Last week I worked on the most complicated course proposal paperwork imaginable, handing it in finally on Thursday - three days late. It's always a bit humbling as a teacher to have to ask for an extension (or two, in this case). But the final document is a masterpiece, if I do say so myself.
On Wednesday night I went to my second skating lesson. After Montreal, I thought it would be nice to learn how to do more than just go round in circles, and also to be able to rest easy in the knowledge that if any small children drift innocently into my path I won't have to run them down. It's fun - I always like being a beginner in things, it's so refreshing not to be expected to know anything, and the first steps always seem so huge.
On Friday I went to do some skating practice, and then spent hours of the day clearing up my office. Tides of paper come in and out, and every few weeks I have to sort my way through the jetsam. The same is true at home - I've spent quite some time today filling bags with accumulated junk mail. It seems to me that companies like Chase and Comcast should be forced to fund recycling bins (or should just stop sending me this crap, which would be even better).
Yesterday, Saturday, I skied at Winter Park. I'm travelling there and back by the
Ski Train this year, which isn't exactly cheap, but at least ensures that I can get there fairly regularly. It takes about two hours each way, and only does that one trip there and back a day - so you can leave your shoes and things on the train. All seats are done by reservation (and unlike Amtrak, this really means that they are specified in advance, so you don't have to get there early to struggle for a good seat). It's very scenic. The staff are friendly. There's a snack-bar which also sells alcoholic drinks, so you can get yourself a margarita on the way home. I did the trip for the first time last week, and it was very pleasant - I read on the way, and talked to my neighbour over a margarita on the way back. Yesterday showed the downside, though - I was seated alone just behind a group of 17 people of around my age or a little younger, who were pretty noisy on the way, but were unbearable on the way back. So now I know what happens in adult life to that type of student so common in Colorado universities and happily so rare in the kinds of classes I teach. They stay exactly the same.
Today I have made up for this last week of activity by never even getting dressed.
Since I got all of my things from Scotland, I've been able to start re-reading some of the books I remember enjoying years ago but of whose content I have little concrete memory. In the last couple of weeks I've read Elizabeth Gaskell's
Cranford and
North and South in quick succession, and I'm now in the middle of
Wives and Daughters. I know that there's been a sudden revival of enthusiasm recently over Gaskell's work in Britain, due to the television series the BBC made of
Cranford. Of course I only heard about it on the radio, but it seemed to get good reviews. I was a little put off by finding that Judi Dench was in the leading role, though. It's not that she isn't a good actress - I just find that continual reliance on a few famous faces to be a bit tedious. Nothing puts me off going to see a new film so much as casting my eyes over the credits and finding that it stars Hugh Grant or Cate Blanchett, for instance. Actually, this isn't entirely fair. I'll rush to see anything that involves Kevin Spacey or Johnny Depp, just because experience tells me that they will play a different part in every film. I'm sure that the others are capable of doing the same - but unfortunately they usually seem to be cast by people who want them to do whatever they did last time but in a slightly different costume.
As to Elizabeth Gaskell, though, I wonder if television can do something like
Cranford justice. Serialised and then published as a whole in 1853, it's a deceptively simple novel - or rather, series of vignettes - on the lives of a group of unmarried or widowed older women whose society dominates a small town at some substantial remove from London. So much lies in the writing style and its very delicate balance between irony and affection that it's hard to imagine an equivalent in visuals. I liked rereading it not only for the style, but also for the subject matter. I'm interested in this character of the single woman in fiction by eighteenth and nineteenth century women. Of course, it has personal resonance - I can't help but be relieved to live in an age when my life is not restricted to the drawing room and dedicated to the maintenance of my respectability. I like the sympathetic aspect of
Cranford - that even as they are treated as objects of absurdity, the women are given a dignity and humanity which transcends ridicule. I've thought a lot before about the role of the unmarried older woman in Jane Austen - especially in
Emma, where the eponymous heroine ridicules the spinster among her acquaintance and then is brought to see the error of her uncharitable ways.
Cranford moves beyond that to explore the possibility of making life meaningful within the absurd restrictions society imposes and the women themselves uphold.
Ah, but I like
North and South even more, in spite of myself! It's the very romantic story of a young woman who has to move from London society to a Northern manufacturing town (via Southern English country life), and whose outlook changes dramatically through her experience. It is, of course, a love story - but the internal struggles in which it is worked out are compelling, even if often quite foreign to me as a modern reader (especially when she is torn apart by her loss of self-respect at having told a lie - one which is told to ensure the safety of her brother, whose life may be in danger. She berates herself for not having sufficient "faith"). The anticipation of the end is rich and delicious, though the ending itself is just a little disappointingly rushed.
Wives and Daughters I'm only about a quarter of the way through, so it's difficult to comment. There is some plethora of detail, situation and character that I feel makes it a little less forceful - though the reaction of young Molly as she is told that her father (with whom she has effectively been alone for her whole childhood) is to remarry is managed very effectively, and the use of Molly as a go-between for the various social classes is interesting.
Yesterday I needed to take something else with me, something thin enough to fit in the inside pocket of my ski jacket. The first thing I found on my bookshelves that fitted the description was James Baldwin's
The Fire Next Time. I remember being bowled over by it about fifteen or twenty years ago, but again had no memory of why. At lunchtime yesterday I read the dedicatory letter and part of the first chapter, and was tempted just to stay indoors and read the whole thing. A beautiful, dignified, measured style, to deal with things which more often are treated with crowd-stirring rhetoric - and if there's one thing I can't stand, I've realised, it's crowd-stirring, whether for good or for bad, Martin Luther King (it's his day tomorrow) or Hitler, that baying tone that creeps into politicians voices on "Any Questions" as they think they're about to raise a cheer, valedictorians' speeches, the point in Hollywood sports films where everyone stands up and applauds together, any point, that is, where I feel that someone is trying to pluck my emotions like cello strings.
