Almost back to normal life

Yesterday I did the decadent steambath and plunge before breakfast thing- partly because I had facial scheduled for midmorning.

Facial - beautifully relaxing - included back massage and hand and arm massage, lovely.

Was only person on afternoon walk, got round in brisk time, in spite of slight rain and conversation with the trainer, who commented that we'd made such good time it was practically a power walk (go moi).

Pilates class, in which I got a one-to-one session for the price of a class, because other person had not turned up. Did some serious work there. Pity that I have such very bad physical memory for how certain exercises should go, because there were some excellent (if challenging) ones that I did.

Breathing for relaxation class was, well, relaxing.

More Adam Adamant in the evening. I might mind more about Georgina getting regularly captured by whoever are the swine of the week, if AA didn't also get routinely bopped on the head (flashback to first episode), tied up, etc (he gets tied up an awful lot...)

Packing up and paying my bills, with a view to spending the rest of the morning working out in gym, having whirlpool, steambath, etc, going for walk after lunch and then taxi to the station (engineering on line woez woez).

I am really feeling a significant physical difference - wish this would last.

But we need to know what we ought to be studying!

Thinking about my post earlier this week on dead white male poets and the need to interrogate the concept of the canon, and reading coffeeandink's post here. and the comments, about some AmLit type still fighting the battles of the 70s about how Dreadful and Oppressive more inclusive curricula are (with particular reference to writings by African-Americans) and claiming that people are only doing this (after 30+ years!) in order to be 'trendy'.

Which made me think that people must do this out of a deep sense of insecurity and a lack of trust in their own judgement. If they are in Literature Departments they will doubtless have been told, or picked up by osmosis, what is good important significant canonical literature and what works may suitably be studied, and who are, in terms of Stephen Potter's Lifemanship, the OKAY names to drop. We certainly saw this in that article about poetry and women poets in which the names dropped as her influences were the dreariest of safe okay names, they pushed no boundaries, had no left-field (what does this mean, by the way?) quality at all.

Whereas if they are being, as this guy seems to be implying, forced to approach works outside the Great and the Good who are universally, or at least by influential dead white males in Lit departments, deemed Worthy, how can they know what they should be looking at and what their response should be? Woez, woez, they might invest time in studying, and even publish on, someone who is Not Among the Truly Chosen, and people will point and laugh.

My general sense is that these are people who, had they been Elizabethans, would have regarded the theatre more or less as the modern equivalents regard soap-opera, or if Victorians, would have regarded Dickens as doubtless an entertaining popular writer, but not for the ages.

Which leads me to some further points. The tendency of new fields to start setting up their own canon of people who are worked on (as non-EngLit person with a fair knowledge of C19th-C20th women writers, am often given to muttering about the Approved List of New Woman novelists upon whom everybody who works on the New Woman is working, and its startling omissions, and why so little attention paid to e.g. Naomi Mitchison?)

Might be one reason why people have problems with writers like Rebecca West, and indeed Mitchison, who didn't stay inside safe boundaries, could not be easily categorised and labelled.

Goodness knows I see rather similar things going on in history, where people would rather follow the marked paths already trodden by numerous scholars' feet, instead of making a sortie into the wild jungle of untapped archives that lie all around.