Little Red Monster

            I woke up at 4:58 on Tuesday, decided to lie there till 5:00, but was woken by the alarm at 5:07. My apartment was very hot and so I had to open three windows just to make it tolerable while I did my yoga. I was sweating anyway during the locust pose, which involves me lying on my stomach with my arms underneath me, then I push down on my arms and pull my hips and legs up as high off the floor as I can. It’s not a swarm of locusts. There are only three locusts and six half locusts but still they are a pestilence, though admittedly they are a plague that is good for me.

            I was supposed to have taken some library books back to the OISE library on Monday but I didn’t want to ride downtown just for that, so I took the day of grace and left for Canadian Poetry class half an hour early on Tuesday evening.

            I was riding east along Bloor Street between Ossington and Christie when suddenly my bicycle seat wasn’t holding my ass up anymore. I was surprised that it hadn’t caused me to wipe out as I stood up, slowly put on the brakes and pulled over to the sidewalk. My seat and my broken seat post were dangling at the side of my bike, only attached by the electrical tape I’d used to wrap around the post to hold my back flasher on. It looked like fifteen years of rust from riding in the winter had finally taken its toll.

            I walked along Bloor, looking for a bike shop, but didn’t find one until Sweet Pete’s, a few blocks past Bathurst. The mechanic had a look at it and saw that the broken part of my seat post was fused by rust inside the seat tube. He offered to try soaking it in something he named but that I don’t remember and that it might help to loosen the post, but that it would have to soak for an hour. I had to be in class in an hour so I didn’t have time for that. He said that it’s possible that my bike is a write-off if the post can’t be removed. I wondered out loud how I was going to get home and he suggested that I could ride it standing up. It’s funny that I hadn’t thought of that when it first came off. It would have saved me a long walk.

            I headed for OISE while riding my bike standing up. It was awkward and tiring, but I managed. The only times I’ve ever ridden without sitting were years ago when I was taking extremely steep hills north of Toronto with my ex-girlfriend. With a seat on I can just throw myself onto the bike and start riding, but without a seat, to get started each time I had to make sure no one was behind me, then position my right pedal just so and after that it was okay. After OISE, I made it to University College without too much of a problem but I was really dreading the ride home. I thought that there would be a good chance of me being quite sore the next day, perhaps in my back, because of the unusual body movements involved in riding while standing.

            When I got to the classroom and started getting my books out of my backpack, I realized that I’d forgotten to bring my lecture notebook with me. So I went on a scavenger hunt to look for paper. I lifted a garbage can lid and looked down into several others because sometimes people throw perfectly good scrap paper away with only one side printed. I walked to the end of the nearest northbound hallway and then back, then I walked to the office, but it was closed. At the west end of the building I went up another northbound hall where I found a little bookshop with the creative name “The Book Shop”. There were two people working there, a lady and a gentleman who looked like they might have been there when the college was first built. I looked it up later though and found that the little store was founded by volunteers in 1999 and has been run by the same since then. They sell donated books at a range from $2.00 to $10.00. I asked the elderly woman who looked like she was the heart and the soul of the place if she had any scrap paper I could have. She warned me that what scrap paper was there was really scrap paper but found several one sided sheets for me with advanced math equations printed on the other side. That looked like just enough for me so I thanked her very much and went back to the classroom.

            George arrived pretty much on time and then immediately took roll call.

            We jumped right into talking about Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red”. The book won the A. M. Klein Poetry Prize. George said he was the judge that argued against his colleagues to help Carson’s book win the award. She is a professor of Classics at McGill University. She knows Greek and Latin and is in tune with rhetoric. Rhetoric used to be essential for learning poetry, but nowadays it is more associated with an entirely different and usually political meaning related to persuasive language such as when politicians say things like, “Make America great again.”

            Rhetoric is really about how to employ language. The art of metaphor is essential. George recommended “A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms” by Richard A, Lanham.

            Carson knows how to work with tropes and understands the beauty of adjectives, which she refers to as “latches of being”. The deployment of surprising adjectives make us think twice about the nouns we are reading.

            Ovid was all about the power of metaphor. He gave the example of a water bottle being a microphone. I commented, “Unless you’re hallucinating”. He argued that hallucinating might help someone with their metaphors.

            Startling original adjectives in common use: the Dead Sea, the Red Sea, the Black Sea and Pink Lake. Are they really dead, red, black and pink? Carson is asking us to understand unexpected adjectives.

            George said he blames Modernists for a lot of crimes, but the worst is that they wanted to get rid of adjectives. “There are thirty-nine people here. If I say ‘coffee cup’ there are suddenly thirty-nine coffee cups being envisioned.”

            “Your love is like a red, red rose. It was Robbie Burns Day yesterday. I was helping celebrate it at the Caledonia Pub. There were flights of scotch.” Some people didn’t show up and so there were extra samples of scotch that George did not allow to go to waste. He said he poured some over his haggis and it was very good.

            The Modernists wanted to avoid clichés by cutting down on adjectives. Carson thinks that they went too far. “Maggot ridden corpse” is a cliché, but both the adjectives and nouns can be refreshed by applying the adjectives to a different noun such as “maggot ridden Trump administration” or “maggot ridden Samsung Seven”. “Brilliant mind” could be renewed with “brilliant chair”.

            The wildest metaphors may be reality.

