Victorian Graffiti

There are so many things pregnant women aren't supposed to do or eat. Deli meats, fancy cheese, caffeine, strenuous exercise. I haven't bought into much of it. Other than not drinking alcohol, I'm not finding this pregnancy thing all that restrictive. Of course, what I do is probably seen by many as bad pregnant behaviour, and I'm putting my life and the life of the shrimp at risk and blah blah fucking blah. Imagine all that concern over eating a hot dog! Besides the natural restrictions food aversions force on me, I haven't cut anything out besides alcohol. I checked all my meds and supplements to figure out what was safe and what wasn't and I just ask my Dr. or pharmacist if I have any doubts.

I eat sushi, hot dogs, deli meat, blue cheese, soft cheese, runny eggs, rare meats.

I drink the same amount of coffee I always have (one cup a day).

I take hot (not smokin' hot, but hot) baths.

My doctor is totally cool with all of this.

I barely read anything about pregnancy and I exercise when I feel like it. I act like a normal person, albeit a normal person who tries to sneak in nap time on a regular basis. I even had half a Guinness with a meal last week. *SHOCKER*

I thought I would hate pregnancy, but I don't. At all. As my doctor says, pregnancy seems to agree with me. A huge relief considering I still have 6 months to go.

I'm revising a conference paper on Dracula that I delivered at ACCUTE two years ago. The paper isn't half bad, actually, and with some tweaking I think it will make a decent journal article. I'm making the tone a bit more formal, extending some of the critical junk -- for conferences you can do a lot of riffing off the top of your head, but that doesn't help a journal reader -- and trying to come up with a conclusion that actually wraps everything up without sounding too pithy and half-assed. I think I'll be done by tomorrow evening, if I keep at it. Right now my head hurts and I need a nap.

I have learnt a lesson, however, and it is as follows: when one is writing conference papers, one tends to think "I don't have to include a works cited, right? Who cares if these quotes are a little off in numbering? I can ad-lib this part, right?". The answer to all three of these questions is nonono (repeated for emphasis). It's so much more of a pain for one to try to find one's quotation two years after one has completed a paper. One really wishes one could go back in time and kick two-years-younger one in the pants.

A couple months ago some of the Victorianist PhD students were joking around about the high fertility rate of Victorian profs in our department (two profs going on mat leave around the same time = limited committee members). I was not pregnant at the time, but as luck would have it, I am now adding to the knocked-up nineteenth century scholars group.

Apparently we Victorianists are a fertile lot. I ran into a former prof in the library on Wednesday and he said that when he was in grad school, it was always the Victorianists who were pregnant or had kids before they finished the PhD. An inexplicable statistic, surely, but an interesting one nonetheless. There is nothing particularly maternity inducing about Victorian literature; in fact, the idea of compulsory motherhood was interrogated during the Victorian era, and the individual rights of wives and single women were finally legislated into place. Pregnancy was still referred to using a kind of fictional shorthand, but pregnant women were slowly becoming more visible in novels and short stories. Of course, not much was said about the technicalities of pregnancy or childbirth, beyond the intimation that birthing often involved blood loss, forceps, and a fairly high maternal mortality rate.

We talk about pregnancy more freely now, but there are certainly things no one tells you before you get pregnant. With that in mind, here is my list of Things I Had No Idea the First Trimester of Pregnancy Would Bring:

*Overwhelming fatigue
*Boobs so sore, heavy and hot they feel like burning bags of sand attached to my chest
*Strong aversions to foods that seem innocuous -- like soup. I miss soup.
*The ability to sleep through the night -- this is actually wonderful, and I'm sure I will
miss it as it will never happen once the kid arrives
*Afternoon, evening and middle-of-the-night nausea. Mornings are all clear, though.
*Intense cravings for raw vegetables -- another good thing.
*The ability to yak in one's mouth but suffer through and feed the cats anyway

I'm sure I'll have more to add later. Feel free to add your own.

