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Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair (Hooder: 2002).

I haven’t read any adult-oriented fantasy/science fiction in quite a while. On Harley’s recommendation (and his kind loan), i started to read The Eyre Affair with little idea what to expect and, although it took me a good 200 pages to reach this conclusion, i do believe this series may now be included among my favourites.

Thursday Next is a literary detective (and yes, this took me quite a while to get my mind around) in 1985. Her 1985, however, is not like ours although the similarities are large enough to make the differences shocking. Britain is still fighting the Crimean, Wales is a Socialist Republic, there is a loose boundary between “reality and fiction” and, perhaps most shocking, people actually care about literature. Fforde’s social commentary is weaved into a catchy narrative that makes you laugh.

I can come up with two analogy’s: The Eyre Affair is much like The Incredibles, which i honestly think is one of the funniest movies i have ever seen.

Reading The Eyre Affair is like watching really good theatre. Although you know you’re caught up in something artificial and unreal, nevertheless, you disbelief is suspended and you can no longer feel your butt in the seat.

While the first hundred-or-so pages were slow going, the last hundred were read at 3am even though i had to get up at 9:30am. I just couldn’t put it down.

I’ve been trying to stay away from the more personal posts these past couple of days. Figure it is better to raise the bar on content - but also realize most of my readers are personal friends actually interested in what i am up to. This is for you…

In the past five days i have:
(a)Gotten almost no work done on my paper due May 7th.
(b)Bought a ticket to visit my grandmother for her birthday this week-end.
(c)Made stew.
(d)Babysat for Emily
(e)Not slept alone for two nights - and was cuddled for one - thanks TTC for forcing Veronica to visit me!
(f)Written the Classics Dept. Latin exam because i failed the Medieval one.
(g)Been pseudo-accosted on the history forum on craigslist
(h)Wasted much time composing blog entries and surfing the internet.
(i)Watched two movies: Prozac Nation and Clueless.
(j)Eaten bumbleberry pie and relished it.
(k)Gone for breakfast at Futures - and got a cake card! Whoot!

Tomorrow we will return to the not-directly-about-my-boring-and-pathetic-personal-life posts.

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During much of the Middle Ages, the most common brevia texts to be copied out were charms against a sudden death. Our current culture idealizes a death that is swift and painless with no time for reflection. There is no “ars moriendi” or “art of dying.” I often find, when people inadvertently presume that medieval commonfolk were somehow dumber than twenty-first century commonfolk, they actually are just unaware of the problems that medieval people were concerned with.

On Saturday, i attended a lecture at the First Annual Canada Chaucer Conference sponsored by the Centre for Medieval Studies and the English Department at U of T. D. Vance Smith, of Princeton University, gave a great talk of Dying, Death and Allegory using Chaucer’s the Pardoner’s Tale as a jumping off point. The room was filled with not only medievalists like myself, to whom much of this material was not new but had never been this material presented to them in a cohesive manner, but also English graduate students of other eras to whom i think much of the information was a bit of a revelation - hence my summary of some of the many points below for your general edification.

To see Death, is always to see an allegory. Although we recognize Death in all his iconographic trappings (the skeleton, the sickle (it was a spear in the Middle Ages, but whatever), the hooded figure), we are not capable of depicting Death - what we get is depictions of dying. In fact, the only part of the Death we can even really speculate about as something “real” or “logical” at all is the moment immediately following the last moment of life - and only because we understand that there must be a moment after.

Problems of representing Death in the Middle Ages actually reached a grammatical level (speculative grammar was a big philosophical movement) and filtered down to much of the general population when they were taught Latin for any number of reasons, from business correspondence to a career in the Church. You cannot us the verb “to-be” in the present tense about someone that is dead - here i draw a distinction between Deadness and Death (Deadness being a descriptor for the negation of the verb “to-be” while Death describes the state of Deadness about which we cannot speak). For example: Aristotle is the Philosopher. Aristotle does not exist. The verb “to-be” requires a predicate - and a predicate “of” something. Non-being cannot be a predicate for being, or, in other words, you cannot say something real and true about something that does not exist.

