Happy Birthday to the Non-Dominion of Canada!

The Constitution Act was signed by the Queen thirty years ago today. Or, more accurately, I think, she signed a proclamation that brought the Act into force. I’m not too sure about that part, but I know that the Constitution Act and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms came into force on this day thirty years ago. Canada (as a country that is allowed to change its own constitution) and I are nearly the same age, which I always quite liked to ponder while I was living there. I still like to ponder it, to tell you the truth.

I used to cat- and garden-sit for an aging professor and his wife, and although they seem very happy in Toronto, they have remained emphatically English in certain respects. For example, they have a formal portrait of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh hanging in the entryway, and their dining room has a display of ceremonial (largely royal-themed) china around the walls, just underneath the ceiling. The sitting room, on the other hand, has a large copy of the Constitution Act framed on the wall, and my first stay in their bungalow was the first time that I’d really paid attention to the fact that Canada (in its present state of governance) and I were nearly the same age.

Similarly, although I’d heard of him before, it was in that house that I first paid attention to Pierre Berton as THE historian of Canada. I am currently reading his book on the Battle of Vimy Ridge (as no one but Canadians refer to it), and I am glad to be reading it. (Given that it’s a book about WWI, I can’t claim to be enjoying every moment, but I am enjoying some of it and feel compelled by other parts of it.) It was very timely to be reading this about a week ago because the assault was launched in the early hours of 9 April 1917, which was an Easter Monday, as it was again this year. What this book seems to boil down to is that the Canadians succeeded where the British and French had failed because they prepared and thought ahead about their strengths, their weaknesses, and the contingencies they might face. (Revolutionary, I know.) I’m grateful not to have had to deal with the conditions on the front lines of that war, but on the other hand, as my prep for one of tomorrow’s classes demonstrates, our wars are hardly less likely to leave soldiers and their families with trauma of various sorts. I didn’t mean this post to turn solemn, but I do find these webpages simultaneously heartbreaking, encouraging, and fascinating: Here’s the NPR story that I happened to listen to several years ago when the DoD launched the first Warrior Resilience Conference and when what was then known as the Philoctetes Project got its start. Now known as the Theater of War Project, they use Greek drama to help veterans and their families process the trauma of war and ponder ways of building up community and family ties once again. The eeriest part was watching the actress playing Tekmessa speak about Ajax’s departure immediately before his suicide. That sounded modern and shocking, in the way that people get all het up about the “modern” and “anachronistic” dialogue in “The Name of the Rose,” all of which is lifted from genuine medieval sources.

I’ve drifted quite a ways away from the point where I started, but I think fondly of Canada at times like this. It’s been both a very good day and a very terrible day – this is the point in the term when my ability to function as a human being is severely impaired, meaning that I both find it difficult to run and find it difficult to not run; that I struggle to concentrate on work, communicate with loved ones, eat, do dishes, or remain truly hygenic; that I am both more able to sleep and less able to sleep; and that I just want to crawl into a hole. So, it was good to have something nice to think about today.  The other nice thing about today was that I can now attest to the fact that the best thing about going tenure-track is that your colleagues start asking you to help coach their children’s soccer teams. So, I spent a chilly hour this evening trying to help a gaggle of seven-year-old boys get better at handling a soccer ball. It was great.

Anyways, a happy birthday to Canada! Thank you for treating me so well and for givinge me the chance to live in a society that seeks after the ideals of peace, justice, and the desire to accomplish good in the world.

Frivolity

It happened that my uncle, who hated being a tax attorney, decided that, instead of getting certified to teach Spanish once his kids were through college, he would join the Foreign Service. As one does. He and my aunt are currently posted to Jerusalem, and because the second half of March turned out to the best time for them to depart, my parents are there visiting Israel and Jordan during the last couple of weeks leading up to Easter. This only adds to my suspicion that I ought to be reacting less frivolously to the photos that my parents have been e-mailing to me.

