Carolyn Craig

            On Wednesday I woke up with a sore shoulder. I sort of knew I would because it had been aching ever since I left work on Tuesday evening. I hate modelling and what it does to my body. If the pension I start getting next year is enough to get by on I think that for the sake of my health I should stop posing for artists.
            I was about five minutes early for class but the class ahead of us were doing presentations and so they didn’t finish right at 11:00 as they usually do. They weren’t too much over but I only had time to move a couple of tables to face the podium.
            I asked Professor Weisman if Thomas De Quincey’s writing about the Malay would have been considered racist in his own era and she said it would. But she didn’t mean by a widely accepted criteria of what racism was understood to be. She just meant that some particularly socially conscious people would have seen the prejudice. I don’t see how that’s the same thing.
            This was our final lecture on Thomas De Quincey.
            The English Mail Coach was written in 1849 and takes measure of how we understand Romanticism. It was published in Blackwood’s Edinborough Magazine which was a right wing publication and so it’s a striking contrast to the liberal periodical that published Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
            The English Mail Coach was originally two essays. The second essay was called “The Vision of Sudden Death” the two later merged into one piece of prose.
            The mail coach also transported passengers and the first class passengers were inside but De Quincey preferred sitting beside the coachman at the top so he could experience the thrill of speed.
            Travel by horse and carriage were already being displaced across England by the train.
            The entire Industrial Revolution had been powered by steam. England was undergoing changes that were devaluing manual labour in favour of mechanization. There was increasing urbanization. The landscape was changing as land became parcelled and divided by fences. The English Mail Coach then is a sentimentally nostalgic elegy just as evocation of the pastoral is also somewhat elegiac throughout Romanticism. There is a sub-industry on the way nostalgia works itself out. In Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, the smoke rising from the hearths of cottages that he describes could have been smoke from distant industries because even at that time they would have been visible from that vantage point. So The English Mail Coach is also tech nostalgia.
            The professor brought up rotary phones and record players and how there is nostalgia for them now. I said I don’t miss scratched, skipping records and she said she doesn’t miss them either.
            The mail coaches carried news of England’s three victories against Napoleon.
            I don’t remember how the lecture got sidelined again but we started talking about escape rooms. Professor Weisman couldn’t understand the appeal.
            The idea of a nation is abstract because it’s only in small villages where everyone knows each other and there’s a real sense of the whole of a community. The concept of the nation depends on a sense of connection. The mail coach delivered newspapers and broadsides in addition to letters. The coach as a national organ was spiritualized.
            The speaker sits at the top because he wants to be exposed to the landscape.
            This is not just nostalgia. Remember “The Lament of Swordy Well”.
            There was a thrill to bringing news of victory. The sound of the horses and the arrival of the mail was a concrete representation of English nationalism. The mail was an important motif as a British organ as it was a source of unification. Tampering with the mail was a dire crime. In Tennyson’s “Rizpah” a mother is lamenting her son’s execution as punishment for interrupting the mail. The mail could not be stopped.
            The great irony is that even though he offers a sentimental evocation of pre-industrial communication. The mail coach becomes an indication of forward movement, and of the triumph of war. Marking the speed of unification with common sources is an aspect of modernity and so in a sense he is welcoming the future.
            I told Professor Weisman that I know exactly what De Quincey is talking about when he says that he got a better sense of speed and power from horses than from the train. I know from riding horses that riding fast on a horse feels faster than a motorcycle even though it’s not simply because of the living, charging strength beneath you.
            On the way home I decided to stop at Metro instead of Freshco. This was a first time I’d been to Metro in Parkdale since they opened almost a year ago. Inside the building there’s a wine store and a Starbucks as well. While the price for bananas and raspberries weren’t any higher than at Freshco, the grapes weren’t any better and the coffee was too expensive, so I got some bananas, two half pints of raspberries and a bag of spicy sriracha peas, but then I walked across the street to Freshco anyway to buy coffee. I don’t think I’ll go back to Metro. The cashier wasn’t very friendly either.
            At Freshco I got a container of Folgers. I could have gotten coffee $2 cheaper at No Frills but it would’ve taken $2 of my time to bother. I also bought orange juice, coconut cream and hummus.
            I typed my lecture notes.
            I couldn’t post the link to my blog on Facebook that night until after 22:00. Apparently Facebook was down for several hours and it was the biggest outage in its history.
            I had half a can of beans with a piece of toast for lunch and the same thing for dinner while watching The Rifleman.
            In this story a gang of bank robbers is escaping a posse when Will, the young brother of the leader, Hank, hears someone call for help. Mark McCain has gotten trapped on the side of a cliff. Will stops to save him but winds up breaking his own leg. Hank leaves Will and the money with the McCains for a month while his leg is healing. But during that time Will begins to like the settled life and he falls for the girl next door. When Hank and the gang come back for him Will refuses to go. Lucas says that if Will is going straight he can’t let his brother have the stolen money. When outlaws draw their pistols, Lucas guns them all down. In the end Will goes to turn himself in but tells Ann to wait for him.
            Will was played by Michael Landon, a few months before the premier of Bonanza would make him a teen idol.
            Ann was played by Carolyn Craig, who got her start posing for a series of photographs meant to show women what great exercise housework is. She co-starred with Vincent Price in The House on Haunted Hill. Her death is listed as resulting from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and it's unclear whether it was a suicide or an accident.