No Sap from OSAP

            The snow on the windshields of some cars look like face tattoos curving around an eye.

            I could barely have the window open at all during song practice on Wednesday morning. My left living room window was frozen and wouldn’t budge until after sunrise but it was so cold that after a while even a crack was too much despite the fact that the heat was on full blast. The little bit of cold air from outside was heated as it hit me in front but some of it seemed to sneak around cold behind me and I caught a chill in my back.

            I’ve been lucky this winter in that for both the storm two weeks ago and the one on Monday I didn’t have to go anywhere on my bike the actual morning after the storm and so each time there has been 24 hours for clearing.

            It seems that a lot more salt was laid down this time because even though the roads didn’t seem any clearer they were not as slippery. I had to eschew the Bloor bike lane entirely because, although it looked like someone had cleared it with a small plough, the big ploughs had filled it up in crucial exits and entrances with snow from the street to the point where it was impossible to traverse.

            The other class was just getting out as I arrived. I asked the instructor what the name of her course was. I think she said it was Epidemiology of Health and Disease. She asked what my course was and I said Romantic Literature. She said they’re a long way apart. I added though that we are studying Keats and he was a doctor.

            I had time to move a lot of tables into rows this time.

            I asked Professor Weisman if she thinks that Frankenstein is a psychodrama like Prometheus Unbound but she said not necessarily. She said that as a novel it doesn’t lend itself as well to psychodrama and Prometheus works better because of the existence of Jupiter as a phantasm. I wondered if all drama with a central character like Oedipus going through something heavy could be seen as psychodrama. She said it was a good question. I said what if this course is a psychodrama and I’m the dark privative mode of Gabriel. Gabriel said, “What?” I repeated, “What if I’m your dark side?" and he just said, “It’s okay man, it's okay!"

            I also wondered, what if the great flood was just a dream that Noah had while drunk in the tub.

            I told the professor that Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, which we don't cover in the course, was clearly an influence for Leonard Cohen’s song “Teachers”. It has the same structure and even some of the phrasing.

            We continued with our study of Keats.

            Keats was willing to entertain other ideas and to release himself from beliefs. He was very dialectical and not rigid and doctrinaire.

            We looked at “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer".

            This is a travel poem and it covers some of the central motifs of Romanticism.

            Keats is transported by Chapman's Homer, which is a famous translation that was new and exciting for Keats. Up until that point the most renowned translation was that of Alexander Pope.

            Keats’s poem about the book is a Petrarchan sonnet.

            She said that “realms of gold” could mean the gold leaf of books but I offered that he could be referring to the golden age.

            The reader is a traveller and reading is travel.

            Poets are bound to Apollo, god of poets.

            The octave of the sonnet establishes the sense of discovery. The sestet clarifies the effect.

            We move to astronomy at the beginning of the sestet as he references Herschel’s discovery of Uranus.

            Keats has seen great things as mediated by poetry. Poetry expands our horizons and our imaginative reach.

            There are paradoxical images as when he says that he heard Chapman.

            Darien is in a province in Panama.

            Keats is locating images of movement.

            We the reader are following Keats the reader.

            She asked what is the significance of Cortez and his men being reduced to silence.

            I wrote that whether Cortez was the first to see the Pacific or not, it was new for he and his men. A reader is silent and Keats was silent while reading Chapman’s Homer. He speaks of a new translation, a new planet and a new ocean. It is the newness that renders the silence.

            Keats uses translation of a metaphor. Homer’s works were originally songs. To translate experience one needs to be articulate. This fourteen-line sonnet contains the experience of an epic.

            We looked at the poem “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”.

            Lord Elgin stole the marbles from the Parthenon in 1806 and brought them to the British Museum.

            Keats was extremely moved by these artefacts even though the marbles are in fragments. Athena the goddess of wisdom is among them.

            Professor Weisman had me read the poem.

            The poem describes a sense of being transported and it reminds Keats of his own mortality. I said that seeing broken immortal gods could make one aware of one's mortality. Life is short, art is long, but art too is mortal.

