Coney Island Baby

            When I woke up on Tuesday I definitely had a cold. The kind where your throat is full of phlegm that you can’t get rid of because your throat is too sore to cough it up. Surprisingly though I wasn’t hoarse during song practice. My throat discomfort wasn’t affected by my singing and although my range was normal I didn’t have as much power and I had to sing around the mucous in my throat. I also started feeling a bit groggy halfway through.

            When I got to the lecture hall for my final Early Medieval Philosophy class, James was there already. I noticed that he was wearing a tie and I asked him if he had a business meeting later. He explained that he has a very old professor that prefers his students to wear ties. The man is in his 80s and he's never imposed a dress code but he has expressed bewilderment as to why students don't wear ties anymore.

            I've also noticed that James has extremely long fingernails. I wonder if it's a personal quirk or if it's a Chinese thing.

            In Professor Black's final lecture she finished her talk on Moses Maimonides’s theory of negative predication.

            He doesn't think that one can just deny any godly attribute. He uses particularization, which she says is amusing because it's a term used by the theologians that he is attacking.

            One must narrow down the subject for understanding. A particularized conception. Positive predications are specific things that particularize attributes. But there is a limit because language is common and it leads to universals. If one follows this line the predicate only works with what might imply what god might have in common with the common. If S is P many things will have the attribute of P.

            If god is not a body, not a knower, not good or not being, that helps to particularize it. Negative predication tells a lot. Knowledge is of universals so we can’t know individuals as individuals. Negative theology must be systematic. God is not a lion. God is not a king.

            God is not a body but what is the limitation of a body? To say god is knowing is wrong. The more negative predicates we use the more we see how god is different. The more negative predicates the more particularized.

            It’s like a game of twenty questions. Is it substantial or non substantial? It’s substantial. Does it have a body or not? It has a body. Is the body animated or inanimate? It’s inanimate. Keep going with the process of elimination until you find out it’s a ship.

            If we say that god shares properties with creatures it makes god a creature and it becomes atheism. She apologetically declared that this was a negative note on which to end the course.

            She told us that she was going to finish the class early after telling us about the exam. She said she is not supposed to say anything about the time and place of our examination because she might be wrong. But proceeded to inform us that it would be on Thursday, December 14 from 9:00 to 11:00 at Knox Presbyterian Church at 630 Spadina. She didn’t want to try to tell us how to get there because she is notorious for giving bad directions even though she seems to have a face that makes people think she knows how to get to places.

            She let us know that the exam would have two parts. The first half would be five out of eight short answer questions and those would be marked by her. The second part would be a choice of one essay topic out of two that Celia would mark.

            We all applauded Professor Deborah Black as per tradition. It was a good thing that she’d let us go half an hour early because I realized as I was getting ready to leave that I’d forgotten to print my answer to the tutorial question. That meant that I had to take advantage of the extra time to ride home and get it.

            On the way home on Queen, I stopped at the Dovercourt light and a 30 something guy in a toque was crossing Queen. He suddenly shouted, “What is this, a fuckin holiday or something?” He stood just off the sidewalk on the road in front of me, then he took a last drag from his cigarette butt, dramatically threw it away with a wide arm swing, and walked away.

            When I got home and printed the page I had almost half an hour before I had to go back downtown for tutorial.

            I arrived at the tutorial classroom just as our class had started going in.

            When I sat down I started to notice that I had a cold again. Once I’d gotten rolling in the morning it hadn’t been all that obvious.

            Because this was our last tutorial, Celia had brought candy for us. I didn’t take any but it was one kind, green and yellow and gummy-looking, perhaps glazed with some extra sugar.

            She started by talking about the exam and said the short answer questions would be similar to the tutorial questions. That’s not good news. She advised us to spend ten minutes on each of the five questions and an hour on the essay, which would be a comparison of two authors.

            She had us do a practice by splitting into groups and discussing the ideas of two philosophers on the same topic. James and I talked, or he talked and I listened about Augustine and Boethius on the topic of providence and free will. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

            Celia urged us to look for text arguments one way or the other and then for us to argue which one was most successful. She gave an example of Anselm’s Proslogian and Avicenna’s Necessary Existent. They are two kinds of argument. The NE is cosmological while the Proslogian is ontological.

She offered that our essay should consist of an outline of what the two authors are talking about, what each one says, how they are different and then finish with our own objection.

We moved on to Moses Maimonides’s negative theology.

God needs to be radically simple. God’s essence must be unique but it can’t have an essence because that would mean that it is not simple. But god can’t exist without that distinguishing feature. I asked why god’s existence and essence couldn’t be the same. She said that’s the solution.

The fact of a horse does not explain its existence. Nothing exists because it is a horse and nothing is a horse because it exists.

The predicates of our language are not set up for god. God cannot be both powerful and all knowing because those are two separate things. They would have to somehow be identical in god.

I noticed that Celia was wearing a little gold cross on a chain around her neck. I don’t know if she’s always worn it.

When she ended the tutorial and thanked us it looked like she’d been hoping for applause. She didn’t get any.

When I got back home I had time for a quick bite and then I had to sleep for a while because I was scheduled to work at OCADU that night.

I worked for Milan Pavlovic and posed for the final examination of his class. He had me sit in a very uncomfortable position, sitting in a chair with my legs forward but with my upper body twisting to the right so that I was facing backwards. When we were first setting the pose, he wanted my left hand somewhere else, but rather than telling me where he took hold of it and moved it. I didn’t say anything but he’s not supposed to do that. He poked me a couple of times as well while pointing out points of my anatomy to his students. I hope he caught my cold.

My ride home was quite cold, a strong wind was against me and I hit almost every red light.

I watched an interesting episode of Mike Hammer that was set on Coney Island. Hammer saw a punk manhandling a pretty young carnie. The older man that ran the wax museum tried to stop it but he got pushed away. He ran to the woman’s husband, a big guy that handled the sledgehammer and bell game and told him that a masher was bothering his wife. Meanwhile though, Hammer had chased away the bad guy but he was still talking with the woman when the angry husband arrived and immediately attacked Hammer with the hammer. Hammer was badly injured. The dragged him into the old guy’s office and didn’t notice Hammer’s gun fall out and get kicked under the couch. They dumped Hammer down by the water but when he woke up the next morning he came back to the carnival to find out who’d attacked him and taken his gun. The carnies told him that the bad guy, Johnny Jersey had attacked him and they told him that he hangs out at a diner where his girlfriend works. Johnny and his girl convinced him that it was Bells Keeler that had knocked him out, so he went looking for Bells. Meanwhile Bells’s wife, Suzy tells Pops that Johnny has been shaking her down because he has dirt on her past that she wouldn’t want her husband to know about. All he wants is $200 so he and his girlfriend can get married. Pop’s lends her the money and she meets Johnny under the roller coaster o pay him. He promises not to bother her again but Bells has been hiding up in the roller coaster supports and after his wife leaves he drops down on Johnny. He chases Johnny to the top of the roller coaster and then severely beats him. Hammer, having been unable to find Bells returns Pops’s office to find Bells’s body and that he’s been shot with Hammer’s gun. Pops tells him it was Johnny that did it. He goes back to look for Johnny and finds he was too beat up to have been able to shoot Bells. He goes back and concludes that Pops killed Bells because he was in love with Suzy. Pops admits it and escapes into his wax museum where Hammer pursues him. Pops is about to shoot Hammer when he accidentally steps on a switch on the floor that triggers one of his wax figures to swing an executioner’s axe that strikes Pops in the head and kills him.