Season of Mists

 Tried to recount the plot of A Prayer for Owen Meany to a colleague, got too choked up to talk; embarrassing over what is, after all, a fictional story. Later I remembered a story I’d heard from my father about one of his university professors, C. C. Love, a naval veteran (he commanded the HMCS Sackville for a while) who according to Dad, was incapable of reading poetry aloud without breaking down. I decided to look hiim up, and
guys
guys
I think Prof. Love was one of the reasons U. of T. is known for Medieval and Renaissance drama:

When I came to Toronto in 1945 as a Fellow in English at University College to work under Professor A. S. P. Woodhouse, I was almost overwhelmed with the catching up I had to do, since my first degree was in Classics. By 1946 things were quietening down and I was required to think about the subject for my Ph.D. thesis. One day Professor Woodhouse called me in to ask about this, and I told him I thought I should like to write a thesis on Hardy. He was silent for a while and then said, meditatively:

Well, Love, Hardy would be an interesting man to work on, but many others could do that. Your background in Classics, Scholar at Cambridge and eight years of teaching Latin and Greek at Bishops College School and now English at Toronto, give you unusual qualifications which should surely be utilized. Now there is a scholarly job which needs to be done as a contribution to knowledge. I think you're admirably equipped to do this. I'm talking about the Renaissance Latin Drama, which is a field almost untapped. I'm writing a book on Milton and he was very interested in this area. His notes on this have survived and are now collected in "Milton's Cambridge Manuscript"; he lists many biblical stories and sometimes gives a brief account of a plot for a play. Other well known biblical subjects he omits or merely notes. It seems likely that he was thinking of writing a play, probably on Adam and Eve. Classical scholars do not seem interested in this area, but you could do something valuable. I thought of a very good topic: The Scriptural Latin Plays of the Renaissance and Milton's Cambridge Manuscript. 

He paused and smiled: "Well, think about it. I'd be very happy to supervise such a thesis."

In other news, got dinner from Mistaan Catering & Sweets — the butter chicken this time, instead of the goat curry. It’s oddly sweet, as though one of the ingredients is honey. So far everything I’ve tried from Mistaan has been mild — given that it’s a family-run Bengali place in a shopping plaza, I don’t doubt the cooking is authentic, which raises several possibilities: 1. Bengali cooking is comparatively mild. 2. Some of the stuff is mild, some is spicy, and I’ve just hit the mild ones by pure chance. 3. Restaurants aiming at Western audiences play up the spices, on the theory that the more spice, the greater the authenticity.