            The poet is a sick eagle looking at the sky.

            A poem that describes another art form is called ekphrasis.

            On the way home the westbound bike lane was too clogged up with snow to ride on as well. I rode to Ossington, which was a wide and clean ride as far as College. I made the mistake of turning right on College where the space between parked cars and the streetcar tracks was not much wider than my bike. At Dovercourt I went slowly south to Queen and then west. I stopped at Freshco where I bought grapes, blackberries, a mango, Bavarian bread, cheese and yogourt. Spoon size shredded wheat was on sale so I bought two boxes. I also got honey and Earl Grey tea.

            Cheryl the cashier had her coat on and was waiting at the express checkout with a big cart full of party items, but she let me go ahead of her. It looked like her shift was over. The older, eastern European cashier complained about how cold it was at that counter and declared that she was going to bring a heater next time.

            When I got home I went back out to the liquor store to buy a can of Creemore.

            I was going to make lunch but then I checked my email and there was a response from U of T about my Noah Meltz grant. I was told that I not only have to file a new application for the winter term, but I now have to apply for OSAP first. In previous years I have always gotten the Noah Meltz grants for the entire term and I’ve never had to apply for OSAP. OSAP is a loan and I can’t afford to pay money back.

I tried to call the Admissions office but I got a message from Freedom Mobile reminding me that my January phone plan has run out. I walked two blocks west to Freedom and paid for February and then I went home to complete my call to Admissions. I got through after about twenty minutes.

The person I spoke to was surprised that I was told that I need to apply for OSAP and so she put me on hold again while she found out about it. It turns out that this more complicated process is the result of new policies by the Ford government in Ontario.

She confirmed that I do need to apply for OSAP but I can refuse it and choose the Noah Meltz grant if my application is accepted. That seemed like a wasted process to me since I don’t plan on accepting a loan from OSAP.

I went online to fill out the Noah Meltz grant. There was an option to submit copies of income documents digitally and so I thought I’d scan my Ontario Works cheque. It seems though that the Canon scanner that Nick Cushing gave me a couple of years ago is kaput. It wouldn't work at all. I guess maybe I'll look into buying a new scanner for my birthday this year.

I took a picture of my Ontario Works deposit statement and uploaded it. I also downloaded a PDF of my most recent pay statement from OCADU.

The Noah Meltz application site seems to be very glitchy. Every time I tried to do something like upload a file or save and move on I got an error message. But when I reloaded the page the upload was complete. It seemed to me that I'd completed the application but when I tried to submit it I got a message that there was still one unfilled field. But the field indicated was a page containing two notices from three months ago. There was nothing for me to fill out or click on. I’ll have to call them tomorrow and see what’s wrong.

I tried applying for OSAP but I got no sap from that tree either. OSAP would not let me establish a password because they said that I already have one. When I clicked “forgot password” my options were to submit my email but my email did not match their files. They asked for the last four digits of my Social Insurance number, which I’ve known by heart since I was a teenager but that doesn’t match their files either. I was told I’d have to go to the Admissions office to apply for OSAP.

I wasted about three hours of valuable time that afternoon that could have been spent on schoolwork.

I had a very late lunch and it was almost evening when I took a siesta.

I typed out my lecture notes.

I had an egg with toast and a beer for dinner and watched two episodes of Peter Gunn.

In the first story, Charlie, an old friend of Peter Gunn who happens to be a genius bank robber is serving 99 years in prison. He deliberately misbehaves so he will be put in solitary with the law books that he is diligently studying with the intention of both becoming a lawyer and of figuring out a way to argue himself out of his sentence. With Charlie's rehabilitation in mind the warden asks Gunn to escort Charlie to his daughter’s wedding. After the ceremony Gunn takes Charlie to Mother’s to buy him champagne before he has to take him back to prison. But he leaves Charlie on the terrace and when he comes back another man is sitting at the table wearing Charlie’s hat and coat. A search is on for the escaped prisoner but Gunn does not think that Charlie deliberately evaded him. Next we see Charlie helping a gang plan a bank robbery and he tells them the best way is to drill open the skylight. After Charlie has been drilling for a while Gunn and Lieutenant Jacoby arrive and Charlie says, "What kept you? I've been drilling on this silent alarm for twenty minutes!” Charlie is told he will probably get a reduced sentence for helping catch the gang.

