Sunday Salon: Balmy Heat and Equinoctial Skies

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Now spring restores the balmy heat,
now Zephyr's sweet breezes calm the rage of the equinoctial skies.

-Catullus

It's springtime in Nova Scotia, a season I had been led to believe did not exist.  When it finally stops raining in June, everyone told me, it will be summer.  But we have had an unseasonable dry and warm March.  Yesterday I was heading off to the gym when I realized how gorgeous it was, and made a detour to Point Pleasant Park, on the southernmost tip of the Halifax peninsula, to walk along the ocean and soak up the sunshine.  Stunning.

Here's hoping it lasts and lasts, and we never get that next wave of snow that I have been hearing murmurs about.

What have I been up to this week?  It has been a fairly normal week of teaching (we have moved been doing Michael Frayn's excellent play about nuclear physics and ethics - Copenhagen - in one of my classes, and the Spanish Golden Age of Drama in my other), grading, reading, and, of course, a wee bit of blogging:
What are my plans for this fine Sunday?

In addition to preparing for the teaching week ahead, I need to prepare for a paper I will be giving at a conference on Thursday.  I'd like to finish Lord Carew's Bride, the second in a series of Regency novels by Mary Balogh, about a beautiful woman who believes she will never want to marry after her heart is broken at age eighteen by a callow, handsome, charmer of a villain.  Now she is falling softly in love with a man she believes to be a good friend and (for that matter) a landscape gardener.  In fact, he is the Marquis of Carew (of course!), and he is reluctant to reveal his true identity because he wants her to love him for himself.  Why is he insecure about the allure his rank and fortune will hold for her? Because, apart from being not terribly good-looking,  he was permanently injured in a childhood accident, and is used to families pushing their unwilling daughters (unnerved by his twisted hand and obvious limp) on him in hopes of a good dynastic match.

I am also midway through the excellent medieval mystery Mistress of the Art of Death, and my basketball season reading of When March Went Mad: The Game that Changed Basketball.  I'd like to get a start on Rose Tremain's The Colour, from the 1001 Books list.  And I'd love to watch more of Satyajit Ray's Aparajito, the second film in his Apu trilogy, which I started on Friday.

Happy springtime, saloners!

They just followed me home, I swear... but can I keep them?

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[A post begun last night, and finished this afternoon...]

The lovely spring weather continues apace here - so much so that I walked to my salon appointment (a little over four miles round trip) and wished I hadn't worn a heavy sweater.  The walk is quite beautiful - it takes me past Halifax's Armory and Common (where people camped in tents after the 1917 Explosion destroyed their homes, and where they were hit by the brutal blizzard that followed that calamity) before leading me across the highest point in town, the star-shaped Citadel fortress (the most visited historic site in Canada), and along the border of the Public Gardens.

But I awoke this morning feeling an exhaustion disproportionate to the amount of sleep I had gotten.  I wouldn't swear to it, but it may also be possible that a family of elephants had taken up squishy residence in my sinuses in the early hours of the morning.  By the time I was about an hour into my time in foils at the salon, I had a screeching headache.  And now, come evening, I am running a low fever and feeling utterly discombobulated.

So there is nothing to do to soothe my fevered brow but to contemplate the books that followed me home this week (via mail, or having hopped into my hands at the bookstore):


The Essential James Reaney 
I have been coveting this collection since participating in a reading to mark its launch.  It is a beautiful, tactile volume - heavy, velvety paper filled with odd little sketches by Reaney himself.  But the true oddity is in the vivid poems.  Consider the beginning and end of "The Antiquary": 
Within these jars and casks 
I keep French and German moonlight [...] 
Here in these flasks 
Lie the coughs of Emily Brontë, 
The urine of John Donne, 
And Jane Austen's caul. 
Here is Queen Anne's seventh child  
Pickled in liquor...  


An Illustrated History of Nova Scotia by Harry Bruce.  
Did you know that the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design was founded by Anna Leonowens, whose writings about her time in Siam inspired The King and I?  Neither did I, until quite recently.  That's why I need this book.  


