Disciplinary Epistemologies 101

Since there have been universities, there has been a crisis in them. We should probably look at the more recent hand-wringing about universities teaching students relativism in the light of recurring accusations that universities corrupt youth, but I’m not going to do that analysis here (or ever, even). Instead I’m going to tell you about my Research Methods class.

1.

I had recently that article for Ethika Politika in which Margaret Blume worries that varied distribution requirements at Yale University—some humanities, some social sciences, some hard sciences, a language or two, etc.—neither give students the sense that the different disciplines could speak to each other nor provide them with a framework in which to organize themselves; with this in the back of my mind, I was listening to my Research Methods instructor talk about the positivist underpinnings of quantitative research and the constructivist underpinnings of qualitative research. Putting the two together, I thought: Hey, maybe what Yale—and UBC, and whoever—needs is a mandatory introductory Research Methods and Disciplinary Epistemologies class.

My experience in undergrad left me with the acute sense that almost none of my peers knew why their own disciplines did things the way they did them, let alone why other disciplines made different decisions. No science student, for example, could tell me why they wrote everything in passive voice, and so they were generally immune to my editorial tirades about 1) cacophonic language and 2) awful epistemology re: denying that the Observer Effect exists.* Students in the humanities weren’t much better; in English, for instance, theory courses were optional for many students, and not all those on offer were great. The only ones who seemed to know these sorts of things were grad-students-to-be or people who took Introduction to Philosophy and listened to the professor.

So if the problem, as Blume would have it, is that undergraduate students had no idea how to put the puzzle pieces together, it seems like a Research Methods and Disciplinary Epistemologies class would be a great solution. I don’t agree, actually, that quantitative research implies positivism and qualitative research implies constructivism—that’s a long discussion, but suffice to say that I’m doing mixed methods research right now—but that’s the sort of conversation that might put the pieces together. Getting a whole big picture of all the disciplines would really help.

Now, there are some problems with this course, logistically. There are really only two people who I’d trust to teach the course: myself and my first-year Philosophy professor. There are probably others here and there, but that’s still a low enough percentage of the people I know that it’s worrisome. Maybe there’d need to be a set curriculum. The issue is that I trust neither insiders nor outsiders to teach a discipline’s epistemology; you’d probably have to have one of each. Maybe there could be modules: one professor handles the etic approach, and guest lecturers handle the emic approach.

2.

This lovely daydream lasted perhaps five minutes before I remembered that I had been a Teaching Assistant for a mandatory Intro to Literature class, and I had sworn off the idea of classes mandatory for all students then and there. You can lead a horse to water, they say, but you can’t make it drink; in my experience, quite a lot of horses won’t drink precisely because you lead them to water when they didn’t want to be lead. These we’ll-make-them-learn-these-things-by-making-it-mandatory schemes rarely work.

I have heard of exceptions, where a professor and batch of TAs manage to get all or most of the students into the humanities, at least in heart if not in enrollment. But this seems to require a dream team of excellent professors, excellent TAs, and excellent students; rarely do you get two, let alone three, of those requirements. In the end, you just can’t force students to accept what they’re not willing to accept.

And it occurred to me, too, that a lot of the content I’d want to teach might be well over the heads of most first year students. As a first year student it took me years to understand existentialism and Buddhism and constructivism, letting them slowly gestate long after I’d passed my Philosophy and Religious Studies finals, and I’m the sort of person who’s good at this sort of thing and won’t leave it alone.

So I’m going to have to come out against mandatory courses in university, no matter how well intended. I don’t think they do what we want them to do. But maybe we’re just doing them wrong?

3.

Leah wrote that maybe the framework-building should be extracurricular anyway, and I’m inclined to agree. Classes might not create incentives for truth-seeking; they are good at creating incentives for skill-building and material-mastering, but I don’t know how you could grade someone on whether or not they are right, on whether their commitment to their values is authentic, on how justified their decisions are. And if you aren’t grading students on something, not many of them are going to do it. We should encourage big questions in the classroom, but we can’t expect students to find them there.

And maybe casting students into a sea of relativism for a while is good for them, as I mentioned in my last post, so long as we give them some sense that they can and should and must get themselves ashore. We can’t get the students ashore for them, more than likely, and while we should think of ways to help them do so, the best method might just be for professors to model evaluativist thinking. For the most part they already do award evaluativist thinking in assignments, since every disciplinary epistemology I’ve encountered has been thoroughly evaluativist; we needn’t make “evaluativist thinking” a formal requirement.

And the not-so-secret subtext of Blume’s article seems to be “every school should be a Catholic school,” so maybe I shouldn’t be taking it as seriously as a critique of university. For instance, Blume’s suggestion that only Catholic theology can tie together the disciplines is just silly: even if you spot her that Catholicism is true, it’s hard to deny that Islamic theology, Buddhist epistemology, and historical materialism have been able to create a coherent, if not necessarily true, framework for all disciplines.

But, anyway, it’s something to think about. I wouldn’t mind teaching a Disciplinary Epistemologies and Academic Research course; I just wonder who I’d teach it to.

* In case you too are unaware of the sciences’ use of the passive voice, I’ll explain it: sciences use the passive voice (“The results were analyzed…” rather than “We analyzed the results”) in order to mask the researchers’ presence. In theory, the researchers shouldn’t matter, the sciences say; we are removing the personality etc. from the procedures. Of course, some version of that claim is true, but not to the extent removing the researcher from consideration entirely. The observer effect is often a serious one, and this grammatical elision hides the way researchers are involved in their research. Consider Nixon’s famous remark, “Mistakes were made”; passive voice is the mechanism by which responsible agents deny responsibility.
Moreover, the science students whose papers I edited never knew why they were supposed to use the passive voice, so they also never knew when they were supposed to use it. As a result, they used it in almost every sentence, even when it was confusing and unnecessary.

7 Quick Takes

1.
I realize that I have been neglecting this blog. For a period I thought about writing a post explaining why, but that might be too self-indulgent. I don’t know what to expect of the future: I could suddenly be more productive, but I could also continue by unreliable trickle. We will see. In the interim, I can at least tell you what is going on with me.

2.
I have finished my courses for my Master’s of English Literature. In a few days I begin a Master’s of Library Science. The good news is that I am not moving from the city or, indeed, my apartment. All is jolly roses here.
A short word on the switch: there are very few professorships available, so getting a PhD is risky; I am feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the seclusion of the English department, as I am uninterested in producing knowledge that will not reach people making decisions; I want a degree which gives me some clear career path, so that even if I do not wind up following that path, I at least know that I can if I need to; I find the idea of helping people access information and knowledge appealing.

3.
For those of you curious about academics, would you be interested in knowing what I have been writing about? I wrote a paper about the trouble with empathy in Wilfred Owen’s poetry; I wrote another paper, for a class on the history of the discipline, trying to figure out the epistemological base of Stephen Greenblatt’s new historicism, finally arguing that he produces a sleight-of-hand covering over a fundamental instability (fusing the old historicism and new criticism); and I wrote a final paper, in my summer course, using Laplanche’s psychoanalysis and Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself to analyze the asexuality described in the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN).

4.
I went on a cross-country trip with Jon after my summer course; I also went to Florida and (very briefly) the Bahamas, including a day in the Magic Kingdom; afterwards, I stayed with my parents in Fort McMurray, where we started a road trip to Hay River, Northwest Territories. It was a busy summer.

