Philoillogica

Cursing...

...A&E, who just reported in their "History of the Vampire" special that Bram Stoker was inspired to write Dracula by "the 1832 epidemic of syphilis in London."

Talk about lousy research: it was cholera. 

Spookerific of the day

Yesterday's efforts at SSHRC writing bought the dearly-needed reward of 28 Days Later, a beautifully hideous viral-zombie film shot with the breathless attention to cinematography that only a Brit can provide.  Alongside the threat of bloodshot, rage-induced maniacs, director Danny Boyle treats the audience to shot after shot of London's eclectic architecture and England's rolling green farmland, all terrifyingly void of human inhabitation and resistant even to the trite shortcut of suspense-building violins. London's streets echo with the footfalls of the delicious Cillian Murphy who, for a pleasant twist on the ubiquitous "the zombies won't eat me if I show them my heaving bosoms", is naked for more than half the film:

Mmm.

And speaking of zombies engorged on manflesh, Rebecca Eckler is now writing her vacuous and insipid prose for The Globe and Mail.

Yes, it seems that Canada's tedious answer to Carrie Bradshaw has apparently lost her National Post byline, and is infecting the older and more expensive of our two national dailies with her own unique brand of pointless tedium. 

This week, the putupon wannabe who makes Bridget Jones look like a rocket scientist is complaining about the latest thing in her oh-so-inventive "this is the latest thing" trope:

There are certain words even the most mature women dread hearing from the ex.

"I have syphilis?"  "You kiss like my sister?"  Er, no:

"I'm getting married!" is one of those sentences. Nowadays, there are a few more words being added. Instead of just hearing that the ex is starting a life with someone new, we're also getting asked to share in the festivities.

The old question of sex with the ex is giving way to: "Should I go to my ex's wedding?"

Oh, right. Marriage. For those of you new to Eckler's heteronormative world, the roles between the sexes are clearly defined. Men buy things in order to make women like them.  Women also buy things to make men like them, but they also take the things that men buy, and there is a large amount of expensive salves and unguents employed by women to trick men into buying them stuff. 

In Eckler's world, all relationships may end in one of two ways: marriage and not-marriage. 

Because all women want marriage, any relationship that ends in not-marriage is a necessary failure, and women are therefore naturally concerned with promoting the unhappiness of their ex-boyfriends and relishing in any unfortunate occurrences that may befall them.  If Eckler knew the term "schadenfreude", doubtless she'd use it here - she had a German boyfriend once who was a total tiger in the sack, a very sweet man who was certainly marriage material, but he once got a piece of spinach stuck in his teeth at dinner, and it totally "wrecked the magic" afterwards, so she dumped him.  What was I saying? Oh, right: schadenfreude.  Anyway, she knows that word.

That's why it's SO surprising that lately, women have been staying friends with their exes and wishing them well and stuff, instead of cursing those happy bastards to the heavens, dolling themselves up and going out to buy a new pair of shoes and drink cosmos and flirt shamelessly.  Apparently, cursing your ex is SO over now, it's wearing Uggs.  Forgiveness is in.

Even though they broke up four years ago after a two-year relationship, they're still friends. "Most people thought it was weird that I went," Munro says. "Most of my girlfriends didn't understand it and my family didn't understand it. I was the only one who thought he wanted me to come for the right reasons. That is, we were in love when we were dating, then we became very close friends after we broke up. He became like a big brother."

SO mature!  And this wedding planner (Eckler's resident guru in male-female social behaviours) agrees:

Maria Vella, a Toronto-based wedding planner for the company Thee Wedding, says, "It's absolutely a good thing to invite the ex. It definitely happens all the time. If they are still good friends, why not?" she asks.

Aha! Aha! Yet another trend spotted by our very own Yummy Mummy with Sevens and a blow-out!

That Eckler.  I like, totally want to be her.

With apologies to Robert Munsch

Elizabeth was a beautiful princess.  She lived in a castle and wore expensive princess clothes. 

She was going to marry a prince named Ronald.

Unfortunately, one day an evil dragon came and burned down Elizabeth's castle and all of Elizabeth's clothes with his firey breath and carried off Prince Ronald.

Elizabeth wanted to chase that dragon and rescue Prince Ronald, but she didn't have any clothes.  All she could find that wasn't burned up was a paper bag.  She put it over her head and went off after the dragon.

Soon Elizabeth came to the former home of an obscure Canadian poet. There were many people there.  But where was the dragon?

"Excuse me," she asked Professor Trelawny.  "Have you seen a dragon?"

"Nope," said Professor Trelawny.  "But I don't see all that well. Maybe you should ask Dr. Sue Johanssen over there.  She seems to know what's going on."