So, why the fascination with depictions of Death in the Middle Ages? Well, Chaucer takes a look at this in the Pardoner’s Tale where his Man in Black is always dying but can never die… Being able to speak about Death is the very assurance you are still alive. Poems about the signs of Death are usually written in the first or second person in order to emphasize one’s non-death state. Talking about dying is a celebration of existence. Death has a paradoxical relationship to life… the more life was has… the less life one has. By writing about dying, the time of dying is deferred… it will be impossible to witness your own Death.

Or, as D. Vance Smith put it so nicely - if Death were anything more than an allegory for you, you would already be Dead.

A merited death is fitting - it brings closure and satisfaction.
An unmerited death is ironic.
The best death was mid-prayer - when thinking about the next life was the only time to leave this one.

Our own relationship to Death is very different from the medieval conception. Neither is simple.

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Umberto Eco. The Island of the Day Before. Translated by W.Weaver. Harvest Books: 2006; 528pgs.

The latest Eco that i have laid my hands on, The Island of the Day Before, was conveniently in the discount books at Chapters last time i went with Veronica. I am a big fan of some of Eco’s other works, like The Name of the Rose and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna. I was not that impressed with Baudolino.

The Island of the Day Before is going into the “take-it-or-leave-it” category. Perhaps in the past year, i have entered a new realm of appreciation for the philosophical problems of the early modern era, but often, i found the main character’s musings, well, trite. Not that Eco presents Roberto de la Griva, shipwrecked on the antipodal meridian within sight of what he believes is the legendary Island of Solomon, as a great thinker. Rather, his letters to his Lady, met in a salon in Paris with whom he has had all of one very abrupt conversation, are to be taken with a grain of salt. His fascination with what we now call the International Dateline - or the idea that 100 feet from where his ship is moored it is “yesterday” - is touching. But, i wasn’t caught up in the narrative and found myself skimming the last 50 or so pages.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel, for me who is relatively acquainted with the different arguments for and against a heliocentric solar system and the other clashes between Jesuit and “Parisian” astronomy, was the way Eco presented the material as rewriting and conjecturing from the letters Roberto left behind. Problems of interpretation - with which i am very concerned - were a main theme of the book and Eco, as a leader in his academic field, has an interesting take on the topic.

Would i recommend The Island of the Day Before to my readers? Yes and no. If you are interested in some of the philosophical, astronomical and theological topics of the early modern period, you will likely find the book very enjoyable. There were sections of narrative about Roberto’s life that had me completely enthralled. But, if you, like me, didn’t particularly like Baudolino, I’d recommend leaving it. If anyone would like my copy… let me know. I enjoy passing along books.

Whenever i come home for even a short stay, my Montrealer friends ask how it is in Toronto - and the answer is always - tedious. I have great things to say about U of T and am perfectly aware that as a busy grad student holed up in her basement bachelor, i don’t get a chance to really enjoy the city as much as a should - for example, i NEED to go with Jen to an Indie Rock show. However, Montreal has many great things which, frankly, Toronto lacks.

Julie just recently wrote a very nice livejournal post listing her eight favourite things about Montreal - all of which i have to agree with. I added my take on Montreal’s architecture (which i think puts it up there with some great European cities i have visited, like Stockholm and Amsterdam) in a comment. It’s a good read that i highly recommend - although i will continue to give Toronto a chance before leaving later this summer.

The most recent ’bout of giving Toronto a chance was karaoke at Fiddler’s Green on Thursday evening. I don’t sing at karaoke - but i do sing along if someone picks a Meatloaf song like “I Would Do Anything for Love, but i won’t do that” (yes, i thought of Bryan). In honour of Sandy’s friends visiting for a week and the completion of comps for those writing them - there was some serious enjoying of ourselves going on among the history/CMS crowd. Yeah! It was the second time i have been to Fiddler’s Green and i will go again - even if they DID change the channel on the TV when the Habs vs. Flyers game was still in overtime. A Toronto faux-pas if you ask me.
Oh, and their poutine is completely edible. The gravy isn’t right and there’s this green stuff that looks way too healthy to be poutine-related (it’s parsley), but it’s edible even if it isn’t real poutine.

