new arrival

too giddy for words (and if you remember this post, you'll know why!)-- so i'll just post a couple of pictures.





update (sunday): props to

megalicious -- for fielding my v. excited phone call when i returned home from the bike shop and for assuring me that i will fall over on my clip-less pedals at least once.

confessing mermaid -- for tolerating my need to look at and talk about 'bike porn' for the past few weeks and for so selflessly sharing in my joy on saturday!

drs m&a -- 'bike advisors' and downstairs neighbours extrodinare. tonight marked my initiation into road bike culture -- the details of said initiation are topic secret, but i can reveal that the ceremony involves champagne, chocolate cake, a multi tool and a squeezy tube of grease.

queen's-mcgill 2007

april 29th, starting at 8 am, the queen's crew (both men's and women's boats) will once again go head to head with archrivals, mcgill, in the annual boat race. oxford and cambridge have over 150 years of animosity between them, and harvard and yale have been settling the score since 1852. comparatively speaking, the queen's-mcgill challenge is a young race (the first race was in 1997), however it is no less exciting. i invite you to come down to the boathouse (1 cataraqui st., across from the whig-standard building) and put yer money on, er ... i mean cheer on the queen's crew.

andrew rastapkevicius, a former student, and fellow KRC rower, spliced the following together for motivation and inspiration:

interpellation

"I shall then suggest that ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 'recruits' subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or 'transforms' the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!'" (Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses)

due to our unique relationship with many of the more abstruse theorists of our time, academics in the humanities have very creative and colourful ways of expressing dismay and discontent. one friend, when she feels folks have crossed over those personal boundaries one is always trying to protect in order to preserve a sense of self, demands that no one "breech her hermeneutic circle". "don't do it", she'll warn. "don't breech the hermeneutic circle!" another friend, when confronted with the prosaic foibles and follies of her students, speaks of being "pedagogically disturbed". lately, as the term winds down and i feel stretched in a million directions at once, the only way i can express my experience of these many demands is to claim that i'm "overinterpellated".

as i've clumsily made my way through the world, front line reps for those institutions that keep our current ideological climate buzzing have been hailing me up the wazoo. if it isn't my beloved grad chair, silently signaling with a sharp wave of her spread index and middle fingers that "she's watching me", it's the policeman who stopped me in the drive thru of tim horton's, following my accidental running of a red light the other morning. as he approached my car, with its window rolled down in preparation for ordering my morning 'coaching coffee' on the way to the boathouse, he wielded his police-ly authority by referring to his attire:

"excuse me, but as you can see by my pants, i'm a police officer, and i saw you run that red light back there. i'm off-duty, but i think you need to know that i think what you did was ignorant. you are arrogant and disrespectful for thinking you can drive like that, and you should be careful, because you'll never know who is watching in the lane beside you."

i was both too stunned and too scared to say much. for the rest of the day, i tried, unsuccessfully, to shake off my ignorant, arrogant and disrespectful subjectivity.

this morning, while out on the water, timing boats for the wednesday morning time trials down at the rowing club, it happened again.

as shani and i sat in the coach boat, waiting for the singles, 4+s and 8+s to come down the course and cross over the 4.5 km mark, we had tied the boat to the dock of the ministry of defense building next to the causeway bridge. shortly after our docking, a man in a smart green uniform approached us and told us, in no uncertain terms, that we were not allowed to dock on ministry property, implying by his arched eyebrow that our fishing boat, with its 9.9 hp motor, presented some sort of security threat. both shani and i had to keep from laughing. dressed as we were in giant orange floater suits that made us each look like the michelin man hepped up on too much vitamin a, the only threat we presented was an aesthetic one. we were hardly outfitted for espionage, what with our stop watch, fox 40 whistle, clipboard and crayons -- yes, crayons. as we motored back to the boathouse we shook our heads, and though i found it easy to locate the humour in the situation, i must admit to shrinking a little inside my giant orange cocoon.

i'm not sure how much more of this hailing i can take. i'm fighting the urge to don a baseball cap and dark glasses. i find myself rounding corners with caution and peering under cushions with suspicion, tensing at the thought of the long arm of authority fingering me yet again. if you pass me on the street, whatever you do, don't call out "hey you, there!". i'll probably duck and run.