During dinner on Saturday, we (two Michaels and one Ben and me) discussed the Lord of the Rings movies. My favourite is the second, the others seemed to prefer the first, and we all agreed that the third is good but, alas, predictable and disappointing in its final execution of the scenes in the shire. It's all just so thoughtlessly confirming of compulsory heterosexual matrimony as the only ending for the real hero -- and by the real hero, we mean Sam. Frodo is the main character, but he's not a real hero. He's odd, so it makes sense that Elijah Wood plays the part. Elijah Wood is creepy as fuck.

Visual evidence, exhibit A:

This is Wood playing Frodo. What the hell, man? Are you trying to steal my soul? And he's not even DOING anything creepy here -- he's just standing around!

Of course, eventually he does put the ring on, being the weirdo-outcast Frodo and all. Never mind all the warnings, Frodo -- Sam will save the day! Yeesh. And to top it off, he's practically suicidal -- he's only happy at the end when he's boarding a boat to....where again? Oh, right. CERTAIN DEATH.

But I can forgive one creepy hobbit role. After all, Frodo's character is complex, and the juxtaposition of the cute wee hobbit image and Wood's icy eyes and awkward, uncomfortable presence make the character interesting. But does he have to be creepy all the time, and does he have to do it so darn convincingly?

Visual evidence, exhibit B:

Sin City had a lot of evil characters, but Wood's dead, dead eyes and smug grin make Kevin the movie equivalent of the creepy dude who lives down the street with a collection of naked dolls and a freezer full of unidentified, slightly rotting ground meat of some kind. Oh, and he owns a wood chipper of some kind despite living on a gravel pit. Creepy as fuck. Gives me the shivers.

The worst of it? Elijah Wood the actor is actually creepier than the plastic action figure made of Kevin.

At least the doll looks a bit angry.

Can Elijah Wood play any role without looking creepy? A quick unscientific image search says no. And as a warning, don't do an image search for Elijah Wood when you're home alone at night. It's like going into the basement when you hear a noise at night -- just not a wise decision.

When I'm sick with a cold the only time I feel good is when I'm in the bath. You know what I mean? You fill up a warm tub, soak until you feel wrinkly and relaxed, and then you figure you've revived yourself enough to face the remainder of the day. But once you're out of the tub and dried off -- once the prospect of getting dressed hits -- bang, you feel sick again, and ready for another soak.

I hit the library this afternoon and picked up some new books: another book by Andrey Kurkov called The Case of the General's Thumb, On the Road by Kerouac (I know, how hideously 10 years too late for me), Herzog by Saul Bellow, and How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn. I haven't decided which one to crack open first.

It's a windy, temperamental day. My kitchen is a mess. My motivation is missing.

I've been fumbling with the poem for a while now. I recently included it in a poetry reading and it sounds much better than it looks, but I also edited it while I was reading. Unfortunately I didn't take notes after the reading.

Seaside Blues

At Margate we did not walk along the water.
The promenade offered a better view:
in front, the dove-grey ocean;
behind, a concrete slab of flats.

Years ago Brits flocked to this spot,
a handy jaunt from London.
Even Oscar Wilde would attest
to its lack of snobbishness.

I am very glad you went to Margate;
It is a nice quiet spot not vulgarised by crowds of literary people.

Tonight, we take a wrong turn off the bandstand
and confront a modern scene:
ladies of the night
and a man being obscene.
Towards our hotel the sea-bathing hospital is brambled
and a sign on it reads: Sold: Ferrari.

So this is seaside England today:
Car companies buy up the shoreline,
the grand hotels look beaten,
the boardwalk glows with marquees.

It is hardly Stratford,
but people still choose to stay.

And in the air there is something that tugs at the past:
an imagined memory of corseted ladies and well-suited men
walking arm in arm, as we have just done.

The sunset is massive.

It bleeds into water.

Near China Beach

I woke up with a sore throat this morning. I feel stuffy and cloudy now. I suppose it matches the day -- warm, but not consistently bright. I had a bath to ease my back.

I suppose this is my version of "This lime-tree bower, my prison." I'm a bit Coleridge today, whiny and self-important. Mike, Scott and Caroline went our to sightsee and go to Beacon Hill Park. My back is still spasming randomly so I am home, alone, considering the garden, considering going back to bed.

