and wear the top in question, and as such she, not he, is responsible for his leering. Just how much of a choice is this? Not much of one. There are only so many options – you can either be a woman or be reviled. And to count as a woman you have to flaunt what has been determined as its most obvious marker – your sexuality. North American women live in an environment that assesses their claims to ‘power’ based on how much or how little they flaunt their sexuality (don’t believe me? Haven’t you been following the Clinton coverage?). Out of all the rights second wave feminism fought for, sexual freedom was one of the easiest to commodify and co-opt, to throw back at us and then ask us to be thankful that clothes screaming “I'm sexual!” are now readily available. We are now not just able but expected to present ourselves as sexual, desiring subjects, and if we don’t, well clearly we’re not empowered. The problem is that only certain things are sexy (and not very many), only certain bodies are sexy (and not very many), and to get and maintain those things and that body we have to subject ourselves to a regime of self-surveillance even more hostile and damaging* than the surveillance of, say, this prick on the metro. The power a woman can claim as her ‘own’ eerily resembles the sexual fantasies that have been marketed to men for ages: being ‘up for it.’ Sorry, metro prick, our practices are not freely chosen. This rhetoric of choice transposes responsibility onto the individual woman and away from felt, lived, experienced – i.e. real – social and structural inequalities. 'Choices' are pragmatically made with the full knowledge that the playing field is by no means even, that there are material penalties. We don’t have choice, we have a dangerous combination of patriarchy and neo-liberalism.
But perhaps I'm taking this too seriously. Ah, irony – metro pricks now get to have it both ways. Irony is the new defense against sexism: it’s not really sexism if you acknowledge that you know you’re being sexist. Women are supposed to sit there and grin and take this because obviously if the law says we’re equal then we must be and it’s all in good fun, and if we don’t laugh it off we don’t ‘count’ as modern empowered women. It’s a gas, he used ‘funbags,’ he can’t be serious. Yeah, he used funbags. And melons. And jugs. And hooters. And rack. Which doesn’t even scratch the surface of the panoply of ways women’s bodies are objectified and sexualized; this relentless and exhaustive parceling into pieces systemically devalues and divorces the female body from any real sense of a woman as an individual, and, importantly, of women as social group deserving the same rights, protections, and freedoms as men. There are reasons why women are by far the majority of victims in reported sexual assaults. And there are just as many reasons why less than 10% of such crimes are reported to police. Metro prick is just one manifestation of one facet of a much larger problem. The answer? Longer than you have patience for, most likely, so here’s a good place to start: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people” (Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler).

*"Because I live in a world that hates women and I am one . . . who is struggling desperately not to hate myself and my best girlfriends, my whole life is constantly felt by me as a contradiction" (Kathleen Hannah)

On my mind:

2007-08-14T18:12:00.000-04:00

'I' could not be who I am if I were to love in the way that I apparently did, which I must, to persist as myself, continue to deny and yet unconsciously reenact in contemporary life with the most terrible suffering as its consequence.
-Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power.

I know it must be hard to fathom that a girl doesn’t care what a smart man thinks about the thing that she cares most about in the world, or that there’s a movement that exists that doesn’t much take into consideration what men have to say on the topic. I know I’m supposed to 1) nod thoughtfully as I process your wisdom, asking clarifying questions about your points just in case I don’t immediately understand something you say, and then 2) offer up some powerful and intelligent argument on why feminism is important, and then 3) try to prove my point with examples from women in politics and a few stories about my grandmother, but of course, in the end, 4) concede that yes, you have some very good points that I will certainly think about, and thank you for educating me about feminism and correcting me on those things I didn’t fully understand about women and the world.
Well, that conversation has been had before and is a bullshit boring ass waste of time that does absolutely nothing for anyone. Pretending to be open to the possibility that I’m a fool for believing what I do is wrong, dishonest, and disrespectful to everyone involved. Being polite and feigning interest, when I’m really thinking “Holy crap, what an indoctrinated, privileged prick he is. Where’s my beer?” is simply no good.
-Ornamenting Away

Before

2007-08-06T20:09:00.000-04:00

It would have been another anniversary. The residue is sloughing off. Sometimes I still catch myself in the vision of a future that’s no longer coming – my eyes linger on for-sale signs on tree-lined park-adjacent streets. Sometimes I still turn to what’s no longer there – with news of my grandfather’s rapidly failing health my fingers instinctively tried to dial the unforgotten number. It was a mess and I was in love and that didn’t feel like quite so much of a paradox at the time.
But hey, crisitunity. I've already re-vamped the future: a post-doc at USC, maybe even Goldsmiths (!). And, importantly, there is no shortage of other phone numbers: those who always stick around, who have cracked the requisite caustic jokes and have cried in sympathy and have paid the entire tab at the end of the night.
I'm off to meet such a handful shortly. Not because it’s the 6th (no, really, this rendezvous has been rescheduled three times), and not as that maudlin matter of life goes on. Life does that regardless, it’s just better now. It’s not as linear as it sounds, but when I stare at myself brushing my teeth at the end of the day I can tell that it’s true. And it’s such a relief. I prefer After.

Waiting for it

2007-08-03T20:26:00.000-04:00

The first few hesitant drops of rain draw us out – nearly ten of us ring the courtyard from our backyards and balconies, evaluating the chartreuse yellow cast of the light and watching the sullen clouds slowly move in. One neighbour is shirtless, in shapeless green boxers. His dog panting languidly behind him, he grins ruefully at me – “It’s only supposed to drop the temperature by a few degrees,” he says. “but I'll take it.” The hot air presses insistently on my skin, almost all of my skin, as I'm in the skimpiest things I own and still covered in the day’s sheen of sweat and sunscreen. “Come on down!” the woman across from me hollers, brandishing her beer at the sky. It finally does and, like the trees, we all lean into it. We shut our eyes and quiver. In a split-second the rain increases and one by one we return to sit in our deep casement windows – we can catch the mist and watch the storm’s quick pass from there.

And now for something completely different*

2007-08-03T09:45:00.000-04:00

Harold Innis’ The Bias of Communication begins with this epigraph:

“Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?” (James Broeke)

Good question. When asked why I write about chicks and crime, my response is either flippant (good for cocktail parties) or theory-laden (good for getting someone to stop talking to you at a cocktail party). But those are not the only reasons, and certainly not the most personally compelling.
There’s something about chick detectives. Not female detectives, though I enjoy them. I've shuddered in empathy with the willful and unapologetic V.I. for years, I remember my first encounter with Miss Marple when I was no more than nine, and was livid when Remington Steele was released on DVD and Stephanie Zimbalist received second billing, or, more accurately, a sticker slapped on to the cardboard sleeve that said “Also starring Stephanie Zimbalist!” as Pierce Brosnan’s (much younger) frame dominated front and back.
No, there’s something about this particular character. It’s the same slightly shamefaced draw of chick lit.
It’s postfeminism.
I'm changing chapters. I've been plugging away at chapter two for about six weeks now and as far as content and structure, it’s nearly solid. But it’s missing a critical edge (a.k.a., pace my supervisor, what’s at stake?) So I'm heading back to chapter one, which I’d abandoned in the winter as teaching two classes took over. And my brain is ramping up again… I love this stuff. I'm fascinated by this nebulous thing called postfeminism, and particularly by its politics – or, more precisely, just how political its seemingly apolitical stance really is.
So I attend to chicks because, well, because I like identity politics. I'm intrigued by how quickly ‘chick’ has become the cultural shorthand or image of an ideal and idealized new female subject, and the elisions within that of the forces that weigh upon women: the economic, racial, and sexual politics of being a ‘chick’. And I attend to chick’s intersection with crime because it’s there that we get a sense of what worries us most – depictions of deviancy are a telling index of cultural anxieties, and one of the central ways in which North American culture tries to reaffirm the rightness of patriarchy.
Okay. Time to spin this out into 40 pages.

*Meaning the Innis reference. Despite (or deliberately to spite?) my years of schooling as such, I'm not a political economist or a hardcore Canadian communications scholar, so I rarely have the chance to cite Innis.

Convivial hire

2007-07-25T10:08:00.000-04:00

After yet another instance of GB* and I expressing the same snide thought at the same time with the same exasperated intonation, I remarked that we should push for what he cleverly called a ‘convivial hire.’ Tweaking the spirit of spousal hires, this would be a case of ‘take me, take my platonic partner.’ What a good idea – to have institutions recognize and acknowledge that that a marriage (or a common-law relationship) isn't the sole source of vital intellectual and emotional support. Families are formed from connections beyond blood or binding legal agreements; we choose our friends as carefully (even more so, in some cases) as we do our romantic partners, and my core friendships are lasting longer than many marriages. In the wake of a professionalization workshop last year one of my professors asked what else should be included when they run the seminar again, and I suggested broadening the range of advice to address precisely this. “What,” I asked, “do you do if you don’t have a partner trailing after you?” I was told that things were much easier in that respect. Easier when negotiating a contract, yeah, but when allowances aren’t made for the other ties that bind everything else is harder. Restarting your life is tricky enough; when doing it alone, taking leave of the people with whom you have weathered everything that has gone before, it becomes even more difficult. Sure, GB and I could get married as convenient lark, but I’d step out on him eventually and adultery is so 2005.

*He needs a pseudonym and is not content with Gay Boyfriend. The initials stick until inspiration strikes.

