What I’m Blogging

Someone someday is going to have to explain to me the benefits of “Soldiering on”. I think it comes from those same traditions from our imperial past as “stiff upper lip” and all that rot. I have been sick for the last week or so, but I’m still going into the office. Standing by the guns all day with my fellow workers who are more or less in the same boat as I am. We are all sick, and our constant and close association has lead to just one thing. Yes, that’s right - the creation of a super work-flu virus.

…scientists are baffled by the outbreak…

It has all the same aspects of the normal flu, however it also attacks the common sense centres of the victim’s cerebral cortex. Once infected the victim is grumpy, miserable, and against the better advice and judgement of his better half, obsessed with going into the office anyway.

Scientists are baffled by the outbreak, and believe that the only cure may be bed rest and a swift kick in the arse.

Winter Tries to Prove me Wrong

I woke up this morning to snow. White, fluffy, wonderful snow. If yesterday’s post prompted nature to respond with wintry precipitation, then I promise to use the power only for good.

I was, however, disappointed by nature as I drove south to the office in Toronto. Meter by meter, the winter landscape disappeared into the bleak non winter that we have been experiencing. Weather reports say that by the weekend, temperatures will be an unseasonable 10 degrees Celsius, and the brief snow will be no more

Nice try nature. Too little, too late.

It was on this day in 1776 that a 77-page pamphlet called “Common Sense” was published anonymously, making the case that the American colonies should declare independence from Great Britain. It had been written by a man named Thomas Paine. The pamphlet sold more than 500,000 copies, more copies than any other publication had ever sold at that time in America.

…persuaded most ordinary Americans to support independence…

Adams would always be somewhat jealous of the attention “Common Sense” received, but even he had to admit that it was “Common Sense,” more than anything else, that had persuaded most ordinary Americans to support independence. Adams said, “Without the pen of the author of ‘Common Sense,’ the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Where’s the snow? I remember snow. When I was a boy the snow from the driveway was piled high on the yard; towering over my head like a white, motionless, tsunami. Mind you I was only three to four feet high then, but still.

…we expect to be shovelling driveways…

There was a faint dusting of snow just after Christmas, and since then record high temperatures, grey gloom and light rain. One would think we were living in Vancouver. This however is Toronto, and in Toronto we expect snow. We expect to be shovelling driveways. We expect there to be so much snow that we have to call out the Army to come clear it away. But there is no snow, and perhaps it is for the best. We will not suffer the ridicule of our fellow countrymen over a future operation “snowplough”, and the Army is on tour in Afghanistan anyway.

They say that the deep cold of winter is just days away. They say there will be snow soon, and a rebirth of the central Ontario psyche that demands blankets of white fluff on the ground. I’m not so sure… I think maybe winter has lost it’s edge, and is a Lame Duck for this year, and some say the next as well. I hope to be proven wrong.

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, which took place on this day in 1815. It was the last major battle of the War of 1812, won with the help of a pirate named Jean Laffite.

…it took place after the war was over…

The war of 1812 had started for a variety of complicated reasons, but mainly because the United States refused to put up with British control of the Atlantic Ocean while the British were fighting a war with France. When the war started, the United States had only existed for a few decades. By 1814, after just two years of fighting with the British, almost all the buildings in Washington, D.C., had been destroyed, the U.S. treasury was virtually empty, and the British Navy had blockaded every major seaport on the East Coast.

At the Battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson managed to fend off the British attempt to take over the mouth of the Mississippi with a ragtag band of volunteers, Indians, and pirates. It was America’s greatest triumph in the War of 1812, but it turned out that it took place after the war was over. The United States and Great Britain had signed a treaty, ending the war, on Christmas Eve, a few weeks before the battle. The news of the treaty just hadn’t reached New Orleans in time.

Restarting after vacation is hard. There are a million things to take care of that were let go during the time of rest. It seems that for every day spent resting and enjoying your family, the workload of the first week back at it is increased “logarithmically”. With mountains of tasks to do, it is important that your head is in the right place as well. Unfortunately, mine is not.

My body is at the desk in front of the keyboard, my mind is at home reading, relaxing, and raiding the refrigerator for snacks. This whole working thing is going to take some getting used to again…

It’s the birthday of the poet W. D. (William DeWitt) Snodgrass, born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania (1926). He started writing poetry at a time when the poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had persuaded most poets writing in English that poetry should be full of imagery and symbols and allusions to mythology, but that it shouldn’t contain any obviously personal details.

…helped inspire a whole new school of poetry…

But while Snodgrass was studying poetry at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the early 1950s, his marriage began to fall apart, and he couldn’t help but write about it in his poems. He showed some of these personal poems to his teacher, the poet Robert Lowell, but Lowell didn’t like them.

Snodgrass kept working on the poems for the next few years, while he took a variety of teaching jobs. He eventually sent the revised drafts to Robert Lowell again, and this time Lowell thought they were amazing. They even influenced Lowell’s decision to start writing personal poems of his own. Lowell helped Snodgrass get his first poetry collection published, and it came out in 1959, called Heart’s Needle. It was Snodgrass’s first book, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Snodgrass’s work helped inspire a whole new school of poetry in which American poets began to write openly about their personal lives for the first time in decades. Snodgrass has since been called one of the founders of confessional poetry, but he said, “The term confessional seems to imply either that I’m concerned with religious matters (I am not) or that I’m writing some sort of bedroom memoir (I hope I’m not).”

But in defense of writing personal poems, Snodgrass said, “The only reality which [a poet] can ever surely know is that self he cannot help being. … If he pretties it up, if he changes its meaning, if he gives it the voice of any borrowed authority, if in short he rejects this reality, his mind will be less than alive. So will his words.”