5.
What have I been reading? Half-World, by Hiromi Goto, is a YA urban fantasy novel that is surprisingly bleak and difficult, but certainly engaging and worth a read (so long as you aren’t put off by journeys into hell-worlds). Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, and Witch Week, by Diana Wynne Jones are the first three of the Chrestomanci series (if you order them according to Jones’ recommended reading order, and not publishing or internal chronological order). Of them, I think I preferred The Lives of Christopher Chant, though I did quite like Charmed Life. Silver: Return to Treasure Island, by Andrew Motion, is a sequel (written by another author) to Treasure Island. It was enjoyable and a highly appropriate read in the Bahamas, but it has perhaps unachieved presumptions to Literature. The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head, by Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, is an interesting, readable, Oliver-Sacks-style set of essays on psychological cases, though I would accuse it of voyeurism and unfounded philosophizing. G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Knew Too Much is what you would get if a Catholic, somewhat bitter C. S. Lewis wrote detective fiction in the school of Sherlock Holmes (at least, that's what I took from it).
From class, I would recommend Roberto Bolano’s Amulet, Pat Barker’s Another World, Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (caution: theory! jargon! Neitzsche! Kafka! Foucault!), and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (which I had the pleasure of discussing as a TA rather than as a student, and which is now my favourite play ever). I would even recommend Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead; I did not especially enjoy the beginning and it was very difficult to teach, but it got better as a plot sedimented.

6.
Of course I have also been reading webcomics. I have picked up John Allison’s Bad Machinery and Scary Go Round, both of which are lovely just for their linguistic talent. Scary Go Round is one that improves as it goes, beginning without much strength but getting wonderful as it loses one set of protagonists and picks up a couple other sets of protagonists. (It is somewhat like what Questionable Content would be like if the characters went on adventurers, stopped genuflecting, had a plot, and decided to investigate the weird things going around them instead of mope about relationship issues...OK, so it’s not much like Questionable Content, I guess.) Bad Machinery, the sequel to Scary Go Round, begins wonderful and holds the note. Namesakes is also a lot of fun for people who are interested in things set in Oz, Wonderland, and other public domain fantasy settings.
And my sister-in-law-to-be is about to launch a web-serialized graphic novel entitled Megan Kearney’s Beauty and the Beast, located here. This I will be reading.

7.
I have also been watching lots of things. I will not list them all, but I especially loved BBC’s Sherlock Holmes. With The X-Files I for perhaps the first time in my life shipped a couple (and was satisfied). I have finished off everything Joss Whedon has directed for television, after watching his work for years. The Secret World of Arriety is gorgeous. I am also starting to watch the Disney "classics" again or for the first time, as the case may be. So far, I have seen Sleeping Beauty, Pocahontas, and The Little Mermaid.

Theoretical Sonnet I

For a seminar I had to summarize Derrida's "Signature, Event, Context"; after I completed that assignment, I decided to do it again in the form of a sonnet. (To those who don't know, even lit theory nerds who disagree with Derrida still get a little bit enamoured, enough to do silly things like write a sonnet about one of his essays.) I found this exercise very helpful, and I might try it again with other theorists.

I'm not sure how much this is worth to you if you aren't already somewhat familiar with Derrida (a deconstructivist), but at any rate I thought I'd put it here, just in case.

Final disclaimer: I'm not saying that I agree with everything Derrida says; this is a summary, not a statement of my opinion.

I sing my song of Derrida; this dry
And second thing communicates to thee,
My absent reader, that this sonnet’s free,
And I, with my intent and context, die.
This place from which I write, you cannot scry,
Nor can I know what meaning you can see,
Nor whether eyes to tears shall movèd be;
To origins quotation shan’t comply.
This sonnet, then, does not communicate;
Could speech? Ah, no, for words of tumbling air
Can only mean in language spoken late
By others, diff’ring concepts here and there.
Speech and writing, each such stratagem
Can graft again upon another stem.

Disallowed Opinions

In my third year of my undergraduate degree, I was asked (as a member of the Department Students Council) to attend a job talk by a prospective lecturer. During this talk, the faculty began to ask the lecturer questions, and one of the junior faculty interrupted her own question to say, "I don't mean to sound conservative--I'm not conservative--but... ." I was a bit concerned by this insertion, ticked that the lecturer would feel such distaste for the conservative position that she would need to distance herself from it. When I got home and related this to my housemates, one of them said, "You would be offended by that, wouldn't you?," as though I was somehow emblematic of conservatism. (Which is kind of weird, since I'm socialist, environmentalist, and strongly concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice.)

Now that I look back on this, I realize that that faculty member could not have done otherwise. If you want to be taken seriously in academia, if you want anyone to listen to you, then you need to remove yourself constantly from the suggestion of being conservative. Conservatism is not an allowable position in academia, or at least not humanities departments in Canada. And so even those people who are not conservative--not even remotely conservative--must always be on guard to disavow conservativism in case any particular opinion seems to appear conservative or look like a particular conservative opinion.

There are a few problems with this, and I'm not sure how they rank in terms of destructiveness. One problem is that people who have conservative opinions are effectively barred from conversation (not necessarily because they cannot speak but rather because no one will listen). And while some might not lament the loss of their conservative opinions (more on this in a moment), we should certainly lament the loss of their other opinions, those that are either not conservative or that are not trackable on a conservative-liberal-socialist continuum. These lost opinions may be very good ones, ones we are in need of, but if we are too busy distancing ourselves from conservatism, we won't be able to take them seriously.

The second problem is that a conservative idea could, of course, be correct. I'm having a difficult time imagining a conservative idea which I could support, but then again I don't think much of that left-right continuum, so ideas I might think of as non-conservative could appear conservative to others. At any rate, I am at least willing to admit that there could be opinions which appear conservative that turn out to be rather valuable without turning out to be non-conservative. In fact, that certain positions which I am very certain are correct can be closely if not perfectly formulated in conservative terms (ie. conservationism and conservative are cognate for a reason) suggests that there are conservative ideas which, if slightly reformulated, could fit admirably within a non-conservative framework. All of this indicates that barring conservative ideas from the discourse is counter-productive. And yet, by making conservatism something we must necessarily distance ourselves from if we want to be heard, we have ensured that those ideas do not get aired. And that is bad news indeed.

Catch-Up

Looking through my archive, I see that I have not given you all an update of my life since 25 February. My apologies; I assure you that I have been quite busy. If you take a look at that last 7 Quick Takes, you'll see that I bought some journals, which means that I actually have a record of what happened in the meantime. Fancy that. Let's dive in.

1. I have become a sidesperson and a liturgical assistant-in-training at my church. I am a member of the church for real. In the instance of the latter, I get to wear an alb again. Regular readers will know that this pleases me. What's even more exciting is that my church does not have albs big enough for me, so I get to wear the priest's spare clergy alb. One of the unexpected privileges of being a liturgical assistant-in-training is that I am sometimes asked to serve the priest the Eucharist.

2. I gave up tea for Lent. It was difficult but I survived. I also planned to write a sonnet each week; I only got two written. Not so good. If you want to see someone who succeeded at a more daunting sonnet Lenten devotion, go visit Miss Lazarus' site.

