She Was Staring At Me

            

             
            When I arrived for class on Tuesday, September 22, a pretty young woman of East Indian descent was sitting halfway up the stairs, waiting for the earlier lecture to be over. I was standing at the foot of the stairs, doing some writing in my notebook. When I looked up though, I noticed that she was staring at me and didn’t look away like most people would when I looked back. I smiled slightly at her and she smiled slightly back, but I went back to my writing. Maybe she was expecting me to talk to her.

            I haven’t figured out yet what the subject is of the class before ours. The instructor has either an eastern European or a Slavic accent. Before she erased the blackboard, I could make out the name Visigoths among the jumble of other words that covered the board. There are a lot more older students in their class than there are in mine.

            Professor Baker was wearing a blue suit with a short, collarless jacket. Her skirt was wrinkled and loose fitting at the hem. Two of the course TAs were sitting in the middle of the front row and when the professor came over, she stood up and gave her a hug. They’ve probably worked together over several years, as is often the case as the TAs work toward their PhDs.

            In the first part of the lecture, Deirdre finished talking about E. Nesbit’s “Story of the Treasure Seekers”. She said that neither the children in the book, nor the world in which they live are idealized. It reflects Nesbit’s own upbringing and her domestic environment with her own family. The real power in the world of these children is in their imagination.

            In the text, Nesbit both pays homage to children’s literature of the past but also mocks the conventions that have been established based on those works. The texts that she cites generates creativity that lands against the wall of realism. The stories mock improbably endings.

            The treasures that the seekers acquire are far less than what they imagine they will gain, but it is appreciated as if it were greater. They often misread the messages presented by their environment but that misreading ultimately results in a traditional fairy tale ending, similar to Cinderella. They are elevated to affluence. And so after opposing conventions throughout the book, Nesbit bows to them in the end, thus fulfilling our expectations.

            The children are self-parenting, using as a guide a sense of honour acquired from reading. The message is that the British are designed and equipped to be the caretakers of the world.

            Their uncle reads the language of the furniture in the children’s home.

            Only imaginative and artistic adults have the ability to win the children’s respect. Imagination is presented as a power than derives from being open to childhood.

            I asked the professor to clarify what she said was anti-Semitic in the way the moneylender is presented in the book. It seemed like a fairly light sort of racism to me in that Rosenbaum is presented as a stereotype. I pointed out that there is a much more extreme case of racism later on when the children’s uncle declares that he would have wanted to have been seen to be behaving like a “nigger”. She said that when Rosenbaum is about to give the children a coin, he stops to caress it first and then decides to give the children something less valuable. In this way he is presented as a “grasping Jew”. In the end, when the children’s fortunes change and almost everyone they encountered in all of the stories shows up at a celebration, the kids ask if Rosenbaum will be coming. The adults dismiss him as having gotten his money back and so he wouldn’t care to be there.

            At this point, I could smell that someone behind me in the class had farted.

            After a short break, Professor Baker began to lecture about J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan”. Referring to the film, “Finding Neverland”, she said that Barrie never looked even remotely like Johnny Depp, but he might have led a much happier life if he had.

            The work began as a play for adults, entitled “The Little White Bird”, many years before it was published in 1928 as “Peter Pan”. In the original story, a man emotionally appropriates a little boy from another family. This is very similar to the real relationship between J. M. Barrie and George Llewellyn Davies. Barrie, at the time was already the best selling author of his time even before publishing Peter Pan, but the fantasy was a survival mechanism for him, because he could not deal with the adult world.

            James Barrie was the youngest and considered by his mother to be the least brilliant of her children, especially when compared to her oldest son. Ironically it was his brother who never really grew up because he died before he had a chance to. She made it clear that James was a disappointment to her and so his childhood was haunted by a lack of maternal love and acknowledgement. He was obsessed with trying to please her and kept a tally of every time he was able to make her laugh. Even in adulthood he was only 1.2 meters tall and in school, because of his height and because he had a very high voice, he was always cast as a girl in school plays. Coincidentally, Peter Pan was traditionally played by young women.

            Even after marrying, Barrie was asexual and incapable of adult passion. He was happiest with other people’s children. The Llewellyn Davies children’s father found it often annoying that he came around so much, but when he died, James became their benefactor. He even had the mother’s will altered so that when she died he would become the children’s legal guardian. Three of the five boys grew up to commit suicide and the rest were just unhappy. Their play consisted of long narratives that continued from day to day. He spoke to them about fairies as if he had first hand knowledge of them.

            The narrator of Peter Pan is very untypical, in that he is prickly and expresses opinions about the characters he is describing. He says at one point that he despises the mother of the Darling children.

            Peter Pan cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is not, and even pretend meals are just as satisfying to him. This confusion of real and unreal has proven to be infectious with children’s audiences when the story is performed as a play, especially in the scene where the audience’s clapping is that which saves Tinkerbell’s life.

            Neverland is an internal and personalized space that is different with every child.

            After class I went up to the Admissions and Awards office to ask about my grant and about my student balance. I was given a fairly good assurance that I will definitely be getting the other half of my grant in January. That means that I have to find out how much a half course is so I can save half of that from my grant refund until I have the other half in January. When I told the counsellor about the $7,000 balance on my student account, she was surprised and said it must be a glitch. She advised me to go to Student Services on Huron. I had trouble finding it and then I had trouble finding a free locking stand for my bike. I had to walk half a block down to College. At Student Services I was told I had to go to my registrar’s office and change my billing to “per course”. On my way up St George I passed a young man with very skinny legs under vertically striped baggy trousers riding a bike by pushing it along with his right leg. At Woodsworth College, the guy at the registrar’s desk simply gave me a slip of paper with a URL on it so I could change my account to per course billing. I guess I was supposed to have already done that.

            I rode down to OCADU for my first job of the new semester. I was fourty-five minutes early, so I went to the models lounge to nap. While I was there, my ex-landlady, Helga walked in. I didn’t talk to her and haven’t for years because I have bad memories of her devious tricks that resulted in me getting evicted from her place back in the mid-nineties.

            I worked for Bob Berger, who is one of my favourite instructors at OCADU. He’s genuinely interested in the people he talks to and enthusiastic about life and art. I just did one head pose for his class and he suggested I just read, so I got through two chapters of Peter Pan, reading from my laptop.

            After work, I went to the washroom for a while and while I was there, I checked my phone. There had been three calls from my doctor’s office that day and one the day before. Dr Shechtman had told me that if there was no problem with my second lab tests, he wouldn’t call me, so I guess that means I have to get an ultrasound done of my kidneys. I would have to call on Wednesday to find out for sure.