In the second story a schoolteacher named Conlan is working late when he hears a girl scream. He follows the sound to the school basement and finds the dead body of a female student named June. He picks up a nearby lead pipe and while holding it the janitor walks in. Conlan is not arrested because the lead pipe was not the murder weapon but the entire town is ready to lynch Conlan for the murder of a student. He hires Gunn to find the killer. Another student named Marjorie comes forward and claims that the murdered girl had been having an affair with Conlan. Conlan says he’d never seen the June before. It is determined in court that it was Marjorie that had attacked June out of jealousy and after being pushed, June had hit her head on a counter. Conlan says he will continue to teach but in a town where no one ever thought he was a murderer.

Maroon River

            It was still storming when I got up on Tuesday morning and I could only open one window a crack despite the heat being on. Even through that crack though I got little mists of snow on my face during yoga. The Dollarama parking lot was not ploughed until after I’d finished song practice and so the people that normally park there to get coffee at the donut shop beneath me had to go elsewhere. The snow banks were high wide and narrowing the streets and I was glad I didn’t have to deal with them until the next day.

            In the late afternoon I finally got caught up in my journal.

            I read the three poems of each of the members of my Poetry Master Class group. I read each poem twice and then made comments. I find Vivian tends to overwrite. She throws in a lot of unnecessary words. I suggested that she try writing the poems in a Twitter window and letting character limitation help her economize.

            Blythe’s poems are all very short with short punchy lines that don’t always flow together but they often work.

            Margaryta is the best poet among my three group mates. Her poems have a lot of depth, texture and intelligence. Also a lot of subtle anger at men.

            I revised the third stanza of my poem “The Street Sucks the Sandman’s Bag”. There were criticisms in class about my use of the words “female” and “events” that made me feel that I could make the gender references more clear.

            Here is the original:

I’m in the cold because it serves much more comfort

than lonely heated rooms.

It’s just where my life escapes me,

Do I even have a choice

of get away cars or routes?

Do I make things happen from this pivotal place

or just weakly mimic

some kind of female strengths?

It seems mostly women

can make events happen

even when they’re sitting in one place alone.

            Here is my revision:

I’m in the cold because it serves much more comfort

than lonely heated rooms.

It’s just where my life escapes me,

Do I even have a choice

of vehicles or avenues?

Can I make things happen from this pivotal seat

or does my gender

even generate the gravity

to draw women’s passion

on in for a landing

without passing this planet of passivity?

                                                                       

            I also revised my poem “Maroon River” though not based on anyone’s suggestions but rather just because presenting it caused me to look at it a little closer on my own.

            Here’s the original second stanza:

Testosterone’s tapping

the pussies like trees:

two fins for a swim in the estrogen sea.

and every space cadet is a nervous wreck,

twisting to watch their backs

as they float with the other space debris

in a twitching, spinning hoedown

around the quaking planet Crack.

            Here’s my revision:

Testosterone’s tapping

the pussies like trees

eight fins for a swim in the estrogen sea.

and every addict is a nervous wreck,

twisting to watch their backs

as they float with the other space debris

in a twitching, spinning hoedown

around the quaking planet Crack.

            I started cooking a potato at 20:00 but at 20:38 at medium setting my large element hadn’t been generating heat. It worked on high but maybe two fuses cover the big element. I had to eat a little later since I was starting from scratch. I heated a piece of pork and had the rest of my turkey gravy.

            I watched an episode of Peter Gunn guest starring Howard McNear as a Mr. Barnaby, mild mannered former member of several juries that failed to convict the city’s most prominent gangsters. Barnaby calmly goes on a one-man killing spree and he makes bombs that blow up their cars, birthday cakes and elevators. The mob on this side of the river hire Gunn to prove it wasn’t them that killed the boss from the other side. Gunn figures out the jury connection and finds the pleasant Barnaby building bombs in his basement. He casually admits that he killed the criminals. It turns out that Barnaby’s wife is in the state mental hospital and when he is arrested and told that he will probably be sent there too he is very happy.