3. I picked up a new webcomic, Order of the Stick. I'm no table-top RPG player but I still find it delightful. Genre-savviness makes me swoon, what can I say?

4. I went to a Contemplative Prayer service or two in the elapsed time. In the most interesting I was introduced to the Anglican Rosary. I am a fan; I wish I had one. I am not sure what makes it different from a Catholic Rosary.

5. For class I have read a number of interesting works, some new to me and some familiar: "Death and the Compass" by Borges, The Tempest by Shakespeare (as well as other things by him, but that's in my opinion the most interesting of them), Waiting for Godot by Beckett, a host of stuff on reported speech, including an article by one Wooffitt on mediums reporting (supposedly) the speech of spirits.

6. I have officially (for myself, at least) moved towards Universalism. I'm aware that it's not fully worked out, but I consider the problems with Arminianism and Calvinism more insurmountable than those of Universalism. This move was entirely instigated by the series over at Dr. Richard Beck's blog.

7. I have started running. Twice a week, that is, in the morning, with a friend of mine. Athleticism is such a strange concept for me yet I've fallen into this routine easily enough. The trick is, will I continue over the summer?

8. I saw a Green College production of The Importance of Being Earnest. If you can believe it, I'd never seen nor read it before. I quite enjoyed it.

9. I also attended the EndNotes conference, the UBC English Department annual graduate conference. This year's theme was "Beyond the Book." I heard friends and colleagues give papers on how the Twilight franchise has impacted the community of Forks, Washington; how Canadian history and archive is explored in the comics of Seth; how V's mask relates to reader identification and the genre conventions of melodrama (theatre) in V for Vendetta (the graphic novel); how narrative pornography has begun to rise with Pirates and what this has to do with the potential for feminist pornography (that one was a bit controversial, you can imagine); how Girl Talk enacts the Death of the Author; and how intertextuality and copyright operate in the Arthurian legend of Swamp Thing #87, in which Merlin draws Swamp Thing back in time to Camelot to defend the kingdom against Mordred. It was an exultation of grad student nerdiness and I loved it.

10. I wrote two papers. One concerns a particular type of self-reporting speech which I examine in detail in order to learn more about self-reporting. The other concerns the constitution and perversion of the ideal male military body through its parodic inversion in the Coventry and Gloucestershire muster scenes of 1 and 2 Henry IV respectively. (Those are Shakespeare plays, in case you are not fully read up on your early modern drama.) The process of researching, writing, and editing was, of course, harrowing.

11. Immediately after submitting my papers I graded about 50 student essays (each of my 25 students had to write two essays for their final exam, as well as do an identify-and-state-the-significance-of section) and calibrate my final grades for submission. I did this perforce over the Easter weekend, which I found quite distasteful. During this process, I crashed a little bit.

12. For these essays, I read papers and books on the early modern English constitution of masculinty and on the dynamics of everyday speech. For the former, may I suggest Gary Spear's article "Shakespeare's "Manly" Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida" and Patricia Cahill's Unto the Breach; for the latter, may I recommend Goffman's Forms of Talk. (His Frame Analysis is also interesting and was written earlier, so perhaps you should skim it first. Both are tomes.)

13. I have given substantial thought to some things other than my papers during this time, among which has been what friendship is and what sorts of requirements come with it. Altruism has always been important to me but certain interpersonal issues seem different when framed by general ideas of altruism than when framed in a context of friendship. As I make and solidify new friendships here in a new city, these question gain some immediacy.

14. Some time in the midst of the above, I finished One of Us, which I wrote on before. I'd like to share another excerpt, one I thought worthy of copying out in my journal: "But what if we understood such twins as people who are no more broken than anyone else? What if we stopped thinking of biological anomalies as the sworn enemies of humanity, and started recognizing their full social nature, perhaps even their social potential? In the long run, we can do more than try to guarantee every child a 'normal' body. We can try to guarantee a just world. If you take seriously what conjoined people have said about their bodies and their lives, you realize they are still experiencing what Mary Wollstonecraft felt in the late eighteenth century: 'It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.' Let us now stop referring to children who undergo massive normalizations as 'real fighters,' and start recognizing that we are the ones who construct what they are fighting against." [emphasis mine]

Now I'm free; I'm very tired at the moment, but I'm loose in the world again. And, who'da thunk it, but it's spring! (Actually, it's been spring here for months now. Vancouver is like that.)

7 Quick Takes (75)

Yet another two-week edition.

1. Last week was Reading Week. What time I did not spend procrastinating, watching Firefly, or visiting with friends, I spent working on a biography review or grading papers. I shouldn't talk about the later as a matter of professional discretion, but I can discuss the former. If I were you, I would not read Park Honan's Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy. It is surprising that a biography about a brilliant poet and playwright, a libertine with ambiguous sexuality, a swashbuckling spy, could be so boring. If you do read this book, prepare for such a surprise. If you nonetheless insisted on reading a biography of an early modern playwright, then I might be more inclined to recommend Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. While its literary readings of Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet are not the best in the world, they are at least interesting, and it nicely situates Shakespeare in the time of his writing. I am not a fully-converted New Historicist, but I find that I appreciate Shakespeare far more (and far more maturely) when I think of him as situated in his time, nation, and culture.

2. I went to the Regent Chapel service on Tuesday morning with a friend, and we went for lunch afterwards. The service was interesting; I'm intrigued by, though not entirely comfortable with, the idea of an overtly religious post-secondary institution. This one is small and feels very collegial. I did, however, like the looks of their library and bookstore.

3. That following Wednesday evening I acquired Hopeful Monsters and a journal. I had received a phone call explaining that my book order for Hiromi Goto's collection of short stories had come in and realizing that I had reached my threshold of productivity for the day, I visited Chapter's that evening to get the book. While there I bought a set of journals. They have writing-paper lining and not graph-paper lining, but otherwise they are identical to those pictured. I have been told by Creative Writing professors and others that I should use a journal as a collection of insights into experience. This will be a useful repository as I write. I am not thinking of it as a "Dear Diary" sort of writing-as-catharsis exercise, though it may be that in some instances; rather, I am thinking of this as a commonplace book of experience. It is also a little bit of a commonplace book more generally, as Bakhtin, Foucault, Barthes, and Firefly have all featured in this first journal.

I know perfectly well that I will not get a chance to read much of Hopeful Monsters soon.

4. On Friday I went to a dinner party organized by the church. It has been a long time since I've been to a dinner party. It was very nice. Fortunately I knew most of the people there at least a little bit, but it's interesting to note how this sort of event, in which the host is good at leading conversation and involving people, is an excellent way of getting to know people better or at all. Having dinner parties is a skill I don't see developing especially well in my generation and/or demographic, and yet it seems tobe a key element in the social fabric of previous generations. Something to think about.

5. On Tuesday, despite being intellectually and emotionally exhausted by Reading Week (I hope you'll forgive me my reticence regarding the reasons--plural--for the emotional exhaustion), I gave what I felt was a good presentation in my Reported Speech class. It was on an essay by Short, Semino, and Wynne on faithfulness in reported speech. That is, they argue that faithfulness is important in some contexts when people report the speech of others. This may interest anyone outside of the field because most people (or most academics, anyway) assume that when we quote, we quote verbatim. What I am learning in this class is that such an assumption is all lies and deceit. We certainly do not quote verbatim. For the most part (especially in conversation) we don't even pretend to. What Short, Semino, and Wynne argue is that faithfulness (not verbatim) is important in some contexts, and while they are right to point this out, their argument is still problematic on a number of details. If this interests you, let me know and I'll tell you more.

