Friends…

Monday's already looking up: my friend and colleague Dorothy just came in with an Anne of Green Gables present for me - a promotional poster for the 1985 Bantam reissue of the entire series. It's going to take pride of place in my office.

Oddly, Dorothy presented it to me while I was playing Credit To The Nation's Teenage Sensation: I wonder how large the Anne/Midlands 90s teenage rap fan base is…

Close encounters of the pedantic kind

I really admire Leslie McGrath:

Throughout Smith's tenure as head of the Boys' and Girls' Division from 1912 to 1952 (during which time it was also known as the 'Boys and Girls Division', as the use of apostrophes in the Division's name varied over the years)'. 

Leslie McGrath, 'Reading With Blitheness: Anne of Green Gables in Toronto Public Library's Children's Collections', in Anne’s World: A New Century of Anne of Green Gables edited by Irene Gammel and Benjamin Lefebvre (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010) pp. 100-116: 102.

It's not exactly pedantry, because she doesn't claim that one version is 'right' and another 'wrong', but she does find the space to make the point, despite not making anything of it. That is one eagle-eyed woman. 


Is there a difference? Yes. Boys' and Girls' is possessive: the boys and girls possess the Division. Boys and Girls implies that said children are available from the division. Sale or return. No deposit required.


I'm sorry, am I boring you?

The Princess and I

Here's a bit of what we academics call 'impact'.

Some royals are visiting Canada, and staying for a while on Prince Edward Island, seemingly because Kate - the female royal - is a fan of L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables.

What a coincidence - I've delivered a conference paper on the series, and have another one in the works, hopefully for the L. M. Montgomery and Cultural Memory conference on the island in June next year, if it's accepted.

I wonder what the royal's love of Anne is based on. Is it the character's near-endless deferral of heterosexual love and marriage? Is it the frequent racial slurs ('street-Arabs', the French and Americans are the main targets)? Is it Anne's fervent espousal of the Conservative Party? Or the novels' eventual whole-hearted endorsement of World War One, on the basis that a country isn't a nation until lots of blood has been spilt? Montgomery repented of this neofascist position when WW2 turned up - it may have been a contributory factor to her suicide (another detail not often mentioned on the back cover of Anne).

Or might it be that she's only skim-read the first novel and never bothered with the many sequels? Perhaps she'll come to the conference so I can explain all this to her. Before producing a guillotine.

(And by the way, Guardian: it's not a 'Victorian classic'. It was written in 1908, seven years after Victoria's death.).

More Wordle fun

I could use Wordle as an analytical tool. Instead of doing what I should be doing (marking), I'm doing a little research for my Anne of Green Gables paper. Here's what happens when I put the entire text into Wordle (better version here):

Interesting how little Gilbert features, considering his prominence in the popular consciousness of the book. 

And so to bed…

Well, home, anyway, before I get locked in the building for the second time this week.

I'm dragging home my latest book purchase: a massive volume called 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective, containing 13% of Doonesbury strips going back to 1970. An acquired taste, admittedly, but one I acquired a long time ago.

It's been a bit of an excessive week for books - I put together a couple of reading lists, and couldn't stop myself buying copies of everything. Then there's the Geoffrey Hill Selected Poems (I couldn't justify spending £100 on a copy of Mercian Hymns) and his new one, Oracles/Oraclau. And the two new Anne of Green Gables books: the restored edition of Rilla of Ingleside and the lost The Blythes Are Quoted. Plus Ackroyd's The Death of King Arthur, some Shakespeare criticism, a book on typefaces (I recently took to using Palatino for presentations), a lovely illustrated Pullman compendium, a history of moral panics involving comic books and, well, you get the picture.

It's a damn good job I've lost my bank card. I won't be able to buy anything for a week. Hurrah! Boo! New Posies album out too…

Oh the irony

It's a day for presents for me: Dorothy's given me a 1940 edition of Anne of Avonlea, and Christine has produced this box of mints. 

