There are many things that I will not miss about Vermont (although I will miss many more things about Vermont than I will about America) when we move overseas, but I will definitely (at least not during Mud Season and the depths of Winter - which is, well, most of the time) miss many aspects of the drive to work.
Yes, I've definitely been on a Julian Barnes reread tear lately, all of which I enjoyed as much or more than the first time I tackled them. Yesterday I finished his A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. Beyond the second chapter, which hinges on some Arabic terrorists kidnapping folks (which seems, in retrospect, to be sort of lazy from a writer of such energy, precision and humanity - but my different response represents changing worlds, both larger ones and my own), I loved it again. Plus, I picked up some lovely passages from the third chapter which will be folded into the epics book. Obviously, highly recommended.
As I've mentioned, one of the great joys of my life is the Breakfast of Excellence, scheduled for every Friday morning at the TASTee Grill. Usually, one of us, OK, usually Sandy or me, proposes a topic of essential conversation by right-thinking individuals. This week I proposed we discuss the world-altering event of 23 September; no, not the aborted Rapture, but the sad passing of the truly excellent Claudia Cardinale. I don't know exactly when Sandy and I became so fixated on her, although I suspect it was after a group viewing of Sergio Leone's brilliant 1968 film Once Up a Time in the West. Since then her name has been uttered in hushed and reverent tones.
A couple weeks ago, during the weekly Breakfast of Excellence at the TASTee Grill, Sandy told me that he had just finished Yevgeny Zamaytin's novel We. Once again, I was reminded of my gaping chasm of knowledge, created by my shamefully adequate Hoosier upbringing. We is a dystopian novel, written in the early days of the 1920s in the Soviet Union. Truthfully, it's rather amazing that it was published, and that Zamaytin survived; apparently, he later directly appealed to Joseph Stalin, and was inexplicably allowed to leave the country (sometimes real life is much stranger than fiction). The hero of the story, D-503, lives, like everyone else, in a glass apartment (a lovely metaphor for life in a totalitarian regime), so rebels, unsuccessfully, against the state. I was thinking that it might be a good choice as a side reading for my film class on Fascism for the spring, but I don't think my students would be able to make much of it (or, I'd have to devote more time to helping them get something out of it than I have to spare). That said, I'm glad I read it, and am looking forward to read it again down the road. I don't think I liked it as much as I thought I would have, but, then, it's hard to get much joy out of reading about an authoritarian regime when you're living in a proto-authoritarian state.
Here's another picture that popped up out of the blue. Andy and I were kvetching about the Vikings this morning, which is just a day of the week when a fan of that cursed team, which led to us swapping pictures back and forth. This is one of the ones he sent me, featuring Heidi and I sporting our Alouettes gear at a Montreal game that I think I dragged seven other people to years ago. Bob and Craig look much less happy (and excellent).
I don't know why I don't have a Label for Beasties or Random Nature Shit or something like that. It's not like I have taken some nice pictures - or are a part of - some nice pictures of various and sundry animals. Anyway, I never have, and it's too late to start now (he said, getting ready to create a new Label for Films in preparation for next year's project of recording every movie I watch). My excellent friend Ines sent me this picture out of the blue from the time when we went to India on a student trip (she also went on one of the Jordan trips). My response, "I remember him. He was very cute, but a mean little fucker with very sharp antlers." I also had to admit, that I knew he was in India but I didn't know where in India, which is definitely a comment on the inexplicably weird life I've led. In the end I sorted it out, with the help of my friend Kelly (not MK but KT), who was the other faculty member on the trip. It was the far north of India, and it was when we were running around either heading to or coming back from the tiger preserve. It's a chinkara, which is a little Indian gazelle.
As it turns out, stacking the forty-pound bags of pellets in my basement is easier than I thought: I just need to call my son. Being a good soul, he's worried about me carrying the heavy bags in by myself and always offers to help, although I've tended to put aside his offers through a serious of lame excuses, at least until I've (over a period of about two months) carried them in on my own. I suppose it's vanity on my part, but also a sincere desire to not be a burden on others (yes, my father left me quite insane on that front). However, in the end, his desire to help out won out. One day he and his friend Seth showed up and in no time at all managed to carry in 1.8 tons. A couple days later he showed up again, although he did allow me to help (and that's about all I can say about my effort, my weakening legs making any sort of equal partnership impossible). We loaded a ton in about an hour, which, left to my own devices, would have taken me at least a week and a half.