6. The last few days have been spent in a glut of social interaction. I am making up for the scarcity of the same over Reading Week (other than ocassional Skype, a smattering of collegial talk in the Graduate Reading Room, tea at a bakery one morning, and what I wrote on above, I spent most of my Reading Week in scholarly isolation). I have a short but heavily-weighted paper due on Tuesday, so I need to put my nose to the grindstone and all of that good stuff. However, to see friends again, even after a week's absense, is a balm.

7. Just last night I started reading DeLillo's End Zone for the class in which I am a TA. I love it so far. I am not a fan of American football (nor should I be), but this book is only about football on the surface. So far I can tell that it is far more about language and the politics of devastation: it examines the jargon of the Cold War and the jargon of professional sports, reducing them to a moment in which they mean either far more than we'd like or nothing at all. Of a player, Bobby, who is "famous for saying he would go though a brick wall for Coach Creed," the narrator says the following:

Maybe he had heard others use it and thought it was a remark demanded by history, a way of affirming the meaning of one's struggle. Maybe the words were commissioned, as it were, by language itself, by that compartment of language in which are kept all bits of diction designed to outlive the men who abuse them, all phrases that reduce speech to units of sound, lullabies processed through intricate systems. Or maybe the remark just satisfied Bobby's need to be loyal to someone. [Creed does not want or deserve loyalty.] But Bobby had this loyalty to give, this eager violence of the heart, and he would smash his body to manifest it. Tradition, of course, supported his sense of what was right. The words were old and true, full of reassurance, comfort, consolation. Men followed such words to their death because other men before them had done the same, and perhaps it was easier to die than admit that words could lose their meaning.

The brackets are my summary of a longer passage; the embolding is my emphasis of sentences I love.

[Bonus round!]

8. I found this video on Facebook, and I was fascinated. It's a fanmade trailer for Riverdale, a fictional "gritty remake" of the Archie Comics. "Lux Aeternae" is likely responsible for 25% of my fascination with the video. My nostalgic and theoretical pull to Archie Comics is responsible for my 35%, and my interest in the genres of the dark remake and the movie trailer account for the remainder. I should warn you that, no matter your politics, something about it will probably offend you. Also, I should give a trigger warning.

9. Due to my nose-to-the-grindstone sentiment I expressed before, I will not be writing the posts I have planned. In response to Leah's post on transhumanism at Unequally Yoked, I plan to write a series of posts concerning the boundries of self. That is, what does and does not consitute "me." I intend to talk about somatic control, prosthetics, two-headed snakes, Judith Butler, and friendship. Do not expect this to be a simple or traditional account of identity; I want to write these posts at all in order to complicate the sort of naive delineations of self that I saw expressed in the comments section of that post. However, I must beg your patience on this matter, as my workload and lifeload not only demand that I abstain from writing those posts any time soon, but cease writing this one as well.

Please go visit Conversion Diary, the host of the 7 Quick Takes blog carnival.

7 Quick Takes (74)

1. I spent a good portion of the first week of February preparing for a seminar presentation on Henry IV 1 & 2, in case you couldn't pick that up from the rant about "gentlemen of the shade" last week. Those are some plays, folks. If you don't believe that a scene can at the same time be hilarious and horribly sad, you might want to look at Part 2 (after reading Part 1 of course). I suppose the knowledge of how it ends makes it sadder than you might get on a fresh reading, but I still find the tavern scenes pathetic, in the full sense of that word.

In case you are somehow entirely unaware of these plays (which I realize is possible and not condemnable), you must be introduced to Falstaff. This video is an excellent way to begin, though I take issue with Welles' description of the reverend vice. It's a great piece of stagecraft nonetheless.

2. Last Sunday after church I attended the Lunar New Year Parade. It was held on Pender Street in the rain. This is, after all, Vancouver. After some (im)patience, I finally managed to get close to the front, at which point my photography improved.
I am a Rabbit, so it seemed important that I attend this parade. I had been planning on going with friends, but I did not get the text that everyone bailed until I was already on the #10, bound for Pender St. So I was there "alone," or as alone as one can be in a crowd. I overheard numerous homeless people griping about the sudden influx of people, though some of them were friendly. I had an interesting conversation with a down-and-out-looking fellow on the bus, who descibed to me in great detail how he manages to avoid fights with drunks through trickery.
The rest of this post will have photographs of said event along the side.

3. There is a used bookstore down the street from me, and they have been stealing my money ruthlessly. Fortunately, this yeilds books: a collection of Donne's poetry (Cait, the one I gave you), One Thousand Years of Solitude, and Fables of Identity. This last is a collection of Frye's essays. Frye is a Canadian and once-influential literary critic who enjoyed significant popularity and is now considered obsolete and/or unreadable by most literary scholars. I know this, and I know why. I cannot take his work 100% seriously (it's too universalizing, for starters), but I must admit that I'm enchanted by Anatomy of Criticism. I might not ever work Frye into my own scholarly work, but they can't stop me from holding a torch.
At any rate, I can't afford to frequent this bookstore too often, but it's not a bad place. And I have a coupon!

4. On the recommendation of a friend, I borrowed the film Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity (2002). It stars Sandra Oh (Grey's Anatomy) and Valeria Tian (Juno) and takes place in the Chinese Canadian community of Vancouver. It's funny, poignant, gripping, etc. and so forth. Mindy is a twelve-year old only child to her workaholic, money-harried mother. She is an eccentric little girl who tries desperately to improve her mother's financial and romantic prospects... by means of Taoist charms. Her inexpert attempts at these charms backfire, appearing to cause ripples in the local community. I suppose you might not like it if you are opposed to movies in which Taoist magic works. But it is a good movie. Watch it!
[American readers: I am not sure if this is available in outside of Canada. I am wholly ignorant of such things. I couldn't get it at the Roger's Video here, not even before it closed down. I had to get it from the library.]

5. Weather-related take: Last Friday I was tempted to write a post raving about the beautiful weather. I finished reading one of the Henry's in the Rose Garden, no sweater, no shoes, no socks. It was gorgeous. Yesterday was nice, too, but otherwise it's generally been rainy. No surprises.

6. This up-coming week is Reading Week. Today, then, was the last day before break. This afternoon I went to a lovely prof talk by one Prof. Patsy Badir on shame and failure in Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost and Twelfth Night. If I do post at all this week, it will either be a continuation of one of the unofficial series (The Fantasy Genre, for instance) or some more explicit form of literary geekiness. However, I have grading, reading, and writing to do for Monday and Tuesday after Reading Week, so I may be too busy for blogging fun.