Ironic, because they're made in China, which distinctly lacks Liberté and Fraternité. I couldn't comment on the presence or absence of minty freshness in that land. 

New old book alert

I've just received remastered copies of The Charlatans' Some Friendly and The Cure's Disintegration (my vinyl copies are worn out), and a fascinating book recommended by a colleague - Jackson Lears' No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920. It's 30 years old, but has a lot to say about all aspects of cultural history - I may use it in my rewritten Anne paper. It's also got a beautiful dustjacket, complete with unicorns!

Anti-Pleasure Dissertation

I'm marking essays, so obviously I need to channel my rage by listening to Riot Grrrl: Bikini Kill, Babes in Toyland and Huggy Bear, leavened only by the occasional twee Heavenly track and some Talulah Gosh.

If you're in The Hegemon tomorrow, I'm giving an extended (though still short) version of my Anne of Green Gables paper tomorrow. Don't worry, I've cut out the Kristeva.

1.15, MC224.

Phew…

OK, I really need to work out how long 20 minutes is: I'd hardly started the proper analysis when the chair waved a piece of paper with the words "TIME UP" printed in bold capitals: cue a desperate summary of six pages of critique and two whole novels. Still, lots of questions must mean that I got something right. Now to turn the missed half into another paper…

I'll be sad to go. A couple of weeks ago I was in the tight emotional circle of an international fencing team - this few days has been the intellectual equivalent: people with similar interests and similar lives living in close proximity. Now I'm coming back to a pile of marking and teaching - these have their own pleasures, but normality is always going to be difficult to return to.

Cover me, I'm going in

Time to disappoint the punters with my paper on Anne of Green Gables. Oh God (there are no atheists at lecterns). I whiled away the last couple of hours by going for a pub lunch with an Australian and a Canadian, then strolled round a couple of colleges to remind myself what I could have had, if I'd passed my A-levels.

Still, it'll all be over soon. Back to concrete and pork scratchings. I know my place.

Valete!

Annoyingly, the office is closed tomorrow, so you'll hear no more of me for a few days, other than the feverish scratching of a quill from my garret as I cobble together something halfway convincing for the Anne of Green Gables paper I'm delivering in Cambridge next week.

Why don't you fill in the time taking the Guardian's First Line Quiz. I got 17 out of 20, though some guesswork was involved. Maddeningly, I've read 2 of the 3 I got wrong. Ho hum.

If you're in the West Midlands on Saturday and fancy facing down the fascists, come to the anti-English Defence League rally in beautiful Dudley: 11 a.m. They've trashed Stoke already, so they've moved on to a town in which rioting won't make the slightest bit of difference to the naked eye.

Seriously though, these people are scum. Let's show them that most Yam Yams aren't bigots.

Fictional advice for writers

Incongruously, I'm listening to Half Man Half Biscuit (sample lyric from 'Shit Arm, Bad Tattoo'): 
I could have put my head in a bucket full of porridge
And moaned about the hospital parking scheme
I would have saved 14 pounds
That I just splashed out on your second album
For that’s what it’s akin to
And furthermore
You’ve got a shit arm, and that’s a bad tattoo
You’ve got a shit arm, and that’s a bad tattoo


If you’re going to quote from the Book of Revelation
Don’t keep calling it the Book of Revelations
There’s no “s”, it’s the Book of Revelation
As revealed to St John the Divine
See also Mary Hopkin
She must despair
You’ve got a shit arm, and that’s a bad tattoo
You’ve got a shit arm, and that’s a bad tattoo

But I'm also reading scholarly texts on Anne of Green Gables, and was reminded of these wise words for students and aspiring writers:

"Miss Stacy makes us write all our essays as simply as possible. It was hard at first. I was so used to crowding in all the fine big words I could think of - and I thought of any number of them. But I've got used to it now and I see it's so much better".

Life just got better

Christmas present to me:

Thank you for your correspondence concerning presenting a twenty-minute paper at the above conference. I am pleased to confirm that your paper has been accepted 

It's my Anne of Green Gables paper, for the British Association of Canadian Studies. Now I've just got to write it! That job at UPEI inches ever closer!