Quote of the day

2007-07-16T21:42:00.000-04:00

The broader implication is this: that one's own collaboration with mass-approved violence - i.e., institutional racism, First World nationalism, and apathetic complacency - doesn't count. Climb the corporate ladder, buy American, tune out on Prozac - these silences equal death. But there's a popular illusion that 'violence' is limited only to the physical, the actual contact of skin on skin. What about the daily devastation of poverty, the lack of child care, the shortage of clean air, the sight of children going without - and one's own active or passive participation in these devastating institutions? If Jane Six Pack hits you, she's a lower-class bitch. If Jane Six Pack sits in her air-conditioned stockbroker suite investing in Latin America, it's affirmative action.
-Veena Cabreros-Sud, "Kicking Ass"

Stacked

2007-07-14T11:01:00.001-04:00

My current stash of library books. And yes, I stacked them on purpose to take a picture. Clearly I was procrastinating. Clearly I still am.
Top to bottom:
-Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance (eds. Sharp et al 2000)
-Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence (Lisa Cuklanz 2000)
-The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader (ed Christoph Lindner 2003)
-Cultures of Masculinity (Tim Edwards 2006)
-Feminism After Bourdieu (eds Lisa Atkins and Beverley Skeggs 2004)
-Masculinities (R.W. Connell 1995)
-Masculine Domination (Pierre Bourdieu 2001)
-Marxism and Literature (Raymond Williams 1977)
-The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Judith Butler 1997)
-Masculinities and Crime (James Messerschmidt 1993)
-Generations: Academic Feminists in Conversation (eds Devoney Loose and E. Ann Kaplan 1997)
-Masculinity and Power (Arthur Brittan 1989)
-Blown Away: American Women and Guns (Caitlin Kelly 2004)
-To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (ed Rebecca Walker 1995)
-Feminism and the Technological Fix (Carol A. Stabile 1994)
-Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (R.W. Connell 1987)

ADDENDUM: It's been brought to my attention that many of these titles contain the word 'power'. Four in total (five, if you consider 'domination' a synonym for power, which the OED certainly does). I am a feminist, and a Leo to boot, such things preoccupy me...

When parents become people...

2007-07-12T19:39:00.000-04:00

they might be the type of people who get really giddy the first week of their retirement. They might call you around 2pm on a weekday to ask how to make Jell-o shooters, and not believe you (with good reason) when you say you don’t know. They could threaten to look it up on the internet. And you could spend the rest of the afternoon really glad you shell out the extra few bucks a month for call display.

If only

2007-07-06T13:18:00.001-04:00

There is no Patriarch Headquarters, with flags and limousines, where all the strategies are worked out.
-R.W. Connell, Masculinities

It would be so much more convenient if there was. I'd apply for a travel grant to visit Patriarch Headquarters - give a quick slideshow presentation, have a light lunch, effect some change in the social order. I'd make a day of it.

Woman travels through Southern Ontario; leaves with pickles, wine

2007-07-04T02:00:00.000-04:00

I can’t imagine living in one place all my life – to not have that dialectic of leaving and returning, moving between pasts and present, the liminal space of the highway. My one-week tour of places called home was both predictable and revelatory (revelations saved for later). Quintessential Ontario moments: being back-slapped by a biker, at the skeezy pub ordering a 50 (and then another, and another), swatting in frustration at mosquitoes the size of quarters, the Quebec license plate on my rental car prompting someone to shout “Go back to your own country!” The expanses – of roads, of fields, of skies, of water – provoked a profound inner quiet that I desperately needed to find again. I was overwhelmed, as always, with wanting to linger in the way it was just a little bit longer: the slow-running comfort of familiar conversations and faces with long histories. My girls, my wine. Life carries on with little regard to how hard that can actually be …

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses (John Irving - I know, I'm sorry, but it’s true).

I cried at the wedding – don’t tell anyone (and that was even before I started dipping into the fountain of cosmopolitans). Not at the legally-obliged-to-be-everlasting-love, but at watching two people so dear to me dancing and smiling and nothing but each other, oblivious to the fireworks of camera flashes. Quintessential wedding moment: the inevitable dance with that guy who spills his beer down the back of your dress as he's trying to grab your ass.
Final tally: 1860 kilometres on the rental car, three awkward conversations with my mother, one drunken 4 a.m. limo ride, two pieces of wedding cake, five in-transit Tim Horton’s coffees.

Homeward bound

2007-06-26T23:01:00.000-04:00

Of course, expecting my mother to be waiting silently for me is too much to ask; she’s always got something to say. I leave tomorrow morning for about a week, home for a few days and then to a wedding. My bags are packed and I'm ready to go… except it’s not a jet plane, it’s a compact rental car. Travelling and visiting in the summer isn’t like the holidays. There’s less chocolate. The car windows stay down the entire trip. And without extended family around to mediate, my mother’s comments become more unpredictable. She’s been uncharacteristic lately – asking about my writing, supporting some of my decisions, offering sorely needed financial assistance. Then there’s the wedding – a reunion of sorts for me, since I haven’t been back in two years. Anticipating the acres of ground to cover with old friends at the same time as I'm looking back on what’s been trod with more recent ones, there’s a pervasive sense of shifting emotional continents. The motion of a few friends’ lives has picked up – jobs are changing, cities are changing – and along with it there’s a scramble to check the anchors. Some fixed points are necessary for navigation: the ones that know who you are now, the ones that know you so well you can’t see behind you without them. Such thoughts recur each time I head home to stretches of sky and of water and of stars. This time tomorrow you can find me standing in the field behind my parents’ house, staring upwards, marvelling.

More fun than Facebook

2007-06-24T17:29:00.001-04:00

Sure, you could join a social networking site. Or you could get six people from various parts of Canada and the U.S. together, soak them in cocktails, and the networks reveal themselves. This is the way it should be – face to face you see the arms waving incredulously at every new recognition of shared people, places, events. The world is small. We circle back to each other eventually.
The drinks continued, a cab was shared. I walked home in the morning, wishing desperately for sunglasses and aspirin, not noticing my underwear was on inside out.

Dinner

2007-06-23T00:38:00.000-04:00

There is a kind of quick intimacy forged in sharing food and wine. Your hosts draw you into their history. Theirs is an epic love story spanning years and continents. She says she looked for him in everyone else, he says he wasn’t going to let her go twice. “Moon River” plays in the background. Your self-deprecating disclosures are met with a heartfelt laughter that lets you see them differently. You look at yourself in someone else’s bathroom mirror and notice how the day, the week, is sloughing off as you sit here. The moon is still bright and high in the sky as you walk back to the metro, relieved – that they were barefaced, that you were as well, that there were more plans exchanged. Someone sees you quietly smiling to yourself and it catches them – they smile too.

Uncomfortable

2007-06-22T00:18:00.000-04:00

Nothing says solstice like a speculum. And the discomfort was only aggravated by the doctor attempting to distract me by asking about my dissertation; what an odd thing to be championing when someone is scraping your cervix. “Lookin’ good” was the cheerful unofficial diagnosis (not the most glowing review I've received – I once had a doctor tell me “Your vagina is fabulous!” Such things I wish I had in writing).
What else is happening, you may wonder, abstractly, when it occurs to you. Not much, and everything. The diss is behind unofficial schedule and yet, as my supervisor informs me, it's coming together. Constructive criticism at this point (note the qualifier) is largely structural. I'm knee-deep in masculinity studies, trying to understand ‘men,’ which is ironic – not so much work imitating life as paralleling it. As usual, I'm sure to hit theoretical rather than empirical paydirt. I'm taking vitamin D pills. Despite the heat I'm inching back to my winter running time, clocking in lately at 70ish minutes. There’s a road trip for a wedding soon, and I desperately long to go dress shopping yet lack the capital (c’mon, Marx, some praxis here). I sidetrack myself with the biggest novels I have on hand (currently Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and next Perdido Street Station, Infinite Jest having been read enough already and Underworld out on loan). I'm about to relive for the umpteenth time the bane of my existence as a grad student: bidding geographical farewell to a dear friend. Travelling across the city I stare blankly at my reflection in the metro window pondering the possibility of patterns and of mistakes; I wake in the middle of the night instinctively reaching for bodies that aren’t there, and can’t decide whether I'm okay with that or not. Sleep comes later and later. Neighbourhood cats wander in and out of my house with an undeserved but endearing sense of entitlement. Time passes – writer’s block, doubt. Summer.

Awesome

2007-06-16T13:13:00.001-04:00

Perhaps I'm getting a little too wrapped up in reading and writing about gadgetry, but this really appeals to me.

Those friends

2007-06-15T11:38:00.000-04:00

I was just talking about, the stalwart supporters back ‘home’… one of them has just launched her own eco-fabulous fashion biz (and some of the much-missed others are her foxy models). Check it out.

Life as an explat*

2007-06-06T09:42:00.000-04:00

I have wanted to live in St Henri since I moved to Montreal. I would glimpse it from the window of the train and think “There – I want to live there.” After a stint in the Plateau and then the Village, I've finally made my way here. I love it – the canal, the hushed nights, the fascinating collision of condos and history, the Atwater Market a quick stroll down the street. But I'm learning that being removed from ‘the action’ is a double-edged sword. Pop-bys have dropped off precipitously, which lets me live without fear of being found slovenly. I don’t mind the sense of distance, but on this (as with many other things) my wallet disagrees. There’s travel time and costs – no night buses venture into St Henri, so I either must become more adept at cycling drunk, or drink less and cab home, or not go out as often. And I'm finding that for my Plateau/Village/Mile End friends St Henri has the aura of the rabbit hole: with cheerful trepidation they approach it as somewhere bravely ventured, a bona-fide excursion. As one put it, “Well, at least it’s close to… whatever places it’s close to” (tautologies, boo).
Apropos of home(s) - I talked for hours with one of my old girlfriends the other day, and we made giddy plans for a friend’s upcoming wedding. She had a list of the things we should do when I was ‘home,’ i.e. back in St Catharines. It struck me after I hung up the phone how naturally I accepted that phrasing – I lived there for three years while I did my MA, and it was the closest any place in my student life has ever come to being home. Not the city per se (that honour goes to Montreal – I feel the city thrumming in my feet) but the people, the pace. There was a sense of camaraderie, of spending rather than passing time, and the pleasure of knowing that I could walk into any one of my (limited) haunts and find someone. Social life works differently here – as a matter of geography and demography it’s more diffuse. If home really is where the heart is, then I’d like to transplant many people to this city (they don’t have to live in St Henri) so I can stop feeling torn between these competing loves – the comfortable nice guy appeal of old dear supportive friends or the intoxicating bad boy charisma of Montreal’s passionate history, rollicking nightlife, energizing arts (we all know how that scenario ends… when have I ever picked the nice guy?).
*This being my latest neologism, meaning an expatriate from the Plateau.

