Dorothy L. Sayers: Clouds of Witness

Last night, I finished the second Lord Peter Wimsey book, Clouds of Witness, and I very much enjoyed it.  Sayers is really quite a good writer, and although Lord Peter can get a little annoying at times, I basically like him as a character.  But here's what's interesting to me, at least at the moment:  Lord Peter is written as a modern, secular kind of guy, but Parker, the police inspector guy that Lord Peter runs around with, is all Christiany and traditional.  Inspector Parker reads commentaries on the New Testament as his bed time reading.  Now none of this is particularly interesting in and of itself, necessarily.  But here's the interesting piece:  Sayers herself was very vocal and "out" about her own Christianity.  She was certainly a scholar and an academic and a writer, and she made it clear that her beliefs and her faith motivated her work and informed her understanding of the world.  So, here's the thing:  in many ways, the middle-class, conservative, seemingly-Christian Parker would seem to be more like Sayers herself than is Lord Peter.  And I don't know what to make of this.  And I understand Peter's social class; after all, who doesn't want to read about a quirky member of the Peerage?  But why make Peter so markedly secular, especially in light of Parker's presence in the books.  I don't know where I'm going with the whole thing, but it seems somehow unexpected.

And So It Begins. . .

I've made it through the first two days of the semester.  And my sanity seems to be entirely intact.  I don't, however, expect this unaccustomed feeling of sanity to last much longer, as my allergies have been increasingly worse over the past week or so.  I'm good for the first eight hours or so after I wake up.  But then, suddenly my eyes are irritated, and all I really want to do is sleep, or maybe intermittently read and sleep.  Or maybe just zone out in front of the TV for a while.  But that's really not what I'd planned to say in this post.  What I really wanted to say is that I'm somehow both relieved and satisfied to be back to work.  It feels healthy and like working and teaching and reading and writing is what I somehow need to be doing.  But just now, I feel so completely exhausted that I think I could collapse.  I don't particularly enjoy the first day of class; I always end up going over my over-long, overly-detailed syllabus, and it's just not all that interesting, especially when I find myself doing it for the third or fourth time in two days.  Nonetheless, I do consider it important and worthwhile, but still boring as anything.  But I'm teaching such fun, fun stuff, and for the first time in a long time, my workload feels manageable.  For these things I am thankful.

Dorothy L. Sayers: Whose Body?

I'm just finishing Sayers's Whose Body? And yes, it really does have the question mark in the title, as you can see above.  Isn't this a really great, retro cover?  I have really enjoyed this book for a number of reasons.  I read one or two of Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries some years ago, and I have seen two different actors portray Lord Peter, courtesy of the BBC.  But now, I've started at the beginning with Whose Body? and hope to read as much as I can of the series (in order, of course) over the next couple of weeks.  OK, so this book is set in England in the early 20s, I think--it was published in 1923.  And one thing that we discover about Lord Peter (a younger son, without land or a title) is that he suffers shell-shock.  I'm interested in how the World Wars affect English culture, and especially English cultural identity.  And--I don't know--I'm always interested in England between the wars, particularly.  But one really cool think about this novel is the ways in which the narrator keeps reminding us that it is, in fact, a novel, a work of fiction.  Over and over, Lord Peter makes remarks like, "well, if this were a Sherlock Holmes story, instead of real life. . . "  But of course, it's not real life and is much more akin to a Sherlock Holmes story.  Towards the end, the narrator tells us that Lord Peter, as an detective, albeit an amature one, has been affected by Holmes and other literary detectives.  And of course, Peter is, in a way, the literary offspring of Holmes.  Lord Peter himself is quite bookish and quotes poetry and that kind of thing a lot, which makes it all double fun!  I'm sure that Sayers's The Mind of the Maker would be instructive here, would allow one to make connections between literary creation and the real world, but I don't remember much about it all.  I'm sooooo enjoying Sayers, anyway.  She's a remarkable person; she was a scholar who, among other things, translated Dante's Divine Comedy, into verse, I think. (Lord Peter, by the way, purchases some rare edition of Dante and reads Dante in the novel.) And she's a really good writer--better, I'd say, than Agatha Christie, who writes during the same period and seems to be much more popular, at least now.  Anyway, I realize that this isn't so like super insightful  or super academic or anything.  But I'm just really enjoying this novel and am especially intrigued by the intertextual references and how they suggest we might read / interpret the work.  Oh, plus, the book opens with a man's finding a naked corpse, wearing only glasses, in his bathtub.  And it takes quite a while to decide whose body it is, hence Whose Body?  And really, that all by itself is great!

