Philoillogica

The wrath of grapes

What do

John Milton,

Henry VIII,

Ben Franklin,

Issac Newton,

Sir John Falstaff,

and my Dad

have in common?

Well, for starters, they're all men, all larger-than-life personalities who have a penchant for the gourmand, Epicurean lifestyle.  All (except for Newton) have had more than one wife.  All look ridiculous in hats.

And all have gout.

When he told me, I almost snorted coffee out my nose.

"Gout?" I said.  "Seriously?  Geez, Dad, what are you gonna' do next winter, get scurvy?"

Apparently people still get gout in 2005, that disease of the decadent that indicates that the sufferer is far too well fed.  Gout was the reason the royals couldn't run from the French Revolution, the reason Henry VIII became far less fun (well that and the beheading his wives thing) and the only thing that bothered Falstaff more than the pox.  Given that it chiefly affected the wealthy and literate, gout is one of the most commonly-recorded diseases in human history. 

And now my Dad's in such good company too.

My fun-lovin' papa is hereafter doomed to a life of sobriety unless he wants to suffer the foot-swelling consequences of his favourite fix, reduced to getting one of those canes with a hollow end to sneak snorts of rum when my stepmother's looking the other way.  To spare himself the pain, he'll have to start eating tofu instead of steak, tempeh instead of ribs.  And rice, the poor sod.  Lots of rice.  His choleric face will become melancholic as the new diet kicks in, and his rising black bile will have him waxing soliloquies all over the house.  It'll snow and he'll stand on the porch dejectedly with his shovel, musing "Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, melt and resolve itself into a dew."  The washing machine'll break down and it'll be "nothing can we call our own but death and that small model of the barren earth which serves as paste and cover to our bones. For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings."  He'll start stabbing the wall hangings.

Of course, Dad could just disregard the cure, and pull a Falstaff, using his gimpy legs to advantage, calling his limp an old war wound and seeking sympathetic attention from pretty ladies in the supermarket: " 'Tis no matter if I do halt. I have the wars for my colour, and my pension shall seem the more reasonable.  A good wit will make use of anything.  I will turn diseases to commodity."   

Since the eldest, it is my job to take over the reins and help out wherever the need is greatest.  My father's tippled honor shall not go unremembered, nor his penchant for beer and spirits dissolved into the ether of recollection and self-restraint.  No, not on my watch.  I've the family name to uphold.

Pint after pint, I'm pullin' for ya, Dad.  From now on, I'm drinking for two. 

 

It plays Hole, Love Spit Love and Cheap Trick, but if it starts playing The Pretenders, you've got to work harder, fella

The singing protective

"I'll take the history of the foreskin for $300, Alex"

...and then there are the days when doing assigned readings feels like preparing for the world's weirdest Jeopardy tournament.

I realize that this is cutting edge work on The Merchant of Venice, but I have to ask, is this really necessary?

Stephen Harper says they just need to learn to straighten out and fly right

Zoo tempts gay penguins to go straight

Gay Penguin for America

Minding my Ps and Qs

One of the most glorious things about being a grad student is being a research bitch.  Those of you in the real world may suppose that being an RB is a somewhat engaging enterprise, filled with small slips of paper and exciting discoveries, perhaps while wearing tweed and fluttering one's eyelashes charmingly behind magnifying glasses, under the watchful eyes of sexy librarians just itching for the right sort of academic to charm the hairpins right out from under that tight bun.  After a hard day of pretentious word-logging, RBs might gather for a snifter of port in a room filled with leather-bound books, a fire blazing cheerily in the hearth, conversation merrily turning to the latest offerings of one's book dealers or the misadventures of one's latest article proposal.  RB's could say things like "good show, old man," and "pity, isn't it?" while they swirl their port around in their snifters, desperately hoping that nobody finds out that they never got all the way through Areopagitica.

This, of course, would be a gross misrepresentation, and I consider myself honour-bound to disabuse you of any notions you may have of the pretentious drinking culture of academia.  Being a research bitch is not all port and winking at librarians, alas, though it does convey a highly-coveted immunity to the itchiness of tweed. As a matter of fact, I am wearing tweed right now.  No, sometimes being a RB involves things that are slightly less interesting than watching linoleum curl, one step above trying to make a duck stand still for a photograph and far, far below researching the boiling point of a hamster. Sometimes RBs have to do the academic equivalent of running laps in gym class while the kids a year up get whifflebats and an inflatable sumo-wrestling ring ("You with the short CV: drop and give me twenty"). At the moment, my RB duties include copy-editing Ben Jonson's The Divell is an Asse, which consists of reading the play aloud from the original seventeenth century folios to another RB, LETTER BY LETTER, PUNCTUATION MARK BY PUNCTUATION MARK.  In other words, I spend several hours a week doing this:

"Speechprefix-P-V-G-capital-I-s-i-t-n-o-t-e-x-c-e-l-l-e-n-t-comma-italic-capital-c-small-h-i-e-f-question mark-roman-small-h-o-w-n-i-m-b-l-e-h-e-i-s-exclamation mark-all caps-a-c-t-ampersand-strange bar-bold-squiggle-k-i-l-l-m-e-j-u-s-t-m-a-k-e-t-h-e-i-t-a-l-i-c-s-s-t-o-p-d-e-a-r-g-o-d-p-l-e-a-s-e-exclamation mark."

