extemporanea

I am teaching a second-year television genre seminar in the BBC Sherlock this semester, which has been inordinate fun, if somewhat demanding in terms of reading frantically up on television genre theory, hunting down screencaps and maniacally assembling Powerpoints. Today was "The Hounds of Baskerville", which has the distinction of being quite my favourite episode in the series, and gave me untold opportunity to burble enthusiastically about Gothic and detection and generic tension and self-conscious narrative and what have you. It would, however, have gone somewhat better without the gravel voice and hacking cough, because, yup, by way of encore to being sick three times in the last two months, I am ill again.

Words cannot express how bored I am with this. Shoot-holes-in-the-wall bored. Drama queen flounce-onto-sofa-and-sprawl-dramatically bored. Sherlock offers really the perfect idiom. I darkly suspect that this is actually the same bug, which has simply treated me, over the last six weeks, to a sort of postmodern deconstructed tour of itself, like those really pretentious exploded desserts they sometimes give you in high-end restaurants. You know, deconstructed apple crumble with a small tower of candied apple artistically juxtaposed with a swathe of clove oatmeal dirt and a spray of cranberry foam, while a small scoop of blue cheese ice-cream lurks in a corner, garnished with eucalyptus. Except here it's the solid cement-filled skull and continual sniffling, dribbled (and I mean dribbled) with sinus, with the weird virusy spacey stuff foaming off to the side, and finished with a solid dollop of bronchitis off in the corner. Moments of apparent actual health stretch between them like expanses of white plate, but really you know the whole thing is a unity. A horrible, exhausting, ennui-inducing unity.

Bored. Very bored. So over this. (As is the cat: the coughing seems to be freaking him out, he is refraining from sleeping on my bed in a marked manner, probably because he thinks I'm barking at him). In default of a lyric soprano and a garret, which the consumptive coughing really seems to demand, bring me a new body, stat.