            Before bed I revised my poem “Failed Launch for the Rocket of the Day”:

Failed launch for the rocket of the day just

into the sea with its stages.

Sinking, dripping self asks, “What’s it all for?”

but only the trash on the street has an answer.

My zombie crotch is rotting the moment

I smell it while standing over it.

Not connecting with the sad uglies

that stare me down with mad slug eyes.

If I should decide to shave and shower

it might kill the mood I'm under.

Flubbed song chords, no elation to sing it,

All is fashioned out of bullshit.

A failure masked by every success

plunges while strapped to the darkness.

Almost consider cutting my throat

but then what would I write about?

Psychodrama

            On Monday morning I finished memorizing Serge Gainsbourg’s “Ballade de Melody Nelson”. It only took about two hours. That’s a big difference from the previous song, which resisted being brain contained for at least fifteen hours over two weeks.

            Putting on all of my layers to ride to class is very time consuming. It takes more than half an hour to get ready.

            Most of the snowbsticles had been cleared away since the storm on Sunday. There was only one other cyclist on Bloor Street and he passed me easily until the beginning of the Bloor bike lane. He chose to eschew the path and to ride along Bloor but I took the lane and got ahead of him. In some spots there was more snow and also there were cars sometimes parked halfway onto the lane, perhaps because through the snow they could not see the paint lines that indicate where the lane begins.

            My class had already gone into the room by the time I arrived and Professor Weisman was there early. I only had time to set up one table for myself and Gabriel joined me.

            I’ve noticed that Gabriel only makes his notes in pencil and I asked him about it. He says that he only uses a pencil in this class because he has to erase a lot and he finds the professor talks very fast.

            I told Professor Weisman that I’d been looking into what the Greeks believed about the liver. Plato said that it’s the seat of dark emotions such as hatred and so if the eagle comes every day to eat Prometheus’s liver then it is effectively removing his hatred. Also the ancient Greeks used sheep’s livers for divination and so there might be a tie-in with Prometheus having the power of foresight. She said some interesting theories could be built around those facts.

            She began the lecture by saying that the moment when Prometheus declares that he no longer hates, it is one of the climaxes of the play. There are several climaxes that can be read in non-linear time, layered on top of one another and seen as one climax.

            Prometheus declares “Misery made me wise” and this can be seen as a reflection of Wordsworth’s “A deep distress hath humanized my soul.”

            If Prometheus Unbound is a psychodrama then all of the characters are projections of the mind of Prometheus.

            Shelley occupies a conventional worldview in which revenge has no place.

            In line 21: “black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb, insect or beast or shape or sound of life”, these are descriptions of negation.

            During the class I was dismayed to see that it was beginning to snow and blow outside. The forecast had said the storm would start during the evening commute, so I felt ripped off.

            Nature cannot give Prometheus back his words.

            Maybe only the image of hateful Jupiter can repeat the curse.

            There is a paradox in that the hateful words of the curse are preserved as a spell by those that Jupiter oppresses.

            Prometheus no longer has a forum in which to hate in his consciousness. What does it mean to have believed something that you now discount to the point of not remembering it? It’s a particular kind of alienation known as self-alienation.

            Who I am is a continuity over time as in Tintern Abbey. Shelley is using Prometheus to communicate his own self-continuity.

            In line 192 Shelley makes up a myth about Zoroaster meeting his own image.

            During the playback Prometheus is being cursed by his own curse. He sees himself in the phantasm of Jupiter.

            Shelley incorporates in Jupiter the Judeo-Christian god.

            The image of Jupiter is saying that there will come a time when the outside and the inside match. It is an empty shell saying this because nothing is internal to a phantasm.

            The Earth worries that Prometheus is capitulating in the withdrawal of his curse but that is not the case.

            She asked us to articulate the paradoxes of this curse by the phantasm as it recalls Prometheus to an aspect of himself.