Occasionally, we are interrupted by a mark that looks vaguely like a squished bug or something that may have been stuck at some time or another between a Jacobean printer's teeth, and we have to figure out what that something really is, and why it is on the page. This involves a lot of debate about whether it is just a bug (boo) or a desiccated piece of mutton (boo) or a piece of broken type (yay). If it's the latter, we have to decide what kind of broken type it is – is it an italic capital 'I', or a lowercase 'l', 't', 'f' or long-s? Is it broken type or just not inked? Is this a consistent problem, or is this a unique variant? Shall I kill you first, or do you want to do me and then yourself, since you're the better shot?

And so on. Lately I've found myself entering a kind of meditative trance when it's my turn to recite, going into this Yellow Submarine-like space with a chainlined sky and ligature forest where Ben Jonson's pudgy mug peeks out from behind trees and sternly shakes a chubby finger. "Philip Sidney had a pimply face," he says. "I know." I say. "You said that in 1617." "Well he did," says Ben Jonson, pouting. "And that's not "wife." It's "wise." Long 's', stupid." And then he smacks me with the 1641 folio, which really makes no sense, because Jonson died in 1637.

And I return to consciousness, absent-mindedly scratching my tweed and squinting at what could either be a mouse footprint or an upside down letter "k." Someday, I know, there'll be port. Someday.

Caution: serifs should not be taken internally

Deadlier form of 'P' on the way

How I got schooled

I have often heard it said that women are unable to recall the trauma of childbirth because of some chemical released by their bodies after labour. This is usually explained as an evolutionary strategy designed to encourage women to have more babies by preventing them from remembering how painful and generally awful the birth process actually is. I have also heard that the aforementioned chemical is vodka.

Whatever it is, I've been experiencing something similar the past few weeks when recalling my time in teacher's college. Even though I hated it, and found the whole thing demeaning, punitive and painful, I've been recalling the whole experience with a rosy, Vaseline-coated nostalgia, which indicates I must either be drunk or coming down with something.

This all started a few weeks ago. Abby and I were discussing strategies of education, when suddenly I began spewing carefully selected tidbits from the Ontario College of Teachers' Standards of Practice for the Teaching Profession document I'd memorized for the ill-conceived Ontario Teacher Qualifying Test (now defunct; what, you mean a four-hour multiple-choice exam on Ontario curricula and written and administered by AMERICANS didn't actually prove anything and just sucked money out of the desperately underfunded school system? REALLY? Well, knock me over with a feather!) After this conversation, I was bewildered at how much "pedagogy" I can actually still recall, despite spending most of my in-class theoretical time fiddling with my mechanical pencil and applying hand lotion. Apparently, I can still raise my hand with the best of them and say things like: "To engage students in reflective thinking and other metacognitive processes, strategies such as concept mapping have proved effective," or "when teachers make a clear commitment to student equity they recognize the inherent power-struggle between teacher and student that can occur in a teacher-centred environment, and demonstrate to students that they are valued members of the educational community whose voices truly matter." I have been CURSED.

Apparently, despite my best efforts to act like a surly and standoffish adolescent in every single B.Ed class (meaning one who's enduring a severe cognitive limiting function, due to the brain's shifting of body clock as a response to puberty, as well as a significant questioning of identity structure and position in a rapidly changing social dynamic), I was actually LEARNING. Damn that seconded gym teacher! ("Oh, sorry, Professor…I meant 'physical education' teacher. Of course I recognize that you do more than coach basketball and encourage eating disorders. You teach health too. My mistake.")

This realization provoked me to suspect that maybe, just maybe, my experiences in teachers' college weren't so awful after all. Maybe I'd invented the inaneness of the whole thing. Maybe I was only imagining the part with the crayons and the safety scissors, and the bit where we all lay on the floor and pretended to be maple keys. Maybe that class where we learned about Shakespeare as if we'd never heard of him before (Julius Caesar was a real guy???) was actually a dream, as was that whole course where our notes were marked for neatness, penmanship and "ink choice."

Hmmmmm…I thought. Maybe it wasn't so bad. I started thinking again about going back and getting my special ed qualifications, like I was planning on doing before the thought of chaining myself to the Ontario Ministry of Education for life made me want to retch.  "Maybe, the next time I'm in Toronto," I thought, "I'll actually go and pick up my degree. And frame it." I started thinking about reading belle hooks again, and Freire. And Piaget. I mean, I really did like that part (okay, not the Piaget). I even considered taking my ed.psych textbook out of the cat box. I mean, the whole experience couldn't have been that bad, right? Surely I must've been exaggerating ?