start spreading the news

lately, i've been overwhelmed by the idea of running away. i haven't been doing much actual running at all lately (my once semi-respectable 8 minute mile has crept up into the double digits -- the horror, the horror!) and thus, my desire to flee doesn't in any way surprise me. it has been a rough and tumble semester and when i'm feeling the weight of it all the thought of jumping in the car, filling up the tank and taking off so as to put some physical distance between myself and my giant ball of stress trips through my brain like a cheerfully tap-dancing fred astaire.

i became aware at a very young age that i would never really be successful at running away. one spring day, i made it as far as the end of my mother's long, gravel drive, and as i clutched my bundle of prized possessions, i was overcome with a fear of what would happen to me when i crossed over the sidewalk on to the road proper. suddenly, what moments before had been a fantasy of freedom became a possibility far more frightening than whatever it was that had made me gather up my pink stuffed bunny, my prized tiny pony and my collection of scented markers in a blue blanket embroidered with colourful farm scenes, the underside of which was red, white and blue checked. i sheepishly made my way back up the drive to the back door that my mother had suggestively (and wisely) propped open.

in the years following that spring afternoon, i have discovered the freedom that comes from traveling: spending a few days "anywhere but here" gives me that fresh perspective, that sense of a new start that i used to think was only found in leaving behind the familiar forever. in three weeks, after i've submitted my students' final grades, handed in the woefully-delayed draft of my current dissertation chapter, and drafted the outline of my next, i'm making like a crazy woman and hopping on a train to visit L&S in new york city. as i sit amid the piles of paper that are currently, metaphorically, blocking out the newly-arrived sun, i'm listening repeatedly to sinead o'connor's recording of "i guess the lord must be in new york city". the lyrics have a resonance that i find comforting, like that warm, cozy feeling one experiences sitting in an idling car.

I say goodbye to all my sorrows
And by tomorrow I'll be on my way
I guess the Lord must be in New York City

I'm so tired of getting nowhere
Seeing my prayers going unanswered
I guess the Lord must be in New York City

Well here I am, Lord
Knocking on your back door
Ain't it wonderful to be
Where I've always wanted to be
For the first time I'll be free in New York City

I say goodbye to all my sorrows
And by tomorrow I'll be on my way
I guess the Lord must in New York City

I'm so tired of getting nowhere
Seeing my prayers going unanswered
I guess the Lord must be in New York City

Well here I am, Lord
Knocking on your back door
Ain't it wonderful to be
Where I've always wanted to be
For the first time I'll be free in New York City

stop this boat ride, i wanna get off

may of 2007 will see the opening of the dickens theme park currently being built in london. as you can imagine, as a victorianist, i'm all over this one. to quote a colleague: "this is so much more than charlotte brontë dishtowels and jane austen tea cozies" -- it's the commercialization of the victorian period for mass consumption on a mammoth scale. it's neo-victoriana for those who can't wait for the next masterpiece theatre adaptation, sarah waters book, or league of extraordinary gentlemen comic (all of which i confess i heartily enjoy!), complete with a boat ride down an artificially muddy river, based on magwitch's escape in great expectations.

while the kitschy part of me was gleefully rubbing my hands a la uriah heep and scheming to find a way over the pond for the may opening, i was kindly reminded by fellow victorianist judith flanders (check out her most recent book consuming passions) of the socio-political implications of watering down dickens's messages of social reform for commerical consumption. today, in the guardian unlimited arts blog she writes:

It is the trivialising of the social issues Dickens cared so passionately about that is the most disturbing. A representative of the Dickens Fellowship, which has been acting in an advisory capacity to the project, defends its integrity by saying, "A lot of the social concerns are still a problem for us today, with these young people going around shooting each other". But how are these "social concerns" being addressed? With Magwitch's boat-ride, do we learn about the Bloody Code and penal reform? In Ebeneezer Scrooge's Haunted House, is the oppression of workers and lack of employment rights a feature? Or the desperate poverty that caused the (probable) rickets that lamed Tiny Tim? Are there going to be crossing-sweepers always being "moved on" until they die of exhaustion? Dust heaps? Parish orphans?

