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48th International Congress on Medieval Studies

…Or Kalamazoo for short. Just got back yesterday evening after missing it for the past two years. So of course I had to hit the book exhibits, hard. And I found some treasures, new and used. I got Bill Klingshirn’s edition of Caesarius of Arles: Life, Testament and Letters — not a bit too soon because I am teaching that tomorrow. I also got a translation of Aldhelm’s Prose works, and the poetry is coming in the mail, as is Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000. I found two books from my doctoral advisor, Jocelyn Hillgarth; one of his oldest, The Conversion of Western Europe 350-750, and his latest, The Visigoths in History and Legend. Kate Cooper’s The Virgin and the Bride, Susanna Elm’s Virgins of God (yes, you are detecting a research theme), Leah Shopkow,’s History and Community, another former teacher, Edouard Jeauneau’s Rethinking the School of Chartres, Matthew Bailey’s translation of Las Mocedades de Rodrigo — the Youthful Deeds of the Cid (because I am tired of taking it out of the library), and Bonnie Mak’s How the Page Matters — which has perhaps the best “medium is the message” cover ever — round out the total. But I am perhaps fondest of all of the tote bag I bought fro the University of Toronto Press. Look Ma, no horns!:

U of Toronto Press
U of Toronto Press
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We are the Beaver

I wasn’t going to post a Canada Day song today, I really wasn’t. I thought I had run through all the good ones. But then I saw this. And, well…

Happy buttertarts, everyone!

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The Only Life You Could Save

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

—Mary Oliver

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Leftovers

The leftover goose bones and trimmings from Christmas were made into stock and into that I put the leftover stout from making my birthday cake and some leftover cauliflower (erm, I don’t even want to think about when I first bought that) and leftover Swedish cheese from Christmas Eve, and pureed it all, and I ate that a few times, and then added to it the leftover broth from simmering the beans and sausage to make cassoulet for New Year’s Eve, as well as the last spoonful or two of the cassoulet. And now I am eating it, along with pate and Finn Crisp from Christmas Eve. And it is so good.

Happy 2012

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2000 Miles

Just in time, here is my other favourite Christmas song. The line I like the best is the one about, “Diamonds in the snow. Sparkle.” Every time I hear it, I remember being in university the winter it came out, and walking back to residence late at night after some Model Parliament party with my current boyfriend at the time. It was one of those dry, crisp frigid nights, and as the snow winked and blinked at us, he said, “Look! The photographers are taking our picture.”

If you, like me, have never seen the video before now, beware. It rivals “Safety Dance” for bad. Chrissie Hynde as a Salvation Army girl? But the song is worth it.

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Christmas Wrapping

I managed to do most of my Christmas shopping in only one day but even that was too much. By the time it was over I felt like I couldn’t stand to hear another Christmas song as long as I lived. Part of that was a consequence of two hours trapped in my hairdressers chair listening to the Christmas channel on the radio. No, I have no desire to rock around the Christmas tree, and I do not hear what you hear. Don’t get me wrong — I like Christmas carols. Just not Christmas songs.

But there are two songs I make an exception for, and by a weird coincidence, both are by bands that originated in Akron, Ohio. Maybe I’ll get to the second later this month (and I bet you’ve already guessed which it is) but the first is The Waitresses, “Christmas Wrapping.” It has been running through my head all month, perhaps because this is the first Christmas I have spent with no family other than my son.

So deck those halls, trim those trees
Raise up cups of Christmas cheer,
I just need to catch my breath,
Christmas by myself this year.

Then I pay more attention to the words: “Had his number but never the time. Most of ’81 passed along those lines.” ’81? ’81?! This song is thirty years old! Am I even thirty years old? Clearly I must be. Oh dear, when did that happen?

There seems to be no video of it (we are almost pre-video for this song) so I present you with the synchronized Christmas lights version:

Christmas Wrapping — The Waitresses

In a quiet way, unwind
Doing Christmas right this time.

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Love and Work

Here’s another poem, also first published in the New Yorker, I think in 2004. I don’t think it is difficult to understand why it speaks to me, and why I saved it all these years…

Love and Work
by Rachel Wetzseon

In an uncurtained room across the way
a woman in a tight dress paints her lips
a deeper red, and sizes up her hips
for signs of ounces gained since yesterday

She has a thoughtful and a clever face
but she is smart enough to know
the truth: however large the brain may grow,
the lashes and the earrings must keep pace.

Although I’ve spread my books in front of me
with a majestic air of I’ll show her,
I’m much less confident than I’d prefer,
and now I’ve started oacing nervously.

I’m pouring over theorems, tomes and tracts.
I’m getting ready for a heavy date
by staying up ridiculously late.
But a small voice advises, Face the facts:

go on this way and you’ll soon come to harm.
The world’s most famous scholars wander down
the most appalling alleyways in town,
a blond and busty airhead on each arm.

There is an inner motor known as lust
that makes a man of learning walk a mile
to gratify his raging senses, while
the woman he can talk to gathers dust.

