Donna Reed

           

            On Saturday I could feel the jagged tip of a cold poking around in my throat. It had been a couple of years, so I guess it was due, but I was still hoping it was just poking its head in the door to say hello and then leaving.

            I spent a lot of the day reading three stories by Katherine Mansfield: “Bliss”, “Something Childish But Very Natural” and “The Garden Party”.

“Bliss” was centred on a well off woman who is feeling in a state of bliss all day as the evening approached when she will be throwing an artsy private party. The feeling continues up until the end of the soiree when she spies her husband giving a passionate goodbye kiss to one of their guests. At the close of the story, nothing has changed.

“Something Childish But Very Natural” is sort of a modern Romeo and Juliet story but it has the feel of a dream. A young man has put his things on a train and gone to browse at the bookstand. He becomes preoccupied with a poem when the train starts moving. He rushes and gets on the wrong car where a pretty young woman, just past sixteen is sitting. They speak shyly but pleasantly but then she has to get off. He asks if he can see her again and she tells him that she rides at the same time every evening. When next they meet they both readily admit that they are in love. They begin a blissful courtship except for the fact that she won’t even let him hold her hand. They rent a cottage together with separate bedrooms. One afternoon as he waits for her he receives a telegram. When he reads it everything goes dark and ugly.

“The Garden Party” is about class. A wealthy family is throwing a garden party. News comes before the party begins that a man that lives in a nearby working class cottage has died in an accident. One of daughters of the rich family, Laura, wants to cancel the party out of respect but her family thinks she’s being absurd. The party takes place and is wonderful but Laura has the idea at the end to take the leftover food to the family of the dead man. She has only planned on dropping off the basket but she is drawn in to meet the widow and led to look at the body. It turns out to be a good experience for her. But isn’t life …?

I listened to a couple of episodes of Amos and Andy. One of them had: Sapphire: “George, why do you have that look on your face? George: “Can you think of a better place for it?”

I went out to pre-pay for next month’s phone service but I was a few minutes late after Wind Mobile had closed. I stopped at the liquor store on the way back home and bought two cans of Creemore, one for Saturday and one for Sunday.

For the last twenty-four hours I’d marinated a pork sirloin roast in balsamic vinegar, oil and all-purpose seasoning. I roasted it that night with a potato and a small yam and ate them while watching the first two episodes of the Donna Reed Show from 1958. I remember having a crush on Donna Reed when I was small. Shelly Fabares, who played her daughter, was pretty hot then too and I was impressed with the acting of Paul Petersen, who played her son.

In the first episode, Donna’s husband, a paediatrician, never had any free time with his family because duties kept on stepping in their way. Donna found clever ways to get around them. One of her husband’s patients kept on complaining of being ill but he couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. Donna figured out that it was the school bully that was making him pretend to be sick.

Donna’s children were arguing about the difference in how long it takes them to get ready for school. The brother said it takes him five minutes to get ready but it takes her thirty-five. His sister said that the difference is that she washes. He quipped that it’s amazing how dirty she gets just from sleeping.

Thinking Outside the Box

           

            On Friday morning I went to my second Continental Philosophy tutorial. The room was occupied with another tutorial when I arrived and so I sat on the floor out in the hallway. My TA, Sean arrived, looking as tense as ever. He leaned against a wall while he was waiting and banged out a rhythm with his right hand on his stomach, his left hand on his pants pocket and his right foot on the floor. I assume he actually is a drummer.

            Once we were inside, he asked us all to sit in the exact spots we’d been in the week before. He had actually made a map with our names on them and he actually had some people move to fit his diagram. He explained that this would help him remember everybody’s names.

            He said of Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments”, “This is so fucking hard!” Apparently it’d been his first time reading it as well.

            I asked if anyone was ready to write a paper on the subject, and like me, everyone seemed at a loss. Sean told us not to worry, because the papers would be expository in nature.

            He told us to keep in mind that Kierkegaard is messing with us.

            Everyone had been expected to bring in one text based question, but Sean said he would call on people at random to voice their query. On this day though, he just went around the circle and had each of us communicate a problem we had with the text.

            Someone wanted to know the difference between the absolute and the ultimate paradoxes. Another was confused about the goal. A guy who’s been in two other courses that I’ve taken: Knowledge and Reality and Science Fiction, wanted to understand the significance of the Cartesian dolls. Other questions covered: Why is god equated with the unknown; why does the moment have decisive significance; why does the offence come when reason interacts with the moment; why is the student throwing away the truth. I said I was thrown off by the idea of the divine teacher and wondered if it could be replaced by Nietzsche’s “Superman”.

            Sean reminded us that Kierkegaard is posing as a non-Christian under the guise of Climacus in order to attack the common sense truthfulness of Protestantism, which Kierkegaard says is too easy. He also attacks the German Philosophical institution of the day in which the professor is the source of understanding, claiming that is also not so easy.

            To solve the problem one has to eliminate the question.

            Sean then related to us the puzzle of the nine dots:

.   .   .

.   .   .

.   .   .

            The problem is to run four lines through the dots without lifting the pen or retracing any lines. The many solutions to the problem involve literally thinking outside the box, and in fact, the expression, “thinking outside the box” comes from this puzzle.

            According to Kierkegaard, the Socratic moment is not enough. He says we need to get past the Socratic figure to help transcend our state of error. The teacher then must be god. To move from ignorance to knowledge, only something beyond the human condition is sufficient. To inhabit the Christian perspective is both absurd and the truth. The disciple receives the truth from the teacher and is thereby reborn. Before this rebirth it is as if the student did not exist. Someone asked if this applied to all knowledge and Sean said that we are talking about capital T Truth here.

            Unequal love is worse than unrequited love.

            The paradox is part of the engine of reason. Passion drives the quest for reason, fuelled by the paradox. The more you analyze something the more you encapsulate it in your own conceptual biases. So let go. Then reason negates itself and becomes confused.

            The absolute paradox is that no one can understand the moment.

            Trying to overcome the unknown by making it more like me. The only way to overcome the paradox is if god pulls it back. Complete likeness comes from the descent of god.

            After tutorial I rode up to the Remenyi House of Music to buy a set of guitar strings. I told the guy that my G-string is always fraying at the second fret. He told me that their guitar repairman comes on Friday afternoons and that if the problem is with only one fret he might not need to take it away to repair it. I might bring my guitar with me next Friday but if he can’t fix it in the store, I won’t let him take it, because I need it every day.
            I had time to go home for about an hour before going to PARC to teach my yoga class. Anna was the only one that came and she was pissed off because she had heard from two other women that they would come.