Somehow I don't think that will happen. I know, I'm a killjoy. But it is the domestication, the taming of the wildness and fierceness of Dickens that I object to. Yes, there were the benevolent Cheeryble brothers; Scrooge is reformed; even Magwitch turns out to be a fairy convict godfather. But that doesn't stop the realism of Dickens: Magwitch doesn't get to enjoy his good deeds: he still dies a hunted man, and that is what I'm willing to bet Dickens World will not show.

It will be Disney-on-Sea instead, a nice, safe, cosy world where nothing bad occurs. It is hardly as though this has never happened before. Peter Pan was originally one of the weirdest, spookiest stories - the only children who never grow up, after all, are dead children. By the time Disney got its hands on it, it was all "Clap your hands and Tinkerbell won't die". It's a long way to Tinkerbell from Miss Flite's birds in Bleak House - "Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach."

(you can read the full blog entry here).

no judith, you're not a killjoy. rather, you are just pointing out, as dickens does in our mutual friend via the veneerings, the dangers of skimming along the artificially muddy surface.

daffodils ... WORD ... sworth

because there are some chilly spring saturday mornings that are made just that much better by a giant squirrel throwing down wordsworth's "i wandered lonely" ...

practice

this morning, at the unholy hour of 6 am, i met up with shani and headed down to the boathouse to erg. i was shocked by the sight that greeted my not-quite-opened eyes: there were crews out on the water. the digital thermometer on the dash of shani's car fluorescently proclaimed that it was a balmy -2˚C. i felt it this morning in a way i haven't been feeling it up until now: the rowing season has started.

soon, i'll be tumbling out of bed at 5 am, blindly tugging on my unisuit (unless i've decided to go to bed in it the night before to save myself the hassle of dressing in the dark! ... yes, i know it's gross), stumbling down the stairs, hopping on my bike and only fully coming awake as i round the corner at bay and bagot. the mornings will be dark, and the sun will only just be settling into the sky as we dock our boat at around 7 am. many mornings, i'll have not layered sufficiently, and the bike ride home will be excruciatingly cold and my only thoughts will be of a hot shower and eggs and toast.

soon, my body will begin that weird metamorphosis, as the weight i inevitably put on in the off season (a testament to my on-again off-again romance with the erg, and this year to the rigors of teaching) disappears and i become, to quote a friend, "all muscle-y". the backs of my calves will bruise from the slides, my hands will become adorned with callouses across the top of my palms (more so on my right hand than my left, as i feather my oar with my right hand) and my appetite will go through the roof. weekend brunches with confessing mermaid will begin to require orders of extra toast. i will once again become a prime consumer of the superbreakfast at morrison's diner. i will start complaining about how single serving containers of yogurt are a joke -- how can that little yogurt be satisfying?!

this year, the start of the season hit me the way it did because this off season has been different from others. with the possibility of not being here in k-town next summer, this final 6 months of rowing bliss is incredibly poignant (note the palpable nostalgia present in the previous two paragraphs!). because of this reason, i wasn't as diligent with my erging over the winter, and thus i'm starved for time with my hands on my blade and my feet pressing against the stretchers. what has kept me sane during my absence from the erg is the way in which i've managed to adapt some of the training techniques i've gleaned from my sessions in a boat and apply them to my dissertation.

a few friends will groan and possibly begin to bang their heads against their keyboards when i say that writing is a lot like rowing. i first breathed life into this simile by comparing the inevitable pain associated with each undertaking. rowing hurts, i'm not going to lie, and for me, often times, writing hurts just as much, if not more -- lactate build up ain't got nothin' on the stomach churning fear i have often fought down as i'm faced with a blank computer screen. this winter, i expanded my understanding of this simile in a variety of ways. after writing an article that theorizes the practice of rowing as a woman using hélène cixous idea of l'écriture feminine, i saw other possibilities. what if i was to take some of the structure provided by my experience as an athlete and apply that to my unruly (and if you're my dissertation committee, my choice of adjectives will seem like a massive understatement!) life as a writer? the result was a sense of writing practice -- and i like the overtones of michel de certeau in that moniker. every day, i spend a certain amount of time building up my writing muscle. i've set myself a training schedule of sorts that requires me to put in so many pages worth of time at my keyboard. i have a training plan, a training diary, and believe it or not, as corny as it sounds, it's working. i'm just under half way through the first draft of my current chapter which up until a couple of weeks ago was woefully behind schedule.

