heh heh heh.

Oops

Next time I decide to make remarks about strangers in a pompous voice, I guess I should take care.

Gah, doesn't time fly when you're reading American novels of the 1890s? Once again, I fear I have neglected my blog in favor of academic concerns, namely the thousand-odd pages of reading we were assigned for class this week. Actually, if you ever want to know what life in a US English department is like, the following blog, recently brought to my attention, gives you a good idea. I find this blog how I find my professional life: interesting, kind of great fun, but irritatingly esoteric (one might say parochial).

However, this weekend I will be putting to one side (bracketing, we call it) one set of esoteric rituals in favor of another: yes, it's Burns Night again! Such was the success of Burns Night last year that we've decided to do it all over again, this time funded by the university! It's actually great to have an excuse to drop the books and do some cooking again. My potted herbs are desperately in need of a haircut: they have languished so long without use they virtually have plant mullets. Luckily cock-a-leekie soup should put an end to that situation. In addition to the soup, Andrew Yale and I will be making our now traditional "Tipsy Laird" (trifle with whisky), five pounds of roast beef, a fresh haggis (from the Irish butcher's), three cans of tinned haggis (one vegetarian) imported from Texas and course the odd neep and tatty.

The old pudding chief* will of course be toasted in the words of Burns, with Scotch, to the accompaniment of Scottish pipe music on CD.

*I seem horribly devoted to whimsy these days, but if, as Burns argues, the haggis is chieftain of the pudding clan, does that mean he is married to the Queen of Puddings? And if so, does that mean that there are somewhere some princes and princesses of pudding hanging about, all made out of a terrifying mixture of jam, meringue and sheep's innards?

So I finally saw the excellent BBC children's series The Children of Green Knowe last night, many moons after buying it from the awesome Rare TV site (now, it seems, stocking DVDs of the unlamented Jim Davidson sitcom Up the Elephant and Round the Castle), and even more moons after Chloe first recommended it. Worth the wait, however. The plot involves a precocious boy, Towsland, going to stay with his great-grandmother (Mrs. Oldknow) in a big old house in the fens called Green Knowe. The house is benignly haunted by three extremely camp children called Linnet, Toby and Alexander, who date from the time of Charles II. The children become friends with Towsland, and eventually save him from the clutches of a demonic tree called Green Noah, by getting St. Christopher to come and strike the tree with lightning. I don't know what the BBC was up to in the 80s -- like Edge of Darkness, Children brims over with weird psychosexual moments. At one point, Alexander gets to dress up in a small sheet and perform as Mercury in a masque for Charles II. The king offers him a gift after the performance, with the extraordinary line "In your present state of nakedness it is impossible to discover what you lack."

Almost as exciting as seeing The Children of Green Knowe is the acceptance of my first conference paper. Yes, in May I will be going to San Francisco to address the members of the American Literature Association on the subject of Flannery O'Connor. Rock and roll!

Fresh Duncan

I wonder if the "ounce of sympathy" referred to in Thompson's "Don't Renege on Our Love" is measured as the quantity of sympathy necessary to assuage the "ounce of pain" from Guns 'n' Roses' "Sweet Child of Mine"? Plus, thinking about it, if (as the saying goes) an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, then it also follows that only one sixteenth of an ounce of prevention would stop Axl's beloved from being in an ounce of pain in the first place.

Sartorial genius

It's all been a bit quiet on blog mountain of late. Perhaps everyone's recovering after Christmas, or designing their own shoes. Not me. I've been reading lots from the American 1890s, and hence have been far too busy to blog, depressingly. However, I thought I'd break my silence to alert interested parties to the presence of the Beesweb brand beret for sale on Thompson's site. Now you too can dress like Thompson, at the same time wearing the Beesweb logo. Though if you design your own shoes you can have whatever text you like embroidered on the side.