            When I am directing her in a pose, she often expresses disappointment at her not being able to perform it like she used to. I told her that there are some things we’ll never be able to do again. She looked at me and exclaimed, “Don’t say that!” I insisted that it’s just a fact. I used to, for example, be able to put my leg behind my head, but I can’t anymore. It’s not about being able to do the postures perfectly, but rather about doing the postures to try to stay as flexible as one can. There’s nothing to be disappointed about.

           
            

Gorgons

On Thursday morning I was in the lecture hall waiting for Philosophy class when Naomi arrived, saying “Good morning!” I asked her how she was and she answered, “Same old same old!” adding, “It’s hard to believe that it’s Thursday again already!” I nodded in agreement, saying, “Time goes fast when you’re busy!”

            As she was unbundling herself, I asked her if the weather was a big adjustment for her when she first came from Israel to Canada. She said, “A little bit, but it wasn’t too bad.” I suggested that maybe she had some resistance to the cold in her DNA and then asked from where her family had come when they first moved to Israel. She told me that it had been Europe, of course, but that it wasn’t exactly clear what part. I told her that I got a Hungarian vibe from her. She said that her last name, Budin, originated from a region that is now in the Czech Republic, but she thinks that the family had been in Poland for a long time leading up to the war. Some joined the Russian army or worked in the salt mines there and there were a few years in Brazil. She said there are a lot of blank spaces about the history of her family. I told her that she could probably find out a lot but it would be time consuming.

            Naomi told me that she’d love to learn to speak Yiddish. I commented that it’s a fun sounding language and that the sound of each word seems to fit the meaning, like “farmisht”, meaning “mixed up”. She added that there are no swear words in Yiddish. She said that the worst word in Yiddish is “schmuck”. When I looked up her claim about swearing in Yiddish there seemed to be plenty of profanity. In a certain sense there are no swear words in any language because words that were once in common use or meant something else, only became offensive later on. I’m pretty sure there are words in Yiddish that are used for cursing. What about “fakakata”?

            Professor Gibbs began by clearing his throat and then described it as a type of “preliminary expectoration”, which is the name of a chapter in another work by Soren Kierkegaard.

            He announced that he has adjusted our schedule of readings and our first paper deadline by one week. He also reminded us that 25% of our fiscal investment in this course is in the tutorials.

            We returned to Kierkegaard’s paradox, the nature of which can’t be understood.

            A hidden lover is not a lover. If I love someone and they don’t see my love, I am miserable.

            Socrates does not love his students. He flirts with them but never puts out. When he is in bed with the sexiest boy in Athens, the boy says to Socrates, “I’m cold!” but Socrates just tells him to put on another blanket. The meaning here is both erotic and cognitive. Socrates does not give his ideas but rather cultivates them in his student.

            Gnosis comes from the emptying of the self. We will leave this course, knowing and being less. I will be less me in the end.

            Is there a relationship with another that changes the self?

            The philosophy of the New Testament is too crazy to have been made up by human beings.

            The conclusion of chapter two of “Philosophical Fragments” is that we can’t imagine this. The conclusion of chapter three is that we can’t understand this.

            Of the title of chapter three: “The Absolute Paradox: a Metaphysical Crotchet”, to crotchet, unlike to knit, requires only one needle.

            A paradox can stump the mind, but the absolute paradox destroys both the subject and the self that thinks about it. Deconstruction.

            Creatures like Pegasus and the gorgon are mixed creatures. They are heathen prototypes of Christian theology.

            The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without passion. Always reach for the paradox because it shows what you can’t do with reason. Real passion wants to be dissolved. To discover the supreme paradox is to discover what thought can’t think. It’s there in all thinking.

            To know what the human is, is self-love. But then the religion of love comes along and says to “love thy neighbour as thy self”. Uh oh! The lover when transformed by love loses touch with its own self. Self-love is the engine of loving another but it turns against itself and becomes someone else, and so self-love perishes.

            What happens when reason tries to understand the unknown?

            If there is no god you can’t prove it and if there is a god you can’t prove it. The tautology is: assume god exists, and then prove it. We can’t demonstrate that anything exists, let alone god. If we have the works, mustn’t there be a god? Not really.

            The professor encouraged each of us to feel that if we made the world, it wouldn’t be like it is.

            Let go of proof. Say you don’t know and thereby prove the unknown.

            The leap is that when one stops trying, the unknown comes.

            Instead of the unknown though, let’s call it “the absolutely different”.

            If it is not like me it must be god. To look for what is not like me is to cause confusion as to what “not me” is. The human falls apart in searching for the non-human and that’s how we get gorgons and Pegasus.

            The B hypothesis is that I produce the unlikeness for myself but depend upon god to know the difference.

            If you want to know the unknown, look for the absolutely different and then go crazy. The absolute paradox declares that there is an absolute difference that needs to be overcome with an absolute likeness.

            Understanding can’t understand the moment when everything changes.

            The self loses the self and regains it when someone gives it back.

            If passion is not happy, reason takes offence. The offence is reactive rather than aggressive. The agent that causes that offence is the absolute paradox. The acoustic illusion is that the paradox is speaking but it sounds like it is coming from the offended one’s rage. The offence has a pathos all its own.

            Professor Gibbs concluded the lecture by saying, “If I made this clear, you haven’t been reading the right book. I hope you don’t understand this book.”

            Naomi said to me that every time she thinks she understands it, she realizes that she doesn’t.

            I nodded in agreement and asked her if she was free to go for coffee. She answered that she had to rush off to the office. She explained that her boss fired her because she couldn’t commit to full time but he keeps calling her back. The paradox is that she is training her own full time replacement but she’s spending more time on the job than the new girl. She said she might be able to go for coffee next week, but I told her I had to work next Thursday.

            I rode home and sent an email to Andrew Lesk, sharing some ideas I had on James Joyce’s Araby. I had time to sleep for about an hour and fifteen minutes before heading back out to my Short Story lecture. Before the lecture, Andrew read to the class most of what I’d written in the email. I won’t repeat them here because they were all comments that I’d made in my journal entry from two days before that spoke about the Araby lecture.

            This lecture started with James Joyce’s “The Dead”, which has five sections: the musicale; the dinner; the speech; the farewells and Gabriel’s vision. Each scene leads to a kind of climax that is more compressed each time. Gabriel is our mode of consciousness but he can’t assimilate all the activity. He identifies with things that are not Irish. Someone calls him a “West Briton”. Britain is east of Ireland and so a West Briton would be an Irishman who acts like an Englishman. Gabriel thinks that being Irish is low rent. He reads Browning, an English poet; he wears galoshes, which are Continental; he went to Trinity College in Dublin, which is Anglican; there is a statue of Wellington, who downplayed his own Irish birth and there is a reference to William III, who conquered Ireland.

Gabriel carries with him an air of superiority. He thinks that people should be in tune with his beliefs. He gives a tip to someone he knows, which is a faux pas. He proposes a pompous toast.

