Day 5: 10,056 Words

Writing was initially a bit of a slog today, but I had a second wind when we discussed Gordon's dissertation. It features prominently in today's excerpt. Little else happened in my writing today, although I laid the groundwork for a Celebrity Feud Support Group retreat at Isla's bed and breakfast.

A little context here: the Regency Movie Club is showing the 1995 adaptation of Persuasion, and they invited some actors from the Shaw Festival to watch the movie and be on a panel afterwards. This is what is happening now. 

The drawing room at the Picton Street Bed and Breakfast was a large cream-coloured room with a dark wooden floor. There were three big light grey couches with red, gold, and navy pillows that made them even more plush and sleep-inducing. The big windows looking out onto Picton Street made the room especially subject to the weather outside; it felt cozy on a rainy day, and bright and cheery on a sunny one. Isla had spent so many quiet nights sitting there, with a cup of tea, waiting to see if anyone would need anything from her before she went home for the night. One wall was entirely a bookshelf that was filled with books spanning the many decades that the house had stood. She had also spent many a rainy afternoon browsing the many books and making recommendations for guests. 

A while back, long before Isla had worked there, a guest in a cape had furtively inserted his own dissertation amongst the many tomes, hoping that the catchy title, “Worshipping at the Altar of Pre-Capitalism: Interpellation, Liminality, and the Rise of the Ego in Bubonic Plague Era European Churches.” It was apparently by Gordon Toodieloo, and had been submitted Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 2012. Everyone still talked about it—but unfortunately for the mysterious caped figure, they were not discussing the content of his dissertation, but instead the ridiculous notion that anyone would write such a thing and then expect others to read it. Her coworkers sometimes performed dramatic readings of the dissertation, laughing at how opaque and somehow misogynist the writing was. 

Isla had been delighted when a few weeks prior, a spry-looking man in his early 40s snuck in—not furtively at all, really—and had placed an even larger bound copy of a book that appeared to be a ten year retrospective on his dissertation. Curious about the contents of the retrospective, Isla decided to check into it and found that the altar of pre-capitalism was the evil within masculinity itself. An evil those in power refused to examine within themselves, preferring instead to cast the devil into the rats, into the women, into the poor, and to punish them, instead. A pattern with which Isla was definitely familiar. She would continue to make fun of Dr. Gordon Toodieloo with her colleagues, but secretly, Isla thought that this Gordon knew what was what. Or, at least he had learned what was what in the past ten years.

When the Regency Movie Club met there, she put out some folding chairs and folding tables to accommodate the larger crowd and the plentiful bowls of popcorn. Today, for the exciting Persuasion viewing event, she had put out some long tables with a pretty lace tablecloth to display the sandwiches, tea biscuits with clotted cream, and teacups that were to be used for the occasion.

Isla was placing the last of the sandwich plates on the table when the guests started to arrive. Isabelle, another retiree who had been frequenting the meetings when she wasn’t caring for her grandchild, was the first to get there. Then Mary and Dwayne came in, accompanied by the actors that had agreed to sit on the panel for the day. Mary introduced Caroline Bradley, a tall and beautiful woman who shook Isla’s hand warmly. Isla thought she had seen her as the lead in last year’s production of “The Glass Menagerie” as Laura Wingfield. Caroline introduced her two friends, Alicia and Theo. They learned that Alicia was starring in a play this season called Trouble In Mind, a forgotten classic of Black American Theatre from the fifties. They did not learn anything about Theo, because he shook their hands briskly and then wordlessly walked over to the sandwiches table. While Isla could obviously understand wanting to spend more time with sandwiches than strangers, she was taken aback by his rudeness. 

The room was gradually filled with people, and the volume was getting louder as they approached the end of the tea hour. Isla suspected that Dwayne might have spiked the tea, but she chose to look the other way. She took the opportunity to look over at Theo, who did not appear to have spoken a word to any of the event attendees. He started by hovering around the sandwiches, then he moved towards the bookcase and pulled out a couple of books. Isla hid her laughter when he pulled out “Worshipping at the Altar of Pre-Capitalism” and then quickly re-shelved it in disgust. She didn’t like to admit it, but he was wearing the hell out of some light brown chinos.