Here, as mentioned, is the picture of "the Coll" -- the United Services College, at Westward Ho! in Devonshire, "Twelve bleak houses by the shore ...." -- where Kipling's Stalky & Co. is set.

Guest Speaker

Great news: Chick-Lit writer Nancy Warren will be a guest lecturer at a soon-to-be-determined date. It won't be the back-end of February, however, because she is off to Daytona to promote the partnership between NASCAR .... & the Harlequin publishing empire exclamation-mark question-mark. (She is writing the first book in a series which will be launched at the Daytona 500. Can you guess the book's planned title?)
Update: Nancy Warren will be speaking at next Tuesday's lecture (February 6th.) Here is a succinct 'blurb:

Nancy has an honors degree in English literature and has had previous careers in Journalism and Public Relations.
She lives in the Pacific Northwest (i.e. here) with her husband, two children and an ever expanding assortment of pets.

Nancy's great loves, apart from her family, are Jane Austen novels, old movies, Swiss chocolate, and men who believe in feminism, but still hold doors open for women.

Literary Recognition:

2004 RITA for Best Traditional Romance Finalist

2004 RITA for Best Short Contemporary Romance Finalist

Being a Man ... is bad for your health

À propos (just) Kipling's "Tommy", an article at the BBC reports that, according to University of Michigan's Randolph Nesse, "Being male is now the single largest demographic factor for early death."

Simply being a man is bad for your health, doctors have suggested.
A study in the United States shows men take more risks than women and are more likely to die from almost everything from heart disease to murder.
While men are more likely to die than women at practically every stage of their lives, the authors found the risks are highest in early twenties and in old age. More >>>

The Stalky Model of British Masculinity

Here are the twelve elements of British masculinity that comprise the Kipling's 1890s representation of male-ness in Stalky & Co. -- derived by Kipling's genius from historical British culture and forming the inescape centre of gravity for the universe of British boys' book, film and comic for the century that followed.

1. A Kind and Sapient “Head” as immediate authority.
2. Male sub-cultures have quasi-automonous existence within a over-arching patriotic system: e.g. Britain. [N.b. Patriotism is implicit but heavily tabooed: vid. "The Flag of Their Country" chapter in Stalky & Co.]
3. A Chaplain-figure as council and side-access to the Head and the external political system.
4. Judicious violence encoded equally all levels of the system.
5. Encouragement of rebelliousness as a means to forestall revolution.
6. Stalkiness: cunning trumps size.
7. Stoicism, with Christian admixture, the background code.
8. Meritocracy through action: successful performance of Masculinity (vid. “If”) determines the individual male's place in leadership hierarchy. [(a.) based on situational performances: i.e. not one permanent alpha-male; (b.) original entrance to Man-hood is by major performance: a Rite of Passage.]
9. Women are on the margins -- the culture is monosexual – but they represent the external object of desire (the quest trope) once “man”-ness is achieved through culturally-sanctioned performance.
10. A small group of complementary individual types: vid. The Beatles.
11. Exclusive shared access to an esoteric code of speech – i.e. slang -- & cultural artifact – e.g. Boy's fiction in Stalky & Co., or the popmusic miscellania in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.
12. Boyhood is not training for life; rather, Life is boyhood writ large.

Lad-lit: Canadian and non-fiction.

A new book that is clearly lad-lit and clearly Canadian was reviewed very favourably in the centre fold of the "Books" section of the Toronto Globe and Mail. It was also well-reviewed in Quill & Quire, and elsewhere. The book is With the Boys: Field Notes on Being a Guy by Jake MacDonald, and is non-fiction of the reads-like-fiction type.
The Toronto Globe and Mail has the book's first chapter available online, and the following passage is worth our attention - especially as it echoes some of the ideas suggested in lecture.

Women appear in some of the stories too. Even when they're not on the scene, their absence is a kind of presence. Women keep an eye on men and exert a moderating influence on their behavior. That's one of the reasons that men like to occasionally get away from them. The singer Garth Brooks once remarked that he was teaching his little daughters a simple concept: "Men are pigs." All men know this about themselves, and they think it's funny. But at the same time, they have their own gender-specific code of ethics. Some kinds of piggy behavior are allowed, and some aren't. There are hundreds of rules affecting male behavior. That's too many to list here, and in any case every guy knows them. But women might find the male codebook strange and interesting. Women, for example, commonly assume that men like to talk about their spouses or sweethearts with their buddies. This is what psychologists call "projection." Women do it, so they think men do it too. A woman will happily dump the entire kitbag of her romantic woes on the table for the amusement of some other woman she's met four minutes ago. But no matter how late the evening or how debauched the conversation, you'll seldom hear a man say more than a few neutral words in passing about his mate. In the male codebook, talking about your love life is considered to be craven and unmanly. So women can at least relax about that.