He wants to have sex with his wife but she is thinking of someone else who died for his passion.

There is a sense of timelessness in the finale. Vision and sympathy is expanded together.

“Snow was general all over Ireland.” This is a fantasy because the weather is never the same all over Ireland.

Instead of a lecture of James Joyce’s story, “Eveline”, Andrew handed out a sheet of seven questions and split us into seven groups. I was in group one with three young women, dealing with the question of the significance of the fact that Eveline, the third story in “Dubliners”, is the first to shift from a first person to a third person narrative. I offered that the third person perspective gave a better view with which to view Eveline’s suffering. Someone else though had an idea that hadn’t occurred to me, which was that Joyce has never written in the first person from a woman’s perspective. When we had all spent about twenty minutes workshopping the questions, Andrew called on our group first.  I immediately pointed to the woman behind me and declared that she’d had a great idea. She accused me of throwing her under the bus and Andrew joked about me smoothly passing the buck like he said he often does. I explained that her idea just happened to be the one that every one of our group thought was a good one. Our clever colleague though seemed to choose not to speak. Instead, the woman with whom I’d been in Children’s Literature last fall explained the point about James Joyce not having written in the first person as a woman. Andrew told us though that he had in fact written from a woman’s perspective at the end of Ulysses. I’d forgotten that.

Andrew skipped the second question and went on to the third, which asks the significance of the reference to “Damned Italians!” Apparently Italian immigrants, especially in North America, were often considered to be people of colour back in the 19^th Century.

The fourth asked why Eveline is pleasantly confused by the song, “The Lass That Loves a Sailor”?  It’s a song of conquest by English sailors, but also a love song. It perhaps confused Eveline because it hinted at bad intentions on the part of her suitor.

Who is the man from Belfast who built the houses on the field where Eveline used to play?” He is British.

The word “dusty” appears twice and “dust” and “Dusted” appear once. Why so much dust? The accumulation of dust relates to time and it also covers things up.

The usual interpretation of the end is that Eveline is in a state of stasis. How might this not be the case? She is resisting, which is not static. She also “sets her face” which implies activity.

in the echo of the underpass

two dogs howl like wolves

at rush hour

That night, Nick Cushing had planned on dropping by at around 19:00, to drop off a scanner he was giving me and to make a recording of a revised script for his animated movie. It was after 22:00 when he finally called. It was too late to ask our brains to tackle a script, but he brought the scanner and a couple of cans of beer. We chatted and drank 

Saving Superwoman

           

            As I was getting ready to go to the food bank to get a number on Wednesday morning, I heard Sundar, the superintendent, mopping the hallway. I hadn’t seen him in the building since the day a week and a half before when the exterminator was supposed to have come to treat my place for cockroaches. I went out to ask him what happened, because I hadn’t seen any trace of the white dust that I’d expected to see behind the stove, in the back of the cupboards, along the baseboards and under the kitchen radiator beside the garbage can. The conclusion I’d come to that day was that the exterminator had not dusted and had rather come to spray poison in my place but on seeing that my cats were still in the apartment, had done nothing. Sundar told me that the Orkin man did indeed dust my place, because he saw him do it. I argued that the cockroaches haven’t diminished at all since that day, but he said the technician told him that it would take two weeks to take effect. I shrugged and said, “Okay.”

            When I got to the food bank there was a small line-up, but it was already moving. There were about seven people ahead of me by the time I’d locked my bike and stepped in line. The tall, slim, talkative young man that I see at the food bank every Wednesday came up behind me and asked if this was the line-up for a number. I confirmed that it was. Then he stepped ahead because he recognized the woman in front of me and went to greet her. Then he turned to me and said, “I saved this woman’s life yesterday! This woman is Superwoman!” I thought that if she’s Superwoman, his saving her was pretty impressive. He didn’t exactly describe in detail the story of this rescue, but he said it happened downtown and he had seen her in need. He then backed up a bit in the driveway to demonstrate. He began pretend running and said, as he moved forward, “I was like ‘Here I come to save the day … linebacker!’” and then he threw up his arms in touchdown victory celebration. The woman in front of me stood there, serene and silent. The young man said, “Ya gotta have humour!” By this time there were four of us in line and the man in front, who I’ve seen around the neighbourhood since the first day I moved to my place almost nineteen years ago, agreed. He said, “There are too many people frowning! You see them when they are coming out of church!” The young man talked about how his parents are starting to invite him into their home again. He said that they recognize that he’s working hard and trying to improve himself. He added that this is what happens when one lets Jesus in.

            I got number 27 and went home for a while.

            I came back two hours later, after they’d started calling the numbers.

            Once I was inside and shopping, the first set of shelves where they tend to keep condiments, flour, mixes and chips, was almost empty. I took some crackers. I skipped the shelves with the pasta, rice and sauce because I have plenty of that at home. I took a box of generic Rice Crispies from the third set of shelves. In the cold section, Sue had two young helpers with her, who looked like siblings. The girl, who looked about twelve, gave me a litre of vanilla flavoured milk, while her little brother, looking at me hopefully, handed me a package of ham slices. I got from Sue a Quinoa Mediterranean Chicken Lean Cuisine, and moved on. The woman ahead of me picked a large bag of bagels from the bread section, but the woman minding the loaves that day told her it was too much. She opened up the bag and dumped out some of the bagels into a bin of buns before retying the bag and giving it to her. I asked for some raisin bread and she found me a loaf with nuts and raisins. The woman handing out the vegetables and fruit that day, gave off the vibe that she was the mother of the two children helping out in Sue’s section. She gave me a handful of Brussels sprouts.

            That night, I looked out my window and saw a poster-sized square of cardboard that had been cut from a larger box. On it was written a message in black marker, but I couldn’t read it because from my point of view it was upside down. I opened my window and stuck my head out into the night and looked down with a perspective un-obscured by my dirty rain stained panes. I was trying to mentally turn the message right side up in my head when the west wind came along and blew it away.

           

           
            

"Why Don't You Join the Rosicrucians?"

           

            On Tuesday morning I rode through a light rain to philosophy class and as usual I was the first one there. I set up my laptop and tried to make sense of Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments”. About fifteen minutes later Miriam came in.

            She sat to my left with one seat empty between us.

I commented that I guess we weren’t in the same tutorial after all. She said that she was in Sean’s session. So was I, but it turned out she had the one he gave two hours later. She observed that he’s very passionate. I think she meant “intense” and I added in agreement that he’s sort of like the Henry Rollins of philosophy.