Stock photography

2007-06-01T20:44:00.000-04:00

I just received a shipment of books by mail (will someone please divest me of my evil credit card?) and after greedily tearing away the strip that lets the box unfold to reveal your books in all their unread glory I thought briefly that there’d been a mistake in my order – two of the books had the same cover. Compare:

I'm wary of how this is the image for 'female television viewer'. It’s reproducing the same ideal and idealized female audience that feminist cultural commentary often wants to expose as a pervasive and loaded construction. Out of all the stock images, I get why this one is used, just as I get why chick lit covers are daubed in pink and glitter and high-heels. It's a shorthand for the audience the publisher wants to create; they want women to see themselves, imagine themselves, as such a woman – affluent, white, sassy who will watch what she wants when she wants to and will make her own meanings in the face of institutional, economic, and narrative logics. It’s easier to market to ‘women’ when you can subsume their diversity and divergences under such an apolitical avatar.
Prime time television is all about such women. But its audience and its critics look decidedly different. The breadth of contemporary feminist media criticism is astonishing and inspiring… I wish its iconography could capture that spirit, rather than reiterating the stock imagery that is proving so problematic in the first place.

Rainy days and Thursdays

2007-05-31T09:18:00.000-04:00

The fresh smell of rain wafted in this morning as I sat down to write. I was turning lights on at 9am, like I’d never gone to bed at all, hadn’t left the computer. Writing again. It’s coming in fits and starts – some sentences trail off while some spring out fully formed. The gears are sliding into place, I can feel it. Or at least I think that’s what I feel; maybe it’s the new coffee.

UPDATE: Most likely not the new coffee (though I'm sure it helped) - I have just had an excellent and exciting epiphany. I can see both where this chapter's going and, now, a really good way to get it there. Huzzah!

The term of the ends.

2007-05-24T00:06:00.000-04:00

Things keep ending. Or, rather, I keep ending things (to make it clear that I'm for once not talking about Veronica Mars). “Good reasons” rings hollow to me right now. Determining the difference between loss and turning points is a matter of time and perspective, but in both of the situations to which I'm alluding it feels like loss. I’d began an earlier version of this post with some ballyhoo about feminism, being a feminist, needing a “Living Feminism for Dummies” handbook, etcetera, by couching things in such terms I was distancing and hiding myself behind theory – pretending these to be merely theoretical conundrums rather than felt (and felt keenly, painfully, confusingly) experiences. If it’s theory, then there are rules and logic and principles, leading to inevitable and inarguably right answers. But when it’s felt, it’s not that simple – it’s a confluence of emotions that tug at me in different, equally powerful ways. What I want versus what I want; what I need versus what I need. No inevitable and inarguably right answers exist here, just a scale that’s constantly shifting. I am at the same time both convinced and profoundly unsure of these endings. And it hurts.

The body

2007-05-22T00:32:00.000-04:00

I've lost a lot of weight in the past few years. I've done it the right way – I’ve modified my eating habits and I’ve set and am sticking to a viable exercise routine (funny how it no longer feels like a routine but a lifestyle; lacing up runners now signals ‘morning’ to me). I'm pleased and proud, not of my appearance per se, but of how my body feels – strong and fit and capable. The extent of this change has never been that apparent to me, yet I know it must be visible when I run into people I haven’t seen in awhile and they comment on how I look. I know it must be real when I grab an old favourite out of the closet only to have it slide off as it tries to rest on hips that aren’t there anymore.
But the inner changes are taking more time. In my mind’s eye I'm still the fat chick that reassured herself about her personality. There are times when I don’t recognize what I see in the mirror. Shopping the other day, I realized my brain hasn’t caught up with my body – I reached for my usual size of pants, then optimistically grabbed for the next size down. I walked to the changeroom, preparing myself for the inevitable suck-in-the-gut and resolve-to-lay-off-the-chocolate moment of struggling with the top button. And pair after pair of pants balanced precariously at the bottom of my hips, inches of material pooled unflatteringly around my bum. Back at the racks, I stared at the pants in a size I haven’t worn since highschool and started to shake. I realized I don’t know my body anymore – this body that wears single-digit pants, smaller cup sizes, mediums instead of larges. It was unnerving.
So I went and bought a pair of shoes instead. That size hasn’t changed.

Quote of the day

2007-05-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

My life seemed to be one of understandings based on sex and misunderstandings based on love.

-Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star

It's crime time

2007-05-15T15:08:00.000-04:00

Do you like obscenity? Serial killers? Surveillance? Check out the schedule for the nearly-upon-me Crime, Media and Culture symposium taking place at McGill this Friday and Saturday. Crime-tastic!

The breaking point

2007-05-09T12:03:00.000-04:00

So it seems that after a year of biting off more than I could chew but chewing nonetheless, my inner ballast has finally decided to speak up and make it perfectly clear that I'm not ready for a dog just yet. Between the mild panic attacks (ever had one? Think the trash compactor scene in Star Wars, but without the Wookie), an unscheduled visit from my period, and constant anxious fidgeting, my body was hollering that this was too much too soon. Colour me surprised. I really believed I was ready for another dog. What happened?
I've spent the past year trying to be the dedicated and attentive teacher, the compassionate and attentive friend, the desirable and attentive girlfriend, the considerate and attentive roommate. Through all of this, a friend wisely pointed out (and my mother, but when do I ever listen to her?), I’d stopped attending to me. Taking on the role of loving and attentive dog owner without an intermission wasn’t going to work – I wouldn’t be able to give her what she needs without hesitation. I had to learn this the hard way, and I had to look into her big brown uncomprehending eyes to apologize and say goodbye.
I feel awful. Shaky. Near tears, again.
I force myself to take comfort in knowing that she’s returning to people who are determined to find her a good home, and I wonder what my home is going to be like. For ten years there’s always been another heartbeat – a roommate, a dog, a boyfriend, a cat – and now there’s only one. I look around my apartment and think it’s just me for the next little while, and am bravely uncertain.

Safety in irked numbers

2007-05-08T20:27:00.000-04:00

I am inordinately pleased to not be the only one that experiences this particular form (and level) of library frustration.

Dog, meet world.

2007-05-06T00:16:00.000-04:00

I'm road-testing a dog (we have a two-week trial period before the animal rescue organization checks back in to see how we’re doing). Her name is Ladybug, but I'm considering calling her Lucy. Think of the possibilities: the dog will have ‘splainin to do, I'll be able to holler “Lucy, I'm home,” and if I'm lucky one day she’ll look up at me with her big brown eyes and howl “Waaaaah.” My first choice was Gracie, but I was so eager to use the name that my iBook is Gracie, and you just can’t have a dog and a laptop with the same name. It’s just not done. Lucy’s part Lab, part Pointer, and has issues. In a nutshell, she’s overprotective. It’s clearly not in her nature, because she’s also a giant suck and more than happy to sidle up to you once she’s been assured you’re harmless. So we’re working on that assurance process by establishing me as the alpha dog (numerous people have pointed out the parallels between dog-shopping/training and dating, and I'm sure a few of my previous boyfriends would vouch for my propensity to jockey for that position). She’s remarkably smart – figured out after just one awkward clotheslining how to navigate oddly placed trees and lampposts – and she listens to me without question, so I think it’s doable. As Dave Gahan so wisely said, it’s a question of time. And of trust. Luckily I have a well-honed teacher voice.
What I've learned about Lucy so far: she eats used Kleenexes. She really really wants to get up on the bed, but politely refrains from doing so until I've left the house. She’s got it in for the horseball. Her bum can wiggle at a remarkable rate. She understands the concept of sleeping in. She likes coffee (I've never seen a dog get so excited at the sound of a coffee grinder, or voraciously lick the remnants from the bottom of a mug).
Tomorrow is another day of socializing. She met, frightened, and then threw herself at the feet of two friends this afternoon, and tomorrow she can repeat the pattern, hopefully with a little less emphasis on the frightening (she’s got an impressive build and one helluva growl, which might prove useful given my penchant for long walks late at night). Lucy just got bumped to the top of my summer project list.

Time.

2007-05-01T10:52:00.001-04:00

I have it now. No lectures to prep, no essays to grade, no student emails to return. Unstructured time! The novelty will wear off shortly but for now I'm enjoying the aimlessness. I haven’t switched gears into dissertation mode yet, so for inspiration I've come up with my summer resolutions:
1. Write. And write. And write some more – drafts of two chapters by the end of August, and a journal article to shop around for publication.
2. Migrate the blog, and then update it more regularly.
3. Drop another pant size. I've shed four since August, and while I'm coming to terms with the hereditary belly I'm not convinced it’s a lost cause.
4. Read at least one book a week (fiction).
5. Take a tiny trip. Quebec City for a weekend, perhaps. Something that fits my financial straits but also gets me off the island.
Crap. That’s a lot to do. I'll start tomorrow.

The slow climb back home

2007-04-26T00:25:00.000-04:00

It’s happening – the fridge slowly refilling with condiments, the milk crates giving way to shelves found tucked at the back of used furniture stores, the creaks of doors and windows becoming familiar background noise. How I can find my way to the bathroom in the dark. Settling in. The appliance count is up to four now with a washer and dryer. Give me a stud-finder so I can hang my favourite antique mirror and I'm set. That’s not entirely true, I still haven’t found a paper towel holder. Or a dog. The hunt continues – I've made a few depressing trips out to the SPCA; dogs endlessly rising to the promise that each person who walks in will be theirs. Hopeful eyes, wagging bums. I cry each time I leave, and not just because I haven’t found the one for me but because I can’t be the one for all of them. Like everyone else, I often imagine what I would do if I won the lottery; I always imagine a sum of at least ten million so that at least one million can go to the SPCA in every city I've lived. When my uncle died a few years ago his will asked that donations be made in his name to the local shelter – their house was always full of foster pets, of strays. They never turned an animal away, and eventually moved somewhere large enough to accommodate their menagerie. I found the best friend of my life thus far at a shelter before and am committed to adopting again, but it’s a heartbreaking search. It will be worth it in the end (sharing your life with an animal always is) but each time I go I have to restrain myself from lashing out at strangers on my way home – I find it hard to stomach that I move amongst people, nameless faceless people, that would do something as cruel as chain a dog’s face to an exhaust pipe while the car is running just so they no longer have to take care of it. I can save one right now, and one day a tenure-financed tract of land and I will save more.

I'm reading fiction again!

2007-04-24T23:21:00.001-04:00

Memory is like fiction; or else it’s fiction that’s like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemed a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn’t even there anymore. You’re left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another. Warm with life, hopelessly unstable.