Elizabeth wandered over to where Dr. Johanssen was standing.  "Excus----" she started to say, but Dr. Johanssen quieted her with a shush.

"I can't help you," said Dr. Sue.  "Can't you see I'm busy photographing someone's woo?  This is a perfectly normal behaviour, and everybody does it."

"Okaaaaaay," said Elizabeth.  "Sorry to bother you."  Elizabeth saw a totally stacked green fairy standing outside on the deck.

"Excuse me," she asked the fairy, trying not to stare at her fantastic rack.  "Have you seen a dragon?"

"Yeah," said the fairy, pointing.  "She's by the bar."

And sure enough, there was the dragon.

"Hey!" said Elizabeth, marching right up to the dragon and pulling on the spangles on the end of her tail.  "I want Prince Ronald Back!"

"Go away," said the dragon.  "I've already eaten a whole castle today, and I have a SSHRC proposal due Monday.  I don't have time for princesses.  I am a very busy dragon.  Come back tomorrow."

But Elizabeth hadn't gone out in public in a paper bag for nothing. 

"Now you look here, dragon," she said.  "I've walked all the way up that bloody hill to rescue Prince Ronald, and I'm going to be irritating until I get him back."

"I can see that," said the dragon.  "You are a redhead.  Fine.  I don't want him anyway.  He's over there in the corner getting fondled by Professor Trelawney."

"What!?!" yelled Elizabeth.  "He gets captured by a dragon and is busy picking up women while I'm trying to rescue him? What a bum!"

"Those are princes for you," said the dragon.  "Usually they're more trouble than they're worth."

"Two can play that game," said Elizabeth.  "There's a hot witch over there.  I'm going to go experiment with lesbianism.  "

"Have fun," said the dragon.  "Just watch out for the Barbies that don't understand irony.  It doesn't count as social commentary on patriarchy if you really look like that the rest of the year."

"I agree," said Elizabeth.  "But what are you going to do? You can't just sit there.  You ate a whole castle today - if you don't burn some of that off, it'll go straight to your ass."

"You're right," said the dragon.  "I'd better hit the dance floor."

The end.

Because when you sacrifice them in the kitchen, the blood gets everywhere, THAT'S why

Maytag repair man: "Okay, 'fess up: which one of you two girls was washing chickens?"

Passing moment in the Sabby house

Telephone: "Ring!"

Sarah: "Hello?"

Person on the other end: "How does one deal with a magic penis?"

Sarah: " I don't know. That's a good question."

Person on the other end: "Isn't it?"

Sarah: "I certainly think so."

<pause>

Person on the other end: "Wait, you're not Abby."

Sarah: "I know."

Abby, picking up: "Hello?"

Sarah: "That's Abby."

Abby, hanging up: *click*

Sarah: "Bye." <hangs up>

Abby, wandering into Sarah's room: "Who was that?"

Sarah: "Dunno.  I think it was for you."

"You know, I'm constantly being called non-descript, lacking any kind of image, having no personality, and each time I respond the same way, 'Kids - go to your room.'"

So the Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner was held last Saturday, and just in case you weren't holed up breathlessly in front of cpac with a bottle of vodka eager to play the Paul Martin drinking game (take one shot for every time he mentions his father; take two shots every time he mentions how much Belinda Stronach costs), ctv has a selection of clips from the speeches.

Governor-General Michaëlle Jean:

People asked me what I whispered to Adrienne Clarkson at my swearing-in ceremony.  It was this:  "I'm Governor-General - and you're not."

Paul Martin, reading from his diary from around the time of Belinda's defection from the conservatives:

Dear Diary: Ohmigod! OH! MY! GOD! So, like, David called, and he said that like, Belinda was, like, TOTALLY thinking about crossing over! And I'm like, "No, WAY," and he's like "Yes, WAY," and I'm like "NO, WAY!"

Stephen Harper:

It's nice to be here at the press gallery dinner, or as my staff calls it, the annual Parliament Hill Classic, where people who aren't funny tell jokes to people with no sense of humour.

And a special message from the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney.

Jack Layton, singing:

(If Jack had yet another $4.6 billion dollars), I'd buy some press with a hefty cheque.
(If Jack had yet another $4.6 billion dollars), I'd buy a freakin' seat in Quebec.

And what I'm wondering is, if Canadian politicians can be this funny once a year, why can't they be at least mildly amusing the rest of the time?

Oh, and in cased you missed it, here's Harper's blisteringly funny speech from last year.

Maritime and Again

It's been awhile since I've had a "where I'm at post", and just when I think that I'm past that glorious cognitive dissonance that can only come from moving across two classifications of Canadian regional literature, something happens to reinvoke that "Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore" feeling.