Yesterday I thought about how I write: in my journal, I am surprisingly careful, holding back some bits, exaggerating others. I don't quite understand the journal concept -- why keep one? To have a written record, yes, but I'm not sure if it's for me or for the future. Maybe someone will find it and read it and I've secured some immortality by tracking my life. When I write here, with just the possibility of public consumption, I am less restrained, but I also write about things less private. I do not write about family conflicts or issues with friends or intimate bodily details. I also type here, whereas I hand-write most of my academic or creative writing. I have no desire to delete here -- it's a very of-the-moment mode of writing, and I don't feel the need to record anything for posterity (although I do get a kick out of the date stamp on every entry, especially since it isn't entirely accurate if I don't publish an entry right away). This is, I suppose, an exercise for me. It is a unique way to write: to know it can be read but not to know by whom. I write freely here. I feel particularly enlightened today.

...if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

It's too early to compose anything intelligent, so for now I'll give you an entry from my old blog that drew some interesting feedback.

Why Orwell Kicks It

A few years ago, Christopher Hitchens published Why Orwell Matters, a commentary/quasi-bio of English essayist and novelist George Orwell. I haven't read it, primarily because I'm too busy reading Orwell and haven't yet explored the commentary on Orwell, but the title resonates with me.

Orwell really kicks it. To be fair, I'm not an Orwell expert, and I'll admit that his idealistic Socialist opinions never seemed to reach any fruition (but to be fair, he died at 46 from TB) -- but his writings about poverty and the various humiliations that are tied up in poverty are, well, touching. I've never been as poor as Orwell, and Orwell was never as poor as some of the friends whose lives he narrates, but he does a damn good job of talking about poverty in a way middle-class folk can understand.

Does that sound strange? It shouldn't. The middle class as we know it today is a fairly new phenomenon, and middle-class living condition have changed drastically in the past 200 years. In the mid-19th century, firmly middle-class folk didn't necessarily own their homes, but they did employ servants. They spent money on school for their children and very little on vacations. They likely had tabs at local grocers and launderers, but they probably had little debt otherwise.

When Orwell writes about being poor, he writes about it as a member of a particular generation of middle-class folk, but his writing is relevant to current ideas about poverty and class today.

Have you ever thought, either about yourself or others, that if money is low the solution is to just not go out? Not do anything fun? Not spend money on non-essentials? Easier said than done, because, as Orwell points out, poverty is boring. It's complicated -- like the rent pay-day shuffle so many students these days have to deal with -- but life gets pretty monotonous when you don't have the money to do anything fun. In Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell writes about living on the fringes of poverty:

You have thought so much about poverty--it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar LOWNESS of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.

And about the strange relief of finding yourself at rock-bottom:

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs--and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

I've never hit rock bottom, but a few times I've felt close. Luckily there are a lot of social safety nets out there, but the day I started looking up how to apply for welfare I realized how a lack of money can make you feel ashamed. Like you're somehow a bad person, even though your only real problem is cash flow. These days, few people in countries like ours starve, but we hide poverty. This really isn't anything new, at least according to Orwell. To keep up appearances, Orwell would spend his last francs on a drink while out with friends; these days, we patch up missing income with credit cards. We don't run tabs at stores, but we live on money borrowed from the bank. We lie about how much money we make, spend and save. So not much has changed in almost a hundred years: "all day you are telling lies, and expensive lies."

I don't know what it's like to be homeless, and besides the occasional day or two without money while travelling I don't know what it's like to go hungry. But it's naive to think that the things we do to keep up the appearance of prosperity and fill our days would suddenly change if we really did hit rock bottom. Orwell knew this, and part of his message about class was the need for empathy. And a good glass of wine every once in a while.

I made it to the doctor this morning and luckily I have no nerve damage in my back. Still don't know what caused the back pain, but at least I have some options now. I'm going to book a chiro/massage appointment, and my doctor gave me some anti-inflammatory pills and some Valium (it's a muscle relaxant and has the fewest side effects -- who knew?). So I've temporarily become a 1950s housewife, popping Valium and dozing on the couch. All I need is a box of bon-bons and an apron. Oh, wait....