-Haruki Murakami, "The Last Lawn of the Afternoon"

Bonheur d'Andrea

2007-04-15T19:16:00.000-04:00

I'm alone again. Boxes have been unpacked (except some that were crammed unceremoniously into the closet at the end of Moving Day Two), my enormous new beast of a table now dominates my dining room, and all I hear are my fingers on the keys and the whirr of the fridge (I now own appliances! An apron must surely be next). Art has been hung, books (and more books, and yet more books) have been shelved, and when I look around at a space that is entirely mine I exhale with real, instinctual happiness. Not to disparage my former roommate in any way – my joy at living alone again has everything to do with me. My phone and internet have yet to be reconnected (I'm currently pilfering someone’s unsecured wifi), and the past few days of dropping out of range of everyone but myself were by this point very necessary. I need me right now. It’s been one hell of a semester, and the dust is still settling. I made it, and sitting amidst the genuine quiet I'm not entirely sure how I managed – or even if I did. I made a string of poor choices based on a laughable over-estimation of my capabilities and capacities. But this change of scenery… it’s a simple shift in perspective that I can already feel. I know that the newness will wear off and this will just become home, but that’s part of what I'm anticipating. I haven’t felt at home in a long time, and there’s something about this configuration of space, this neighbourhood, that’s already tugging at that part of my heart. Proximity to train tracks and waterways. The old warm wood permeating the apartment. The money set aside in lieu of painting, of a washer and dryer, of cable, of high-speed internet, for a new canine best friend. I miss Isis every day, and the past few months especially. Dogs bring a certain kind of companionship made up of unconditional love and unrelenting get-outsideness that you forget is essential until you need it most. The SPCA is near the top of my to-do list, after a bathmat and before a paper-towel holder.

Lasts

2007-04-12T12:54:00.000-04:00

Day of school.
March up the stairs at the Papineau metro.
Nap on the daybed.
Run in the park.
Day of cable.

Officially a summer project

2007-04-07T11:25:00.000-04:00

Migrate the blog. Not just to mildly protest that my pretty, labour-intensive graphic has disappeared, but also to set up categories (there's something satisfying about classifying and organizing - I can see why structuralism caught on). One of the biggest categories will no doubt be 'Feminism,' and I'll put stuff like this in it - a reminder that women are still demeaned when we speak out in public, that our sexuality is still viciously policed, that our most culturally acceptable choice is still to be quiet and modest lest we be seen as 'asking for it.' Grrrrr.

Not the intended effect, I'm sure.

2007-03-20T17:34:00.000-04:00

A great ad from the U.S.'s National Drug Control office. Makes me wish I was high.

Why there's a pot of coffee brewing

2007-03-19T18:22:00.000-04:00

They’re waiting. Perched on the edge of my desk. Silent, complacent, knowing I can’t avoid them forever. Student essays. Sigh.

Sibling rivalry

2007-03-18T20:25:00.000-04:00

Some of you may remember the entertaining photoshopped picture of me that went out as an invite to my birthday celebrations last summer:
Not liking to be beaten at his own game – my brother’s photoshopped picture advertising his birthday celebrations (25, my gawd) this past weekend:
My brother looks better in a gold bikini than I do. At least I've got bigger breasts.

Glimpsed

2007-03-14T18:20:00.001-04:00

An old couple standing still in the metropolitan rush hour. Aging more than gracefully – unashamed grey and white hair, stylish lines in classic styles. Him: weighing the coins in his hand as he stands in front of a parking meter. Her: reading the instructions over his shoulder, an arm hooked through his. She lifts her head slightly and brushes her lips against the arc of his cheekbone, he turns to her and smiles, pulls her closer. He feeds the meter.

I saw this on my way to the metro after work today, pulling someone else’s vignette into my own preoccupations about what I want. If anything, maybe it’s this. Not pop song love, not poetry love, but quotidian, powerful, wordless shared looks love. And more – I might even believe in it.

And they weren't even fermented.

2007-03-03T15:33:00.000-05:00

I love grapes. Love them. I hardly ever have them (except at Xmas, since one of my aunts always comes bearing bags of grapes) because they’re expensive and because and I tend to buy more portable fruit like Granny Smith apples. White seedless grapes (my fave; Welch’s makes a white grape juice that’s just delicious) were on sale at the grocery store this week, so I've been mindlessly popping them into my mouth all day. And now I have a terrible stomachache. I had no idea it was possible to eat too many grapes, that I even had a grape threshold. I've been bested by a small indifferent fruit.

A different kind of live journal

2007-03-01T22:59:00.000-05:00

My department’s shiny new online journal – avenue – launched today. Yours truly has a column about television (no surprise there), which will be regularly updated. Ideally. Check it out – it’s a little more erudite than this. Ideally.

Back to life, back to reality

2007-02-26T17:52:00.000-05:00

Everyone is telling me to update this more often. And I’d like to post more regularly, I really would. I just don’t know what to say – with two classes three times a week I have a hard time finding space in my head for much else, or even switching off my teaching voice (my roommate is now reluctant to watch Canadian or crime television with me – I'm a few didactic outbursts away from being insufferable). This first day back after the break was a refresher in how unwaveringly routine and segmented each week is: Monday, Wednesday and Friday: teach, office hours, gym, office hours, teach, dinner, prep, bed (coffee breaks are implied). Tuesday and Thursday: run, write, domestic errands (such as buying more coffee), dinner, prep, bed. Repeat two days later. My planner breaks weekdays down by the hour, and I actually have to use that section. I mildly enjoy all this structure. I always know exactly what I'm doing next, and my days are a series of small tasks continually being accomplished. Full and satisfying. Like lasagne.
Today’s tasty tidbit: I taught a few of Poe’s short stories early in the term, and as a larf started one lecture with The Alan Parsons Project’s “The Raven.” Since then a bunch of students have emailed me other musical interpretations of Poe, and after class today one approached*, earphones in hand, to have me listen to an Iron Maiden version of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Rock on! I've now got nearly enough for a very macabre mixed tape.

*the same student who, in a discussion about the eroticism of violence and the violence of eroticism, mentioned that it’s easy to meet a chick you want to fuck, or a chick you want to kill, but never one you want to marry because that goes on forever. Maybe romance really is dead.

This Post Has Seven Days

2007-02-25T12:27:00.000-05:00

Yes, I actually did read over reading week. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, and one of my comfort novels – Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. Still peppered with post-its from my last pass, I noticed how the book speaks to me differently on each return. Flagged this time:

Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the ‘findings’ in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves.

Aside from reading, the break meant I actually had to think about what’s been going on in my life, rather than just unreflectively living through it. Patterns of lost and found (or perhaps I just see it that way because my inner structuralist likes to impose categories? At any rate, a skewed equilibrium in which some sides are punching more than their weight). This past week of downtime meant I couldn’t escape thinking about what I've been doing, or not doing, for me. The double-edged sword of busy is that while it keeps you from looking too closely at what you’re missing the moments of loneliness hit harder – the end of the night when the computer shuts down and there’s nothing else left.
I've been debating about this post for awhile (well, at least a week). A friend told me to own it. So I'm trying. I'm missing some of the anchors in my life right now, and it’s hard. During a therapeutic pizza, wine, and roommate evening this week he laughed at the suggestion that I was an open book. He tossed off a detailed list of jokes, deflections, quippy rhetorical diversions that I use to keep people outside, and tried to explain what these moves have cost me. My usual strategy is to move on without looking back, but lately that’s been obscuring things – like how not looking back can be an expression of fear rather than strength. I'm trying to face and own up to repercussions of the past, of both messing up and of letting things get messed up. Not really a ‘you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone,’ because I always knew. It’s hitting harder now – the people that matter and what I need to do bring my life back into balance again. Like seeing strength not as leaving someone behind, but something – a habit of armour, a belief that intimacy and vulnerability are signs of weakness. Otherwise what’s lost could stay that way, and I'm brave enough to do better than that.

Yet another reason why feminism isn't irrelevant

2007-02-20T17:50:00.000-05:00

The Bluenotes clothing store chain is selling guys' t-shirts that read "No means have another drink." A classy endorsement of date rape for the low price of $15.50. More on that here. Even better, use the chain's convenient feedback button at the bottom of their website to remind them that promoting sexual assault in order to make money is offensive.

One down

2007-02-13T21:41:00.000-05:00

Round one (of four) of marking is done. I like grading papers. Really. Particularly because it reminds me of the things language can do. Once you hit a certain point academically your writing style solidifies – you can learn new minor rhetorical flourishes (which you then promptly overuse) but your voice is pretty much established. So it’s refreshing to read undergraduate essays for glimpses of other ways words can be put together – creative, enthusiastic, proud sentences. My two faves from this round:
1. (From a paper on the development of Canadian film): “Then Grierson emerged.” I like this because it makes me think of Swamp Thing: John Grierson rising impressively out of the muck in a dated suit, flabby arms flailing, spouting gibberish about how narrative film degenerates the mind.
2. (On the detective’s trademark wit): “He wields his snark and disdain like a flaming sword.” Awesome: a) the use of ‘snark’ in an academic paper; b) “flaming sword.” That’s a weapon.
And my vote for sexiest sentence: “What Canada's taste for American film style suggests, then, is that we imagine ourselves as a bland shadow of a borrowed cinema.”
With this done, reading week seems so tantalizing close – sleeping in, wine on a weeknight, a book without a bibliography. Soon.

So I talk to myself. So what?

2007-01-25T10:57:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-01-17T16:52:00.000-05:00

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

Lonely Boy

2007-01-07T17:51:00.000-05:00

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...

2007-01-03T18:04:00.000-05:00

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

Good reading

2006-12-18T10:19:00.000-05:00

Fascinating article in the latest Maisonneuve...

Grrr

2006-11-30T13:34:00.000-05:00

I don't like Harper. Women can be better served without lobbying and advocacy? Grrr.

