How Was Your Reading Week?

That’s good. Oh? Mine was pretty good too, thanks for asking.

You visited your grandparents, cool. I didn’t go anywhere. I’m pretty busy, you see. I had a lot of stuff to do on campus this week. Well, I spent a lot of time at the Jackman Humanities Building, specifically. That’s where the English department is located. They’ve actually got a lobby room where you can hang out and read, but it’s usually just grad students there. They’re usually pretty quiet. Now that I think about it, I can’t think of the last time I saw another undergrad in there. So maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this? It can be our little secret, haha.

Oh, you’re in English, too? That’s cool, I thought maybe you were just auditing this course since you weren’t up at the front. Especially since today we were talking about Ezra Pound. I really don’t get why you wouldn’t sit at the front for that. Sitting in the front is super important if you want professors to recognize you when you go to their office hours. Last week I was in my prof’s office hours the entire duration. There were two or three of us just talking about how Pound’s total lack of unity in the Cantos is a reply to the dialectical materialist view of history. But it’s interesting because at the same time some of his fascism was influenced by Marx. Did you know Pound was a fascist? Interesting, isn’t it? But you have to separate the art from the artist, you know?

Have you read the Cantos? I have. I read them over the Christmas holidays. I’m actually going to write a paper on them later this term. In one of my 400-level seminars, not this course.

Hopefully it doesn’t get in the way of the research I’m doing with this visiting professor from Cambridge. It’s actually a pretty crazy story as to how I got into that, haha. I saw the posting on the job board, yeah, but just a resumé and cover letter really don’t show what I’m all about. So I figured I would do some research on this prof before I met him, and then I’d have something to talk to him about when I got the interview. I knew I’d get an interview at least; I put my GPA right in my cover letter. So anyway, I found his LinkedIn and then I found a bunch of papers that he had written and I printed all of them off, as well as a couple of photos from his LinkedIn and from his Professor page on cam.ac.uk. Then I found his personal website and downloaded his CV so that I could really have an idea of what he’s all about. At this point I figured I’d try to run into him in Jackman—which I’m already at like all the time anyway—and with the photos I had a really good idea of what he’s looked like for the last ten years and was probably going to look like for the next 22 days between when I sent in my application and the deadline closed.

But at this point I figured “Well if I just make it clear to him that I’m the best student for the job he can just ignore the other applications,” so I was thinking of ways to run into him even if he wasn’t going to be on campus and figured that I might as well just catch him on his walk to campus. So one day, before he knew who I was, I followed behind him walking west on Bloor towards Spadina station but then he got on the subway to go north so I made sure to get on the same train but in a different subway car than him and luckily I got in the one right behind him and when he finally got off I got a look at his wife and kids as well since they were at Eglinton station to pick him up but they were in a rush so I didn’t get a very good look. Anyway, after all that, at my interview later that week I knew precisely the questions to ask. Profs don’t like to admit it, but they really like it when you’re interested in their teaching. It gives them a sense of purpose, I guess. So of course I got the job, haha. Like I said, funny story.

Can I add you on Facebook?