Bewitched (And With Agnes Moorehead Nowhere In Sight)

      My apologies to all of you for not updating this blog of late, but, alas, there's not been much time (and certainly no energy) to write anything here. I'll spare you the boring details and simply attend to matters coming instead of gone: it seems more than appropriate that my return to Toronto, and to Pork Spew, will fall on Hallowe'en, for which the night of and the day after I'll be masquerading as an academic guest star. So, it's official, I'm turning into Dick Cavett or Zsa Zsa Gabor for a day, a disarming thought especially if one doesn't think too long on their bizarre collusion in a certain film also associated with spooky silliness. (RK's unfortunate charges might end up invoking Cavett's words to the Double-Zsa in that film: "Who gives a fuck what you think?") Anyway, this means I'll be in Toronto sometime Sunday evening, and then cavorting about Falstaff-like Monday afternoon. My lecture? I'm sure it'll prove another exercise in ritual humiliation, though it will ostensibly be on the subject of heroic and metaphysical poetry in the pre-Renaissance days. It'll be a generalist's discussion, and I suspect I'll touch on The Iliad, The Odyssey, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Caedmon's Hymn, Beowulf, and maybe, just maybe, The Vision of Piers Plowman and Dante's eternal Commedia. It'll be more thematic than intensive, an outline of basics rather than specifics, and I think I'll take it to that crucial nexus point for the heroic, when heroism is finally fused with the comic, the ironic and the tragic: Cervantes' Don Quixote, which seems to have redrawn the template for our understanding of the heroic in the Modern age. We shall see.

      It has just occurred to me that me talking about the heroic is rather like Rush Limbaugh talking about feminism, but there we go.

      So, I'll be trying to get in touch with most of you in the Toronto region before I head up, but, failing that, all I can say is this: you know where I'll be, and so you can probably guess how you can find me if you want to, though I may be outside now that Toronto, like my own primitive little burg, has banished those of that smoke to the bluster of the cold. So gather ye round, if ye wish, and tell me about the beauty of your lives, and you can lie robustly if you need to. We can knock back a few and party like it's 1399. Costumes, of course, are entirely at your own discretion. I'll be dressed as a guy that supposedly has something important to say. They key word there, of course, is "supposedly."

      So, feel free any of you in the area to join the Not-So-Good Doctor's table once more. For old time's sake. Let us be, once more, Diana's foresters, let us be minions of the macabre moonlight....