            She stripped her upper wear down to a tank top. A tattoo took up the whole of her right arm and disappeared into the fabric at her shoulder. She began massaging the tattoo clinically but sensually with her left hand for a while and then she ran a small pad of tissue, which I assume was soaked with alcohol, over her body art. I got the impression this was treatment for a recently acquired tattoo, so I asked her about it and she confirmed that it was new. She said it wasn’t finished though and pointed out the outlines still waiting to be filled in. She told me that she’s been working on it for the last ten years. It’s her design but someone else is doing the drawing. I didn’t stare that closely at the imagery but I did notice something like a fairy with bat wings among the complex visual display. I asked her for the story behind it all but she answered, “Too long!” She told me that the tattoo runs from her right arm, down her right shoulder, cross the top of her back at a downward angle to finish or start on her left ribs.

            I told her I couldn’t think of a single image that I wouldn’t get bored with after about five minutes. She explained that it’s not about the images but rather what they represent. I told her I knew that but I don’t even like wearing t-shirts with images on them. She said that every time she looks at her tattoo she gets excited.

            We discussed the course and she complained that so far, after two lectures, they are still just talking about what we are going to talk about, without delving into the material itself. I said that I find Nietzsche a lot easier to understand than Kierkegaard. She commented that they spent a fair amount of time on Nietzsche in Introductory Philosophy. She confirmed when I enquired, that this was her second Philosophy course. She added that Philosophy is her major but she was thinking of changing that. Her plan had been to go into Criminology but she failed the required Sociology course. She said she was somewhat handicapped by English being her second language. I had detected a slight accent when she spoke and now asked her what her first language was and she told me it was Hebrew.

            “So you’re from Israel!” I said, “That explains the name Miriam!”

            “My name’s Naomi.” She told me, without annoyance.
            ”Naomi!” I was embarrassed, “Where did I get Miriam from?”

            “It doesn’t matter. It’s almost the same thing!”

            “No it’s not!” I argued, “Other than having three syllables, it’s not the same at all!

            “Well, they’re both Biblical names.”

            “So did you serve in the army?”

            “Yes, I was in special ops, though I didn’t know what I was doing and still don’t know what I did. I wanted to be in combat.”

            “How long were you in the army?”

            “Girls serve two years and boys serve three, though you can apply to serve longer. “My sister liked it, so she did another year.” She paused and added, “I didn’t kill anybody though.”

            “But you said that you wanted to go into combat. You might have killed people if you’d gotten in.”

            “Well, I was eighteen when I joined. At that age everybody wants to do combat. There’s a sense of …”

            “Romance?”

            “Yeah”. She told me that kids know for a long time that military service is something they have to do, so they are mentally prepared for it when it happens.

            Professor Gibbs came in, looking recovered from his illness. He seems like an extremely good-natured person even when he isn’t saying anything.

            He began by describing where our peripatetic course has gone so far. At Emmanuel College there had been no room for us at the United Church Theological Seminary. He joked that it was maybe too much philosophy for the United Church but then added that in fact the United Church is one of the most open minded of the Christian churches. We were moved before our first lecture to the Koffler multi-faith centre but then we were bumped from there by a history course. Finally, there we were as he spoke, at Alumni Hall, on the campus of St Michael’s College.

            The professor thanked Keegan for lecturing in his place on the previous Thursday, but commented that Keegan must not have read chapter two of Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments” because he had ASCENDED to the balcony.

            Then, finally, at the beginning of the third week of a course that is supposed to begin with Kierkegaard, Robert Gibbs began talking about Kierkegaard. He said that Kierkegaard is confusing in important ways. But then he stepped away from Kierkegaard again to touch on some of the philosopher’s we will be studying later. Heidegger, the greatest 20^th Century philosopher, was a Nazi. He asked, “Can philosophy recover from that? He added that the later writers talk a lot about the earlier writers in a kind of snowball.

            When we read works by Kierkegaard for which he used pseudonyms, Kierkegaard wants us to think about the books as if they were by other authors than himself. Behind “Philosophical Fragments”, for instance, Kierkegaard, a devout Christian, as Johannes Climacus, is posing as a non-Christian. Climacus’s task is to make Christianity unintelligible. Chapter two is plagiarized from the New Testament. Chapter three is an attack on Plato.

            The question here is, can we make rational sense of this? Kierkegaard is writing to an audience that knows Christianity but telling them that what they think they know they don’t. He is driven by his own commitment to Christ to deconstruct Christianity.

            In Chapter one he asks, “Can truth be learned?”

            Plato told of the traitor General Meno. Can virtue be taught? Not to Meno!

Plato said that knowledge is recollection, which is a pre-echo of Hegel.

            Socrates failed with almost everybody he taught. From a Socratic perspective, there is no course in which you are learning, “So I hope people are worried!” Did Socrates want to give to people what they already know, or take it away? Climacus is deeply Socratic. Socrates would have been a lousy philosophy professor.

            In the first chapter of “Philosophical Fragments” there is lots of language related to birth and midwifery.

            Meeting the teacher is an “occasion”.

            You are less of a human being if you received the knowledge from someone else.

            Hegel was like a philosophical rock star and people thronged to universities where he was lecturing. I wonder if there was a mosh pit. Then Schelling came along and took the matters with which Hegel dealt to an even higher level. It was Kierkegaard though who declared, wait a minute, that isn’t knowledge! The teacher’s goal is to help you fin it in yourself. The teacher should withdraw and disappear.

            The A premise then is that you can’t get much from anyone. You have autonomy. Think and judge for yourself.

            The antecedent state is the moment of decisive significance.

            The B premise is that a new kind of teacher must provide the condition for understanding. The highest kind of relationship between human beings is a Socratic one, but god can transform the learner. God already gave the learner that capacity and the learner lost it.

            The acoustical paradox is that understanding cannot of itself conceive, understand or resolve.               One can only be in error by one’s own action. The decisive moment then was not when the teacher gave the knowledge, but when we threw away our freedom to know.

            The Aristotelian moment is that you can’t pull back an act of free will. It’s not freedom unless you can give it away. Freedom is the principal that you can divest yourself of freedom. It wouldn’t be freedom unless you could abandon it.

            If the moment of teaching is to be decisive it must recreate the learner.

            Socrates does not allow you to be reborn.

            Can we imagine divine love from outside? No.

            Chapter two of “Philosophical Fragments” changes the register. It’s all about love and will.                 There’s a bit of Kierkegaard’s contemporary, Hans Christian Anderson, in this chapter. Love equalizes. Love creates understanding and then goes looking for it. If love is not equal it is unhappy.               The higher one will be miserable. Is there a happy love story in existence? Pygmalian. The professor said, “Bring me a poet! We need help!”

            Socratic ignorance is a way of equality.

            In the way of descent, the king descends as a servant. Love does not alter the beloved but rather alters itself.