            I said that the Earth’s speech is interesting. She and nature cannot repeat the curse although they know the words and believe them to be just. She says, “We meditate in secret joy and hope” that the curse is fulfilled but she and nature cannot speak the curse because it requires hatred, of which they have none. She lists for Prometheus those beings that can utter the words: the gods, demigorgon and three phantoms. These can speak the words of hatred because they have hatred. Nature requires of Prometheus that he embody the curse.

            Prometheus is suffering from a discontinuity within himself because he cannot remember. So not only does he suffer from Jupiter’s punishment but from an inability to remember. Remembering or hearing the curse would reconnect him with essential selfhood.

            Prometheus has mastered himself.

            The Spirits are the images of comfort and the opposite of the Furies.

            Later he reunites with Asia.

            We finished with Shelley and ended the class with a little bit of Keats.

            Keats died of consumption at the age of 25.

            He was a working class cockney who invested in high lyric form to the annoyance of many readers who thought that he was getting better than himself.

            Clare was a peasant and deliberately wrote like a peasant. Keats did not have a working class poetic presence.

            Keats was the least dogmatic of the Romantics. He was always between possibilities of belief. He was not illogical but distrusted simple logic. He could think himself into others and objects. He could throw himself into a belief or a conviction but was willing to give it up.

            She had me read “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and that was the end of the class.

            The idea of psychodrama had reminded me of the film “Being John Malkovich”. I asked Professor Weisman if she’d ever seen it. She said she’d seen the trailer and loves John Malkovich but had never seen the film. “Is it good?” “Oh yeah!” I told her that the scene in which Malkovich goes inside of his own mind reminded me of psychodrama. He finds a world populated entirely by John Malkovitch, including the women and the only language is the word “Malkovitch”. I said that part of the film was so funny that I collapsed laughing on the theatre floor. She said, “That’s a good recommendation!”

            I went to the Admissions office to enquire about my Noah Meltz Grant having not arrived yet. The woman I spoke with said she would arrange for a counsellor to contact me. I guess I should have just called in the first place but usually they are helpful there.

            I rode very carefully down St George with the snow blowing into my face. I had to ride in front of the cars down Bedford to avoid getting gunked up in slippery snow. On Queen Street I had to thread my bike along a narrow space between the snow beside the parked cars and the streetcar track.

            I stopped at Loblaws to buy some grapes.

            The trip home was intense because I had to concentrate to keep myself slowly and delicately free of the slippery patches.

            I opened a carton of tomato and roasted red pepper soup and heated it up to have with some potato chips for lunch.

            I worked toward getting caught up on my journal.

            I had a piece of pork and a potato with gravy for dinner and watched one episode of Peter Gunn.

            This story was somewhat predictable as I think I’d seen a similar plot twist in an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode. A ventriloquist named the Marvelous Marvon is murdered and Gunn is hired by a man named Marcel who had planned on killing Marvon to find the real killer so he won’t be blamed. Marcel is blamed anyway and hangs himself in jail. Gunn goes to Rinaldo’s apartment where he finds a medicine and he calls the doctor that prescribed it, who said that he’d given Marvon an unsuccessful throat operation and so he was no longer able to speak. This was strange because he was still performing right up to the night he was murdered in his dressing room. Gunn hides in Marvon’s apartment and the killer comes in. It turns out that the murderer is Rinaldo, a little man who pretended to be Marvon’s dummy and who was a master ventriloquist who’d provided Marvon with his own voice after the failed operation. Rinaldo killed Marvon because he’d only paid him less than a tenth of his income even though he did all the work and had laughed in his face when he’d asked for more.

            Rinaldo was played by Dick Beals, who was the original voice of Speedy Alka-Seltzer, Gumby and Davey from Davey and Goliath. When producer’s found out that he could do the voice of a child they were glad to not have to deal with the nutty parents of child actors.