Earlier this week, i got a referral from We Feel Fine. I had never before heard of them and promptly put aside my paper writing to go check it out.

We Feel Fine is a truly beautiful piece of webart - the mathematics behind which boggles my mind. Interactive, this work can be used to view statistics, surf personal blogs or simply enjoy a fleeting connection on a global level. The creators describe it as follows:

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

One of the main problems i have had with developing my daily RSS feeds is variety. I get stuck in a rut of only finding academics, then people in bad relationships, blah blah blah. All but one of the blogs i read were published in North America (the exceptions was Ilya’s Adam Smith vs. Jesus, and only because he moved to Sydney last year). After playing with We Feel Fine, i’ve added some more international flavour to my daily readings and have reflected on my own diction choices.

Check it out!

1833-2008

Founding

In the wake of the English conquest of the territories that were to become Québec in 1759, Lower Canada’s religious and cultural community widened. Among these new immigrants were many Scottish and English families who settled in Terrebonne. In 1833, a group of Presbyterians, led by Mr. John Morris and Mr. Alpheus Kimpton, joined together to establish a place of worship and, by September 1834, had bought the current lot on which our church rests for fifty sterlings silver.

Although the building was not to be completed for another 23 years, the nascent congregation shared and spread their faith in a manner reminiscient of the first Christian congregations and holding services in members’ homes. While the earliest recorded gatherings occurred in the home of Rev. Brompton just west of the church hall, in 1842 the congregation settled on the home of Mr. John Morris situated on what is St. Lambert St. today as their meeting place.

Surrounded by a predominantly French-speaking population, the Ste. Thérèse congregation played an integral role in serving French protestants as both the centre for French Protestant work, the Institut Evangélique later relocated to Pointe-aux-Trembles, and shared its registers of births, marriages and deaths with French Protestant ministers.

Building

In 1857, the church was completed and looked much as it does at present: an understated, cozy brick edifice with high ceilings and many windows. An oculus placed above the front door was later filled in although its outline still remains visible. The rear of the church served as the Protestant school in Ste. Thérèse.

Schoolhouse

A separate schoolhouse was opened in 1912 just next door. With separate cloakrooms for boys and girls and one large classroom, grades one through seven were taught by a single teacher. Those children going beyond an elementary education had to leave the box stove-heated building behind and enroll in a school on the island of Montréal.

In 1945, Elmwood, on Grande-Côte in Rosemere, was constructed and the schoolhouse was emptied of its weekday children. However, Sunday school lessons, bazaars, meetings, seder suppers and a wide array of other pastoral activities continued. The last schoolteacher, McCaig, was memorialized when a second Protestant school was erected in Rosemère on Northcote Blvd.

Cemetery

The first graves in the cemetery at the back of the church date from 1838. They tell the story of a parish. The Davies plot (13) containes the remains of a brother and sister, Elsreth-Charlotte and Edward-J., born 23 years apart, who died before their first birthdays. The pain felt over these lost children emanates strongly from the tombstone that tells us Robert Brown was 12 years and six months old when he died in 1847 – those six months meant a lot. Seventy monuments, some more legible than others, commemorate the lives of deceased. For over twenty years now the cemetery has been full, although individual family plots are still in use.

Parishioners

On March 29, 1874, the Ste. Thérèse church voted in overwhelming favour for the union of all the Presbyterian churches in Canada and in 1924, the Congregational and Methodist Churches joined to form the United Church of Canada. Well-known for its openness and willingness to deal with the social issues of contemporary society, our congregation is proud to be affiliated with this national organization.

But there are many reasons to be proud of the little brick church on St. Charles St. Its congregation both fought and died in the Great War and the Second World War. As its size has diminished with the relocation of Québec’s anglophone population during the 1970s and 1980s, its faith has not.