            During the last few minutes of the lecture, Naomi was putting on her clothes. At the end, she stuck a cigarette in her mouth, said she’d see me Thursday, and rushed out the door just like she did the last time we had a Tuesday lecture, which was our first lecture.

            I rode home and had time to sleep for an hour before riding back downtown for my Short Story lecture.

            This week were looking at a few stories from James Joyce’s “Dubliners”.

            All the stories are connected and speak to a sense of community.

            One of Joyce’s main concerns was with how Ireland was being held back by Catholicism. He saw that it leads to paralysis of the mind.

            There are no joyful Joycian stories, except perhaps in parts of Ulysses.

            “The Sisters” tells of actual sisters but also means nuns. They also represent Irish culture.

            The third stroke of the clock refers to the Trinity.

            A simple story, dense with meaning that criticizes the Catholic Church.

            The word “queer” refers to corruption.

            Someone is referred to as a “Rosicrucian” and Andrew stopped to ask if anyone knows what they are. I said the Rosicrucians are a secret society and they used to post ads in comic books for people to send away for reading material. Andrew Lesk, who also teaches the Graphic Novel course didn’t know that. I added that in Leonard Cohen’s song, “The Dress Rehearsal Rag”, from his album, “Songs of Love and Hate”, he sings, “Why don’t you join the Rosicrucians, they will give you back your hope, You can find your love in diagrams in a plain brown envelope.”

            The priest is referred to as being paralytic.

            A simoniac is someone that profits from selling sacred things.

            A mortal sin is a harmful sin that kills the babtismal spirit while a venial sin may only be a little hurtful.

            The last sacraments are given to dying Catholics.

            Andrew was talking about the priests body rotting and going into that good night when suddenly, as if of its own free will, the projector light came on, shining on the blackboard.

            A breviary is a collection of scriptures.

            The priest’s life was crossed.

            The chalice contained nothing. There was nothing in it and nothing to it. Catholicism is empty.

            In the story “Araby” we began with the end of the story in which the boy is inexplicably angry. Then we went into the story to see if we could figure it out.

            In the home of a Catholic priest that died, the boy finds three books:

            “The Abbot” by Walter Scott, which centres on Mary Queen of Scott’s imprisonment, escape and defeat.

            "The Devout Communicant: Rules for holy week”, which was written by an Anglican.

            “The Memoirs of Vidocq” are the story of the French criminal turned criminologist who is said to be the father of criminology.

            Behind the dead priests house is a ruined garden with an apple tree in the centre. The place of original sin.

            Andrew, who was raised Catholic, saw something fishy in the priest having an estate to distribute in his will, because he thought that all priests take a vow of poverty. I looked this up and found that this is not the case. Certain orders like the Jesuits and the Dominicans require a vow of poverty from their members and some individual priests may choose to take the vow, but there is no rule that says a priest that hasn’t taken the vow can’t make money or even be rich.

            Mangan’s sister is symbolic of sexuality and commercialism. The boy has a perverse adoration for her, watching her from his window. She plays him like a harp, which is the symbol of Ireland. Again there is the idea of sister and nun. Mangan’s sister speaks of her convent.

Caroline Norton’s “The Arab’s Farewell” is a parallel story to this.

            The boy’s uncle gives him a florin, which would have had the image of Queen Victoria, representing colonialism. He has no father, like the boy in The Sisters.

            The Araby bazaar was in a cathedral like hall. The kiosk keepers had English accents.

            The boy finds his epiphany while looking into darkness.

            He buys nothing. He doesn’t buy it. Commercialism.

            As I was getting ready to leave at the end of class, some of us were discussing with Andrew the days when drugs like opium and cocaine were not illegal. I mentioned that Sherlock Holmes took cocaine, but Andrew thought it had been opium. I said I was pretty sure that he used cocaine to keep himself on the ball. Since then I’ve confirmed that the idea of the “seven percent solution” relates to cocaine injection.

            That night I watched an episode of the Walt Disney “Davy Crockett” TV series. They’d run out of stories from his journal, so they made movies out of some of the made up legends. It was a pretty horrible story about a keelboat river race. 

The Truth About the Alamo

            

            On Monday I woke up at 5:25, not wanting to get up any more than usual, but feeling I could handle it. I got washed up, flipped my bed against the wall and started to get dressed. I turned on Radio Canada and heard classical music playing, which was odd, because after 5:30 a news program called Heure Du Monde comes on. I double checked the time and saw that it was 3:35, so I went back to bed.

I woke up at 5:22, feeling twice as groggy as I’d felt when I got up at 3:25.

At midday I worked at OCADU for the final week of my pose for Bob Berger’s class. While posing I read two stories by James Joyce on my laptop: “The Sisters” and “Araby”, both from his book “Dubliners”. I’d studied “Araby” in Academic Bridging back in 2008. The story of a boy in love for the first time is a lot easier to identify with than the story of the wake of an old priest. I also read a little of Soren Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments”. I still can’t think of any questions to ask about it though.

            I went home, spent some time on the internet, and then I took a shower followed by a siesta. I got up at 19:00. I cut up a squash and cooked it in a little water and then I added to that a Campbell’s asparagus and basil soup. I grilled some chicken in the oven and watched Walt Disney’s production of Davy Crockett at the Alamo. Now there’s a heavily mythologized story.

            The real story is that Mexico encouraged settlement of Texas by English Americans because it wanted them to farm cotton there and also for them to act as a buffer to hold the American aborigines at bay. The settlers were Southerners, and understood cotton, as did the slaves that they brought along to pick it. There was one slave for every five Texans. But Mexicans were moving toward slavery abolition and when Santa Anna banned slavery, the Texans declared themselves as the independent Republic of Texas. After the Alamo the Texans won their freedom and asked for statehood in the American union, as long as they could keep their slaves. Meanwhile a large number of their slaves escaped to live in freedom in Mexico.                                                                      

            

Ransomware

            

            On Sunday morning my nightmare was realized. A virus had encrypted almost every one of my saved files and every folder was accompanied with a file, using the Google symbol, with the name “Help Recovery” on it. When I restarted my computer a note appeared on my screen that was literally a ransom note that read: “What happened to your files? All of your files were protected by a strong encryption with RSA. More information about the encryption RSA can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem). This means that the structure and data within your files have been irrevocably changed. You will not be able to work with them, read them or see them. It is the same as losing them forever but with our help you can restore them. How did this happen? Especially for you was generated the secret keypair RSA – public and private. All your files were encrypted with the public key, which has been transferred to your computer via the internet. Decrypting of YOUR FILES is only possible with the help of the private key and decrypt program, which is on our Secret Server!!! Alas, if you do not take the necessary measures for the specified time then the conditions for obtaining the private key will be changed. If you really need your data then we suggest you do not waste valuable time searching for other solutions because they do not exist.” This was followed with several choices of links for me to follow, which I didn’t. Instead I looked it up and found that this is called “ransomware” and it all started in Russia, of course. I guess since they wanted me to be able to access the internet in order to pay them, they selectively left unencrypted any files I needed for that purpose.