Truculence

2006-11-22T19:22:00.000-05:00

I'm reading, among many other things, Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: The Rise of Raunch Culture. It’s more informed than a lot of mainstream (i.e. outside of the academy) cultural criticism and Levy’s familiarity with popular second-wave feminist work (e.g. Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller) often goes beyond chatty intellectualism. I'm on board with some parts of her argument: we have a problematically narrow definition of sexy that continues to rest on the objectification of women and does a disservice to the fundamental goals of second-wave feminism; women’s sexual empowerment is frustratingly still defined as the ability to arouse men. However, I'm not keen on how she roots the seeds of ‘raunch culture’ in the women’s movement. For someone that must have read Susan Faludi’s Backlash, she seems to have missed its point. Levy’s overtures toward the role capitalism plays in perpetuating these kinds of representations could be much more profoundly thought out – capitalism is still a deeply patriarchal system, and its insidious language of personal choice that frames the way raunch culture is positioned as ‘liberating’ serves a narrow set of economic and political interests. Looking at how efficiently feminism has been shorthanded, diffused, and co-opted into only its most marketable and non-threatening goals – leaving us not with feminism, but female individualism – would turn Levy’s position from righteous (and rightly so) indignation into real criticism and praxis. Not all my evening reading has been this disappointing lately – I finally picked up Bitchfest (Sex and the City may have categorized women into Katy Girls and Simple Girls; I prefer Bust Women and Bitch Women). Not only is it satisfyingly polemical, but the title also keeps strangers from bothering you when you’re reading in public (I have an entire shelf of these, like Sarah Projansky’s Watching Rape or Philip Jenkins’ Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America). Held at just the right angle, they can ensure a peaceful, smalltalk-free afternoon at the café.

Mmm... Bond...

2006-11-18T12:48:00.000-05:00

I saw Casino Royale last night - yes, opening night, that’s just how excited I was about the new Bond film. I grew up on Bond, reading the books and watching the movies over and over again with my Bond-loving parents. Rather than comfort food, I have 007 for comfort films. I was thrilled, during my M.A., that we learned cultural theory by way of Bond – Bond and psychoanalysis, Bond and gender theory, Bond and poststructuralism. I was inordinately pleased when Pierce Brosnan, the target of my pre-teen desire as Remington Steele, became Bond. And, aside from Casino Royale’s dull theme song and boring credit sequence, I loved it. But this isn’t a movie review. You can find those elsewhere. And when you do, you might notice how relieved these reviews sound about just how manly Daniel Craig is as Bond. Moore, Lazenby, Dalton, and Brosnan are quickly and summarily dismissed, and we now have, as both the Toronto Star and the New York Times tell us (lifting without acknowledgment from Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott), the Bond we deserve. A real man. A sweaty man. Or, from the Globe & Mail, “a gloriously old-fashioned, absolutely masculine body.” To pull from the movie’s own poker rhetoric, this is one of popular culture’s tells: the male body as a cipher for deeper anxieties and anger about losing political ground and privilege. Brosnan doesn’t cut it, the Globe says, because he’s “effete . . . too much of a pretty boy.” This latest Bond enacts a complex fantasy of potency and rage and guilt, reassuringly rebuilding a cultural touchstone. Take, for instance, the film’s inclusion of the novel’s muscle-clenching torture scene, in which Bond is strapped naked to a chair and has his genitals mercilessly whipped. While the Globe review complains “Finally, we get a Bond actor with real balls, and the film has to batter them,” that’s precisely the point. What better way to remasculinize the epitome of masculinity, to prove just how real his balls are? Redeeming the ‘blunt instrument’ primarily through violent rather than sexual prowess (though the vicious penis-lashing doesn’t seem to have any real effect on his sexual performance – nothing can defeat the penis!), Casino Royale gives us a Bond that’s not entirely sure what he’s doing is right but is too far in to stop now (Bond films not being particularly well-known for the subtlety of their political allegories). It was a fantastic movie, worth the price of admission just for the phenomenal parkour scene, I'm just, as always, intrigued and amused by the action genre’s compulsive bulwarking and buttressing of white male heterosexuality. Penis pity rather than envy.

Hot damn!

2006-11-09T18:45:00.001-05:00

So the topic’s been changed for the lecture I'm giving on Monday. It’s now… wait for it… Canadian television! Woohoo! Sure I can talk about film and make it interesting, but Canadian tv gets me gesturing excitedly. I've only got an hour, which isn’t nearly long enough, but I suppose that’s why MISC gave me an entire course next semester. As an added bonus, anything I say could make its way onto the quiz the students have at the end of next week, which is one of the things that still startles me about teaching – seeing my own words spit back in short answer form. The students also have an essay due in two weeks, which means I'm now constantly fielding questions that up the intrigue about the kinds of things they’ll be writing on. So far it looks like I'm getting one on Tim Hortons and one on Canadian Bacon.
My own writing is taking awhile to come together. I haven’t been able to keep my mind focused enough to get more than three or four pages a day. It’s frustrating, knowing I'm coming up on a semester with no time for my own research, and I'm afraid I won’t have a substantive draft of my first chapter before that happens. To try and clear out even a handful of the cobwebs I'm thinking of taking off next weekend for a quick and dirty trip to Hogtown. The liminal space of the train often gives me a greater sense of perspective, not to mention the therapy of a late night out and long lazy morning in with dear old friends. I haven’t left Montreal since last Xmas, and while I love this city I could really use a day or two somewhere ghostless.
What a completely unenlightening post. Blah blah minor and irrelevant excitements, blah blah allusions to emotions, blah blah. I do have thoughts about important things like the midterm elections, like Parc Ave and patrimoine, like the fascinatingly honest Canadian Armed Forces ads on tv lately. But like I said: unfocused brain. It’s spent all day trying to be cogent and will spend all evening catching up on course material for seminars the next morning. It needs a break.

Mission: Untoppable?

2006-11-03T15:19:00.000-05:00

Just when I think that writing one of these romantic suspense novels will be the funnest and fastest way to pay off my student loans, the bar on what makes a good trashy novel inches a little higher. Last night I read Mission: Irresistible (same author as License to Thrill) which contained the line: “Oh, she was an unrepentant slut puppy!” This was in addition to the ancient Minoan Order the heroine was investigating, whose language has been lost to scholars for years and its closest translation (in an extinct Cretan dialogue, of course) is Wannamakemecomealot. Dare I try to top that?

Doing things with texts

2006-11-02T10:31:00.000-05:00

Riddle me this: how much of an impact has Sex and the City had on women’s maudlin writing? I know I'm not the only person – male or female – that draws parallels between television stories and my own life stories (I'm, like, totally, sooo much more Miranda than, like, anyone else). The series saturates late-night syndication slots, hitting prime nightcap-and-laptop time. What are women (not implying that men don’t watch SATC, but for brevity using what the inane weight-loss ads indicate is the show’s target audience) doing with the easy accessibility and repetition of this show, with its emphasis on chronicling experiences in order to make sense of them? Can someone (not me, I'm bad with quantitative stuff) please do some sort of study that charts the content of blog posting alongside airdates and times? It should come as no surprise, then, that I just watched the episode in which Miranda first meets Steve, knowing of course how their story ends, and starts again, and ends again, and starts again… what can I say, there’s a romantic (mass, not heartless) buried somewhere under a layer or two of crusty cynicism. Like crème brulee. Mmm… crème brulee…
In other parts of my brain: I've been harassing the library for awhile now, since no one seems able to answer my question. The “upgrade” to WebCT Vista means it’s now possible to link to journal articles from within the course website, provided McGill’s already got access to the articles in their databases. I took it the next logical step further, figuring I’d just get all the other readings for my courses (book sections, e.g.) turned into pdfs and put them on there as well. No stacks of expensive coursepacks that invariably end up in the garbage at the end of the semester. And yet no one at the library can tell me whether or not this infringes upon ‘free use.’ I don’t see why not – only students registered in my courses will have access to these materials and they’re being reproduced for teaching purposes. What struck me as a no-brainer is turning into an increasingly irritating endeavour. So much for being a visionary…

As promised

2006-11-01T00:25:00.000-05:00

The aforementioned musings. We’re talking about Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion this week. I love talking about novels, even if I didn’t particularly like them (bad Canadian, not overly keen on Ondaatje). Most people I know tend toward non-fiction so I rarely get the chance (sidenote: I got to live out a fantasy scenario on Friday: meeting a cute boy in a bookstore as we were both reaching for the same book by my favourite writer – I was picking up Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore as a present for a girlfriend. Next on the list is looking out my window to see where the Peter Gabriel’s coming from…). I love listening to the different ways fiction affects people, and aside from the expected comments of how this book completely changes the way a few students are going to think about the Bloor Street viaduct, I was intrigued by their perceptions of the book’s ideas about identity, or lack thereof. How very Canadian, they commented, that the protagonist has no clear sense of where he fits in. I don’t know if it’s a uniquely Canadian trait, this navel-gazing, though we’ve become very adept at marketing as such. On a more personal level, it seems to be going around – I had a thematically similar conversation a few weeks ago with someone traipsing from cultural world to cultural world and feeling foreign in each of them. A discomfiting experience. I'm sure we’ve all had them, especially in places that we think we’d feel most at home. There are times when I feel profoundly out of place in front of a classroom, just waiting to be exposed as a professorial poseur. Every time I go out for drinks in my hometown I listen to the stories of stag and does at the arena, of first and second children being born, of cashier shifts at the giant box stores, and wonder when I can politely leave. My old lives no longer fit, the new one is often lonely or uncomfortable. Not yet a prof but not only a student; sometimes a feminist just because it’s theoretically convenient; a dog person sans dog… we can’t expect one simple label to encompass everything we are and are not, particularly when we’re exposed to and made up of multiple and often contradictory experiences. Such is the fun and frustration, as my best friend is discovering in her experiments with online dating, of describing yourself in 200 words or less, catchy snippets that only offer a less-than-partial glimpse. And, tritely, that’s part of the allure of Halloween – trying other identities on for size, at least for a night (remember the Buffy episode when the Scooby Gang becomes their costumes, and learns in the process that cocksure masculinity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that there’s a vixen under every white bedsheet, that being a simpering priss is even more frustrating then a self-assured young woman?). Judith Butler (Judy B! What can I say, I was holed up writing about sex and gender as problematic social constructions all day) talks about the inherent potential of identity construction and masquerade, convinced (and convincingly so) that these are sites of political possibility. That may be little consolation, even for theory nerds like myself, for how in the interim and on a daily level, this process of process opens cracks of self-doubt, that because it’s not static or sure it’s not good enough. But rather than get into the genuinely personal, I'll circle back out to Ondaatje, whose writing is full of thinly veiled versions of his own personal dramas – note the recurring love triangles with married or otherwise unavailable women, or the entirety of Secular Love. Just wait until my first novel. Or first sitcom.

C'est l'halloween!