How I went down this rabbit hole is a bit of a mystery, but this morning I finished reading John Treherne's The Galapagos Affair. It's an account of the murders, still an unsolved mystery, that occurred on the Galapagos island of Floreana in 1934. I think Ron Howard made it into a movie, although I haven't seen it, but maybe it operated on some subconscious level to track down info on the case. Anyway, I ended up ordering Treherns's book - and also a separate memoir from from of the participants - and plowed through the former pretty quickly. It would definitely fall into the category of guilty pleasure, but I still enjoyed it. Now, I just need to figure out who I'm going to pass it to. Hmmmm.
It's amazing that here we are, halfway through September, and I still have material from my June trips that I haven't posted. I'll give myself credit for devoting so much time to writing; it may be an excuse, but I'll take what I can get. We watched the Calgary Stampeders game on Saturday (I need to post on that as well, and how we barely, and heroically, survived), but because of a scheduling glitch we had all day Sunday to kill before heading back to Edmonton that night. Kevin suggested that we head up into the Canada Rockies to Banff, which led me to reply: You mean to see the Merman, right? Kevin, inexplicably, knew nothing about the Banff Merman. We tracked him down in the Banff Trading Post, and he was worth the trip. And, oh, the Merman swag that I brought home . . .
The other day I was chatting with my excellent friend Sanford Zale, and asked him if I my belief that Albert Camus's The Fall is a better novel than The Stranger was a mark of my lack of cultish sophistication. Happily, he validated my theory. It's not that I didn't like The Stranger, because I did, but I do think The Fall is better. I'm in the middle of a bit of Camus run lately, having read The Plague during this year of reading all sorts of stuff. I finally got around to reading The Fall after my latest listen to Charles Mathewes's Why Evil Exist Great Course. Professor Mathewes goes into a fascinating deep dive in regards to what The Plague and The Fall tell us about Camus's concept of evil, and I'm glad that he convinced me to follow through on reading a book that I've been putting off for way too long. Highly recommended.
Yesterday I walked into the office to find this epic Alouettes pennant hanging on our office door. I suspected that Erik had spirited away from treasure from the Alouettes game, not only because he had mysteriously disappeared during the game, but also because it's a classically Erik thing to do. He's definitely one of the people who I will miss the most next year when we're overseas.
I'm finishing up a reread of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, a novel that I truly love. The novel tells the story of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a professor searching for the actual stuffed parrot that sat on Flaubert's desk, but the book is really a love letter to Flaubert. Barnes is such a brilliant writer. Last year I reread his nonfiction work The Man in the Red Coat and reread The Sense of an Ending, and was blown away once again. This makes me want to go through a massive Barnes reading - and also reread (for who knows how many times) Flaubert's Sentimental Education (ne of my all-time favorite novels).
A couple posts ago I shared the surprising math wherein I had, over the years, brought 19 different people to CFL games. The "research" was inspired by taking my friend Erik, a first-time CFL game participant, along with Cyndi and Kevin (veterans) to an Alouettes game on Saturday. The game was pretty dreadful. It was played in a steady cold rain, and the Alouettes were, due to injury, down to their backup backup backup quarterback, but the day itself was an amazing day spent with great friends.
Last year I bought all three of my friend and office-mate Erik Esckilsen's novels. A couple nights ago I finished his first novel, The Last Mall Rat, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Technically, I guess it falls in the young adult fiction category, except that's awfully reductionist for a thoughtful and knowing novel. I asked Erik if he was actually Mitch, the main protagonist, who set up a sort of protection racket at a mall to mildly terrorize horrible customers; he said only mildly and indirectly, which I took to be yes. On a deeper level I think the novel is also about the tension between a small town and corporate America - and between a younger and older generation. As I said, I liked it a lot, and it's definitely recommended. I think me reading his novel made Erik slightly uneasy - and Janet was when I read her - and which I will doubtless be if my book is ever published (happily, that will never happen, so I'll avoid that uncomfortable moment). I'm looking forward to reading Erik's other two novels, which are on my nightstand.