I just went upstairs to photocopy syllabi, but the photocopier jammed, which isn't unusual, and I'm waiting for the staff to fix it.  This means that I have a bit of free time.  I've realized last night and this morning that I'm super excited for the semester to start in some ways.  I'm teaching a course that I'm calling British Detective Fiction, and it's just feeling super fab and fun and interesting.  And maybe this is why I have the job I do, because where else would I be getting paid to reading and talk about Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Morse and Albert Campion and Inspector Dalgliesh and all the rest?  Really, what could be better than that?  And I'm looking forward to all the little things, like rereading The Hound of the Baskervilles and, even better, watching all the adaptations I can get ahold of.  The one with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee is the absolute worst / best.  It could qualify for MST3K, and if you are really interested, Netflix has a great trailer for it here, which gives a good sense of the tone and production quality of the whole thing.  And it just seems like there's so much to read and talk about and look forward to.  As I've been reading and thinking about this course, it's come to my attention that all these people I know, especially my colleagues, are sort of in the closet about reading murder mysteries, and it feels great to feel like there's actually this whole community of us indulging in this reading and that, I don't know, we don't have to keep being in the closet about it.  And I keep thinking about  mysteries and detectives and popular culture and official culture and medievalism.  And I keep watching more and more of the Midsommer Murders, which are grand, and plan to start at the beginning and watch all of the BBC's Inspector Morse, who is probably my favorite.  And it's nice--finally!--to feel interested in something again.

Ok, so I haven't posted much lately--here's a quickie update.  I'm feeling less depressed / anxious, which is good.  I've been busy with prepping for the new semester--classes start Monday.  I always kinda enjoy getting all organized and putting together syllabi and planning out my semester, but it's always a little maddening too.  For example, yesterday, I discovered that three novels I'd planned to teach this fall are out of print.  That really hadn't occurred to me as a possibililty (silly me!) and wasn't an eventuality that I'd considered.  And it was just somehow so frustrating.  I mean, it seems especially ridiculous (or something) that in a series of detective novels, all but one would be available, especially when it's the one that everyone seems to think the best.  And yes, they can be purchased used online for really very reasonable prices.  But that sort of isn't the point.  I guess it was an unexpected bump in the road, or whatever.  And I've been working a lot--mental work, not physical labour--and I've been tired but not able to get to sleep.  And the whole insomnia thingy is always maddening in its own way.  And then, I've been really craving a good cheese burger, which is unlike me, mostly because I don't normally eat dead cow.  So I guess I just don't really know what's going on with me other than to say that I've been working a lot and I'm tired but I'm somehow satisfied.

I don't know where to begin.  I've been back from CA for nine days now, and with each passing day, I've become increasingly blah feeling.  With the exception of yesterday, it's rained every day since I've been back.  And maybe that's part of my current listlessness.  About four days ago, I had several nights of wicked bad insomnia, and that affects my mood too.  And maybe it's just that I'm ready to go back to work; after all, it's been about three months since I've really worked.  The only other summer I've not taught was the summer I was working, nearly feverishly, to finish my dissertation.  And that counts as work, doesn't it?  I had grand plans, at one point, to get lots and lots of studying and prep and writing done over the summer, but somehow that didn't happen.  Until I left for CA, I did get lots of crafting and yoga and fun reading done, and it seems like that's really, really what I needed to do with my summer.  (And wow, when's the last time I wrote a "what I did with my summer vacation" essay?)  But now, on the other end of things, I feel icky, that whole I-haven't-accomplished-anything feeling, coupled with creeping anxiety, the paralyzing kind.  And apparently Netflix is having technical difficulties, so I don't have anything good to watch.  *sigh*  I'm just feeling kinda lonely and lost and purposeless.  Not good.  But starting next week, I'll just have to get a lot of work done, in anticipation of the new semester, and really, maybe that's good for me.  I'm looking forward to it.

Oi.  So I haven't posted in ages, and there are lots of good reasons for my silence.  But they really aren't that interesting, I suppose.  I was in California for nearly 2 weeks.  It was a good, if somewhat exhausting, trip.  But I think I'm glad to be home.  My semester starts in less than two weeks, and I'm feeling pretty anxious about it.  I don't know why I'm feeling anxious, but it's a really unpleasant (at best) kind of feeling.  And so it goes.  I'm at work today, attempting to pencil out syllabi and plan for the semester; classes require more advance planning than most people suspect.  It feels good to be getting organized and sorted and all that.  It seems that I only have really banal kinds of things to say.  Oh well.