My parents started in Jordan, although I’m not sure that this is meant to be the true River Jordan experience:

By the way, they also visited this place, while they were there. You may have heard of it:

Meanwhile, they saw Macharaeus (Herod’s palace, where John the Baptist was beheaded) and the Roman city of Jerash, but the next photo that made me laugh was this one, showing the group (my mother’s sister and brother-in-law, my mother, minus my dad while he was shooting the picture) with their driver.

I love how the driver is dressed like a tough guy but then grinning like a softie.

If you know my father, then you know how much he loves irises. So, when they spotted a field of black irises at Tel Arad, he was pretty happy about that.

Apparently, the black iris is the national flower of Jordan. I can see why.

Similarly, my mother enjoyed picking poppies on the Mount of Olives. I can’t decide whether it’s another moment of frivolity or actually entirely fitting that this is the only photo that I have of the Mount of Olives:

The last photo that I will share with you is very definitely frivolous. I don’t know what he’s carrying around in that heavily laden vest, but in any case, my mother claims that this composition was accidental:

I’ll leave that to you to decide.

Houses

I was thinking lately that I, much to my surprise, don’t feel in any big hurry to live in a purchased, stand-alone (no more semi-detached, please!) house. For my current and near-future projected needs, the apartment is actually a pretty good fit (or it would be, if I could just get that study-cum-second bedroom cleaned out), but now that I’m probably going to be staying here for at least the next few years, if not longer, I’ve got to face up to the advantages, financial or otherwise, of owning one’s own home.

When I’m out and about in the area, I worry about whether or not I would be able to find a house that would let me continue to walk to work (still less along such a pleasant route) and to the grocery store. I also find myself disinclined to up stakes and deal with another move, unless I could reasonably expect that move to be semi-permanent. Life may take whatever sudden turns she desires, but I don’t feel a need to move for the sake of moving, if you see what I mean.

I think that I may also be resisting this idea because I would like to feel that I was truly making a long-term commitment to a home, and, not to put too fine a point on it, I don’t have any way of knowing now whether or not there will start to be another decision-making adult in the picture any time soon. Still less do I know whether or not any hypothetical second decision-making adult and I would stay in the area or discover reasons to leave, but maybe I will tackle one problem at a time.

HOWEVER. Having said all of that, I am starting to keep a list of things that I’m looking forward to in owning my own home: I’ve been waiting for years and years for the time when I’ll be able to purchase a piano for my home and play at any time I wish. I would also love to have a bit of earth in which to plant growing things, and I’m eager to be able to put things up on the walls, not so much for decorative purposes (though I wouldn’t mind that), but so that I could mount curtains over the windows for winter insulation. At the moment, I have tension rods that hold up curtains in the two bedrooms during the winter months, but the windows in my living room are too wide for a tension rod. All of the windows are equipped with blinds that serve their purpose well during the summer, but blinds don’t do much to insulate the living room (in which I spend most of my time at home) during the winter. So, as I was running this morning, mentally evaluating the houses I passed, I was tickled by the thought that I *could* look for the amount of windows that a kid raised in California and Arizona demands, without having to sacrifice every last bit of insulation.

There’s one other important item on my list: Since moving into this apartment, I’ve also started to nurse fantasies about bathroom fixtures that are actually useable. The shower drain (and, to a lesser extent, the kitchen sink) is the one real downside of this apartment. I shower under a trickle (which does not seem to me to be the end of world, since I grew up in the desert, with buckets catching non-soapy shower water for the plants), but I am STILL standing in water by the time I’ve even shampooed my hair. It doesn’t really get better when the maintenance guys come and snake out the drain; it’s just that there’s physically not much space for the water to move through, so I end up using Liquid Plumr far more frequently than I would like to be using it. If anyone reading this knows of a good home remedy that actually works, then I’d be very happy to hear it! I have no desire to continue pouring corrosive chemicals down the pipes on a regular basis.

Ahem, perhaps I should note here for the benefit of any potential guests that I always make sure that the drain is cleared out before anyone else comes to stay! For the moment, however, I’m content to know that a load of laundry is just finishing up and that I am slowly, slowly accomplishing my longed-for purge.

