Well, the hollerdays, as Colin calls them, are over, and a new year just begun. We had a wonderful family-oriented Christmas, with lots of visiting and prezzies and snow(!). Now, Dr. T and the kids are back to the usual grind, and I\u2019m enjoying one more week at home before reprising my Lennoxville routine…<\/p>\n
\nColin is officially in Grade 1 as of yesterday, and according to the note from his teacher, he\u2019s doing well, and making a real effort to speak in French. I\u2019m still working with him at home, and I suspect that his homework will be my biggest source of worry and guilt while I\u2019m away at work.
\nI got the word from on high that I will, in fact, be full-time this semester \u2013 my colleague finally got and signed her 18-month renewable contract with CIDA, so she\u2019s off to Belgrade and I\u2019m committed to at least one more semester of Monday to Friday far from home and family. A truly good news\/bad news scenario\u2026 I love (love, love, love) the work, and the campus and my departmental colleagues; but I am really starting to wish for miracles, like some massively rich corporation in Sherbrooke suddenly offering Dr. T a lifetime contract.
\nI reread The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz <\/i>in preparation for my course on Montreal writers. Ah, Mordecai. Perhaps it\u2019s a municipal bias on my part, but Richler is, well, great. His writing epitomizes what I want to get across in this course \u2013 how setting, and specifically this city, can be a character unto itself. It molds its inhabitants, be they real or fictional. It\u2019s a microcosm of the world. The haves, the have-nots, the good, the bad and the ugly, the two solitudes (which, in Richler\u2019s case, are ironic in that they\u2019re so wrapped up in being the \u2018two\u2019 solitudes that they don\u2019t even notice the significant population that doesn\u2019t belong to either one)\u2026
\nReally, I should be applying this analysis to my course prep, which is the work I\u2019m avoiding by writing this instead.
\nBut before I go: Just finished Therapy<\/i>, by David Lodge, for the Million Book Club. Good read! Funny, sad, weird, etc. I have to admit, though, by the time I got to the end of the book I was beginning to wonder about the ubiquitous neuroses in male writers. It seems that the \u2018guy\u2019 writers \u2013 Hemingway, Mailer, Miller (Henry, that is) \u2013 have been supplanted by the quiche-eaters. Not that there\u2019s anything wrong with that. Ah, well, subject to discussion with the MBC. Report to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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