Semester Two, Week One

I'm holed up in bed with my computer for the rest of the day, trying to work out a compromise between my body, which is determined to acquire another cold, and my brain, which has to write a lecture for my Arthurian Legends class. Juice and Cold-Eez at the ready, I have constructed a lovely work nest of which I am quite proud.

So far this semester is fantastic. My Shakespeare class is very cozy indeed, with only fifteen students, all of whom are brilliant, enthusiastic bardophile English majors who, at least this week, seem willing to work their talented little arses off for this course. Today was a workshop day, so I had them acting out snippets of Richard III's opening soliloquy as mini-plays to get them used to speaking and physicalizing the verse. They seemed to have fun with it, and I somehow found a way to make my Strong Bad sweatshirt into a teaching tool as well as a comfy garment: as with Richard, the audience identifies with Strong Bad because he takes us into his confidence, and when he abuses those around him, one can't feel bad for them because they're so absurdly stupid. I was pleased with myself, anyway.

Hic iacet Bruckheimer, productor quondam productorque futurus

So I watched the 2004 movie King Arthur last night in preparation for my course, and I confess I liked it more than I thought I would. I've been wanting a gritty, non-magical treatment of a Roman-Empire Arthur for a long time, and the movie scratched that itch, but boy, could it ever have been better written. And please pardon my pedantry, but if you're going to insist that this is the "true story" of the historical Arthur, remove him from Wales to Hadrian's Wall, etc., you'd better make it a damned historically accurate movie. Crossbows in the fifth century? Chain-mail? Why insist on having a character called Merlin if you're ditching the myth? Why include Lancelot and Guenever if you're trying to get to a true story unsullied by late medieval French interpolations? The fifth century didn't see marauding armies of Picti sailing over the wall (nor, I believe, did anyone call them "woads"); the Saxons landed in Kent and East Anglia, not Scotland. Why does the Roman longsword (yeah, I know) "Excalibur" have Saxon runes inscribed on it? Are "Tristan" and "Gawain" really meant to be Salmatian names?

That said, the battle sequences and fight choreography are pretty brilliant, and Arthur's knights--Salmatian mercenary cavalry--are charmingly like a dark-age biker gang: Bors head-butts a guy and claims to be from hell; all he needs is some Skynyrd and a hog. And any movie that lets Keira Knightley kick Saxon ass in a costume made of leather straps and blue paint has to earn at least three stars.

But I'm still writing 1974 on my checks!

Seriously, there's always one day a year when I write the year of my birth instead of the current year. If I write a one and then a seventeen, 1974 just seems more natural. So I try not to write checks on my birthday.

That was a not-so subtle hint, I realize. Happy almost birthday to me. I'd like an electric bass, one of those really fancy corkscrews, a plane ticket to Bermuda on March 17th, or some new glasses. Or just best wishes. Thirty-one means nothing. It's a crappy, unspecial age. It's a prime number, I suppose, but I was just a prime number last year. Now thirty-two will be two to the fifth power. That's an age to look forward to.

I was going to write a lengthy, reflective, looking-back-on-2004 entry, but I decided not to. Screw it. I have memories, I have a journal I can reread, I have a blog archive, I have that Peruvian nun still locked in my closet. Oh shit...um...forget I said that.

I'm still setting daily adult-life records for not being in a relationship, and I'm really happy about that. This year, agonizing as it has often been, has finally given me the opportunity to bounce back into a nice neutral emotional shape. Next time I have a relationship, it won't be out of duty or fear or loneliness or anything like that. That's a good feeling. I like being single. I like being me. That said, I have recently begun paying my suitorly attentions to a fascinating young woman in a nearby metropole, and she has been entertaining said attentions. Falling back on the archaic vocabulary of nineteenth-century courtship is amusing and healthy, I think.

Academia is a pernicious kind of profession for scheduling one's work. There's never a moment in my life when I couldn't be working on something. Even when I don't have to be. It's a struggle even on Christmas day not to think "I have an hour or so before dinner; I could get that abstract done." Rrrrg. So today I really do have to get this abstract done, write up my syllabi, and work on a chapter excerpt that's becoming both an article and a conference paper.

Oooh. And the new Vanity Fair with the Star Wars Episode III spectacular came! Discipline is so hard.