Purging

Well, I was originally going to post this resolution two months ago, and then I promised to post it at the beginning of February, and here we are, moving into the latter part of March. Just in case anybody is on tenterhooks over this, the big goal for the part of the year before my birthday was and is to purge the apartment. I just don’t want to live with clutter, physical or mental, and I don’t like the sense of having acquired a truly needless amount of physical appurtenances.

I’m trying to get rid of a decent-sized pile of clothes that are in good condition but which I don’t need and won’t wear often, even if I were to keep them. This is not generally a terribly difficult task, although I’ve still got a stack of clothes to evaluate further. Far more painfully, on the other hand, I’m also trying to get rid of some books. My plan is to donate these to the local public library for them to use when they hold fundraising book sales. But it’s hard to get rid of books! I have a stack of perhaps eight books so far, but I am going to steel myself to spend an hour in the study/second bedroom, culling books that simply won’t serve a purpose here. Maybe some of the ones on the to-be-read shelf, the ones that have lived there for a few years, although it pains me to declare a tactical retreat from any book. Sigh.

Small

That is how I am feeling at the moment.

I have been intending to make a post about an unrelated topic, and I will do that soon, but I want to be sure that I get my current preoccupation out of my system so that I can get back to work on the things that need my attention. I have been in discussions with a former student about something affecting his eligibility for a sports season, and I just got a message from the dean who oversees this student that, while making it clear that she’s not impressed with the student’s handling of the situation, left me feeling rather small. I still think that the student is not in the right about much of what we’ve been discussing (and the same goes for the dean), but I inadvertently helped him to not be in the right.

I sent a reply back to the dean expressing my quite sincere thanks for her thoughts and her warning about dealing with this kind of situation, but I wouldn’t say that the episode left me feeling buoyant. Happily, I received a very kind note back from her within seven minutes of hitting “send” on my own message, but this is most definitely a learning experience. Oof.

Singing

I’ve been doing dishes to the accompaniment of Mahler’s second symphony (“Resurrection”), and in fact, the kitchen is undergoing something of a resurrection, especially filled with the smell of the apples that are cooking as I wash up. I have somehow gotten into a routine of only doing the dishes every other day or so, and while that’s all very well if you’ve got a dishwasher (and no more than three people in your household), it’s not such a viable lifestyle when you wash everything by hand, and your dirty dishes must inhabit your sink. No more! I’m quite fond of William Byrd’s works as dishwashing music – there’s nothing so magical as having an excuse to sing along with Byrd as dusk falls. Maybe I need to start relying on this tactic again, although it is difficult for me to plan to be home before dark most days, and even if I make it home before dark, the tiny kitchen window leaves that room in darkness well before dark falls outside. Ah, well, we make the best of it.

As it happens, it’s been quite a day for choral music: the Brahms Requiem this morning (the first piece I can remember, as a very small child, wanting to conduct), then Bach’s Mass in B Minor (swoon!), assorted Tallis and Byrd numbers, Victoria’s Missa O Magnum Mysterium, and then the Mahler. The Mahler Symphony No. 2 draws on material from his “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” with which I fell in love as a teenager, especially the haunting “Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen.” Coincidentally, I am just starting out to reread the series that got me started on these Mahler lieder, the Inspector Felse novels by Ellis Peters.

In somewhat related news, a friend posted this link to an extended interview with John Eliot Gardiner as he prepares and studies the music of Beethoven and Berlioz. Even if you don’t buy his linking of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 with the music of the French Revolution, how can you pass up a marching village choir from the South of France? You can’t, can you? I was having a bit of a John Eliot Gardiner crisis this week because, until today, I couldn’t find the first disc of his recording of, yes, the B-minor Mass. Not everyone likes his zippy tempos (tempi, for the Italianate among you), but you haven’t heard the “Quoniam tu solus sanctus”/”Cum sancto spiritu” and the “Et resurrexit” until you’ve heard them as performed on this recording. (Seriously, go listen to the other performances available on YouTube.) It’s fiendishly difficult (as far as I can tell, as a non-horn player*) to give such definition to the “Quoniam tu solus sanctus,” and if those poor, magnificent trumpeters are probably quadruple-tonguing at the end of the “Cum sancto spiritu,” then it’s well worth it. And no matter what your religious views, if you’re going to perform a text like the “Et resurrexit,” then it really *ought* to blaze off of the page.