Last week, it all started with the unbearably banal act of trying to order in dinner.   In an extraordinary display of passive-aggressive posturing, Abby and I had both tried valiantly to guilt the other one into doing the cooking, pulling all the strings in what was sure to be the "'You're hungrier than I am' Fakeout 2005":

"Oh, I ate lunch at four, so I'm fine."

"I live on air and poptarts - don't worry about me.  I'll probably won't be hungry again, EVER."

"Liar."

"Shut up.  You get up and cook."

"No."

This lasted about four hours, until finally Abby's father put a stop to it, from Calgary.

"What did you girls eat for dinner?"

"Nothing.  Sarah won't cook."

"You tell your father that your lazy ass won't cook either!"

"Why don't I just buy you girls dinner, then?" (Dad, are you reading this?)

All passivity was forgotten as Abby and I raced to the takeout menu drawer, salivating over glossy photos of pizza and chop suey and fried chicken.  It was a cornucopia of foldable plenty, punctuated with erasers and twist ties.  But now we had a new problem.

"What do you want to eat?"

"I dunno.  What do you want to eat?"

After kicking each other across the sofa cushions for another hour or so, it was now about 10:30pm, and ravenous hunger demanded the cessation of all "I eat nothing" posturing.

Abby fondled the dog-eared Swiss Chalet menu with a lover's caress, stroking a quarter-white meat with a manicured finger. 

"Chicken?"

"Chicken.  Order it up."  I threw the phone at her.  She dialed expectantly.  Visions of steaming french fries dipped in Chalet sauce filled my head.  I contentedly turned back to the television.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Abby's brow furrow.  A single tear ran down one cheek.  "That's it," I thought.  "No more John Waters movies for you."

"What?"

"They're....closed.  They close at ten.  Ten.  On a Wednesday."

"Well, okay.  We'll just order Chinese food."

But that was closed too. And so was the next restaurant we tried, and the next.  All closed at ten pm, except for the ones that closed at nine.

"Why isn't anything open?"  I wailed.

"Because we're in Fredericton.  That's why," said Abby, pouting.  "We should make a sign."

We made two.  Now all we have to do is point.

From hubby's car buddy, 25/02/05, re: infant

AKA the new addition.  AKA the boobhoover.  AKA primo assvomitisto.  AKA, jay n alee's new baby girl.

she was born sunday, september 25 (happy birthday, scott!).

much like all of our cars, she won't pass emmissions with the free-flow exhaust she's sporting right now.

the intake is loud as fuck.

everything else is being broken in right now.
she should be on the road by next spring.

anyone know of any go-karting schools for 4 day olds?  i wanna get her going quick like.

oh.  gotta go.  i can hear her getting ready to blare at mom and me to stuff her gullet.

Delighting...

...in Stephen Hawking's choice of reading material for the American Library Association's READ poster campaign:

Yes, Mr. "Wrong again, Albert" is reading the new Marilyn Monroe biography.

Stackin' my codex

Even though it's the time of year again when I really should be waxing my bikini line, painting my toenails and practicing come-hither glances for that annual academic equivalent to The Bachelor, I just can't bring myself to get off the couch.  I know perfectly well that I have to wrest my latest grant proposal into a stylistic Wonderbra that lifts and separates in excellent proportion to my mean badunkadunk, but I'm too busy moping about missing the Trinity College Book Sale to care.

I've been going to the Trin book sale for over a decade now, lining up for hours that first Friday night alongside every book dealer and bookwormy old fogey in town, all of us jonesing for new stacks of reading and fondling material to get us through Hogtown's gloomy season of discontent.  Over the course of the year, the libraries of retiring, downsizing and dying book-lovers would be bequeathed to the sale and stored in the basement of the College, spinning Philip Sidney in his grave should he learn of the rare exotics and banal paperbacks rubbing spines in liquor store boxes, clowns and kings intermingling in a tragicomedy only John Fletcher could love.

It was Sandor who first learned about the booksale when we were in twelfth grade.  We'd just started dating, and my book consumption was appropriately feverish, matched only by my righteous adolescent rage and an easily-explained proclivity for double-stuffed oreos.  Since childhood, I've always carried a book on me at all times, but it was in high school that I started carrying two, just in case I finished the first.   Realizing that the way to my heart was through my bookshelf, Sandor had conspicuously started reading, and when his English teacher had mentioned the sale as a great place to pick up cheap books, the Boy saw an excellent opportunity to score more bonus points with his hyper, oreo-wolfing Girl.

