The Republic of Letters

This is how academic life should be: stunning modern architecture (I'll post some pictures later), serious and interesting discussions which reveal how fascinating things can be even if you've never given them a moment's thought previously, and no managers. 


I've learned about Francophone-First Nations literature, about Robertson Davies's politics (weirdly, I started a campus novel by him this very morning) and about the cultural complexities of the Toronto Book Awards. Next up (after a very agreeable lunch spent talking to Robyn Morris, who specialises in Asian-Canadian literature) is her paper and two on Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake including one by Fiona Tolan, author of Atwood: Feminism and Fiction, which is excellent value at £48. Atwood's liberalism, the acculturated self and John Rawls' A Theory of Justice is at the core of this paper. The other, by Heidi Butler, examines the commodification of women under capitalism in Atwood's speculative fiction. An s-f dimension opens…

Update: three fascinating papers on speculative fictions (Atwood's and poet Larissa Lai's rebel take on Rachel in Blade Runner) and constructions of women. Hardly any questions: I asked a couple of dumb ones simply because I was surprised by the lack of response. Perhaps it's because the papers were so comprehensive. Whatever, I've learned more about one of my favourite authors and intend to read Lai's work.

No mention of Due South yet though. I'll remedy that next year…

Talking of books I've read, don't bother with Michael Dobbs' House of Cards. It's a political thriller which was adapted very successfully for television, set in the upper echelons of the post-Thatcher Tory Party. I couldn't buy it new because that would mean giving money to a Tory, but I now resent the 25p I spent on the used copy. It is rubbish. Every sentence contains things like 'he said, menacingly'. Character seems to consist of assuming that all men want power and all career women are driven by emotional inadequacy. Reader, it is rubbish. Even if you're looking for an easy read (which I was), this isn't it, because every sentence is unreadable and politically objectionable. I don't know why Tory politicians think they can write novels (Currie, Hurd et al.), but every time they do, it demonstrates how little they understand of human nature. Which is no surprise to me. Tory Scum.

Yes, but what books?

I know, you're clamouring to discover. Well, the day before, I received Reimer's A Simple Little Tale, another anthology of Anne of Green Gables critical essays, as well as Wodehouse's Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves and Much Obliged, Jeeves, because Roderick Spode (Oswald Mosley) appears in them.

Yesterday, I added too many. I gorged. My eyes are bigger than my brain. I added Opened Ground, a collection of Heaney poems, Paul McAuley's Gardens of the Sun and Pasquale's Angel, because I like intelligent hard SF and steampunk, Brian Aldiss's classic Non-Stop, Margaret Atwood's essays on debt, Payback, Heaney's translation of Henryson's medieval Scots classic The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables, Tom Furniss's Reading Poetry, 4 maps of Wales and the Welsh/Shropshire border, and Spivak's translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology, because I've never read it in English.

Oh dear. I think I'm going to be sick. Greedy boy.

Here's Atwood talking to us about the recession:

Back to the books

In my absence, the flow of lovely books did not stop. Today's haul included Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, a classic detailing the period in which religion and politics were nigh on indistinguishable, and in which political radicalism and heresy often went together. Thanks to Norbert for the recommendation! I've also dived into European literature - which we, and certainly I, shamefully neglect. I've bought Cees Nooteboom's postmodern The Following Story and volume 1 of Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance: a novel. One day, I promise myself, I'll be able to read it in the original. I can read French and with some effort, Welsh, but I'm continually ashamed of my limited abilities in languages.

What else? A collection of Margaret Atwood's essays called Curious Pursuits, and David Horspool's The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Troublemaking from the Normans to the Nineties. It looks like a slightly more conservative companion to Vallance's A Radical History of Britain. I love this stuff because despite the many evils perpetrated by English and then British imperialism, the British are also recalcitrant bunch who don't want to be pushed around. You decapitated a king before the French and staged numerous other revolts from the Peasants to the Poll Tax. Revive that tradition!

I also received a replacement Danish Literature Tree and Renaissance Tree posters - very beautiful.