felis_ultharus

I am very much enjoying Headhunter, though having worked half the day and slept the other half, I'm not much farther. I find I'm quite hampered by my lack of Wuthering Heights knowledge -- what does "Heathcliff hath murdered sleep" mean? How did Linton perish?

This is a book that requires you to know a lot of other books. I'm very glad I've read Heart of Darkness three times. I'm glad I know about the Samurai Susanna. I found this line very funny:

"The groundhog, looking up at her as it ate, had a face very much like Susanna Moodie's -- slightly bad-tempered, furrowed over the brow, a weatherbeaten red in colour -- grey around the edges.

But if Susanna is going to help Lilah Kemp fight Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, she should have come with her giant samurai sword. That would help. A faithful groundhog familiar couldn't hurt, but Kurtz is likely very powerful.

This is a very fun book.

Worked today. Sounds like they're going to want me back for my old job, starting week after next. I've barely written anything today (1.5 pages), but I'll probably spend the evening doing that :)

For the record, I don't exist on Tuesdays. I phase out of existance. I refuse to exist on this plane on Tuesdays, because that would mean trying to balance the reading and writing necessary before any one of my grad classes, and the 8 million tasks and crises of daily life.

The world refuses to listen to this basic rule. Every crisis imaginable lands in my lap, invariably, on a Tuesday -- today it was a long talk with a landlord pleading for time to regulate the problem of my roommate's rent cheque bouncing. It was a cashflow problem, but the roommate is in Spain, I don't have enough money in my account to cover the rent without a transfer of funds.

And that conversation ate into my preparation time for the big project I had going on Susanna Moodie, Margaret Atwood, and Carl Jung -- which fortunately came off without a hitch, in spite of my only getting to it 48 hours before it was due.

And also, every social activity I could ever want attend happens on a Tuesday. The six other days of the week -- when I do exist -- do not seem to exist for other people.

(After my project, I would just like to crash and sleep for the rest of the week. Of course, since The-Place-Where-I-Don't-Work has called me in for an all-morning shift tomorrow, that's not happening.)

This week's disasters have begun to peter out. My presentation was a success last night, which is good because it counts for a whopping percentage of the mark. Everyone looked bored, but then everyone always looks bored at these things. I tried to make it less boring by talking more about Atwood and Jung than the Samurai Susanna, but I gave the second major presentation of the night, so everyone was just falling asleep.

After me there was a presentation on some of the work of Catherine MacKinnon. One of her usual bait-and-switch, non-sequitor arguments used to demonize pornography by association ("In the 19th century, there was a lot of abuse of women in psychiatric institutions by male doctors. Here's the proof it was going on. Now, isn't porn evil?").

We didn't have time for class discussion after three presentations, so I didn't have a chance to rip into her. For those of you who don't know, MacKinnon's crusade for censorship has played a major part in the persecution of queer bookstores by Canada Customs. If it weren't for hers and Andrea Dworkin's briefs to the Supreme Court, Little Sister's and other bookstores wouldn't have to face the tyranny of Canada's most backward public institution.

Anyway, I have my ticket now to Advent Children -- today's English Tests were right near the theatre, so I ran out and grabbed it. I've never been as excited about seeing a movie in theatres as I am this time, especially since so few theatres around the world will be playing it.

So I'm nearly finished the Samurai Susanna. I wouldn't say reading it is so much good as it is character-building.

I really wanted to like her stuff. She is a big name in Canadian lit. My favourite Canadian novelist loved Moodie's work enough to write a volume of fan-poetry about her. She shows up as a hero, I've heard, in Timothy Findley's Headhunter, which promises to be a great book. On top of it all, she was very active in the anti-slavery movement.

But she is very tedious. It's that same long, drawn-out, dry prose style that has made me avoid any class in Victorian lit. The same ultra-sentimental Christian morality, the same cheerleading of British Empire, and for an anti-slavery activist, she's awfully narrow-minded. She also likes to go on for pages about how she's the only one around her who ever keeps her head in a crisis.

Oh well. Writing is continuing well and I expect to be at my first hundred pages of the new novel in the next few days. And tonight, I'm getting a Firefly education in preparation for watching Serenity tomorrow.

I'm still enjoying Solomon Gursky, though it is getting a little irritating because of all the homophobia. At first, I was giving the author the benefit of the doubt -- he's not writing about nice people, and I assumed it was they, not the author, who were the bigoted.

After awhile though, it gets to be a little too much, and you have to wonder if -- among the dozens of queer predators and shallow queens, all played for laughs -- there's going to be one nice one. Mordecai Richler is misanthropic, but there are nice straight people around the margins of his story.

( Minor spoilers here for Solomon Gursky )

(I need a Canadian Lit icon. If I could draw at all, and still access to Photoshop, I think I'd put together a Samurai Susanna animated icon, done in the style of a Canadian Heritage Minute. You know, something like an anime scene, followed by,

"In 1837, Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie defeated the last ninja gang of the Duoro Township, ending the plague of ninjas that had been plaguing the Canadian wilderness, and thwarting American plans to built a space station capable of destroying Ottawa from orbit. A part of our heritage.")

My writing is getting sluggish right at the worst possible moment. I have to turn in a very short story by the day after tomorrow. I have something written (I wrote it just yesterday), but it needs heavy revision, and I keep getting sidetracked.

I finished Prisoner of Azkaban again, and then went dutifully back to the Samurai Susanna Moodie. Apparently, she had a talking dog:

"[The servant] Jacob's attachment to us, in its simplicity and fidelity, greatly resembled that of the dog; and sometimes, like the dog, he would push himself where he was not wanted, and gratuitously give his advice, and make remarks which were not required.

She seems remarkably unperturbed owning a dog who "gratuitously gives his advice" and who "makes remarks which were not required."

That talking dog must have been a great help to her whilst she was hunting ninjas in the Canadian wilderness.

Also, it turns out I'm a fairy, which is of no surprise to anyone, I'm sure:

( meme )

I think by far the most interesting detail of Susannah Moodie's life is that she carried an ostentious Japanese sword into the forests near Peterborough, to her new log-cabin home. From the description, and from a brief internet search, it sounds like something called "a reverse-handled Tachi sword," a kind of samurai sword.

Which is a great mental image. There's Susannah -- matronly, aristocratic, patronizing, self-absorbed Susannah Moodie in her bonnet and farmwife's skirt -- wielding a giant Japanese sword.

I can see it now:

She pauses in the middle of a maple grove. Something doesn't quite seem right. Cherry blossoms whirl out of nowhere.

Then, suddenly, ninjas -- those ever-present scourge of the Canadian wilderness -- drop out of the maple trees. She's surrounded. Susannah raises her sword, and says, "I will never forgive you." Then she cries, "I will destroy your happiness."

Everything goes dark. Several red slashes cut across the blackness.

The lights come up, and there's Susannah, sole survivor, standing over her defeated enemies in the maple grove, her hair stirred by the wind. A mournful Japanese flute is the only noise, amidst the sombre silence.

Yes, I'm in a weird mood today ^_^