Sunday services continue under the auspices of a joint-pastoral charge with Rosemère Memorial Church – an agreement begun in 1968.

The information for this commemorative history was gleaned from past anniversary pamphlets, Marge McCord’s “The little old schoolhouse in Ste. Thérèse” which appeared in the March 19, 1990 edition of The Watchman, J.G.Gilles Charron’s L’histoire de Sainte-Thérèse par ses pierres tombales and the author’s memory of conversations with past congregation members.

Letter: Semper teneo memoria

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s spirit lives in you?—I Corinthians 1:16

Although I don’t remember going to Church on Sunday morning, just my Dad and I, when Mom stayed home with my “little” brother, Robert, who was too little to not cry during the service, I do know which pew was “ours.” I do remember wearing wire coat-hangers draped in silver tinsel as an angel in the Christmas pageant, singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and “Kumbaya” at Easter in the front of the church, requesting “Spirit of Gentleness” every Sunday for months on end, and lighting EVERY advent candle – I was 14 for the Christ. I also remember our first children’s time with Rev. Kurdyla, when he asked “What does Jesus look like?” and I gave him the undesirable response that I could not imagine God because God was everything. My earliest encounter with the Book of Samuel came rushing back anew this past year when I was translating from the Vulgate in Latin class – I am still not sure I would have the courage to say “Here I am.”

But my memories of the Ste. Thérèse United Church extend far beyond the actual services to Saturdays spent spring-cleaning: beating the pew cushions, polishing the silver and raking leaves while avoiding stepping in Joe Cebola’s lovingly tended garden. Many a great book was recommended to me while manning the books, games and puzzles room in the basement of the hall at a bazaar. I still love soda crackers with cheez-whiz, our Sunday schools snacks. I think my fascination with the distant past may have begun with the discovery of newspaper clippings pinned on the walls from when the rear of the church was still used as a schoolhouse.

The years of my life spent in these buildings have affected me in ways I could never have imagined. This past December I attended a St. James Anglican Church service in Sydney, Australia – and felt at home halfway around the world watching the advent candle of Joy being lit and singing some of my favourite hymns. Memories of the welcoming, caring and loving congregation of the Ste. Thérèse United Church will always rekindle feelings of comfort, well-being and belonging.

Happy 175th Birthday!
Heather Stein, M.A.

(Written for the 175th Commemorative Service being held this Victoria Day Week-End)

I was under the impression that Knopff was a good publisher. I recently read a review in the New York Sun that has challenged this assessment.

From what i can gather, Burton has published a five hundred some odd pages on a subject i have seen covered NUMEROUS times in 30-page articles in the Journal History and Theory.

I mean, really, am i supposed to find the statement that not until the Renaissance does history become recognizable to us as a discipline, deep, meaningful or worth reiterating for the fifth billion time? The Middle Ages was a period of darkness, was it? (i’m SO tired of people unconcerned with the philosophical, theological and epistemological concerns of medieval intellectuals critique them for not being “deep.” Perpetuating historical misconceptions is just evil. ). And WHAT about The British Book of Kings? And hagiographies in general?

Ugh. You can read the article here if you must. I won’t be reading the book.

After our horrible brunch on Saturday morning, Veronica and i decided to venture out to BMV books (no, i did not buy anything, though i came VERY close to picking up more material for my novel, Hemingway’s Short Stories and other great finds that i have no time to read) and then to Greg’s Ice Cream (at Spadina on Bloor).

What’s nice about Greg’s Ice Cream is that it is an adventure as the flavours change daily. Saturday’s flavours included (among others) vanilla and honey, chocolate almond, roasted marshmallow, chocolate-chocolate chip, green tea, extra cream, mint chip, banana, pistachio, cinnamon and nutmeg, and orange cream. A small cone/dish is two scoops - perfect for sharing - and we tried banana and roasted marshmallow which went excellent together. Yummy. The line was very long and there was only one girl working the counter, but it was worth it at only $3.86. We will be returning - and if you’re looking for good ice cream (it ain’t gelato, but what can compare with gelato but gelato itself?), it comes highly recommended!