Begging in a Snowstorm

            There was a heavy snowfall overnight and well into Sunday morning. The elderly or extremely weathered middle-aged woman who panhandles around all four corners of Dunn and Queen was the first person I saw walking in the storm as I began song practice. In the first hour I don’t think there were more than four other pedestrians, but she would stop cars on Dunn Avenue as they tried to turn right or left onto Queen. She would beg the drivers loudly and desperately to please help her while a horn or two from a held up vehicle behind was demanding progress. I’ve always wondered if she’s homeless but seeing her come out in the storm to panhandle pretty much clinches that she must be. Chances are that no one that had a home would venture out of it on such a wicked morning even to scratch up enough for breakfast. When there was no one to beg from she often called out “Paulie!” But Paul, her boyfriend was nowhere that I could see.

            After the sun came up I saw an elderly man riding his electric wheelchair in front of the cars heading westbound on Queen Street until he got to the traffic light at Dunn Avenue and then crossed to take the sidewalk southward. 

            One of my two favourite deep blue dinner plates that I use every day shattered later that morning. I’d carelessly set it down too close to the edge of my living room dresser and it fell to the floor. I’ll have to take a trip down the street to the Sally Ann thrift store to see if they have any more.

            I had the same thing for lunch as the day before and dinner was a repeat as well.

            I watched two episodes of Peter Gunn.

            In the first a man named Cole with a ten-year-old daughter named Angela hires Gunn to find the killer of a wealthy businessman’s wife because he was secretly in love with her but it turns out that Cole is the killer and did it for a large sum of money that he could leave for his daughter since he is dying. He dies after being arrested in a very unrealistic and sudden way, since he doesn’t behave as if he is ill.

            In the second story a woman named Helen goes to Gunn because she thinks her husband, a world famous trumpet player named Bud Bailey, is plotting to kill her. Gunn visits Bailey and finds that he clearly has emotional and mental problems. He can barely play trumpet anymore because he is distracted by a loud pounding in his head. He laughs when Gunn proposes that he wants to kill Helen. He says she is nothing and not worth the effort. Helen is missing though and when he finds out that Bailey owns a remote cabin he goes there to find it burned down. The police find a man’s body in the charred wreckage of the fire. Helen is arrested for Bud’s murder because he’d recently taken out a life insurance policy and they find letters from her insisting that he do so. Gunn smells a rat and it turns out the fingerprints of the dead man belong to a down and out man on skid row. Gunn finds the man’s address and discovers as he suspected that Bud has taken his identity.

            Bud was played by James Coburn before he became famous as Our Man Flint.

            Helen was played by Cece Whitney.

            Lola Albright as Edie Hart sings, “Candy" by Mack David, Joan Whitney and Alex Kramer. 

Diahann Carroll

            I didn’t go to the food bank on Saturday morning because I needed to finish my review of Shab-e She'r and I probably won't go for a while because I want to finish all the reading for my Romantic Literature course and get started on my research essay, which makes up the highest mark of the term.

Raja knocked on my door in the late morning to hand me a new notice of rent increase, this time dated for May 1. He warned me, “Don’t fuck around!” and suggested that I may lose my life if I do. So my landlord has threatened to kill me. I told him to relax and do some yoga. He complained about me playing games with how things are worded on legal documents. I said that things are worded precisely on legal documents for a reason and if those words meant nothing then he’d be able to just raise the rent whenever he wanted.       

I rode down to No Frills around midday where I bought black sable grapes, blueberries and toilet paper.

I had two slices of marble cheese on toast for lunch.

I finished my review of Shab-e Sh’er, posted it on my blog and sent a copy to K.J. Mullins at newz4u.ca.

For dinner I had an egg with toast and a beer and watched two episodes of Peter Gunn.