this morning, with the sight of singles and 8+s out on the water, i had a fine sense of the season beginning. life at the boathouse has picked up -- shani and are no longer the only early morning denizens, and now that teaching is winding down, i face eight months solely devoted to work on my dissertation. it's okay, i keep reminding myself, i've been practicing.

in praise of "doing stuff"

being a grad student is tough. being a "real" academic, so my friends a few years ahead in the game tell me, is no walk in the park either. that's not to say it's horrible -- indeed, no. many of us are here because we love what we do -- but it *is a lot of hard work (my recent love affair with the microfiche reader in the basement of the campus humanities library only confirmed this for me!), and as such, requires a certain degree of down time in which one can find renewal.

given the number of hours we devote as a community to innovative thought, i find it surprising that there are so few modes of release that are validated by fellow community members. pontificating over a pint (or several) -- not a problem; "doing stuff" that falls outside status-quo scholarly behaviour -- that's a different story. at the same time that reports of colleagues "doing stuff" evoke curiosity, coupled with that curiosity is often a simultaneous questioning of that activity's validity. two friends have recently been involved in discussions of varying intensity about the legitimacy of blogging; another friend often finds herself staring into puzzled faces when she explains that the activity that keeps her sane while in the thick of studying for her comprehensive exams is training to compete internationally in triathlons. i've had both veiled and direct questions about my love of rowing. "doesn't that take away from writing time?" "don't you find your energies and attention divided?" all fancy ways of saying, i think, "how can you be a nerd and a jock at the same time?"

i won't deny that there is a danger in allowing "doing stuff" to become a retreat from the academy. at one point last summer, after being in a car accident and dealing with the serious illness of a family member, the only thing i felt i had the strength to do was row (ironic, yes). my dissertation was the furthest thing from my mind, and i wanted to keep it there; the anxiety that writing provokes in me was the last thing i felt capable of dealing with effectively. the rhythm of a rowing day was calming -- down at the boathouse at 5 am, home from practice by 7:30 am, back at the boathouse at 5 pm, home by 7:30 pm, shower, dinner, bed -- and in a couple of weeks, it effected the healing that i so needed. a retreat? yes. but a necessary one. in the end, the love of what i do brought me back to my keyboard and i learned that i could adapt that rhythmic day to fit my writing schedule. the hours between daily practices soon became filled by trips to the library, writing, revising and researching. my productivity shot up in surprising ways.

i write/think/speak better when i row (or run, or bike). i know this. during my comprehensive exam year, i decided to forgo all exercise and focus solely on studying. i reasoned that i didn't want to look back at the smoldering wreck of my academic career brought about by failing my comps and think "oh! if i'd only spent the hours i did in the gym reading more robert browning in the library!" -- it was one of the stupidest decisions i have ever made. i came out of that second year quite literally a nervous wreck and it took me several months to fully recover.

ultimately i suppose the question is one of integration -- of finding a way to organically join the love of what you pursue academically (my research focuses on 19th-century sport culture and sport journalism and the relationship these two cultural fields have with popular Victorian literature) and the joy you find in "doing stuff". my fellow academic bloggers have varying uses for their on-line space: one of my blogging friends uses her blog to flex her writing muscle in a variety of genres so as to liven up her academic prose -- it keeps her fresh, if you will. another friend has used her blog to open up a discussion of the place of such on-line activity in the scholarly community -- can blogs do something heretofore not done in the universe of scholarship? i'm with her in thinking yes, they can, but we have yet to fully realize the possibilities (and the limitations).

along with on-line scholars and scholar-athletes, i'm lucky to count among my friends who "do stuff" those who find joy in making music. this week, a friend and her band *finally put up a profile on myspace. when not researching/teaching courses in/writing books about topics as diverse as 19th-century performance practices, theoretical conceptions of authorship, and canadian copyright law, L is playing gigs and laying down tracks with the swamp ward orchestra, who are due to release their first CD very soon. is marking out a place for your band on the folk festival circuit tough? yes. but there's a way in which the music she plays and her practices of musicianship are intricately linked to, and actively fuel, her research interests -- a sort of organic whole.

i don't know if the climate of the academy will ever change concerning those who "do stuff", and admittedly, there's a part of me that likes my position on the fringe of things. i do know, however, that if i'm going to make it through to the end of my dissertation, i'm going to row a hell of a lot to get there.