7. If you aren't already, I suggest you go take a look at the debate at Leah's Unequally Yoked. The argument surrounds whether it is at all acceptable, from any point of view, for someone to steal a host from a Catholic church, desecrate it, and post a video of said desecration on-line. What fascinates me is that there should be no debate at all. It's an obviously reprehensible act. I don't, for instance, think that a Zoroastrian fire is actually sacred, but I would react in horror if someone put it out; I don't, for instance, think that the Qu'ran is the revealed word of God, but burning one in public is a gross insult. I don't see how anyone could fail to make this connection, though it's also clear that many do. Anyway. Go take a look. I've linked to the most recent post on the issue, but from there you should be able to navigate to the older ones. [Edit 12 Feb: I should clarify that Leah is not the one advocating desecration. Not at all. I commend her for what she's said so far.] [Edit 14 Feb: I have now linked to her index of the posts. Thank-you, Leah, for your lovely indexes.]

And that's it for me. Please visit Jennifer Fulwiler at Conversion Diary for more.

7 Quick Takes (73)

1. I should not be doing this. I should be reading and editing a fragment of a novella for a friend so we can discuss it tomorrow. I should also be writing something new for tomorrow, problably a sonnet about silverfish. I should ALSO be reading Marlowe's Tamburlaine (both parts). Getting a start on Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 might also be a good idea. As would preparing for my Reported Speech class. Also, there is an e-mail to an aunt that I ought to write soon. Not to mention letters to reply to. And, yet, all I want to do is write this blog post and then watch the events unfolding in Egypt.

2. If you are unaware of what's happening in Egypt, you should become aware of what's happening in Egypt. I've been watching Al Jazeera, and from what I understand, that is the only competitive source right now. None of the North American channels are worthwhile at the time I'm writing this. You can stream Al Jazeera live here. For those of you in the dark about what's going on, there's possibly a popular revolution right now in Egypt, and similar protests are going on in Jordan. (I say "possibly" only because it won't be a revolution if it doesn't succeed.)

3. I wrote a lot of letters this week. I'm still not caught up.

Last week I visited the Rare Books Collection at UBC with a class and read some authors' correspondences (Douglas Coupland, Dante Gabriel Rossetti). Suddenly letter-writing looks different. What if one of my recipients becomes famous and some embarassingly juvenile comment I wrote becomes part of a public collection?

4. As you might have read in my previous post, I got One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal out from the library. I have started to think that perhaps this is an area I should pursue. Anatomic and neurological atypicality are in many ways invisible minorities. Disability activism has some momentum, but disability is somewhat different from anatomic atypicality.

5. On Sunday I was recruited at church to help move a TV. I was recruited on the strength of being the youngest adult parishioner. It was another one of those unusual incidents in which I clearly was the strongest, most able-bodied person present. That is so entirely unlike my usual self-image that I don't know how to respond. (I helped, of course; I mean that I don't know how to respond mentally to people telling me I look strong, because I don't.)

It wasn't a bad move, though.

6. On the Saturday preceding I spent three hours helping organize the church library. We "released" a number of books "into the wild" because they were written at a time when a lot of churches saw things differently, especially concerning child-rearing, gender roles, and disability. There was a sort of catharsis to purging the shelves and boxes of that material. Most of the time we spent getting the books out of boxes and onto the shelves in numerical order. It was dusty work, but I was happy to help.

7. Wallace Stevens. We read Wallace Stevens in the class for which I am a TA. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is beautiful; if you have time, I encourage you to indulge in the luxurious language of "The Comedian as the Letter C." It's as rich as chocolate truffle. We also read some Marianne Moore. Are you familiar with her work? I like "The Fish." (Hint: the title is also the first line.)

Also, I am slowly, grumpily unfolding as far as T S Eliot is concerned. I may be approaching a position from which I could actual appreciate "The Wasteland." Maybe.

This blog carnival is kindly, excitingly, adjectivally hosted by Jen Fulwiler of Conversion Diary. Please pay a visit to her and the other participants in this carnival.

Bonus!

Grooveshark Playlist:

"Africa," Toto

"Dani California," Red Hot Chilli Peppers

"Welcome to the Jungle," Guns & Roses

"House of the Rising Sun," The Doors

"Stairway to Heaven," Led Zeppelin

"Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ya," Dropkick Murphies

"I'm Shipping Up to Boston," Dropkick Murphies

"Amazing Grace," Dropkick Murphies

"Nothing Else Matters," Apocalyptica

"Kyrie Elison," Gregorian Chant

"O come Emmanual," Gregorian Chant

"Cossack Dance," Tchaikovsky

"Marche Slave," Tchaikovsky

"Concerto for Two Violins," Bach

"Ich Ruf Zu Din, Herr Jesu Christ," Bach

"We Three Kings," The Irish Tenors

"Fairytale of New York," The Irish Tenors

"Mordred's Lullaby," Heather Dale

"Tarnished Silver," Heather Dale

"Only Time," Enya

"My! My! Time Flies!" Enya

"O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," Enya

7 Quick Takes (72)

1. Lots of photography. We've had snow, rain, and sun over the last two weeks, so I've had varied photographic opportunities. I will upload some of them.

2. I've been enjoying my classes. Reported Speech is a lot of fun, in the sort of way that fuses theory and grammatical technicality together in highly localized instances.

In my Research Methods class we visited the Rare Books Collection of the library, where we got to browse through old folios of Shakespeare; an old Milton; part of the best Alice in Wonderland collection in the world; the letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (but they didn't take out Christina's for us to see, alas); the archives (fonds) of Douglas Coupland; old versions of Burns. We also got to see inside the Vault.

And who could complain about a Shakespeare and Marlowe course?

3. Recently I have expanded my musical listening habits to include Tchaikovsky and Bach. I have Melissa to thank for Bach: I have Anna to thank for Tchaikovsky.

4. On Tuesday evening I went to an Ecumenical Service at St. Mark's Chapel. It's out of my diocese, so I would not have known about it were it not for Melissa, who invited me. It was ecumenical and so not especially Catholic, which I had expected and sort of hoped for. The chapel space was not what I had expected of a Catholic church; it was not especially ornamented, for instance. There were crucifixes instead of crosses, but some Protestant churches use crucifixes anyway.

5. On Wednesday evening I went to a Centring Prayer service at St. Faith's. It reminded me a lot of Buddhist meditation. (It's interesting to note that that's what I compare it to; I've had more experience with Buddhist meditation in my Religious Studies classes in undergrad than I have had with Christian meditative prayer.) I am a clear beginner, so it's not unexpected that I spent most of the time in the thrall of monkey-mind (a Buddhist term, but if you have any experience with any meditative exercise, I think you can figure out what it means).

What is perhaps more surprising is how long it took me to come out again. I wasn't exactly sleepy, but I was quiet, slow to respond, detached.

There will be other services like this one (2-3 times a month), and I shall likely attend them.

6. Last Saturday I went on a trip across Vancouver looking for materials with which to make a top-secret craft gift. First I went to the Public Library (not really for the gift, though I did take a look for books there that might help me), then to West Broadway, then to Richmond' Aberdeen Centre. This last I poked around a little bit; I was rather conspicuous as the only white guy under 45 in a fairly populated mall.

7. I am concerned about my career prospects. Somehow the job prospects are even worse than we thought they were. ("We" being the English grads. Most of us will not become professors, it seems.) While I haven't given up entirely on the goal of being a professor, I am both aware that I might not get that job after all and that I might not want it even if I got it. So I am on the look-out for new job prospects. I am giving serious thought to a Master's of Library Science (in which having another Master's is a very very good thing); I am also wondering whether there could be work in copy-editing/proof-reading. Finally, I spoke today with my priest's husband, who told me about church-related avenues I might look into.