A chilling vision of the years ahead
invades my thoughts and widens like a stain:
a barren dance card and a teeming brain,
a crowded bookcase and an empty bed…

what if I compromised? I’d stay up late
to hone my elocutionary skills,
and at the crack of dawn I’d swallow pills
to calm my temper and control my weight,

but I just can’t. Romantics, so far gone
they think their lovers live for wisdom, woo
by growing wiser; when I think of you
I find the nearest lamp and turn it on.

Great gods of longing, watch me as I work,
and if I sprout a martyr’s smarmy grin
please find some violent way to do me in;
I’m burning all these candles not to shirk

a night of passion, but to give that night
a richly textured backdrop when it comes.
The girl who gets up from her desk and dumbs
her discourse down has never seen the flight

of wide-eyed starlings from their shabby cage;
the fool whose love is truest is the one
who knows a lover’s work is never done.
I’ll call you when I’ve finished one more page.

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My Soul

I found this poem while I was in graduate school in Toronto in the 90s, in one of the New Yorkers lying around the PIMS Common Room from their subscription. I have returned to it over and over again since that time (sigh), and I am putting it on my blog so I can find it more easily, darn it.

“My Soul is a Light Housekeeper”
(Error in the printing of the line “My soul is a lighthouse keeper,”
by an unknown female poet.)

Bored with the high drama of watching,
I see myself bound always to your absence,
sending out my pure circle of light so you
will know where I am, and how close
you might come to disaster. Imagine, love,
the tedium of this watch. On almost every day
nothing happens. And isn’t it wrong to yearn
for a great storm just to feel important?
I’ll let you go, then. Why shouldn’t my house
be my own, and my soul its keeper?
This work I needn’t take so seriously
since I’ve learned what pleases me, the light
of late afternoon through that window,
the intricate cobwebs I won’t disturb.
I know you don’t want to think of me
not always thinking of you, brave and imperilled.
I’m sure you’ll write to say: How can you change
so completely? You’re not the woman
I thought I knew. And I’m not,
but understand, dear, it wasn’t such a great change.
Imagine you could have seen that side of me
at the beginning, when we walked
for hours along the shore, and you were so certain
I was yours just because you loved me.

—Lawrence Raab, from The Probable World (Penguin Books, 2000)

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Another Year, Another Used Book Sale

There’s a sameness to this season, always — the turn of the leaves, the chill of the air, the encroaching dark. Even the beginning of the university year feels like an ending. And this year, like last, I also marked the end of a relationship whose time had passed.

But there are compensatons, like the extra week of summer that appeared out of no where last week. And the annual used book sale. As always, I present a photo of my haul. I am most excited by the five Rowan magazines I got for 10 cents each, and Ekaterina Sedia’s Secret History of Moscow, which I have been seeking for a while. The books are all used and have been read before by people who came to their end and discarded them. But they offer a new beginning to me.

Book Sale 2011

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Thoughts on Leaving my Son at O’Hare This Morning

When Outward Bound tells you that their programs are supposed to teach maturity and independence, they forget to let you know that they mean by that also the maturity and independence of the parents who have to let their children go and trust that the universe will move them along on their journey and bring them back safe and sound when it is over.

Anyway, I was reminded of a passage from one of my favourite books, A Big Storm Knocked it Over, by one of my favourite authors, Laurie Colwin, taken from us much to soon. And taken from her own small daughter much too soon too, as I recall more often than one might expect. Jane Louise has just left her baby, Miranda, alone with her husband for the first time and is returning from spending time with a friend:

It was nearing the end of the academic year. Everywhere she looked students were lugging boxes of books, clothes, and standing lamps out of their dorms. She stood on the sidewalk and watched a serious young boy load two duffel bags into the trunk of his father’s car and dash into a building. His father, a gray-haired man with a wide chest and a linen sports jacket, was loading the trunk. Jane Louise stood perfectly still, blinded by the sunny glare. Hazy light poured down around her.
Some day Miranda would grow up and go to college. day would follow day: She would lose her baby teeth. Her adult teeth would come in. She would go to school, learn to read, go to high school, have boyfriends, leave home. To her amazement, jane Louise found herself in tears. Her throat got hot, and tears poured down her cheeks. She felt powerless to brush them away.
The gray-haired man walked past her, carrying a pair of suitcases. When he saw her, he stopped and set the cases down.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“I was just thinking about my child going to college,” Jane Louise said.
“How old is your child?” the man asked gently.
“Just five months old,” said Jane Louise, and she began to sob. “You must think I’m a nut.”
The man looked at her thoughtfully. “When my kid went to sleep-away camp for the first time, I wanted to lie down in the driveway and eat dirt,” he said.
Jane Louise looked up at him. He filled her vision entirely. The hazy sunshine swirled around them. She grabbed his wrist, and kissed his hand. He was wearing a beautiful gold watch.
“Thank you,” she said. “Oh thank you.”
Then she collected herself. The man picked up the suitcases.
“It’ll be all right,” he said. “You’ll grow into it.”