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.