PS. Thanks to the students who've e-mailed me today, demanding a meeting about upcoming essays, without even a 'hello'! It's good to know you're thinking about work, but weirdly, I'm leaving the office for a few days. I'm on holiday! See you January 4th and not before. Happy Christmas to you too.

Weariness…

Well, we've just done the final Winter's Tale session: low turnout, very few people had read it, and we gave up halfway through, on the hour mark. How depressing.

On the good side, I've received another two books: Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, and Gammel's Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L. M. Montgomery and her Literary Classic. The notion of 'classic' is dubious, and the packaging makes it look very soft indeed, but I'll reserve judgement for now.

Back to the marking…

Oh yes. My weekend starts here.

A goodly haul today:
Irene Gammel (ed.), Making Avonlea: L. M. Montgomery and Popular Culture (U of Toronto Press 2002)
Irene Gammel (ed.), The Intimate Life of L. M. Montgomery (U of Toronto Press 2005) - probably not as racy as you think it is
Siân James, A Small Country (Collins, 1979).

and finally

Star Trek (the new film). Man cannot live on Anne of Green Gables and Stephen Greenblatt alone.

It's not all doom and gloom though

As George Eliot wrote, 'the world outside books is not a happy place' (or something similar). It's great inside though, and I've just taken delivery of another consignment. A wall is rising around my desk…

Rubio and Waterston's Norton critical edition of Anne of Green Gables;
Lauter and Fitzgerald's anthology Literature, Class and Culture (rather too American for my plans, but fascinating anyway);
Kate Roberts's The Awakening, a new translation by Siân James (whose A Small Country is a wonderful, rich text) which looks excellent.

Lovely, lovely books

Yes, the trucks are now rolling in. Lots of wonderful Welsh literature, and some hardcore Anne.

Today's haul:
Kate Roberts' One Bright Morning, translated by Gillian Clarke (a brilliant writer herself);
Kate Roberts' Y Lon Wen / The White Lane (also translated by Clarke);
Lynette Roberts' Collected Poems (inspired by the Lynette Roberts conference I didn't go to);
Fintan O'Toole's Ship of Fools, about the rape and pillage of the Irish economy by a clique of greedy, tightknit bankers, businessmen and politicians;
Cecily Devereux's edition of Anne of Green Gables;
Barry, Doody and Jones's Annotated Anne of Green Gables (which looks rather wet, actually).

Mmmm…

The bookalanche rumbles

I've rather foolishly ordered loads of books recently. A certain large internet shop promises that they're on the way, but the only thing I've received this week is Gammel and Epperly's L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture - sent by a very trusting distributor prior to payment. Lucky I'm an honest fellow (as Iago repeatedly says).

Amazing - actual academic work!

I've just written and sent off a conference paper proposal for the British Association of Canadian Studies 2010 conference, on Anne of Green Gables as a metonym for the Canadian Project - lots of Kristeva, racial and cultural theory and a dose of cheek: I'm not a Canadian Studies bloke, but the novels are so interesting that I thought I should get something out of them.

And the first step, of course, is to spend £80+ on variant editions of the texts. Damn.

My so-called life

I wasn't grumpy last night. I went to the pub with colleagues and (after the compulsory moan about the Institution), we talked books, particularly children's books, as they'd been teaching Pullman that evening. Mark and I have cooked up a plan for some papers on Edwardian children's literature (basically: it's all very weird) and I tried out my Anne of Green Gables paper idea on him - he approves. Obviously I'm not going to rehearse my arguments here, but I'm tempted to call it 'Beating the Red-Headed Stepchild: Canada, race and colonialism in Anne of Green Gables'. Obviously (to me, anyway), the e marks Anne's Kristevan excess. No, really, that's what I do for my job. For now, anyway.

Most of this came to me while I was drunkenly ironing at midnight, and it's all scrawled on the back of a bookshop receipt. Rock and roll!