2006-10-31T11:57:00.000-05:00

Halloween pics are making their way up. It was of course a great party, with the most disturbing costume being a simple horsehead (I didn’t get a shot of it, but one’s up on the host’s blog). I went as a trashy undergrad, which was a surprisingly easy costume to put together at the last minute (just tuck some baggy jogging pants into some ugly boots and you’re halfway there) and was immediately identified by everyone, which says something about the uniformity of the McGill ghetto girls. I know they look different parading their wares along the Main on a Saturday night, but I don’t have the boots for that look. And yes, I made sure that a skinny black thong was clearly visible above the rolled-down waistband (that photo probably won’t make an appearance). More thoughts on undergrads later – they’ve been on my mind as I've been putting my two courses together for the winter. If you’d like a preview, I'm lecturing about the Canadian film industry for CANS 200 on November 13th. Further inter-related thoughts on costuming/identity, teaching, and Canada later...

Snap-tacular

2006-10-27T18:52:00.000-04:00

To celebrate my camera’s return to good health, and to assuage (or perhaps provoke) my roommate’s homesickness I took some pictures of the fall colours in Parc Lafontaine late this afternoon. I wasn’t alone – I spotted seven other people snapping away, no doubt as glad as I was to finally have some sunshine. Some have already made it up on my neglected flickr account, and I think when I've got more money next semester I'm going to upgrade to their Pro account, if for no other reason than to be able to endlessly categorize my photos (how I do love to organize). I felt a wee bit embarrassed taking these shots; growing up my family used to dread fall as our road would be overrun with slow drivers taking in the (admittedly breathtaking) escarpment scenery, and relatives would make weekend trips to sit bundled up on the back porch and marvel at the display. And today I became one of them. Sidenote: my hometown was mentioned on the Colbert Report last week – you can check it out here. Playing in the sunshine all day (shopping for the first of many birthday presents, as I seem to make friends almost exclusively with Scorpios) means that tonight I need to sit down and write something other than this. Thankfully the coffeemaker has a ‘strong’ setting. Coming soon: illustrated tales of tomorrow night’s inevitably fantastic Halloween party.

Eleven down

2006-10-25T01:15:00.000-04:00

I find chick dick fiction a satisfying, if sometimes fleeting, form of therapy. Some reach for chocolate, I reach for a Janet Evanovich novel. This evening I made it through all of Evanovich’s Eleven On Top. No need to reiterate how much I enjoy my research, and because the grad student in me doesn’t always know how to stop, was thinking the entire time of why I keep coming back to these novels (I'm not the only one pondering this question; hordes of intrigued academics aside, check out this article in the McGill Tribune). While I could hypothesize for ages (or write a dissertation on it, even), some of it is that unlike many other serial writers, Evanovich manages to hang onto the stuff that keeps chick dick fiction interesting, for me at least: the mystery. It never takes a backseat to the angst of lust and life, and their intrusions often ring true for me, such as the momentary and consuming diversions of sugary treats, pretty shoes, or giving in to a sexy hand reaching up your shirt even when you know it’s going to lead to a capital-R Regret. Reading a lot of formula fiction, as I do, things start to jump out at you, this time the phrases “he cut his eyes to the man standing…” and “he angled out of the car.” These expressions stay vivid for me precisely because of their overuse – they’ve become a cliché of pump-it-out-fast writing and in other circumstances tend to grate. But here they remind me of what these kinds of novels are trying to do – straddle competing generic worlds, get the mass-market fiction audience, convey an image with the efficiently of the familiar. I feel better, or at least distracted, now. And I can fall asleep without wondering whodunit.

I DO learn something new every day.

2006-10-24T17:36:00.000-04:00

Things I've discovered today:
1. How awful orange juice tastes after you’ve brushed your teeth. This one’s actually a re-discovery, since I've started dosing myself with juice to stave off the inevitable fall cold that I can feel lurking in my glands. The body is its own best barometer – I can always feel in my knees when it’s going to rain, thanks to a high school sports injury. If you connect the dots of acne they point to my period, although this one’s kind of misleading, since they also gang up on me as a warning that my parents are imminent, but then it’s easy to confuse cramps with a gut reaction to mothering. Hopefully it's my period and not my mother that shows up tomorrow.

2. The Weather Network has a “fall colour report,” a guide to how the leaves are changing across the country. So you can best plan your slow Sunday drive, I guess. Yet one more reason to have the site bookmarked.

3. I have no idea how one goes about starting to write a dissertation. Staring into the face of this huge project, I’m realizing that distilling it down into a 50-page proposal wasn’t as helpful as it would seem, rather it actually makes the project feel more intimidating. A related re-discovery: I still need a basic pen and paper to brainstorm. There’s something about the tactile quality and the movement of thoughts and hand that stimulates my brain, like being able to draw arrows between things. I also like having a record of ideas that on the first round of thinking seemed useless but can trigger bigger, better thoughts further into the process. I’ve become more adept at writing on the computer, it creates a tighter finished draft, but I still need labyrinthine handwritten notes to get me to that point.

4. I've grown accustomed to and generally miss having a roommate (who's globe-trotting off to Spain to visit the original roommate until the first week of November). I like hollering questions down the hall, or ignoring the phone and knowing that it’ll get answered anyway. And yes, I admit it, being a lazy suck and having coffee refills delivered by hand to my office door.

I’d also like to say that I'm enamoured of Kraft’s peanut butter-chocolate spread. I'm testing a theory that it, rather than time, heals all wounds. Scientific method being adjusted at whim, of course.

And the theme of the week is…

2006-10-18T10:27:00.000-04:00

Everywhere I turn this week climate change is on the agenda. This is not a complaint. It came up in class this week, which surprised me. The professor segued from a discussion of regionalism in Canada into slideshow (not as good as Gore’s) about Canada's poor performance in reducing emissions. I was pleasantly surprised – from my experience in Canadian Studies, and not just at McGill, there’s been a tendency to shy away from casting the country in a bad light, and to spin the less laudable aspects (like the Historica Minutes approach to history). Then there’s the upcoming symposium at U de M on Friday. And more coverage of Schwarzenegger’s big plans for California (though I still have a hard time taking him seriously as a politician). I like this trend. I admit to not knowing as much about these issues as I should, but I'm trying, and it’s great to see that I'm not the only one getting my consciousness raised.

You know you're becoming a Quebecer when...

2006-10-15T10:45:00.000-04:00

I dreamt about Lucien Bouchard the other night. It was sexy. He was in a very tiny parade going past my house, looked in my office window, waved, and snuck out of the parade to lean against my windowsill and chat (flanked by an entourage of men in dark grey suits and oversized black sunglasses). I don't remember perfectly, but I think we just talked about everyday stuff - he asked how my work was going, I commented on his manifesto, offered him a homemade cookie (oatmeal raisin, he seemed to enjoy it), and we promised to keep in better touch. Then he paraded away. I've been suffering through a stretch of not remembering my dreams - I wake up assuming I've had some, but haven't been able to recollect anything until this past week. They're still just snippets, sensations, often triggered by moments in conversation when I start to say something and it hits me that I'm about to make reference to a dream and not waking life. I really enjoyed this one; Quebec has always been this magical place in my mental landscape, created through my parents' frequent trips here when I was younger and their enthusiastic stories. I had a conversation awhile ago with someone who insisted that to him places don't have a feel, but even on daytrips years ago Montreal has always somehow felt like home. Writing about place and identity, Gillian Rose talks about home as "a place in which you feel comfortable . . . because part of how you define yourself is symbolized by certain qualities of that place." Swapping baking tips with Bouchard on a sunny fall afternoon - how much more homey can you get?

ABD, baby!

2006-10-13T19:26:00.000-04:00

I defended my dissertation proposal today, and despite last night's crushing doubts of "Oh crap I'm not ready to do this, I'm not nearly as smart as I like to think I am," it went off without a hitch. Woohoo! I was apprehensive about having an English prof on my examination committee, not specific to her but a reaction to my incredibly confrontational M.A. defense a few years ago with another English department examiner. Silly fears - she paid me the most amazing compliment I've ever received in school: that she thought my work was fantastic and wished she had come up with it so she could do it. All of the questions tended toward "This idea is neat, can you talk about it some more." Boy could I. So now I'm ABD (all but dissertation), which is only a hop, skip, and a couple hundred pages away from the holy grail. I love loving what I do, obscene debt be damned. And I'm excited - to finally be able to start writing, but first to go out and celebrate this evening. Once more, for good measure: woohoo!

Mark your calendars

2006-09-21T21:13:00.000-04:00

The last tiny mile before I sleep

2006-09-21T02:04:00.000-04:00

We all have bedtime routines – the order of activities that, night after night, signal to our minds that sleep is imminent. I always wash my face before brushing my teeth, and the socks are always the last to come off before I crawl under the covers. But before all of that I check my email. I rarely respond to anything that may have shown up, yet still pad down the hall to see, and spend a few minutes with the last of my wine, a final cigarette, and (most often) the Weather Network (or, if I'm feeling masochistic, my bank statement). It’s become such a force of habit that I can’t remember not doing it, although I know that this part of my pattern is relatively recent – I wasn’t nearly as conscious of email until moving here two years ago. Not that I was computer illiterate, but before Montreal my bedtime habit consisted of curling up with a book for half an hour. It saddens me that I've given that up in favour of my computer, I have so little time to read for pleasure as it is, and I find myself getting sketchy if I go too long without some fiction in my life. Some of this compulsion is professional – it’s hard to distinguish between Andrea-at-home and Andrea-the-teacher after this long. Most of it, though, has to do with the inevitable repeated separations of the student life, uprooting myself every few years to move to a new city, a new degree, a new set of friends. The more I do this, however, the less I care to. I love the friends I've made and the friendships I've maintained; at the risk of sounding callous I’d rather have them than new ones. I like to go to bed with the full knowledge of their day and the sense that regardless of distance they’re still the closest.