Apocalyptic Swing 
I am on record as adoring Gabrielle Calvocoressi's previous book of poems, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, both for its title cycle, and for the long poem that treats the Hartford Circus Fire.   In that first work, she was a prodigy of perspective, getting at the experience of historical catastrophes by giving us the vivid points of view of various bystanders and participants, all laid out with imagery that circles back on itself and back and back, building in complexity with every return.  This new collection, from what I can tell so far, circles round the dual themes of desire and boxing.  Consider the power of these lines from the first of two poems called "A Love Supreme" (paying particular attention to how she uses the line-breaks to create double meanings):
You beautiful, broke-
back horse of my heart.  Proud,
debonair, not quite there

in the head. You current
with no river in sight.

There are lines I want to tell you about in the poems I have read so far, but I am reluctant to share them, since they seem to me to be spoilers.  That's right - these are poems so playful and surprising and urgent that I am fearful of spoilers.  And can we also agree that Calvocoressi has quite the gift for titling her books?  There is a wonderful onomatopoeia to Apocalyptic Swing....


Ruined by Lynn Nottage
One of the most acclaimed plays of 2009 (it swept up the Pulitzer, the Obie, and the NY Drama Critics' Circle Award, among others), it tells the tale of a brothel in the wartorn Congo, and is based on interviews Nottage did with women fleeing the sexual violence of the civil conflict there.

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M.R. James
I can't quite remember how this came to be on my BookMooch wishlist, but I am glad that it is.  It is a set of tales of otherworldly horror by an early-twentieth-century director of Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum.  I am enthralled by the prospects promised by this description on the back cover: "In a style as neat as a croquet lawn he penetrates to the heart of Hell and beyond."


The Devil and Miss Prym: A Novel of Temptation by Paulo Coelho
I do know, however, how this volume (about the arrival of a wealthy stranger in a remote Brazilian[?] village) came to be on my wishlist: it is one of the 1001 books I must read before I die.  


And speaking of that project, I recently returned to the spreadsheet that tells me how many books I must read a year in order to read the whole list before I die, based on my age and gender.  And it was a sobering memento mori.  Despite the fact that I have devoted my entire adult life and a solid portion of my childhood to the study of literature, I have only read about 17% of the list.  This means I must read 16 books from the list a year for the rest of my existence to complete the list.  How many did I read in the last year?  One.  So this calls for a serious shuffling of Mt TBR.  What are some of the works I might start with?
  • Ovid's Metamorphoses
  • Rose Tremain's The Colour (which Wendy recently brought back to my attention)
  • Ian McEwan's Saturday
  • Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (which I should have finished back in college - sorry, spirit of the late Professor K.  I think of you every time I see it on my shelf.)
  •  The Lover by Marguerite Duras
  • A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Borges's Labyrinths
  • Possession by A.S. Byatt
  • Mario Puzo's The Godfather 
Any favorites from this list?

    One day you're a prisoner... the next you're a prince

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    One year you're national champions, the next you are having this conversation:

    Yesterday, my students said to me, "Is your team even in the tournament this year?".  (I may have been regaling them with the Carolina basketball psychodrama all term.)

    "Thanks," I replied, scowling at them, "I appreciate your concern." 

    They went on, cruelly: "Duke's in first place! What happened to you guys?". 

    I looked down at my lesson plan, and felt a violent blush rising up my neck, all the way past my cheeks to my hairline. The whole vivid wave of shame took about twenty seconds to complete its journey.  I couldn't even look up and meet my students' eyes.  I had thought I was at peace with our enfeebled basketball season, I really did.*   I was wrong.

    And then we went back to discussing Life is a Dream. Which seemed apt.



    ¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
    ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
    una sombra, una ficción,
    y el mayor bien es pequeño:
    que toda la vida es sueño,
    y los sueños, sueños son.

     

    *I had even told my Intro to Drama students in a previous class that I had come to terms with it by viewing it as a sort of memento mori: this way goes all earthly glory, Everyman.  Think on't, Faustus.  Fortune's privates we.