I went to talk to Tony at Mobil Computers but he said that tax season has begun and he doesn’t have time to fix computers when he’s doing people’s taxes. I called up the place where I bought my computer but they were closed on Sundays.

            I then did what I should have done as soon as I bought my computer. I downloaded Malwarebytes. It’s free but they give you the Premium version for two weeks. I ran a scan and the program found fourty pieces of malware, including several Trojans, which it removed.

I was fortunate that I’d recently gotten another system and that most of my files were still on the old hard drive. It was also lucky that this had happened before Nick Cushing came back for his hard drive dock and so he had inadvertently saved me all over again. I deleted every single visibly encrypted file and replaced them with the files from my old hard drive. I made sure every now and then that the ransomware didn’t have some ability to infect the files again from within, but I found they were all functional. Once I’d deleted the ransom files from my start up menu, I stopped receiving the ransom note. The only thing that came up after every restart was a warning that a certain file in the registry failed to load. I assume that is one of the files they put into the registry.

What I really should have done was to reinstall Windows but my system was functioning and was only slowed down by the work of Malwarebytes Premium fending off a veritable storm of viruses trying to get in. I may have to get an illegal version of Premium to keep the wolves at bay.

Nick Cushing came by with Bruce March later that afternoon to pick up his hard drive dock. By that time I had replaced all of the infected files. I have a little bit of money left over from my Grant, so if I need to soon I can just buy a dock of my own.

I spent a good part of the rest of Sunday downloading a lot of the files I’d lost. It’s also very fortunate that I post a blog on a daily basis, because I was able to simply copy my journal back from my blog and reformat it into the Word document in which I keep it.

All I really lost from this hassle was time that I should have been spending reading the material for my two courses.

            What gets me is thinking about the kind of people that would be in such a criminal business that would kidnap people’s computer files and hold them for ransom. Why would someone be all right with fucking other people up like that? Do they only live in Russia or are there people here that would be that mean? Either way they are total assholes.            

The Word "Malicious" Sounds Delicious but It's Not

           

            Saturday was a laundry day and since the salvation Army thrift store is right next door to the Laundromat, I went in the see if there was anything I needed there or anything interesting that I didn't know I needed. I keep looking for a clamshell soap dish and a clamshell light fixture but I never see them. I used to have a soap dish like that to go with the clamshell shaped bathroom basin but it broke many years ago. I found a hair dryer, not for me because I never use one, but for my cats, so I can torture them all with a flea and tic bath. I’ll be less worried about them getting sick from the cold if I can dry them off thoroughly afterwards. I still couldn't find any curtains for the living room window that weren't too feminine, too light or too small. I did find a yoga mat though to eventually replace one that will probably fall apart soon.

            That night I watched the first episode of the Walt Disney television series from the fifties based on the life of Davy Crocket. I think the guy’s accomplishments are a little too impressive to be fully real. It was interesting to see Buddy Ebson as Crocket’s sidekick. This role was probably the last major stepping stone before he became a star as Jed Clampet in the Beverly Hillbillies.

            My Short Story professor had posted a document online in PowerPoint format, which my system couldn't read, so I went looking for software to convert a .ppt file to .doc format. I found a site called ppttopdfonline.com and it seemed innocent enough, but I think I was stupid to not look it up. I see now that it’s been found to carry malicious software. It didn't even do the job after I gave it my email address. At first nothing happened that I could tell. I found another site that claimed to be able to do the conversion but this time I looked up “Zamzar” and found they have a good reputation. They also did the conversion easily. Later on though my computer started acting strangely and I started getting a persistent pop-up from a program that wanted to do something I didn't ask it to on my system. I went to bed worried that I’d gotten a virus.

Gentrification

           

            On Friday morning I headed down to the Sidney Smith Building for my first Continental Philosophy tutorial. I was looking forward to seeing Miriam again but she either didn’t come or simply was assigned one of the other two sessions. I suspect the latter is the case. I was the first person there. The TA for our group turned out to be Sean who is full of unrelaxed energy. He sat at his laptop, banging out rhythms while he was waiting to start. There are supposed to be twenty-five students in our tutorial but there were only eleven of us there when Sean started. The grading for this course is unique because just for just showing up at the tutorial and voicing an opinion gives us a full 25% of our overall mark. Sean congratulated us for giving a shit. He told us that he was supposed to ask five of us to join one of the other tutorials, but since there were only eleven of us, he chose not to this time.

            Sean introduced himself and promised that he gives a shit about each one of us. He told us a bit about himself, saying, “I’m a loud, white male who has ascended the privilege ladder. I’ve got it dialled up to eleven! I’m very intense! I do this like my life depends upon it because it does! I’m intense, but it’s safe. Don’t be intimidated. There are no stupid questions! This is exceptionally difficult material! I’m a hard but thorough grader but you’ll get more feedback than you ever have before! I’m harsh but not unfair! I’m looking for an excuse to give you an A!

            He urged us to bring at least one text based question to every tutorial and to have an angle.

            He said that the fear of public speaking is statistically considered to be a worse fear by people than the fear of death.

            He told us that he prefers to lean away from structure and towards conversation. He said that we could interrupt him but not any of our fellow students.

            He had each of us introduce ourselves and say something about our philosophical backgrounds. I said that I was an English major and that I’ve taken two philosophy courses so far. I described myself as being more of a right-brained thinker and so that’s why I enjoyed the Philosophy of Sex but hated Knowledge and Reality. Of the other students there was a wide mix from first year to fourth year.

            He declared, “I love Continental Philosophy! Continental Philosophy is the best!” He said that in Kerkegaard and Nietzsche, philosophy is also psychological.  Nietzsche, Sean added, was a very troubled person. He said of Knowledge and Reality that it’s a very hard course. Continental Philosophy is psychologically more visceral because it deals with death, suffering and meaning.
            I commented, “So it’s more like poetry then!”

            He said that certainly the first two texts we would be studying are more performative and literary. Kerkegaard’s use of pseudonyms is a type of performance. The work is emotional. It attempts to untie cognitive knots. People read Nietzsche as a straight up moral relativist. Nietzsche was an arch atheist who wanted to exorcise the philosophical world of Christian morality, while Kerkegaard was profoundly Christian. Both of them, however, were existentialists.

            Kerkegaard’s pseudonym of Johannes Climacus, or John of the ladder, was a gesture to the Hegelian system. Architectonic of reason. An innate drive in reason for maximum generality and specificity.

            Hegel struggled to rise above Kant. Phenomena versus pneumena.

