Essay Frustration

           

            On Thursday, in Children’s Literature class we continued to discuss M. T Anderson’s “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing”.

            The book, from the point of view of a highly educated slave, examines the approaching and unfolding America Revolution, which is compared hopefully to slave rebellions of Greek and Latin classical literature. Hope only lies in instability. There is an irony of the American colonists considering themselves to be rebelling slaves while at the same time maintaining slaves themselves, even to the point of having their slaves serve as proxies of themselves in the rebellion.

            Anderson’s novel destabilizes the traditional story of the American Revolution, thus challenging the monolithic artefact that is the foundational identity of the United States of America.

            Stories help one to understand one’s identity and serve to give order to the surrounding chaos.

            A counterargument by a scientist named Sharpe is presented, claiming that stories are inferior to the logic of language because they provide a trellis on which the illusion of understanding can grow. Yet Sharpe’s descriptions of his own scientific experiments on people take the form of a narrative.

            Under the tutelage of Sharpe, Octavian receives education without context, causing him to feel exiled and immobilized.

            As the United States of America takes root, Octavian searches for his own roots, but receives only fairy tales from his mother that all speech was song in the African kingdom that spawned her.

            There are four pages of the novel in which Octavian describes experiments done on his mother, but most of the words are frantically scratched out with ink, communicating indescribability, but also representing self erasure.

            After class I rode up to St. George and Bloor for my meeting with my TA, but I had more than an hour to wait, so I went to New York Fries, a few door down. There was a long line-up made entirely of high school students on their lunch break. When my turn finally came I bought a simple small order of fries and was surprised that it cost $3.40. I walked to the Jackman Humanities building and sat on one of the black metal frame benches with the metal mesh seats. I poured my fries into the brown take-out bag, sprinkled them with the contents of a small package of salt, and shook it all together. I ate them and washed them down with a Styrofoam cupful of tap water.

            I went up to the seventh floor half an hour early and sat on a bench down the hall from Christina’s office while her previous appointment was underway.

            Christina is not unfriendly, but she’s not even close to being as engaging as many of the TAs I’ve had. I think that the effect of her disengagement is enhanced by the fact that students only get fifteen minutes with their TA to discuss each essay. Uniquely and communistically, this course requires that every single student goes to see their TA, or else five percent will be deducted from their mark. I always consult my TA and since no one else usually does the same, I often get a lot of time with my TA. This system gives me less of an advantage. Fortunately though, there is no specified limit as to how often we can consult Professor Baker in her office.

            I didn’t really have an essay to show Christina, but rather three pages of ideas towards an essay. She liked my comparison of the Piccaninny tribe in J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” to the Wild Things in Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”. She reminded me that I must in my essay address the questions, of what Peter and Max’s in the two books tell us about what adulthood means and what types of future they can imagine for themselves and how do these futures change according to the age of each child?

            As I was walking along Bloor to where my bike was locked, a young woman ahead of me was telling someone on her phone, “Sorry I ruined your weekend!” and taking up the whole back of her jacket, in hand painted white lettering, were the words, “Sorry I’m Bad”.

            On Yonge Street, south of St Clair, I heard a driver in an suv ask, “Who do you think you are?” though I didn’t know to whom he was speaking.

            I was riding north past the Mount Pleasant Cemetery when someone called my name. It was Charles Winder, the classical guitarist who plays at Fat Albert’s open stage. I stopped and chatted briefly with him, and explained that I can’t come to Fat Albert’s during the school year because I need the study time.

            I rode up to Hillsdale, across that to Bayview and then I rode back down Mount Pleasant, but stopped for a while just north of St Clair, to watch three or four of what I at first thought were hawks, soaring and circling the area. I think though that their wingspan was too wide for them to be hawks, so I’m assuming they were falcons.

I returned to the Bloor Street and St George area because I had an appointment with my professor at 16:30, though that was an hour and a half away. If I had gone home, I would have had to leave again in half an hour, so I just went to sit in the park across from Varsity Stadium.

A taller than average elderly man was walking along Bloor Street with the help of a staff instead of a cane. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone outside of a theatrical situation or child’s play using a staff to walk, but it seems to me that it might be better for the posture than a cane.

After a while the sky started to sprinkle, so I waited the rest of the time on a couch in the OISE library.

            When I saw Professor Baker, she gave me helpful advice on how to get a better mark on my next prose analysis assignment. She also looked at the beginnings of my essay and made it clear that I have a lot of work to do. She had a lot of praise for the insights I offer in my writing and in my comments in class, but obviously I need more than insight to do well in this course. In discussing the way that children play at being dictators, I told her that when I was ten my ambition was to rule the world and I would draw up elaborate plans as to how I was going to achieve that goal.

            I watched the Buster Keaton short silent film, “My Wife’s Relations”. Buster accidentally breaks a window, then a large middle-aged woman grabs him and takes him to a court, but it turns out that the judge only speaks Polish and thinks that Buster and her are the Polish couple who just called to say they were coming over to get married. So Buster gets married accidentally and his bride takes him home to where she lives with her father and several tough brothers. They don’t like Buster until they find a letter in his jacket that they think is telling him that he has inherited one million dollars. Suddenly they become very nice to him. They spend all their money to rent a nice place with a butler until they find out that the letter announcing the inheritance was not addressed to Buster. He has to get away before they do violence to him.