The first story was unique in that it featured the first lead role by an African American actor in the Peter Gunn series and even the “bad” guy was black. The first story begins with us having the point of view of someone getting out of prison, so we can’t see whom it is. Next we see a burial ceremony in a cemetery where Gunn meets Arnie, the husband of the deceased woman. He is told that contrary to reports, his wife, the singer Dina Wright was murdered and he wants Gunn to find the killer. Gunn goes to see a songwriter named Bernie who only seems to write songs that have already been written. He plays something called “Begin the Baha” but Gunn tells him it’s the melody of “Begin the Beguine”. Bernie declares, "That don't make no sense! Who wrote it?" "Cole Porter, twenty years ago!” “Never heard of him!” Gunn asks for some information on the murder of Dina Wright and Bernie reluctantly tells him to look in a club called Monty's across the river. Gunn goes there and finds a woman named Donna Martin singing “Don’t Worry Bout Me” by Rube Bloom and Ted Koehler. After her song Gunn confronts her and reveals that he knows she’s really Dina Wright. She says she'll talk to him about it after getting dressed but she sneaks away. He tracks her to her apartment and catches her on the fire escape trying to get away again. She says that she staged her death because her husband is trying to kill her and Gunn realizes that Arnie had hired him to locate her. Gunn asks her to sing again at Monty’s to draw out Arnie and she agrees. Lieutenant Jacoby poses as a waiter. Dina sings, “I’m Through with Love” by Gus Kahn, Matty Malneck and Jay Livingston. Arnie shows up and pulls a gun. He is shot in the arm and captured, so no black people get killed at all.

Arnie was played by pioneering black film actor James Edwards.

Dina was played by Diahann Carroll, who started off as a singer, became a musical star. She was the first African American woman to win a Tony Award, and in the 60s she was the first African American woman to become a TV star in the show Julia. This Peter Gunn episode was her first television role. She looks in a lot of photos like my ex-girlfriend Brenda.

In the second story, Joe Webber, an old style mob boss has gotten out of several decades in prison and finds that the current boss, thinking that he wants to reclaim his territory, has put a hit out on him. Joe’s daughter Carole asks Gunn to protect her father. He tries but it turns out that Joe really does want to rebuild his crime empire. He goes to confront the new boss and pulls out a machine gun. He manages to wipe out the competition but takes a fatal bullet.
Carole was played by Claudia Barrett, who starred in the famously bad 1953 science fiction film, Robot Monster. The monster, while killing off the last family on earth, falls in love with her character.

            

Raja

            Around midday on Friday my landlord called me. He asked, “How are you?” and he has never asked, “How are you?” in the twenty years that I’ve known him. I responded, “I’m okay, how are you?" and I've never given him such a greeting. So obviously something bad was about to happen. He said that he thought that I made a mistake when I paid the rent because I’d forgotten that there was a rent increase. I told him that I did not receive a proper rent increase. He asked what I meant. I told him to read it or have either his lawyer or his wife read it so they could explain it to him. He said, “Explain what? I gave you sixty days notice!” I said, “Read the notice. It says you have to give ninety days notice.” As I expected he began shouting and calling me an asshole. I told him to relax and follow the rules. "You wanna follow the rules? You wanna follow the rules? You fucking asshole!” and he hung up. The rent increase that he’d intended was about $13, which means that if he submits a proper ninety day notice before February 1 then my millionaire landlord will lose about $50. I live below the poverty line and lose a lot more than he does every year from his rent increases and yet when I receive a notice I do not start screaming and calling him names. I talk to a lawyer to find out if it’s legal and if it is then I pay the increase. A few years ago Raja got so stressed out that his stomach literally exploded. He’s a Hindu and so I would think that he must know people that can direct him to some yoga classes. I’m qualified myself but I doubt he would be willing to take instruction from me.

            I’d noticed recently that there wasn’t as much money in my account as usual and checked to see if I’d gotten my Toronto Housing Allowance for January. I hadn’t but had forgotten exactly when the deposit is supposed to be made. I checked my account and saw that the last deposit had been in the middle of December and so I suddenly got worried that this was another program that Doug Ford had cancelled. I called my worker but she didn’t even know that I’d been getting the subsidy. I called the Ministry of Housing and found out that it hasn’t been cancelled and that it is usually deposited on the 28^th of every month. I checked my account a little further back and saw that my November deposit had been on the 28^th and so I realized that the earlier December deposit was just a pre-Christmas courtesy.

