Dreaming of Bowling with Natalie as Jackie

            She had gotten all dolled up and we were about to leave. She looked like Natalie Portman playing Jacqueline Kennedy. I told her she looked very beautiful. She seemed stunned that I would say that, but recovered quickly and said, “You know, there’s a place we could go where there are lanes for bowling.” We ended up semi accidentally in one another’s arms and I began to kiss her soft lips. I woke up when my penis did.

            On Friday, October 7th, we started Aesthetics class with a review. It was an iclicker question that almost everyone got right, including me. The answer was that the artist has absolute authority over nothing. Not aesthetic properties or meaning, but some authority over meaning, for example, irony.

            Our lecture was on the topic of fiction, make believe and representational kinds of art.

            A novel creates the world we live in within worlds with their own rules. Why does recognition of a plot hole in stories constrain things? There are also fan theories about stories. Some things are invented and some are inferred. If there were no limit, this could not happen.

            How mere words and pictures transport us.

            A famous theory is Kendal Walton’s Mimesis as Make Believe: Games for the imagination. Kids make a castle out of a stump. Sticks become swords and then they form rules, sometimes explicit ones, in combat for the castle. A carpet becomes lava.

            Adult art does the same thing. 

            Devlin showed us the image of a page from a comic book of a woman with a baseball bat fighting creatures that are maybe zombies or aliens. The comic can be explained in the same way as children’s games. We know there is going to be a fight with the bat being used against the bad guys. We are trained to consume comics. The rule is saying that we should pretend in a specific way. We don’t think of ink in the shape of an eye, we think of an eye.

            Devlin gave us an account from his own life. He told us that his mother loved soap operas and she would talk about the characters as if they were real. Imagination is lively but because there are rules, imagination has to stay on the rails. Given that it engages imagination we can delve into imagination itself.

            Imagistic versus Propositional imagination.

            Imagistic – picture an apple. It accompanies all of the senses.

            Propositional – Imagine that it is raining or that a drawing is an eye. Propositional imaginings behave like beliefs. They govern plot holes and fan theories. We can make inferences. Imagine Rob Stark is Ned Stark’s son. If Ned Stark dies we imagine Rob Stark becoming his heir. They behave like beliefs but they cannot be beliefs.

            In photography and movies there is less Imagistic imagination. Movies are prepositional.

            This raises questions.

            We have real desires. Can there be make desires like make believe, such as when we desire that the villain in a story be captured?

            Devlin told us that when he reads stories he wants someone to make a certain choice but then doesn’t want them to as well. For instance, he wants someone to get caught but he doesn’t want them to either.

            I drew a parallel between art and dreams and what Freud would say about them using the same type of imagination. I suggested that the reasons, for instance that we identify with a character is because of what that character represents in our subconscious.

            The subject of emotion is a challenge to Walton. We experience real emotions and empathy. Walton might say that what we experience are not real emotions but rather make emotions.

            Professor Roberts asked us to answer via iclicker if emoting is imagining. I disagreed, but the class was spread almost evenly over agree, disagree, somewhat agree and somewhat disagree. When you feel emotion over a story do you think that your emotion is fictional?

I talked with Javid as we walked downstairs after class. He doesn’t find the class interesting. He doesn’t take notes and doesn’t do all the readings. He hasn’t bought the expensive textbook, so he just tries to find equivalent essays online. He thinks the course is approaching the subject too broadly, but says that’s the problem with second year courses. He got his BA in economics before he came to Canada from Azerbaijan. He had expected U of T to offer more intensive undergraduate courses but he was disappointed that it’s the same here as back home. It turns out that he’s a drummer, though he hasn’t played very much in public. Just the odd talent night on campus. I inquired about the correct pronunciation of his name and found that though it’s spelled Javid, it’s pronounced “Javeed”.

            On the way home I stopped at Freshco. Since Thanksgiving was approaching and turkeys are cheap, I got the smallest butterball I could find for $16 and change.

I watched a couple of funny episodes from the fifth season of “I Love Lucy” They are in Paris and Lucy decides to venture out on her own but outside of the money exchange office she is accosted by a guy that offers her a much better exchange rate. She goes to a café but when she pays they call the police because her money is counterfeit. She manages to call Ricky, but there is a language barrier. Fortunately, one of the cops speaks German and they have a drunken prisoner that speaks German and Spanish. So they have a language relay. The head cop speaks in French to the other cop who turns and translates what he said into German for the drunk, who then turns and translates the German into Spanish for Ricky, who turns and translates the Spanish into English for Lucy.

            The other episode had a guest appearance by Charles Boyer. Lucy has been looking for Charles Boyer ever since she arrived in Paris but Ricky speaks to Charles beforehand and asks him, in order to avoid disaster, to pretend to Lucy that he is not Charles Boyer, so he does. Ricky and Charles though arrange to have a business lunch to discuss some US television opportunities for Boyer, but the newspapers get hold of the story and Lucy reads it. She still wants to meet the real Boyer but Ricky, in order to throw Lucy off, pretends to be uncontrollably jealous of Boyer. Lucy then wants to prove to Ricky that Boyer means nothing to her so she goes to meet the guy that she thinks isn’t Boyer in order to hire him to pretend to be Boyer and to try to make love to Lucy in front of Ricky so she can be indifferent and prove to Rick that he has nothing to worry about. At lunch though, Boyer tells Ricky about the plan and they go ahead with it. Boyer pretends to be the guy imitating Boyer while Ricky pretends to be jealous.