Brad Pitt ruptured his Achilles tendon while playing Achilles in the movie Troy. Talk about life imitating art. Or whatever Troy was.

Hiromi Queen of Snacks 

Lenny, Chris, Sandy. Shameless product placement. 

Jordan and Chris drinking. Water?! 

Trav’s sympathetic wound. Andrea’s is on the inside. 

I dream of walking the way others dream of flying.

“Pay attention to the signs,” Roy says. “It was your Achilles heel you ruptured.” Achilles, as in the warrior hero of the Iliad who was invincible because his mother Thetis dipped him in the river Styx when he was a baby. His only vulnerable spot was the soft tendon that attached his calf to his foot, where she held him to keep him from falling in. And that is precisely where Paris fatally wounded him. I have a bad mental image of that elf dude from The Lord of the Rings shooting Brad Pitt in the heel in last summer’s epic flop, Troy.

My friend Andrea says that Roman soldiers used to slash the enemy’s Achilles heel, in order to immobilize them on the battleground.

If Achilles is watching us from the depths of the Elysian Fields, I wonder how he feels about having given his name to the weakest part of the human body. I wouldn’t like it. “I’m sorry but you’ve injured your Larissa heel. I’m afraid we have to operate.” Nope. No good.

Get me out of this bed. I need to go slay some Trojans.

So I was supposed to fly to Seville immediately after that Wild Words panel. What should I do but forget my bag in the bathroom, and need to run out of the Mac Hall Ballroom just as the panel was starting? I ran to get it, tripped on the three stairs leading up to the door, fell on my face, and tore my Achilles tendon. I thought I’d just sprained it. It hurt, but not much. What was strange was that I’d lost control of my leg. It felt plastic. I dragged it down to the bathroom and back up to the Ballroom. I gave my talk about Grandma Naoe and Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. Afterwards, thinking some anti-inflamatories might not be a bad thing for my aching leg, I dropped into the student clinic on the other side of the building afterwards.

“You’re not going anywhere,” said the doctor. “You’re going straight to surgery.” 24 hours and a strong hit of anaesthetic later, I found myself in Ward 72 of the Foothills Hospital, stoned on morphine, with a plaster cast from toe to knee of my right leg.

It’s three days later. I’m supposed to be visiting the Alhambra. Instead, I’m hobbling around my apartment trying figure out how I can kick a nasty codeine dependency. I’ve had lots of kind and worried visitors. I’ve watched three movies, a lot of bad TV, and more episodes of Sex and the City than I’d really care to admit.

“Life,” says my friend Slavia, “is what happens when you think you have everything under control.”

If you’re in town, and interested, I’m speaking at Wild Words: 2005 Alberta Centennial Literary Celebration tomorrow at the lovely hour of 8:30 AM in the MacEwan Hall Ballroom (3rd Floor) at the University of Calgary. I’m on a panel with Jay Gamble, Carmen Derkson and Derek Beaulieu. I’ll be talking about carnival in Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms.

It’s part of my diss. I’m interested in strategies of subject construction– this one looks at the inversion of the daylight world in order to produce a new kind of subaltern, more empowered than the protagonists of much realist fiction. It’s full of fun stuff– gender-bending, cannibalism, seaweed paste, beer and an old lady rides bulls under the moniker “The Purple Mask” at the Calgary Stampede. Yahoo!

Two days ’til lift-off. I go to Seville first. And then for a little tour of two of the famous cities of Moorish Spain– Cordoba and Granada. I am really excited to be visiting the Alhambra. Ever since reading Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, I’ve been dying to go. After that I’ll start work– a talk at the University of Huelva, a conference on Canadian Women’s Lit in Strasbourg, then talks at the universities of Avignon, Rouen and Nancy. It’ll be interesting to see what they make of me and my imaginary friends– Fox, Fish, Rachel and Miranda. I’m anticipating productive discussion. All my current interests in capital, globalization, technology, biology, and mobility are being re-imagined in Europe in very different ways from the ways they are conceived here, in the shadow of the beast.
To do/buy: currency exchange, electrical socket adapter, extra battery for the camera