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radfrac_archive_fullI`ve told you this story before, but there`s a new one to go with it.
When I was last in school, 2001-2003 or so, the sweetness of my day was that after class, which must have been one of your 4:30 - 7:30 evening classes, as I will have in this January`s semester, I would get off the bus downtown and walk past Munro`s Books.
On Tuesdays, they`d be closed by the time I got there, and I could only look in the dim windows. I remember the street as always dark and always shining wetly, with cool air and a fine rain just ending or just beginning.
On Thursdays, though, they would be open until 9, and I could spend half an hour browsing their remarkable sales tables. I don`t think I often bought anything, but there was always the tactile pleasure of picking up and examining the books, the smell of dust and paper, the warm yellow light, and the mental pleasure of imagining each reading -- what the contents might be, how complexly the analysis would unfold. (I always seem to be attracted to the eccentrically-populated non-fiction table, heavy on literary and anthropological material, the study of the human -- and doesn`t Munro`s sort of feel like the embodiment of old-school humanism, with all its pleasures and flaws, right down to the big wooden bookcases?)
The pleasure of my day this semester is early in the morning. My class is from 8:30 - 9:30, and at most I have fifteen minutes after class before I catch the bus to work. If I get to school early enough, though, I can spend my half-hour in the nearly empty library. Usually, I admit, checking email or playing Facebook Scrabble. I do also sometimes look up books that might be useful.
These morning have changed my sense of time. I hadn`t realized before how much you can get done in fifteen minutes. There`s time to enter the library, look up a book, go up two floors and fetch it, claim it at the counter, and still get to class on time.
Lately I`m thinking a lot about Shakespeare`s language, and so I`m looking up supplementary books about that, especially the use of puns. We had a close-reading exercise this week. I was a little hostile going in (for no very good reason), but it was illuminating. Mmmaybe even transformative.
I don`t want to get all canonical here, but the use of language, word by word, is extraordinary. It`s knit as tightly as one of your most complex antique socks,stitchinmyside, if every loop you made and pulled tight was a word, and each thread twisted of a dozen colours of meaning.
I don`t know how handsome a sock that would make, actually, but it`s incredible use of language. I don`t think we use language this way any more. I don`t remember reading anything from the 20th century, except possibly Nabokov, that has this kind of density, word and action knit so tight. I love puzzle-books, books that are ideas as well as books, but I wasn`t expecting to find that kind of richness in something so dogeared by so much use, foxed and fumbled in every school and playhouse.
I suppose I knew there had to be some reason why we all must read W.S. and not Marlowe and not Jonson, but I don`t know that it was ever communicated to me that the language was anything other than a rather dry challenge, peppered with useful quotations. Then again, I didn`t know what I was looking for, or rather, how to look.
Ah, and I did get my essay back at last. An A, which is a matter of some relief.
Onward!
{rf}
When I was last in school, 2001-2003 or so, the sweetness of my day was that after class, which must have been one of your 4:30 - 7:30 evening classes, as I will have in this January`s semester, I would get off the bus downtown and walk past Munro`s Books.
On Tuesdays, they`d be closed by the time I got there, and I could only look in the dim windows. I remember the street as always dark and always shining wetly, with cool air and a fine rain just ending or just beginning.
On Thursdays, though, they would be open until 9, and I could spend half an hour browsing their remarkable sales tables. I don`t think I often bought anything, but there was always the tactile pleasure of picking up and examining the books, the smell of dust and paper, the warm yellow light, and the mental pleasure of imagining each reading -- what the contents might be, how complexly the analysis would unfold. (I always seem to be attracted to the eccentrically-populated non-fiction table, heavy on literary and anthropological material, the study of the human -- and doesn`t Munro`s sort of feel like the embodiment of old-school humanism, with all its pleasures and flaws, right down to the big wooden bookcases?)
The pleasure of my day this semester is early in the morning. My class is from 8:30 - 9:30, and at most I have fifteen minutes after class before I catch the bus to work. If I get to school early enough, though, I can spend my half-hour in the nearly empty library. Usually, I admit, checking email or playing Facebook Scrabble. I do also sometimes look up books that might be useful.
These morning have changed my sense of time. I hadn`t realized before how much you can get done in fifteen minutes. There`s time to enter the library, look up a book, go up two floors and fetch it, claim it at the counter, and still get to class on time.
Lately I`m thinking a lot about Shakespeare`s language, and so I`m looking up supplementary books about that, especially the use of puns. We had a close-reading exercise this week. I was a little hostile going in (for no very good reason), but it was illuminating. Mmmaybe even transformative.
I don`t want to get all canonical here, but the use of language, word by word, is extraordinary. It`s knit as tightly as one of your most complex antique socks,
stitchinmyside, if every loop you made and pulled tight was a word, and each thread twisted of a dozen colours of meaning.I don`t know how handsome a sock that would make, actually, but it`s incredible use of language. I don`t think we use language this way any more. I don`t remember reading anything from the 20th century, except possibly Nabokov, that has this kind of density, word and action knit so tight. I love puzzle-books, books that are ideas as well as books, but I wasn`t expecting to find that kind of richness in something so dogeared by so much use, foxed and fumbled in every school and playhouse.
I suppose I knew there had to be some reason why we all must read W.S. and not Marlowe and not Jonson, but I don`t know that it was ever communicated to me that the language was anything other than a rather dry challenge, peppered with useful quotations. Then again, I didn`t know what I was looking for, or rather, how to look.
Ah, and I did get my essay back at last. An A, which is a matter of some relief.
Onward!
{rf}
