Morisseau

            My singing voice still wasn’t back up to its old range after the virus. I still had a little too much phlegm in my throat to hit the notes.

            I spent some time on Tuesday working on a poem based on some old notes.

            It was a messy day outside with snow that only half melted on the ground, making it cold and slushy on the street. I was hoping it would clear up by evening because this would be my first night in Canadian Poetry class since the beginning of December. I decided to leave half an hour early because I wanted to stop at the U of T Bookstore to pick up the next two books on the reading list for the course.

            I put on as many layers as I could to still have the ability to ride a bike. It wasn’t all that cold out so the layers were only there to hold back the dampness. I rode through the chunk, dirty, cold soup to College and St George. I found the poetry section in the bookstore but I couldn’t find the books I was looking for. I went to the help desk. One thing about the U of T Bookstore is that there is no shortage of helpful staff. It’s like the opposite of Walmart or Canadian Tire in that way. As I stepped up to the desk there was a helper already in the aisle who asked me what he could do for me. He was discouraging at first because he didn’t think they had the books that I’d named, but he said, “Let’s go have a look anyway!” All the books for the course were there, but just not directly in the section that had been formally labelled as “Poetry”. I guess where I’d looked is where they put the non-course related poetry. The staff member found them and recognized George Elliot Clarke’s name beside each title, indication that it was his course. He informed me, “I’m really good friends with George! He gave me his card!” I didn’t tell him that George gives his card to everybody he ever meets. George is a very friendly guy so it’s easy to see how someone would think they are his friend upon meeting him. Who knows? Maybe they are!

            I didn’t have as much money with me as I’d thought so I could only buy “The Thunderbird Poems” by Armand Garnet Ruffo and “Live From The Afrikan Resistance!” by El Jones.

            I got to the classroom a few minutes earlier than usual and started reading “The Thunderbird Poems”. Each poem is inspired by a different one of Norval Morriseau’s paintings. Poems contrived along themes tend to fall flat for me, whether they are about someone’s paintings or whatever. I read almost half the book while sitting there but really felt that I should try to look at digital images of Morisseau’s paintings while reading the poems, even though I find his paintings to be cartoonish. The poems have their moments but I didn’t think they were very good either.

            When George arrived he told me that it had been good to see me at the Shab-e She’r poetry night when he saw me there a couple of weeks ago. He told me that on that night he had just returned from his six-city tour of Germany. I asked him how it had been and he answered, “Triumphant!” Then he excused himself because he had to go back to his car to get the movies he’d brought with him.

            When he came back he had to call up tech support to help him play the DVDs because he didn’t have his Utor identification with him.

            Then he took attendance and handed out our essays. I got 16 out of 20, which is 80%, which is an A-minus, which is the exact same mark I got for my previous paper. His notes were not as extensive. He circled my repetitions, of the words “confession” and “darkness” which I would have been able to avoid with more time and I should have time to do that for the next essay, which will be due on February 28. Hopefully I’ll be able to get out of this A-minus rut. At the end he said, “Good work, but do avoid repetition!” He also abbreviated my name as “Xn” which I found annoying.

            He reminded us all that if we are repeating ourselves we are not advancing our arguments. He also stressed that we should vary our verbs. He urged us to be clear on who is speaking in the poem. If we are sure that it is the poet we have to prove it. He said we need to avoid awkward syntax and keep sentences as short as possible. He told us again to read “The Elements of Style”.

            He told us again about our option of submitting twenty pages of poetry instead of a final paper along with three pages of prose explaining how the poems were inspired by poets we have covered in this course. He warned us not to submit twenty haiku. I asked, “What about twenty pages of haiku?” He seemed to misunderstand and said, “I just told you that you can’t turn in twenty haiku. I clarified that I meant maybe a hundred haiku. He reluctantly said that would be okay and then told me that I should go into law.

            A lot of people had just come for their papers and since there was no lecture they left rather than stayed to watch the movies.

            Both films were technically Canadian content.

            The first one was a weird gangster film called “Pale Saints” about two gangsters who come from Montreal to do a bank job for a crazy Toronto mobster called “The Pirate”, but their plan is to keep the money themselves and take off for California. But one of the gangsters is brain damaged from his friend accidentally having shot him during a previous job and so his guilty friend has made a religion of taking care of him. The bank job does not go well, even though they get the money, because Louis’s mask came off in the struggle. So he gives his friend Dodie and his girlfriend Chicklette the money and says he’ll meet them later. The most suspenseful scene is when a tow truck driver captures him along with another gangster he’s been working for. He ties them up and makes them play Russian roulette blindfolded with a revolver containing one bullet. But Louis somehow figures out when the bullet is in the chamber and shoots the tow truck driver. Louis has a weird sense of his own destiny and only engages in criminal activities tied directly to that fate, ignoring even things that would make his life less complicated.

            Gordon Pinsent and Maury Chaykin are also in the film. I noticed that Ian Thomas did the music, but George didn’t know exactly whom I meant. “Of Blood Sweat and Tears fame?” he asked. When I sang, “Feelin fine mama, painted ladies and a bottle of wine mama” he understood vaguely who I was talking about. “Dave Thomas’s brother” I added.

            The second film was “Regression”, which was set in the States but clearly filmed in and around Toronto. A police detective discovers that a teenage girl has been the victim of abuse by her father. But with the help of regression therapy it is discovered that there is a satanic cult involved and the whole town seems to belong to it. In the end though it turns out that the whole thing is mass hysteria created by the girl and that there is no satanic cult.

            There are lots of shots of Neville Park in the Beaches being used as the outside of a prison.

            When 21:00 rolled around I though, George was going to cut the film short, but he was getting into it and so I stayed with him till it was over at almost 22:00 and we were the only ones left.

            I told him about the true story about mass hysteria over satanic possession in Aldous Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudun” that was also made into a movie. I also told him about a photograph that I saw once of Ronald Reagan meeting the pope while Nancy seemed to be ducking away, scowling and making the sign of the devil.

            It was raining as I left University College. I was afraid of the stone steps being icy so I slid down the slanted lawn beside them. There was no more slush on the streets but I was good and soaked when I got home.

            I watched a funny episode of “The Big Bang Theory”. The gang went to a wine tasting where they met Penny’s ex-boyfriend, Zack, who has a reputation for being kind of dumb. But when Leonard and Howard told him they were working on a gyroscope to be a guidance system for satellites, Zack wondered if it could be used for missiles. They told them they didn’t think the government would use it for that. Zack said with surprise, “Maybe you guys aren’t so smart after all!”