I think I originally had in mind some kind of further meditation on the day, but my ability to enjoy things was damped when I watched the video in which Gabby Giffords announced her resignation. I had a lot of respect for her very, very hard work in the service of an optimistic certainty that we could accomplish good in the world – whatever it is that we decide that “good” may be, and that, of course, is the whole difficulty of politics. I hated that any politician should receive such a flood of death threats as Giffords did in the six months or so leading up to the shooting, and I hate that a young man was troubled enough to act on his anger in that particular way. As a Tucsonan, I hated that such a thing should happen in my town, but I loved it when the “angels” turned out to line the roads leading to the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church, to prevent protesters from disrupting the funerals of two of the shooting victims. I also loved the relish with which Giffords led the Pledge of Allegiance at the anniversary commemoration two weeks ago. Just look at her face when she gets to the “liberty and justice for all” bit at the end – there was definitely an exclamation point at the end of that sentence! And I love that her smile has not changed. Pure Gabby, that.

 

*In high school, we had to participate in both the marching band and whatever other ensemble we were placed in, and on the years when I didn’t march piccolo, I marched mellophone, which is what horn players use in marching season. No, I don’t play the french horn; the mellophone uses trumpet fingerings. No, I don’t play the trumpet either, although my grandmother recently walked into her den at 1AM, where I was sleeping on a piece of furniture that she usually refers to as a “davenport,” to give me my grandfather’s cornet from when he was in a band at age eight. I think we eventually convinced her to put it back in her underwear drawer, but I suppose it’s mine for the asking. Anyways, I won’t make any comment on the question of whether or not I actually enhanced the sound of the marching band in the years when I “played” the mellophone.

Shakespeare, in the estimation of the Vicar of Wakefield

I keep a daily journal, yet I have always felt like blogging took too long, too much mental energy. I was thinking yesterday that maybe this blog would turn out to be DOA, but the following is an example of an item that doesn’t really have another forum that I’m happy with:

I’ve been trying to make my peace with the eighteenth century and finding it no easy task. Musically, I’m all set – Bach is, after all, the man whose music I have most loved for as long as I can remember – but in terms of literature, well, it’s a struggle for me when I hit this period while teaching the British Literature survey for my undergrads. The eighteenth century and the Romantic poets. Oy. So, when I found a copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield available for 50 cents in my favourite used bookstore in Toronto a month and a half ago, I decided that I’d better seize my chance. Sadly, I am barely creeping along, not enjoying the book at all. I keep hoping that maybe it will turn out to be the same kind of delicious satire as Northanger Abbey, but so far, I merely despise the eponymous vicar. It’s a relief when there’s a passage that makes me laugh, as this one did, especially in light of the more insane excesses of the anti-Stratfordian cohort of late. (I should say that I’m not particularly bothered by the idea that someone other than Will Shakespeare wrote the plays, but the way to argue that is to, well, argue it, not to make wildly inaccurate characterizations of the work of academic Stratfordians, nor to make a film that tries to be both a thriller and an “educational tool.” I’m actually quite incensed about that last.) So, here’s what our friend, the vicar of Wakefield, has to say about the Bard:

 

“I fancy, sir,” cried the player, “few of our modern dramatists would think themselves much honoured by being compared to the writers you mention. Dryden and Row’s manner, sir, are quite out of fashion; our taste has gone back a whole century, Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and all the plays of Shakespear, are the only things that go down.”

“How,” cried I, “is it possible the present age can be pleased with that antiquated dialect, that obsolete humour, those over-charged characters, which abound in the works you mention?”

“Sir,” returned my companion, “the public think nothing about dialect, or humour, or character; for that is none of their business, they only go to be amused, and find themselves happy when they can enjoy a pantomime under the sanction of Jonson’s or Shakespear’s name.”

[Chapter 18; pp. 89-90 in the Signet Classics edition of 1961]