Life imitates life

2006-09-14T10:11:00.000-04:00

Coming on the heels of my last musings about teen series season finales, a shooting at Dawson College. Spoilers ensue. The season two finale of Veronica Mars had a highschool boy confess to orchestrating the deaths of a busload of his peers and then throws himself off the roof of a building, after brandishing a gun at three of his friends. The previously referenced BTVS finale was initially postponed due to its scenes of violence in hallowed halls (not the first time for the series, which also had to push back “Earshot,” for similar reasons). Most obviously, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. What these texts have in common is a relatively uncompromising look at a cultural microcosm in which social divisions – economic, sexual, gender – are powerfully experienced. I make these references not to diminish the reality or impact of the shooting at Dawson, but because our fictional treatments (and treatments of such fictions) is revealing. Television scholar John Ellis argues in Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty that one of television’s most important social functions is how its thematic consistencies across formats and genres to work through our most pressing tensions and anxieties: “Working through is a constant process of making and remaking meanings, and of exploring possibilities. It is an important process in an age that threatens to make us witness to too muich information without providing us with enough explanation . . . It renders familiar, integrates and provides a place for the difficult material that it brings to our witness” (79). The media is an enormous machine for processing trauma, with a vast store of images and narratives for situating and resituating such events as we try to make them make sense. Because, trite but true, some motivations we’ll never really know and can only make educated guesses that hopefully, this time, please, will go beyond shallow scapegoating (videogames made them do it!) Elephant makes powerfully, heartstoppingly clear the deeply systemic factors – school culture and its attendant forms of appropriate identities – absent from news reports. Words like “rampage” and “terrorize” paint a resonant picture of monstrous deviance that is hard to argue against without running the risk of seeming insensitive to the real physical and emotional damage of these events. What happened at Dawson is awful, I'm not even trying to suggest otherwise, but these familiar scripts don’t give us the chance to learn from this. So many young men being so desperately unhappy should cue us in to the possibility that something bigger is wrong.

Other people's endings

2006-09-09T17:28:00.000-04:00

Highschool graduation episodes of teen tv shows make me tear up. This is a sharp contrast to real life, in which I hated highschool and shudder at the thought of returning. First it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer's season three finale, and then Dawson’s Creek. Now it’s the end of Veronica Mars’ second season (I'm a little behind, I know, but I've only recently returned to cable tv after a long stint in popular culture purgatory). BTVS and Veronica Mars especially purport to be critical of highschool’s highly stratified and emotionally degrading social culture yet their graduations both played out the same tired dream of “outcasts” (inasmuch as petite blonde white middle class girls can be outcasts) finally revered and applauded by their peers (cue swelling music). The lucrative mythology of highschool years as glory years is somehow enticing, and I must admit to missing some of the conveniences of home: how it was always more effective to ignore my mother in person, or the luxury of in-house laundry. I dream of the day when I have my own washer and dryer, especially after Friday morning’s slapstick affair of me and the local laundromaster combining our powers to untangle a pair of my panties from the washing machine’s inner workings. There’s nothing quite like seeing a portly middle-aged man waving your favourite thong around in triumph to make you reconsider the elasticity of your appliance budget.

School's in!

2006-09-07T22:00:00.000-04:00

The first week of school is always a mess – meetings, chance encounters and the obligatory “my summer vacation” anecdotes, dodging undergrads as they stop en mass mid-sidewalk. It always makes me feel like I've gone soft over the summer, for now accomplishing more than two tasks in a day wipes me out. I need to rebuild my social stamina and coffee tolerance. It smells like fall, dusk descends more quickly, I have readings on my list of things to do… school’s definitely back. All intimations of complaint aside, campus’ air of enthusiasm is infectious. It’s far too easy when I'm staring at a stack of books and a computer screen day after day to forget why I'm here, why I'm doing this. The fame of a bestselling dissertation-turned-book? Maybe that’s a tiny and naively optimistic part of it, but those picturesque and deeply connotative ivy covered buildings make me remember how much I believe in and love encouraging students to pay critical attention to the popular culture that surrounds us (experience the magic for yourself later this month). There’s nothing quite like teaching, especially at McGill. Perhaps this too is the ivy speaking, but there’s a qualitative difference between the undergrads here and ones I've taught elsewhere that makes walking into a classroom a challenge – the rush at realizing just how sharp they are, the exhilaration of being constantly on your intellectual toes, the way they can make you revisit the way you’ve presented something. Bring it on, semester. Just let me grab a coffee first…

Savvy?

2006-09-01T01:38:00.000-04:00

When I looked at the calendar this afternoon I noticed that somehow the summer has ended. I panicked. So much stuff left unfinished (well, mostly just the dissertation proposal), but there was something I could still cross off the list. Which means I finally saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. So much swashbuckling action and fun CGI! And a reminder that both Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom are welcome any time (they can eat all the crackers they want in my bed). This is not to diminish the appeal of the boy I brought with me, who has the added benefit of being real and who occasionally expresses interest in puffy shirts (jokingly, but a girl can dream). So now the fall can officially start, and good thing too, since I have my first of what will no doubt be an eight-month marathon of meetings Tuesday morning. I managed to catch the last metro back, and saw something neat – a little tunnel trolley carting things around on the tracks. It had never occurred to me that they could be used for transporting things other than people, and I had an unsettling frisson not unlike the sensation of being in the mall when all the stores are closing, rattling their giant chainlink doors shut and plunging the mannequins into darkness. It reminded me of two stories: Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and Jenny Colgan’s “The Wrong Train” in the Tart Noir anthology. I'm either going to finally buy a metro pass, or start grabbing transfers on my way in as proof that I'm where I'm supposed to be. Such paranoia is an unavoidable consequence of reading speculative fiction, but can you imagine how dull I’d be if I never let my imagination run away from me?

Obituary

2006-08-25T18:39:00.000-04:00

Today I said goodbye to my best friend and constant companion of the past eight years – my beautiful dog Isis. I couldn’t have asked for a better dog. I'm going to miss her warm body curled up beside me at night, her big brown eyes (and their impossibly long white eyelashes) looking up to mine, her soft white head peeking around the corner, her giddy galumphing down the hall when I returned home. She loved playing tug-of-war with her leash, car rides, making snow angels in the winter, chasing tennis balls and never bringing them back, resting her head on your lap, disciplining her array of stuffed animals, and snausages. Isis won over cat people and dog-phobes in minutes with her big dopey grin and calm affection. She made getting out of bed every morning a pleasure, her smile broke my heart, and I can’t begin to imagine my life without her. I love her more than I knew I knew how, and I'm going to miss her in ways I can’t even predict. May she finally be in a place to catch the rabbits she’s been dreaming about for so many years.

Excuses, excuses

2006-08-16T01:08:00.000-04:00

I’d like to claim that blogging’s been sidetracked by tweaking the blog’s appearance, but I can’t take credit for its newish veneer (with the exception of actually taking the photo at the top). Those props go out to the boy that lives down the hall (his blog is much swankier, I aspire to a swanky one myself someday), who’s about to depart for a teaching gig in Spain and leave me to fend for myself against a house full of white pets for the next four months. Other things have been keeping me busy lately, namely revising, revising, revising. I've got a workable draft now, excepting a methods section that I still haven’t figured out how to write. Part of me wants to adopt an air of snooty defiance (“I don’t have to explain my methods to you!”) but then I’d never pass. Pragmatism. My birthday is this weekend, which is both exciting and sad. Not sad age-wise, since I am eternally young and vivacious, but because my birthday’s always meant that summer is almost over. Even though I'm not teaching this semester it’s still a return to school, or at least the feeling that the school year has started and I can’t get away with nearly as much slacking. At least in the interim I will have presents to console me, and a ceremonial birthday pie – strawberry rhubarb (my favourite). Mmm… pie…

best store name yet

2006-08-10T20:54:00.000-04:00

(spotted while walking to a meeting this afternoon)

Hosertalk

2006-08-04T22:45:00.000-04:00

One of the courses I'm teaching this coming year is an introduction to Canadian film and television. I taught a similar course at Brock in 2005, but focused specifically on Canadian television. I love teaching, so it goes without saying that I had a great time and am really looking forward to throwing some Canadian film into the mix this time around (if nothing else, I'll be able to expose more people to Ham and Cheese). Canada's cultural policies, not surprisingly, play a huge role in the course just as they have in our cultural production, for better or worse. My background and interest in television means I'm more knowledgeable about broadcasting policy than film production, which has a fairly obvious patriarchal and pedagogical bent – a propensity for proclaiming what’s best for Canadian audiences that often results in embarrassingly unpopular programming. Don’t misinterpret that, I love and will passionately defend some Canadian television (KITH, DaVinci's Inquest, The Hilarious House of Frightenstein - which Space is going to start airing again in the fall to my immense delight, Degrassi, Prisoners of Gravity, This Hour Has Seven Days, and Straight Up, to name only a very small handful), but others really shouldn’t have ever made it past the programming directors. Canadian television production and broadcasting policies are intimately bound up in nationalism, the idea that our cultural products are capable of expressing a uniquely Canadian identity in the face of an overwhelming American presence in our popular culture. We’re not the only nation-state to adopt this strategy – Australia and New Zealand are also battling to retain public broadcasting as a form of citizen glue – but as Graeme Turner points out in an article I read this afternoon, our proximity to the U.S. makes our situation significantly different. He says, “This is a geopolitical context in which a national television regulatory system has very limited possibilities, but in which the representation national difference is fundamentally important for cultural and political reasons. So, what do you do if you want Canadian television to do more for the Canadian community than it does at present?” It’s a good question. It’s something I've been thinking about, both in terms of how to teach Canadian cultural policy in a way that acknowledges both its positive and negative impact, and from the perspective of someone who’s got a sitcom script at the back of her head. The increasing transnational movement of media means that there is no longer an easy equivalence between television consumption and national identity, yet it still persists in policy and in commentary. This makes it hard to get students to look past seeing television texts as simple reflections of Canadian identity that magically build a cohesive citizenry. With no other framework readily available, Canadian film and television remain tricky political and cultural texts, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s why Bon Cop Bad Cop is on my must-see list.
You might also want to check out Dead Things On Sticks, and the Museum of Broadcast Communications entry on Canadian television.