            Kant wrote “The Critique of Pure Reason” – “In order to understand how judgement works we have to posit certain structures in the mind and shut the door on any other absolutes.”

            There are phenomena which are appearances. The way the world appears to you depends on you. This creates a chasm between phenomena and pneumena.

            Then Hegel came along with “geist”.

            Kerkegaard rebelled against the search for absolute knowledge and the forgetting of concrete problems of being. Because he believes in god he thinks that there is an ascent.

            Hegel thinks that everything is spirit. In the teleological analysis of history, knowledge is the historical process. Individuals are spirits that are part of a bigger spirit.

            Kerkegaard is less abstract. He uses a pseudonym to distance himself from the material so that the reader will be drawn in to participate. He doesn’t want to be an authority at the centre. His pseudonymic texts are more procedural.

            Sean told us to think about the propositio and the last part of the preface.

            I had time to go home for a couple of hours before teaching my yoga class. There was a meeting in the healing centre that didn’t clear out until five minutes before my class was supposed to start. The leader of the group told me that it was about speaking out against the gentrification of Parkdale. He asked to pass the info on to my students. Anna and Eleanor both came to the class. When I told them about the group, Anna rolled her eyes, and asked, “Do you know how long they’ve been trying to fight gentrification in Parkdale? Ever since the new owners of the Gladstone Hotel kicked out its tenants!” This happened more than ten years ago.

If I heard Anna right, she’s the president of the West Lodge Tenants Association. She told me that she remembers when the business beneath where I now live was a hat shop.

I had a bit of an argument with Eleanor about the difference between physical and psychological addiction in reference to marijuana. She couldn’t understand why marijuana couldn’t be physically addictive if it gives someone pleasure. I said that it’s about more than pleasure when something is physically addictive. It’s about feeling that the body needs the drug desperately to the point that they almost think they’ll die without it.

I watched an episode of Make Room for Daddy in which Danny was auditioning piano players for a USO tour and had this one Hipster who called him every name but Danny, explaining that no one calls anybody by their real name. He called him Jack, Clyde and several other appellations. He also did a handshake that involved him sliding his palm over Danny’s. The show ended with a song and skit that would be considered extremely racist by today’s standards. Danny and another man pretended to be Chinese and sang a ridiculous song in which English words were made to sound like Chinese. 

           

The Ghost of University College

           

           On Thursday we finally had our second Continental Philosophy class, after two cancellations. We were in a new location as well, but Alumni Hall on St Joseph Street is a building to which I’ve been many times, though not to room 100. It’s considered to be on the first floor but the entrance from there goes to the balcony, so I went to the basement. I opened the door but it was pitch black inside and they never have the light switch near the door at U of T, so I backed out into the hall. After a while I decided to go in again. I had to feel my way along to a little stairs that ascended to the top of the incline of the lecture theatre. Once I was there my eyes adjusted but though I could basically see the whole space of the auditorium, the floor and my feet were still in total darkness, so I walked very slowly to the front, just in case the downhill walk wasn’t a smooth ramp and had steps at some point on which to stumble. I made it to the front and then looked for the light switch, which is usually near the front, for the convenience of the lecturer. Finally I found the switches and turned them all on. There was a power bar plugged into the podium that my laptop cord could easily reach without being a tripping danger for other students and so I set myself up, making sure I had the reading material at the ready, if needed.

            A guy came in and walked up to the podium. I guessed right away that Professor Gibbs was still recovering and that this was one of our TAs acting as a substitute. His name is Keegan.

            An attractive early middle-aged woman came in and sat just to my left. I recognized her from the first lecture when she three rows below me and just across the aisle to my right. I found her to be quite striking with her long legs, her auburn hair pulled back tightly and she also had a presence that was very noticeable. Now that she was closer to me I noticed that she had a small white laptop and was writing her lecture notes directly on the screen with a special pen. I wonder if it reads the cursive and accurately changes it to print. I assume the screen has to be touch sensitive.

            I got the impression during the lecture that she was turning her head and checking me out a couple of times.

            Our substitute lecturer, Keegan, told us that his field of study is German philosophy, especially Hegel, who led the German Idealists. Our first subject of study though, Soren Kerkegaard, was an antagonistic critic of Hegelianism, which was the rising philosophical school of the day, even though Hegel was already dead by this time. German culture was colonizing Europe. Keegan said that unlike most philosophers, knowing Kerkegaard’s biography is more of a key to understanding his philosophy because his thinking was interwoven with his lived experience.

            At this point Keegan urged us to not lose patience with his lecturing on a topic on which the professor asked him at the last minute to speak. He added that patience is a terrible thing to lose.

            Soren’s brother Peter was a bishop and a Hegelian. Kerkegaard positioned himself against the Christian mainstream, which his brother represented.