Somewhat related to this, I am going to treat writing and researching as a full time job this summer. I haven't quite worked out the details, but I'm excited and nervous about this. It will be the first time since high school that I took a summer "off", but I will be very busy (I hope) producing a substantial amount of prose and/or poetry. I want to see if writing is something I can really do after all.

That's all. (I did 7 Quick Takes! Thanks to Leah and Cait for your concerns.)

Jennifer Fulwiler hosts this blog carnival. Please visit her for more.

7 Quick Takes (71)

1. I gave up Coke. Please notice the capitalization. It makes a difference.

It's a New Year's thing. I've done this before; I will give up more on Lent, either all carbonated drinks or all caffeinated drinks. It's been hard as is (I probably have an addiction to it), so this is like not quitting cold turkey. I'll do it in stages. In the meantime, my tea intake is skyrocketing. To think I used to dislike tea.

(That I am contemplating drinks is interesting in light of Penny Arcade's arc this week. Don't click through if you're sensitive to language. Don't finish the link if you dislike body horror.)

2. Jon visited on Saturday. That is, he returned to Fort McMurray; my mother and I got him at the airport and had him over for dinner.

3. And then I flew back to Vancouver on Sunday. It was fine: no turbulence at all, I had an open seat next to me on both legs of the journey, and it's a lot shorter than I'm used to.

4. I finished a paper on Monday. It was one of those things that wasn't hard to do but was hard to motivate oneself to do.

5. I had my first class of the term on Tuesday. It seems like fun. It's on reported speech. One of the assignments calls on us to eavesdrop on people and record when they use reported speech. Each week we bring examples to the class and by the year's end we will have compiled a corpus of examples of reported speech. That's not all there is to it--There Will Be Theory--but I will enjoy it. I already have examples to bring in next Tuesday. One of those examples is a cheat, though, as I used something someone said to me during a conversation.

I recognize that the mechanics and theory of reported speech may not sound like fun to other people. I do recognize that. Really.

I watched Fire and So I Married an Axe Murder in the afternoon. They are very different movies.

6. On Wednesday I saw a greater number of my friends again! Well, that's not strictly true. I played TA in a lecture, during which I saw M. and K. (I need standard nomenclature for people I refer to not-by-name. I should look back and see what I called M. previously.) And then spent the rest of the day, pretty much, with M.

It was on Thursday that I saw most of my friends who I had not seen up until that point, or who I hadn't had a chance to speak to at length. That was nice. And I had lunch with...oh, man, it's another M. Initials won't work. Male M., as opposed to Female M., in the previous paragraph.

7. Today I TA'd my new discussion group and it went well. We discussed how people frequenty misread and misquote (not in the sense of getting the phrasing wrong but in using it to mean something that it doesn't mean in the context of the poem) "The Road Not Taken." The prof directed us (both TAs and students) to look at a Monster.com ad which uses a truncated version of the poem and compare this to the original. Folks, including the ad company script writers, often refer to this poem as an American icon which emphasizes confidence, decisiveness, and individuality. The last lines, after all, read, "I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." What's funny is that the poem is about the road not taken; it's about the road the speaker doesn't take. It's about regret, about being uncertain of your choices both when you make them and after you look back upon them. If this in any way surprises or upsets you, I suggest you read the poem. Please notice that a) the speaker perpetually dithers about things, b) that the roads are virtually indistinguishable, c) that he figures he'd plan on trying the other road out if he got the opportunity, and d) that he's not sure he made the right choice. Those final lines seem more ironic in light of the whole poem; they seem like the speaker's attempt to assert that he made the right choice, even though we can see (and he can see) that it's far from clear that he did.

By the way, it might be worth mentioning that Archie Comics, in the Archie Marries Veronica/Archie Marries Betty release, seems to give a bit more of a nuanced reading of this poem from what I can tell on Wikipedia and from the interview with Michael Uslan (writer of that plot arc and producer of almost every modern Batman movie, including the ones with Christian Bale). I haven't actually read the comic, though, so I suppose I should reserve that judgement.

In the afternoon I went to Coffee Hour and it, too, was good. I talked with some people I like talking to and also talked to people with whom I do not talk much. That's important. I am strengthening bonds all around.

That's it for me! Make sure you go see Jennifer Fulwiler, host of this carnival.

[Edit: I have updated my 2010 review in books post. I plan to finish it this weekend if not tonight, so I suggest you go look at it.]

2010 in 10 Books

Subtitle: Because I'm a Huge Nerd Like That

[Once I posted the first bit I realized that this post will be enormous when it's done. This is going to rival some of Jon's stuff.]

I don't usually get too worked up about New Year's Eve; the arbitrariness of it prevents my taking it seriously. That being said, many people treat it as a point of reflection on the last secular calendar year and since I love collective actions--especially on the Interwebs--I shall indulge in a bit of the same. Thus I shall do a review of the year in books. (I couldn't really think of any other topic and, anyway, I'm a huge nerd.) I will note that I recommend all of these books to everyone, provided you are a critical reader and not a mindlessly absorptive one. (I'm pretty sure you're the former.)


1. Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

This was likely the first book I read in 2010. Leacock gives us an episodic account of life in a small Ontario town shortly after Confederation. The genre is emphatically a comedy. I loved it. It reminded me of my own country-boy roots and with my increasingly urban living conditions this is something I like. Perhaps the removal from the rural space was necessary for me to fully appreciate this book. The epilogue after all makes it quite clear that it is written for an audience that is removed from the small town but nonetheless remembers that life. I don't know how well this registers with people who have lived their whole lives in urban culture (though Cait likes it, maybe she can tell us why); for me, the sharp and almost accusatory nostalgia of the book's final pages forced me to become aware of my own urban position.

I can no longer orient myself as being in the country, in the small town. Fort McMurray--where I lived reading the book, where I am writing this--is not a small town. It's not a metropolis like Toronto or Vancouver and I know lots of people from metropolises (metropoles?) see anything smaller than Edmonton as a small town, but compared to most communities Fort McMurray is large. It's just isolated and lacks certain amenities. Kingston, the city in which I had most recently built a full life when I was reading this book, is no small town, either. Recognizing that I am more urbanite than hick was an odd thing for me and is something with which I am still coming to terms. I prefered thinking of myself as a hick than as an urbanite largely because I like thinking of myself as having an outsider's perspective.

The second lesson I got from this book is that one can mix idyll and irony. The narrator treats the characters--and perhaps himself--with a gentle mockery which makes you like them more, not less. This is important: we can still care for the characters in spite of, maybe because of, their faults. This book is built on this blend more than anything else. Humanity is flawed right through, but we're nonetheless likeable. What's important is that the narrator could have presented the characters as flawed and unlikeable, but instead chose to gently, caringly point out these flaws. That specific chosen perspective is an important one.

2. Wade Davis' The Wayfinders

The emotion of the posts that this book spawned should indicate its importance to my 2010. The import of this book comes on two levels.

First, the premise of this book is eye-opening and perhaps liberating: Davis thinks of non-Western civilizations as ones that have the same creative intellectual resources that we have but invested those resources not into the Enlightenment project but into other endeavours entirely. Most of his book explores different endangered cultures which exemplify his premise. I think this is a very important idea, not only in countering the ideas of liberal progress that run rampant through our culture, but also in giving us ways of re-imagining what our society could be like if we started doing things differently. In this respect Davis' book is one of hope, that hope that things can be different.