Yesterday I calculated that over the years I've taken 19 different people to CFL games, some multiple times, across six different cities. I'm afraid that when we move to Europe the Canadian economy may collapse.
Here's a simple picture that I snapped in my office the other day, which reflects the hectic, exotic life that I lead as a professor: the Ramayana, a scribbled edit, coffee, and Digestives.
Yesterday I finished Albert Camus's The Stranger, which is another book that definitely calls for a reread before too much time has passed. I didn't like it as much as The Plague, which I loved a few months ago when I reread it for the first time in decades. Somehow, and I blame growing up in the intellectual wasteland that is Indiana, I had never read The Stranger. I'm also looking forward to reading Camus's The Fall and The Myth of Sisyphus, which have found their way into my queue.
Granted, we'll be moving to Sicily and not Venice, but Italy is a simmering conversation in the cabin. As such, it's not surprising that my mind has been coming back time and again to last year's trip to Venice. Truthfully, I didn't like Venice as much as I thought I would, but that may be more a statement of how it is suffering under the weight of over-tourism (even in November) and the often debilitating pain I'm in (which makes even the shortest walk a challenge that takes away from its joy).
I've tried to be completely honest in regards to chronicling my readings this year (after all, I did discuss my cryptid picture book), so I'll go ahead and talk about my reread of Marvel Masterworks collection of Avengers comic books. The key above is the word "reread." What led to me delving into the early Avengers comic books is that I am using it in a chapter in the Epics books. In the seventh chapter, which deals with women and gender, I have a section about gender roles and expectations and norms in the Iliad, etc. In the last paragraph I provide a little late context for the discussion by focusing on this frame - and also some egregiously misogynistic passages - to show that if this was so routine in the early 1960s in the US we shouldn't be too hard on a series of epics that were written hundreds if not thousands of years ago. The point is not to give them a pass, but rather to problematize the issue. The funny thing about all this is that I was looking for this frame, but also one in when I remember Ant Man telling the Wasp why she, as a woman, much like the Hulk and Captain America's teenage friend Rick Jones, couldn't be a full-time, official member of the Avengers. However, apparently that was just a fever dream of mine because I can't find it. This may also be moved up a little further into the chapter to a section on the nature of the patriarchy - or maybe both. Anyway, getting back to the "reread" part of this: I already have the first six collections of the Avengers Masterworks on my Kindle, so I can't simply rack this up as the demands of the epics book. They were on sale a few years ago so I grabbed several of them. What amazed me was how bad they were. Granted, they were created in the early 1960s and I read them not much later, but still, they're pretty bad, and not simply the inherent misogyny of their universe, but also the language and the plots. Still, I had fun rereading them, even if they were far clunkier than I remembered. That said, I also plan to reference that utterly cringeworthy five minute section in the last Avengers movie when the female heroes get to run around with the Infinity Gauntlet for a highly compartmentalized scene, before the dudes step back to the forefront to save the day (some things never change).
I snapped this picture at our final Adamant Coop Cookout of the season last week. We are a wonderfully wacky mixture of hard scrabble folks and pseudo-Europeans.
A couple days ago I finished Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, which I had somehow never read. I was inspired to tackle it after my recent reread of Heart of Darkness. The Secret Agent was quite good - in fact, I think that I liked it better than Heart of Darkness - and I'm disappointed that I had not read it previously. I make up for it because I can already sense a pretty quick reread. I don't think it's necessarily a fair criticism to state that the ending went a little off the rails, but it is suddenly and unexpectedly dominated by a couple characters who had played minor roles up until that moment. It's not that it doesn't work, because I think it does, but it spins off in a way that I don't think I've processed yet. Maybe I'll add to this post after my reread. Anyway, The Secret Agent is definitely recommended.