            Soren’s fiancé, Regina Olsen, was another key figure in Kerkegaard’s development because he broke off the engagement at the last minute. Regina committed suicide. He felt guilty about this for the rest of his life and this informed his thinking. He kept a journal of his romance with Regina and it is the part called “The Seducer’s Diary” of his first major work, “Either Or”. He concluded that a person that follows truth must refuse marriage. When he wrote under certain pseudonyms he emphasized this point more. In the early 20^th Century, an interest in Kerkegaard was revived by Franz Kafka and György Lukács. Lukács felt the same way about marriage.             
            Soren’s father was a melancholy and anxious minister who passed a lot of guilt down to his children. Inherited psychology, anxiety and irony became some of Kerkegaard’s themes. Soren inherited a fortune from his father and his Bourgeois background is significant, but not at this point of our study. It’s good to keep in mind though the material conditions of philosophy. Nietzsche’s dad was also a priest.             
            Both Kerkegaard and Marx had been students of Hegelianism. I asked, “Didn’t Marx and Kerkegaard have the exact same birthday?” Keegan said he didn’t know.             
            Soren’s mother is present symbolically in his writing as the Danish language. The word for mother tongue in the Danish language is important. Kerkegaard had to make a special request to write his dissertation on irony in Danish rather than Latin. Danish emphasizes the local that is never consumed completely. There is some irreducible about the local and the particular. Hegelians were particularly consumed by the universal.             
            Our first text of study has two titles: “Philosophical Fragments” or “A Fragment of Philosophy”. These don’t mean the same thing. One implies that the systematic whole is not engaged. Kerkegaard wrote the book under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, which means “John of the Ladder”. The name emphasizes ascent. This directional metaphor is also a Hegelian concept. But a ladder is used for construction and is also a structure in itself. A ladder is an appendage of a larger structure without being part of it. Architectural metaphors are often used in philosophy because a system of philosophy is considered to be a structure. Kant used the word “architectonic”.                                 When reading texts that Kerkegaard wrote under a pseudonym, think about the character Kerkegaard has created separately from Kerkegaard himself. When, for instance, is Socrates himself and not a tool of Plato’s argument? But this is not to say that the character runs counter to Kerkegaard. The editor of this work by Johannes Climacus is listed as Soren Kerkegaard. An editor is a type of midwife.             
            The first three questions in Philosophical Fragments are: Is an historical point of departure possible for an eternal consciousness? How can such a point of departure have any other than a merely historical interest? Is it possible to base an eternal happiness on historical knowledge?                    In the first question there is the idea of eternity, which is a strange idea. Eternity is atemporal but not the opposite of temporal. Sempiternal means everlasting, thus standing the test of time. But standing the test of time is not to be eternal. The word “infinite” means without end. Circles are infinite. Schlegel talked about good and bad infinity. He said that the progression of numbers is bad infinity and circles are good infinity. When Kerkegaard talks about Archimedes not wanting his circles disturbed, he is making fun of Hegel. Kerkegaard is not a trumpeter of the absolute as a goal. The absolute represents eternal consciousness, eternal happiness and the immortal soul. The infinitive in grammar is atemporal.            
            According to Hegel, history is moved by finite spirit. Thinking has a manifestation in the world and forms our history. History is contrasted by nature. Our concept of nature comes from self-understanding.            
            He’s saying this is not Hegel.             
            Of the title, “Philosophical Fragments”, a fragment is contrasted with the whole. Fragments don’t make a whole. The text is based on the idea of unity, which has form (form contains the idea) and content (extensional and intentional content). What is being unified? A fragment doesn’t have unity but is rather an anarchic collection of properties. A philosophical system is supposed to anticipate new developments but fragments don’t do that.            
            At this point, in trying to begin talking about the beginning of the preface of “Philosophical Fragments”, Keegan started with the words, “The beginning …” and then in a sheepish voice he asked, “We’re out of time aren’t we?” and that was the end.            
            As we started to gather our things up, the attractive woman to my left turned to me and said, “It seems he talked more about Hegel than he did about Kerkegaard!” I said that I guess since Kerkegaard stood against Hegel, Hegel sort of defined his thinking.
            She told me that I was right that Kerkegaard and Marx had the same birthday, though they were five years apart. I told her about the idea I had to write a dialogue between Kerkegaard and Marx in the form of a Minstrel Show comedy skit. She said that was a good idea.             
            I introduced myself to her and she told me her name was Miriam. She wondered if we would be in the same tutorial on Friday morning. I suggested that the groupings might be according to our last names. She said that hers starts with a “B” and since mine is “C” we thought that there was a good chance. She said she had a lecture at 18:00 and so she was going to go do what every girl does, then she paused. I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking that I was going to sleep and wondered if that was what she meant that every girl does. Then she finally said, “Read”.  I did not know that that was what every girl does. We said that we’d see each other the next day and said goodbye.             
            I went home and had time to sleep for about an hour before heading back downtown for my Short Story lecture. This time we talked about Stephen King’s “The Boogieman”, which deals with psychoanalysis; and “The Mangler” which plays with the idea of machines having a life of their own, which has been a prominent fantasy since the 1950s when home appliances became a common thing.             Andrew Lesk projected a quote from Douglas Winter for us to read: “ Horror fiction's focus upon morbidity and mortality suggests a masochistic or exploitative experience, conjuring subjective fantasies in which our worst fears or darkest desires are brought into tangible existence. But conscientious fiction of escape provides something more—an art of mimesis, a counterfeiting of reality whose inducement to imagination gives the reader access to truths beyond the scope of reason.”            
            Andrew told us not to ever have sex in a horror film because those who do always die a horrible death. This sends a conservative message to the viewer that sex is wrong.            
            Andrew suggested that Stephen King is a critically under appreciated writer, along with John Irving and P. D. James, but in the future he may be held in the same esteem as Charles Dickens.            
            In Stephen King’s “The Boogieman” the fact that the doctor’s perspective is shown at the beginning tips us off that he is not really the Boogieman, as the patient believes at the end.            Andrew thinks that psychiatry is shown here to help create and further psychotic behaviour like that of Billings. Psychosis is a creation of the medical field as shown in the diagnostic statistics manual. The Boogieman kills Billings’s children when Billings has been drinking. He blames himself but not directly. Billings dismisses religion and the law, but is drawn to psychoanalysis.            
            The Boogieman is a type of man.           
            King shatters the distinction between the supernatural and the empirical or rational. They meet and result in an end collapse. Violent psychosis is a self-fulfilling prophecy.            
            Psychiatry replaced the geisha and the confession booth. Here, Andrew confessed that he was raised Catholic.             
            Billings has strong family values.             
            The child says “craws” because she can’t sound the “l”. The psychiatrist suggests something less violent like the beginning of “closet” but Billings knows it is “claws”. Is the psychiatrist trying to put the claws in the closet?            
            If you think of something long enough it will happen.            
            The mask is a façade and beneath it is chaos.            
            Andrew and some of the students began to discuss the ghost that supposedly haunts University College. During the construction, a stonemason named Ivan Reznikoff attacked another named Paul Diabolos with an axe on the site because Diabolos had seduced Reznikoff’s fiancé. Diabolos though managed to kill Reznikoff instead. He hid the body on the site and disappeared, probably heading out west with Ivan’s fiancé. Many years later, while cleaning up after a fire that gutted most of the east wing, workers found the skeleton of a man. Some claim to have encountered Reznikoff’s ghost. Andrew’s office is on the second floor between the east Hall and the West Hall. He says he’s been there late at night and it is pretty spooky.            
            The story, “The Mangler” features rational supernaturalism. Characters try to defeat modern technology with religious superstition. One of them is reading Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, which marries the Old and the New Testaments.             
            The Golden Bough is a book that attempts to rationalize mythology.             
            Given time, anything can happen, such as monkeys writing Shakespeare.             
            Exorcism is compared to nuclear fission. Exorcism is old magic and evil precedes humanity.            
            I told Andrew that “The Mangler” is much scarier than “The Boogieman”. I grew up around big machines on the farm and I’ve worked in factories. Any machine that is big enough to swallow a human being is pretty scary. I told him about vacuum potato harvesters back home that could rip someone’s arm off and he said, “Ewwww!” The young woman sitting next to me who was also in my Children’s Literature class, agreed with me about machines.            
            That night I watched an episode of Make Room for Daddy. Terry was planning a party but Danny was being a buttinsky and turning off Terry’s friends. Terry was upset and ran crying out of the room. Her little brother, Rusty exclaimed, “Girls are funny! They’ll cry even when you don’t hit them!” The band being hired to play at the party was Sheldon Fineschlabber and his Crazy Cats.