Unfortunately, opening one's eyes can be a painful experience. The reason Davis' book is hopeful, not complacent, is that there are a lot of things wrong with the world today. As a result, this book sent me into a week-long bout of hopelessness, nigh on despair, with the state of the world. The aftershocks are on-going. This book then marked the beginning of my rocky relationship with the entire idea of hope. I am still working on what kinds of hope are productive and what kinds of hope are deadly.

3. Madeleine L'Engle's A Ring of Endless Light

If The Wayfinders sent me into despair, A Ring of Endless Light helped me get back out of it. This is a young adult novel about a girl named Vicky dealing with death: the recent death of a family friend, the impending death of her grandfather, the deaths of animals (birds, dolphins), the death-seeking of a potential lover. The book is therefore also about love, the full spectrum of friendly, familial, and romantic. Vicky has three potential lovers, and so it triggered one of my theoretical interests (polyamory), but this was not the most fulfilling part of the book. The novel's treatment of love and death coalesce into an exploration into the role hope plays in a dark world.

It is this interest in hope that made the book important to me. I read it following The Wayfinders and this book was part of what pulled me out of that slump. Others will tell you that it's a beautiful book but to me in particular, at that moment, it was necessary. It has also been part of the context in which I have worked through ideas of hope. This is an on-going project, one I can date as beginning in 2010 but cannot date as ending there, as it has not yet ended.

The primary downside to this book is that, like most of L'Engle's books, it made me self-conscious about my own lack of life experiences. Having hit fewer 'maturity markers' than a teenage protagonist is a bit depressing. I hope that my earstwhile readers will not have similar experiences reading it.

4. Walter Truett Anderson's The Truth About the Truth

I picked this up used in a Goodwill; I realized that I didn't really know what postmodernism was and thought remedying that would be a good idea. As it turned out I had been trained in postmodernism for four years at university and just hadn't encountered it as a coherent, labeled theoretical framework. That story is here, here, and here. I am not a postmodernist--I believe in truth, for instance--but I recognize that many of the insights that postmodernism has produced are relevant and important. Postmodernism has significantly changed how I view human identity and has been important upon returning to an English Department. This book not only helped me understand in retrospect exactly what it was I did in much of my undergrad, but it helped me understand the culture in which I will be studying and working for the next few years (at least).

I am not done with postmodernism yet; while I do not agree with the whole package, it has importantly impacted by ongoing thinking. Expect future posts clarifying this.

5. John Milton's Paradise Lost

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. (I'm classifying it as a book, even though that designation doesn't quite work.) I was supposed to have finished reading it a long time ago and decided that it was time. Theologically it's iffy but poetically it works fairly well. I am still confused about the number of pro-Satan readings I hear people produce; having read it straight through now I agree that Satan is a charismatic and understandable villain, but he is nonetheless a villain. What is fascinating is Milton's ability to remain ambiguous about the Ptolemaic versus Copernican universes while elaborately describing the world. Beyond which it's beautiful poetry.

I include PL not only because I finished and enjoyed it, but because I recognize it as one of the touchstones of our current culture. Its vision of the Christian universe has had a lasting impact on societal and cultural understanding of religion (which is ironic, considering it's theological iffiness), and its images have been revisited and revised in subsequent literature. If anything, it has reminded me that drawing on the ideas and images of predecessors is an honourable, perhaps necessary, literary enterprise. Whether or not it has all been said before, it can still be said again, differently. There is still room for poetry.

6. Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

If you ever thought reading fiction is unimportant, you may want to read this book. It is non-fiction about how reading fiction is important, especially when the going gets tough. In these memoirs, Azar Nafisi recounts her time as a professor of English in post-revolutionary Iran teaching students, including and particularly a group of young women, how to read the classics: how to read them critically, yes, but also how to learn from them. Thus the novel is divided into four sections called "Lolita," "Gatsby," "James," and "Austen." She deals with the intersections of the attempt to control others' dreams and censorship, the intersections between the refusal to accept uncertainty in fiction and the refusal to accept uncertainty in personal beliefs, and the intersections between the failure to understand characters and the failure to empathize with real people. Nafisi's life, the other characters' lives, and her observations on Iran are captivating enough to make an interesting book, but the moral strength of the book earns it a place on this list.

If you have read some of my past posts about fantasy or the suspension of disbelief, you will recognize some similar themes. This book has impacted my thinking and has rekindled my faith in the power of and study of literature. In case you were unaware, it is all but a professional requirement that students of literature agonize over their own relevance. Reading Lolita in Tehran has convinced me all over again that reading fiction matters.

7. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics

When you move from a high style or theme to a low style or theme, it is called bathos. That is what's happening with Book #7. Where Nafisi's book was inspirational, McCloud's book is fun, interesting, at best instructive.

McCloud's Understanding Comics explores sequential art, the technical term McCloud gives for comics and graphic novels. His interest is not in superheroes, though; his interest is in the form itself. What happens in the gutter (the space between panels)? Is there a difference between realistically-rendered characters and cartoon ones? How does sequential art relate to other forms of art?

McCloud's Reinventing Comics digs into much more technical elements of drawing, panelling, inking, etc., but even in this he is often very theoretical and many of his concerns apply to all artistic production. Thus if Understanding Comics is more interesting to people who are interested in comics (or the rare duck like me who is interested in genres generally (haha! PUN!)), Reinventing Comics has something to offer anyone involved in the production of narrative art. It is in this book that he also unveils an idea about artistic motivations, which he calls campfire. I began exploring that idea and, to those interested in that exploration, I do intend to finish it sometime. Maybe.

8. The Book of Alternative Services

I borrowed this from St. Thomas' in Fort McMurray. I may have taken it with me to Vancouver. If I did not intend to return it this might bear some resemblance to theft. Which would be ironic, right? (There's a scene in M*A*S*H where Father Mulcahy discovers Klinger has been selling him stolen Bibles. I tried to find it on YouTube but no luck. Sorry, folks.)

To those not in the know, The Book of Alternative Services of the Anglican Church of Canada is the standard book for Canadian Anglican services. It contains the responsive readings that characterize any Anglican service; the BAS is important in churches that do not use projector screens because this is how the congregation knows how to respond during certain parts of the liturgy. This is especially true of seasonal events and prayers, as congregation members could not possibly be expected to memorize responses they use once a year. You can get a PDF of the full text here.

My first encounter with the BAS was in St. Pauls' Lutheran Church, the swamp church I attended during my elementary school and high school years. After Confirmation (grade 8), however, I stopped attending services upstairs and stayed downstairs to teach Sunday school. In university I went to a non-liturgical church, so it wasn't until I attended St. Thomas' that I encountered liturgical services again. While a child I respected but did not understand or appreciate liturgy. I was afraid of getting things wrong; it seemed like it was all rules for their own sakes. I found that I missed liturgy in university, especially as the sort of church I went to had unspoken expectations (which are even worse, in my opinion, than written ones). It was therefore with great relief that I discovered St. Thomas had responsive readings, albs, acolytes, and coloured vestments. It was like coming home.