            The task of poets is also to imagine contemporary myths. “Autobiography of Red” is a 90s love story about a little red monster finding romance. It’s Postmodernism rooted in classicism. Classical mythology is about divisions. But myth moves to the hyperreal and so it is also surrealistic.

            Unlike Ondaatje’s “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid”, Carson’s “Autobiography of Red” is sequential. It can be called a narrative lyric sequence.

            Obviously Anne Carson is from the intellectual, ivory tower side of Canadian literature. She makes us think and like Canadians in general she is interested in puns like Shakespeare. I added that the French are also very interested in puns. George wanted to know which French. I answered that the language in general is very conducive to puns.

            George said the text of “Autobiography of Red” is red meat thrown before the scholars who are starving for meaning. In “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid” things are already torn apart. A text is always an excavation. We are all archeologists. The ordinary becomes bizarre. Could living roses set on fire sound like running horses? Surrealism could be realism if we understand its context.

            The book begins with some text translated from classical Greek poet, Stesichoros. The translation mentions a glowing hotplate. Patrick challenged, “The ancient Greeks had hotplates?” George responded, “Of course they didn’t, but they may have had hot stones glowing red”.

            George said that he deliberately selected “Autobiography of Red” to follow “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid”. The book is anachronistic and it is based on Classical Greek meter. It’s a work that depends on juxtaposition. One long line is always followed by a short line. The story is also cinematic. George suggested that David Lynch could make it into a movie and then he named a few other possible directors. I added Terry Gilliam. I noticed after a little research that “Autobiography of Red” was put on as a play by Luke Mullins in 2006.

            The opening lines of the book call the rest into being like the blank photo at the beginning of “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid”.

            Mythology only works if it might be true.

            The word “each” is scrambled reformed as “ache”. This playing with language is a nod to Gertrude Stein. It turned out that at least three students, including Zack and Patrick, had taken part in a class on Gertrude Stein earlier that day. There was a several minute discussion about her work in our class and a general conclusion that she is very hard to get. George doesn’t find her work to be engaged enough with the world in order to make an adequate linguistic intervention. Stein made language too plastic. George prefers playfulness with language. Though influenced by Stein, Carson comes back to narrative.

            We were already past the halfway point and so George called a fifteen-minute break. I suggested a change in the syllabus and that instead of “G. E. Clarke and films” for the last class, I proposed that we have “G. E. Clarke and a class poetry reading”. He said it was a great idea and that he’d give it serious consideration. Last week he brought up the poetry of mine that I’d sent him. I’d thought he’d forgotten about it. He assured me that he hadn’t and promised me that he’d give me some feedback this week, but he didn’t mention it.

            When we returned we dug deeper into the text of Carson’s book. George said there are mixings of high and low registers. It’s not the cliché that is bad, but that the cliché must be changed.

            She uses synesthesia in referring to “The smell of velvet”.

            I commented that she seems to deliberately avoid saying that Geryon, the lead character is Canadian. The only Canadian geographical landmark she refers to is the Churchill River. But I see that it was that Geryon’s fourth grade class had gone to an aquarium to see beluga whales that had been newly captured from the Churchill River, so it doesn’t really mean that he had to be in Canada. George explained that in the 1990s when the book was written, it was post NAFTA. There was a sense that borders didn’t matter and it ate into our national identity.

            To write a queer love story was unusual, even in the 90s.

            Geryon is a photographer. The story is full of flashes and glimpses. Geryon is a creature of fire. The Heraclitean Cycle says that we are born in fire and we are reborn in fire. Geryon writes postcards, which is a medium in which the message changes before it reaches its destination because thousands of people can have read it first.

            To be translated is to be moved through space to a different context.

            Volcanoes figure prominently in the story. George mentioned Mount St Helens going off in 1980, but he though that it happened in Alaska. I corrected him that it was south of the border. Zack said that it was Washington. I recounted how I’d been in Vancouver at the time and I woke up to see what looked like snow on the ground but it was white volcanic ash.

            George said that he saw the smoke coming out of Mount Etna in Sicily.

            Time is made of the eruptions of events.

            George offered that “Autobiography of Red” is really an old fashioned love story.

            I mentioned I thought that Geryon’s hiding of his wings from everyone represented him suppressing his homosexuality. George agreed.

            The song “Joy to the World” was mentioned being sung two or three times early in the story and I wondered whether it was the Christmas song or the Hoyt Axton song. George wanted to know how the Hoyt Axton song went so I sang the first line, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog …” George thought it was probably the Hoyt Axton song.

            I started riding home but before I’d even made it a few meters along King’s College Circle, I guess my chain wasn’t used to the force and the angle of thrust that riding standing up involves, but my chain came off and my left knee banged against the frame of my bike. It was hurting a bit but there was nothing to do but to put the chain back on and try again. I pedaled in spurts and coasted when it was possible. I took College to Beverly and Beverly to Queen. Around Ossington I instinctively tried to sit down while riding but of course found nothing to sit on and came back up. There were about three red lights on the way that gave me a chance to rest. It was really not an ordeal that I want to repeat. I almost felt that I wasn’t going to make it and strangely I felt that way most when I could see the landmarks of home, like the Dollarama. . When I got home I could feel myself panting heavily, but it looked like it only took me about five minutes more than usual to get home.