Muse - 1, Andrea - 0

2006-07-26T23:28:00.000-04:00

I sat down tonight to start working on a submission to a magazine, and realized with dismay just how accustomed I've grown to writing in academese (e.g. I keep wanting to buttress things with quotes). An argumentative stance has become second nature after ten years of university (many who know me would say it’s always been my only nature) and while I used to spend a lot of my free time writing for pleasure rather than publication it’s something I've drifted further and further away from the past few years. Some of the rules of good writing still apply – clear language, active voice, absolutely everything in Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which you all should read – but academic writing has a distinctly different flavour. I won’t be coy: academic writing is pretentious. Even the relatively recent shift to the first-person as a way for the critic to acknowledge her own position and its blindspots doesn’t really compensate, and can often come off as aggrandizing. I'll admit I'm floundering a bit with this piece, my pinky finger is regularly arching up to the backspace key. I'm really excited about writing this, since it’s a memoir of my years in journalism school (the epigraph is my favourite line from State and Main: “It’s not a lie, it’s a gift for fiction”), and I've covered sheets of lined paper (I think better writing longhand) with posterity-worthy moments as they come back to me, like covering the hullabaloo about Elisha the flamingo, I'm just struggling with how to put it all together in a way that doesn’t scream “She’s a grad student! Get her!” If I'm still wrestling with this tomorrow night I may just grab a bottle of brain juice (a.k.a. red wine) and see if that helps. It certainly made journalism school itself easier. Method writing.

Before this river becomes an ocean

2006-07-24T19:13:00.000-04:00

Because I enjoy the feeling of popularity implied by a constantly ringing phone, I dutifully updated my contact information with the National Student Loan Service this morning. I took advantage of being on hold to rest my fingers after the exhausting array of touch-tone menus, and couldn’t help but laugh at the music selection: George Michael’s “Faith.” Sometimes life does a remarkable job of providing its own soundtrack.

Comin' at ya from da East end

2006-07-20T22:45:00.000-04:00

So the move went well, or as well as moves can go. Nothing broke (except perhaps our sanity at some point between trips five and six). The minivan I’d reserved wasn’t available, so imagine my glee when I ended up with a shiny charcoal grey pickup truck instead – you can take the girl out of Owen Sound but you can’t take the Owen Sound out of the girl (pictures to follow – my camera threw a fit and so the worth-a-thousand-words shot of me behind the wheel is stashed on someone else’s camera). We booted around in the truck for about an hour (singing Bon Jovi of course) before the rain started, which impeded our progress. Eventually everything got moved, and I've spent the past few days unpacking, settling, and keeping an eye on the dog and cat. It’s an odd feeling, being in someone else’s place. To be more precise, it’s odd to be somewhere that until now I’d associated with eating, getting drunk, and falling into a cab (just think of how much cab fare I'm going to save). And the pets seem to be co-existing so far. Tibi is much more interested in Isis than she is in him, though to be fair Isis spends most of her time sleeping. I still cling to the hope that they’ll become best friends and spend their time photogenically curled up together. I'm slowly shaking the feeling of being on vacation, and I've learned how to work the TiVo (it’s now taping every C.S.I., What Not To Wear, and Kids in the Hall it can find – good TiVo). At some point I'll stop basking in the existence of my office and start using it to actually work. Maybe tomorrow.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I dread you, tomorrow...

2006-07-14T19:51:00.000-04:00

I've been packing all day, and thanks to some doubtlessly karmic timing, it looks like I'll be moving on the hottest weekend so far this summer. Which means I was also dripping unpleasantly all over everything I packed. With the exception of the always unwieldy floor lamps and of course the coffeemaker all my worldly possession are now bagged or boxed (the otherworldly possessions can find their own way to the east end, and if not I'm sure we’ll be leaving a Hansel and Gretelesque trail of sweat in our wake tomorrow). I'm perversely anticipating the exertion. Sure, I work out, but the results aren’t so immediately visible – it’s not like after an intense kickboxing session all the fat I burned is piled in a corner of the room instead of on my thighs. I have a dynamic helping duo – their dynamism a result of their food allergies (gluten for one, lactose for the other), so this will be the first time I move sans pizza and beer. Instead it’ll be punch and pie. And then fireworks, though they’re actually part of the international competition, not in honour of me (not like that’ll stop me from pretending). Another cold shower beckons, to rid myself of sweat and grime for at least a few hours (and to be a wee bit poetic and circular, since when I moved in here the hot water wasn’t working so all I could take were cold showers). The next post will be written from new co-ordinates, which will surely have a remarkable effect on my perspicacity, and might even include “aren’t you glad you weren’t us?” pictures from the move…

My life in boxes

2006-07-13T10:01:00.000-04:00

So the packing continues. Moving day is only two sleeps away. Deftly side-stepping the obstacle course of boxes in my hallway makes me feel both nimble and nostalgic. Every time I move I make the same pledge to be more ruthless in weeding out the non-essentials, and I think I've done a better job of it this time. Gone are the tealight holders I bought at the dollar store in my second year of undergrad. Gone are the objects that after years of being squished are barely recognizable as pillows. Gone are the masses of tiny decorative boxes filled with spare buttons, safety pins, and (for some reason) ribbon spools. My rat-packiness is astounding. I keep reminding myself, each time I tape another box closed (with that satisfying stretch and slap of packing tape) that in a few days I get to unpack, reorganize, build myself a new space. Make coffee in a new kitchen, curl up amidst a different configuration of furniture, have a backyard. Whee!

"She was smoldering, burning, simmering with heat and tension and desire."

2006-07-09T23:49:00.000-04:00

Poking around S.W. Welch this weekend I came across yet another book that fits within my conveniently vague parameters for dissertation background reading, Lori Wilde’s License to Thrill. It’s the story of a sassy young private eye who doesn’t take no crap from no body, least of all no man, until one day a dashingly handsome uppercrust type strolls into her storefront office looking for his grandfather. Hijinks ensue. Most were inadvertent flesh-brushing sparks-flying, but there was a decent bout of explicit hot-tubbing. I haven’t read a straight-up romance novel in awhile (the detective stuff was all a foxy front for trapping the two characters in erotically tight situations), and remembered with surprise that those always end happily, which in this genre means marriage – ah, art imitating, well, certainly not life. None of the texts I'm dealing with for my thesis end this way. While chick dick texts certainly involve a healthy dose of sex they more closely align with what Janice Radway terms in her canonical Reading the Romance the ‘failed romance,’ a story that “fails to convince the reader that the traditional sexual arrangements are benign” (133). Part of this stems from the chick dick’s debt to the hardboiled tradition in which relationships are inevitably doomed, yet in these stories the women leave the men behind, frustrating typical romance narratives’ sense of closure – the story never ends with mutual declarations of love, or often even interest. The chick dick’s object of desire may still be the heterosexual male, but a monogamous relationship is no longer a source of pleasure, a key inversion of most texts produced for women. This intrigues me, and so I was dissatisfied with License to Thrill (though I love the title – where do I get mine?). It was, however, just the kind of book to get me through an afternoon of codeine-popping, hot water bottle-clutching cramps. Nothing staves off uterine reality like a fantasy world in which all sex is mind-blowing and all men have a rock-hard… core of true decency. And technically it’s research.

What my brain and I are up to this Friday night

2006-07-07T20:23:00.000-04:00

My dissertation proposal’s in full swing, and part of the process means I've been sifting through acres of reading (luckily for me the weather’s been so beautiful lately I've been able to lounge in the park soaking up both sun and theory – often more of the former). A few days ago I read an article that’s made me re-think the way I've been pulling the pieces together so far: Carol Stabile's “Resistance, Recuperation, and Reflexivity: The Limits of a Paradigm.” I stumbled across it during a more general search for stuff written on Roseanne, since both the series and its eponymous actor figure prominently in discussions of “unruly women” (e.g. Kathleen Rowe; in one of my favourite articles – yes, I have favourite articles – Patricia Mellencamp takes a similar approach to Lucille Ball and Gracie Allen. I first read that piece years ago, and since then have been determined to one day get two dogs so I can name them Gracie and Lucy. Until then, I've settled with naming my laptop Gracie, and maintaining the theme by dubbing my new little iPod shuffle Desi. But I digress. A lot). Anyway, so part of what Stabile argues against is this prevalent and popular textual analysis that positions a character or narrative as ‘unruly,’ progressive, transgressive, laughing in the face of social norms, etcetera. Taking Roseanne as her example, she points to how such an interpretation highlights the difference between, say, Roseanne Connor and June Cleaver, but in Roseanne’s own socio-historical context, the program doesn’t live up to such hype. What these sorts of academic arguments do, Stabile says, is reiterate and reinforce how such texts are lauded elsewhere, like in popular press reviews. The most provocative part of Stabile’s work for me was the parallel she pointed out between the industrial and academic investment in difference-in-repetition, how both sitcoms and academic critics rely upon these traces of distinction for capital (be it economic or cultural, another tenuous distinction since academics trade on their cultural capital for economic capital in the form of tenure, research grants, and so forth). Stabile is concerned with how this homology can preclude economic and political analyses that would show just how implicated both media and academia are in reproducing existing – and for women, oppressive – social conditions. As she says, “Within the field of media production, Roseanne reassures middle-class women that their everyday experiences are neither alienation nor unique, but normal, natural, and entirely surmountable. Within the imbricated fields of media and academic production, Roseanne’s ‘resistance’ deflects attention from the wider economic field in which so many of the world’s women confront dire material conditions” (416).
So what does this mean for me? I'm not entirely sure yet, but I know it means something. Feminist media criticism frequently produces these kinds of readings; the notion of resistance is an attractive one, since it lets us think about our audience/ourselves as actively working against images of women we find problematic. The rub, though, is that our default setting for these images – of women as passive, docile, happy homemakers lovingly serving the nuclear family – are no longer the norm. What we see as resistance in Roseanne Stabile says is better described as recuperation; the traditional nuclear family is not the economic force it once was and so does not need buttressing, unlike working women. Like, oh, say, the chick dick, a.k.a. my object of study. Stabile puts forth Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology as a corrective for this tendency toward resistance, as a strategy for recognizing that much of what we mean by that is indeed more accurately thought of as recuperation. Bourdieu’s schtick (one of them, at least) is the notion of ‘fields,’ spheres of social and cultural organization in which power struggles are constantly being waged. By thinking across fields, then, any object of study becomes more contextualized, seen in its relation to a myriad of other processes that influence it. This is something I'm already trying to do, by looking at the chick dick in popular fiction and television. Fiction and television each have their own economic and generic logics, and now their own ways of perpetuating postfeminist ideas and images. I'm reconsidering how I want to frame these logics – so far I've been thinking of the chick dick as a similarly unruly character, and I still believe that, particularly as a way to account for her absence from film (Janet Evanovich’s bestselling books have reportedly been optioned, but have yet to appear). “Unruly in comparison to what?” now becomes the question. I have some ideas. I always have some ideas. They need some fleshing-out, however, before they appear here as answers. Stay tuned…