At the end of 2009 I began training to be a server, but I did not borrow the BAS until 2010. I borrowed it so that I could better learn my role as a server and I also thought about using my literary analytical skills on it, but instead I have mainly used it like a book of poetry. For some reason I love reading the Penitential Rite (page 46 of the PDF I linked to); I can say it from memory but I still read it from the page, savouring its rhythm. (OK, I'm weird.) Perhaps part of my appreciation of it is that I know it is all true when I saw it; it is a performative truth.

This is not why I include this book in the list, though. I include it because I am finding myself more and more in love with liturgy. It is a complicated love, for sure; I do not know absolutely that it is enough, or that I understand how to use it to approach God as fully as I would like. But it offers a lot. I find narrative, symbol, and structure powerful tools and liturgy uses them well; I find liturgical language is beautiful and can reveal the beauty of God; I find the communitarian elements of corporate speech and act also useful during Communion. (I am using "Communion" over the more typically Anglican "Eucharist" to make a etymological point.) The BAS is the crux of my liturgical experiences both in St. Thomas, Fort McMurray and St. Faith's, Vancouver, and this is why it makes this list.

9. Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan

This play, about the revolution, trial, and death of Joan d'Arc, was assigned to the class for which I was a TA last term. I had never read Shaw's plays before, though I had seen Caesar and Cleopatra at the Festival. I found Saint Joan to be a quick and enjoyable read; it is also substantial enough for an English major like me to have fun with. Given that I was teaching the text to the class, after the professor for the class gave it a lecture, I decided that that's what I would do in discussion: we would have fun with it.

I went in early and arranged the room so that in the midst of the tables was a set, with chairs and tables set up according to the stage directions. When the students came in, I cast them in roles and we played out Joan's trial. It was one of the best classes I had; I had many volunteers to read the parts and there was no problem getting the non-actors to comment on the action. Every so often I would stop the play and we would comment on what just happened, focusing on specific characters and asking them to describe how the stage itself impacts their character's emotional state and so forth.

Saint Joan is a fun, quick, and easy read, but it's substantial enough to hold one's interest (or at least my own). In it Shaw is not interested in the truth of religious claims, but in how religion and politics intersect on the social stage. That in and of itself is an interesting literary choice. Like Shaw, I consistently had to separate the truth of religious claims for how religion operates with texts. This wasn't a challenge insofar as I never want to proselytize but it was a challenge insofar as I was wary of students misreading atheist propaganda into the assigned readings (many students of many backgrounds did this; it seems that to lots of students, whether Christian, atheist, or agnostic, there are unrecognized athiests hiding in the canon). But it's not why I include it on the list. I include it on the list as one success as a TA. It changed the dynamics of the class and it got us on our feet. It was fun and critically detailed. You can't ask for much more than that.

10. Linda Medley's Castle Waiting Vol. 1

With the exception of the largely unplacable Book of Alternative Services, this list has been chronological--until now. If I were to insert Castle Waiting Vol. 1 properly, it would have to precede Paradise Lost, the reading of which I interrupted to read this graphic novel. However, this book may have been the most important and therefore deserving of the capping #10 spot, and its direct influence continues into 2011, which also justifies its placement at the end of the list.

Castle Waiting is about the eponymous castle, in which a number of adventures happen. At first it follows the story of Sleeping Beauty in an extended prologue, but following this the story changes signficantly: Castle Putney is all but abandoned and becomes Castle Waiting, a sanctuary for assorted runaways and misfits. The story travels with Lady Jain, pregnant and battered, as she flees her husband and her reputation to the legendary refuge. Upon her arrival, the story shifts again, becoming a catalogue of the daily adventures and exchanges of the Castle's residents (Rackham the anthropomorphic stork, Simon the large and simple boy, the heartbroken Iron Henry, Sister Peace of the Order Solicitine, the reclusive and perpetually masked Dr. Fell, numerous Poltersprites...), as well as the long biographical tales Sister Peace tells involving bearded women, a travelling circus with gypsies and giantesses and conjoined twins, a woman martyr and her developing hagiography, and a greedy mill owner. It deserves the description on the back of the book: "A set of linked nouveaux fairy tales, this graphic novel extends the story of Sleeping Beauty into a modern, feminist Chaucer."

I was visiting my brother while he worked on his group film when his girlfriend and co-animator lent me her copy of the book to read between scanning for them and going on sushi-and-juice runs. I loved it immediately and the book stayed in my mind thereafter. When I got to Vancouver I decided I wanted to own it and promptly took the opportunity of numerous Chapters to make that happen. I re-read it.

The first reason that this book is significant is that it told me in no uncertain terms that you can have a successful fantasy (in this case more fairy-tale-esque, but the line between the two is indistinct if extant) book without making it an adventure story with wars and monsters. That's not to say that the book is without suspense or risk, but rather its emphases are friendship, community, redemption, sanctuary, and storytelling. This book is a powerful reminder that fantasy can be a lot more than it usually is. Which is to say, Castle Waiting has changed my idea of what sorts of things I would like to write.

The second reason that this book is significant is that I lent it to Melissa. She loved it as much as I did and we spoke about it for some time, speculating what would happen next, what fairytales all of the characters came from, and so forth. I also recommended it to Cait and to Julia, a friend from back home. If I recall correctly, Cait also liked it. (Did I get that right?) And then, just before I returned home for Christmas, I lent it to The Rev'd Paula +, the priest at St. Faith's. (I found out today, Jan 9, that she loved it--as did Owen, who I presume is a child.) I bought my brother's girlfriend Vol. 2, which my brother bought me for Christmas. (Melissa is currently reading my copy of it and has lent me a book she got for Christmas. So it goes into 2011...) This book has become, though repeated recommendations, lendings, and givings, a social nexus connecting me to a large number of people spread over significant geographical distances. The people it has connected me to are also very important to me and it has helped strengthen those bonds. I think, given the themes and mood of the book, that Linda Medley would be pleased.

Honourable Mentions: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion; Heather O'Neill's lullabies for little criminals; somebody or another's Saturday; Michael Ingham's The Mansions of the Spirit: The Gospel in a Multi-Faith World; Coetzee's The Life & Times of Michael K; Gruen's Water for Elephants; Kostova's The Historian

Some Thoughts on the Decision to Review 2010 by Means of Books

With a few exceptions, reviewing my year through books makes me look like a shut-in who has no friends. I would like to say this is untrue, but I think the specific books chosen makes clear that it was true and stopped being so. I only have three books that relate to my time in Vancouver, and two of those are more related to my time in Fort McMurray. (I have also lent The Wayfinders out, but it has played a far less important social role than Castle Waiting has.) This is directly related to the sorts of books I read in Vancouver: I read assigned material. The syllabus is often interesting and mentally enriching but it does not impact my life in the same way these ten books have. (In fact, the only one that made the Honourable Mentions is Coetzee's.) More importantly, however, books in general have not impacted me as much because people impact me more, and you can see this in the final three books. The first (or eighth) is liturgical and concerns my place within churches; the second (or ninth) was assigned and concerns my role as a TA; the third (or tenth) became a social artifact and concerned my relationship with friends. We thus see a shift from introverted significances to extraverted significances in the books I have chosen, and I think that is reflective of 2010 itself.

Next year, perhaps, I will be able to offer you 2011 in 11 somethings other than books.

Or maybe I'm too much of a bookworm for that to ever be likely.