And so off we went, two skinny teenagers with a fistful of money and the keys to his father's car, wandering around the University of Toronto with the smug assurance that in another year or so we'd be a part of that weirdly archaic world.  We each came out of there with more books than we could easily carry, having spent more than we ever could've anticipated on a matching set of Yale Shakespeares, thumby trade paperbacks and glossy coffeetable books.  There was no room or need for any form of self-control when prices ranged from $1-$4.  And we've been hooked ever since.

When it came time to apply to university, it was the booksale that convinced me to go to Trin - the possibility of having insider access to that glorious print orgy was too good to pass up.  Just to walk into Seely Hall's vaulted expanse crammed full of dusty folios was to reach back into an era of monastic tranquility, ones senses enlivened by the dry scrape of bindings and the musty reminder of books' woodish origins in things that were once alive.   

The Friends of the Library who run the Trin booksale were alive once too.  At least I think they were.  At this point, the only thing that's clear is that the slave army of 400 year old Methuselahs in cardigans and slippershoes that handles the booksale is fed exclusively on a diet of sherry and hors d'oeuvres.  The females of the species have ethereal visage of Renaissance faeries, their lace shawl wings waving gently as they pad softly through the halls, dewdrop costume jewelery glittering in the artificial light.  They had real names once, like "Mrs. William Fitzherbert" and "Mrs. Happenstance", but now they answer to only "Moth" and "Mustardseed", spending their evenings in reclining in nectar-filled dewslips after long afternoons sorting old titles from the New Canadian Library.  Like all faeries, if you misbehave in their realm, they'll torment you with pinches, and if you bring babies nearby, they swarm in needle-toothed masses, ever eager to steal another human changeling.

One morning, I awoke to find one standing at the end of my bed, her furled umbrella pointing at my head like a magic wand.  She hissed something incomprehensible, and for a split second I thought I was about to become another of Trinity's ghosts, the abducted undergraduate spirited away to a sherry-glazed netherworld of tweed and blouses, doomed to read Chapman's Homer for eternity.

Terrified, I scooted backwards across my bed to avoid the umbrella's range of fire.  The faerie spoke again.    

"Is this the Archives?"

Somehow, an ancient and clearly demented Friend of the Library had got long past a security door that separated the residential areas of the College from the  administrative ones.

"Um, no..." I said, gesturing at my futon with its frog comforter, at my fridge, at my desk and computer.  "This is my room."

Using her umbrella as a crutch, the faerie sat down at the edge of my bed. She regarded the frogs with interest. 

"Are you sure this isn't the Archives?" 

"Pretty sure."

Every year, about two weeks before the booksale was due to start, maintenance staff would begin to bring up the boxes of books from the College basement and store them in the window alcoves in the front hall.  Walking from the Dean's office to the Porter's Lodge, the boxes would slowly suffocate the light from the quad until a monochromatic dusk turned Trinity's stone walls into something out of Horace Walpole, begowned students whispering furtively after seeing glimmers of a giant foot or helmet looming far above.  The fact that Seely has its own ghost didn't help much either.

When it came time to bring those boxes upstairs, the Friends of the Library would hire students to form a long chain through the halls and the College's main staircase, passing 30 pound boxes along and up until a tiny, white-haired alumna determined their final resting place with a beringed finger.   For these three or four hours of manual labour, we'd get paid about $40 and the right to enter the sale a day early, so long as we paid a 50% premium on whatever we purchased.  It was brilliant, well-worth the brutal trackmarks from box corners and the aching bones from standing sideways on a staircase for hours, one hip arched like Dietrich's eyebrow.  Actually, forget Dietrich - there wasn't an English student in the place who wouldn't be willing to navigate Joan Crawford if it meant getting into the sale a day early.

When they'd open the doors we'd all fly to the literature section, jostling for position like piglets at a sow, desperate to feed on the texts we all knew we'd need in the graduate careers to come.  We'd each grab a corner of the table and hunch over it protectively, scanning furiously in the desperate fear that someone else will hone in on one of my books, at the same time glancing over our neighbour's shoulders to see what they've missed.

The best distraction was a classic bait and switch:

"Check it out!  A Student's Milton for only $3!" You'd say, deftly blocking their peripheral vision from glimpsing A.C. Hamilton's Faerie Queene.  "And hardcover!"  And when the gull would reach for the inferior text, a quick elbow would knock the Spenser right out from under their nose and into your box.  All's fair in the booktrade - there's no honour amongst thieves, after all. 

And I'm missing it!

Snarl.  At least half the books I own come from one Trinity sale or another, and for the first time in ten years, I'm not going to be in the city when it's on.  I'll have to settle for the warm embrace of my laptop instead, mending my own offensive shadows without the aid of Cupid's balm to offer a frenzied chaotic release. Just call me Robert Burton.