So, to judge whether I was heading down the evolutionary path of a woman pregnant with her second child, I went back and looked at some of the emails I was sending around this time last year. Was it so bad as all that?

Gentle readers, you be the judge:

"I actually realized this morning that I would honestly prefer going to the gynecologist every day than go to class - at the very least it would be more interesting (they've got a "Where's Waldo" poster on the ceiling) and less uncomfortable." (January 15, 2004)

"In my educational psychology class (taught by a woman who clearly views Anne Rice as a fashion maven), we had to draw a picture symbolizing adolescence (in a group, no less).  Most groups drew stick-figured androgynous teenagers surrounded by various influences - music, food, tv, friends, drugs, etc.  My group drew a bunch of sheep grazing in a field growing a giant penis and vagina, pubic hair and all.  When called upon to explain our drawing to the rest of the class, I insisted that the vagina was a 'rift signifying the threshold of adulthood' and the penis was a 'microphone representing music and the false suggestion that teens have the power to change the world.  What?' " (January 20, 2004)

"This week is looking up, if only because I've got my sense of humour back and we're covering Shakespeare in Drama, which gave me the opportunity to do a scene from Romeo and Juliet with "Dreamy Greg."  "Dreamy Greg" is a guy in three of my classes this year who I cannot EVER think of in my head without adding the "dreamy" prefix.  He looks exactly like he just stepped out of a Benetton ad - the sort of man who can actually pull off wearing a sweater with a scarf indoors - with the mixed racial features and slightly poofy minidreadlocked hair that all the male models in mid-range clothing campaigns seem to have.  He's a brilliant drama teacher, clearly, and he had his first practicum at a very exclusive all girls' private school where he spent most of the time being ogled by his students, who, to his dismay, kept bending over in their little kilts. Working with Dreamy Greg in drama class is just tops - he's clearly got enough improv training to roll with the punches, but he's also got oodles of patience when you (inevitably, because you're too busy drooling over how just goddamn yummy he is) screw up.  Very fun." (February 10, 2004)

"I'm trying to get my head around all of my employment applications at the moment, which consists mostly of a sea of unnecessary papers that nobody will ever read that need to be sent to places where nobody really wants to go.  I've got things like TB tests and criminal background checks that appear to be neverending.  Right now I've just filled in a bunch of little bubbles on a piece of paper that will enable me to write the "Ontario Teacher Qualifying Test" which is a useless waste of four hours on a Saturday in April, that all parties concerned (university faculty, the Ontario College of Teachers, the Ontario Ministry of Education, countless experts, etc.) freely admit has no rationale WHATSOEVER.  The absolute best part of the whole thing though, is that the test is administered by the Educational Testing Service, which is, as you probably know, the American company that also administers the GRE, LSATs, etc.  Why on earth tests on the Ontario curriculum were designed by people in New Jersey is beyond anyone's attempt to explain, but fortunately the test will be poorly worded, complicated in delivery and on obscure, irrelevant material.  "Thank goodness teaching has no practical application, and is easily tested in such a theoretical and hypothetical manner," I find myself muttering, as I beat myself over the head with the Ontario teacher's "Foundations of Professional Practice" yet again (a sample: "Members of the Ontario College of Teachers effect change through decision-making, initiating change, and evaluating and communicating results" -  in other words, by DOING STUFF, AND THEN TALKING WITH OTHER PEOPLE ABOUT THE STUFF THEY DID [brilliant stuff, what?])  Sigh.  At least it will be painful, and for a prolonged period of time." (February 10, 2004)

"Sometimes think that I too should start a blog, but with all of the 'reflections,' 'personal perspectives' and 'thought journals' I have to keep for my crappy latest degree attempt, I'm flush out of energy for creatively charged writing that doesn't explain how I'm going to 'utilize this knowledge in a classroom setting.' " (February 10, 2004)

Well. That settles it. Fuck the teaching. Clearly, it would hinder my commitment to you people, and I'm far, far too egocentric to let y'all go now, potential to efficiently corrupt Ontario's youth with a solid reign of unmitigated terror notwithstanding.

Besides. Dreamy Greg's already married.

Guess my mood

The Utterly Subtle Workout Mix:

Funky Cold Medina - Tone Loc
Set it up - Peaches
The Bad Touch - Bloodhound Gang
Mini-Correct - The Beautiful South
I love myself today - Bif Naked
Longview - Green Day
No Sugar Tonight - The Guess Who
Toyz - Missy Elliott
Striptease - Hawksley Workman
Gett Off - Prince
Closer - Nine Inch Nails
Bleed a Little While Tonight - The Lowest of the Low