            I didn’t go outside at all on Friday and spent a lot of the day working on my review of Shab-e She’r.

            In the evening I rubbed a pork shoulder roast with oregano, rosemary, olive oil, wine vinegar, lime zest, lime juice, garlic, salt and cumin and roasted it for two hours. I had a piece for dinner with a potato and two small carrots while watching an episode of Peter Gunn.

            This story starts with a murder on a movie set. The producer hires Gunn to find the killer. It turns out the guy who died was not even hired by the casting agency. Gunn goes to his trailer and talks with the attractive and flirtatious early middle-aged “interpretive” dancer who is in the process of painting herself for her act. In the end he figures out that the movie producer is a former hood that used the set to settle a score. There is a gunfight and of course Lieutenant Jacoby shows up to save the day. The producer dies.

            The trailer park landlady was played by Tracey Roberts, who became more successful as an acting coach and theatrical producer than as a film actor.

Feather Tongued Dodos

            I spent a lot of time on Thursday writing my review of Shab-e She’r.

            In the evening I printed six copies each of the three poems I would be bringing to the Poetry Master Class that night. The poems were an old one called “The Wives of the Prophets”, one from two years ago called “This is a Manner of Flight” and a fresh poem entitled “Evangelikaraoke”.

            I was a lot more organized this time and stapled together and labelled copies that were for a specific member of my group or for Albert, the professor.

            It seemed quite a bit lighter out when I left than the same time last week. The sun sets about seven minutes later every week but maybe it was overcast last Thursday and the sky was darker because of that.

            I was sitting on the cushioned bench in the hallway outside of our occupied classroom when Albert was passing. We chatted briefly about the extra daylight but he thinks we get an extra six minutes a day. He said that up in Nunavat they get an extra hour a day. I just looked it up and found that we gained nine minutes of daylight in the evening between January 17 and January 24. In Iqaluit they gained twenty-two minutes of afternoon daylight in the same week.

            Ashley was the first other student to arrive and when I asked how she was she said she was winded from the stairs. She explained that she has injuries left over from childhood that cause her physical difficulties now and she has to take physiotherapy on a regular basis to deal with them.

            Margaryta was the next one to get there. I tried to make eye contact to say hello but she avoided looking at me. Ashley is actually the only member of the class that has chatted with me at all. Margaryta readily made conversation with Ashley and informed her that they are neighbours and even ride the same bus to Kipling Station.

           

            The chairs around the big table in our classroom have long backs and they are very comfortable. It would be nice to have one for my computer.

The women engage with one another easily so I was thinking it was a gender thing but then when Matthew came he was immediately exchanging verbiage with Lara and so maybe it’s a generational thing or maybe it’s just me.

Ashley told Blythe she hates Facebook and really thinks that Mark Zuckerberg is the devil.

Our group was even smaller this week as we learned that Andrew has dropped the course and Emily and Arin are away doing a theatrical production.

Albert complains that what annoys him is the way they keep improving the Web, which is often a deprovement.

Except for Emily’s poem and those of the two that dropped out, we finished looking at all of the poems that were read on the first night, beginning with “Swainson’s Thrush” by Jenny.

Someone argued that her use of the word “instant” to indicate a moment didn’t work and that she should have used “instance”. I said that I got right away that “instant” meant the present.

Albert commented that Jenny’s poem is in between a verse poem and a prose poem. He said a prose poem tends to be more sober and accommodates description.

Albert declared that the most rabid desire is to be cosy.

Next we looked at my own poem “The Street Sucks the Sandman’s Bag”.

I was pleasantly surprised that so many people liked it.

Albert pointed out that the title has a double meaning. Matthew loved the title. Someone else said that she was confused in trying to relate the Sandman in the title to the speaker and his sidewalk home.

The Sandman is not meant to appear in the poem. The Sandman presides over the poem and over the street. He causes things to wind down but the street also sucks both his sleep dust and his genitalia.

Albert admired the development of metaphor in the first stanza:

My eyes are pans that sift the river of the street

for anything that shines.

Everything passes through me,

I’m a fixture in the plumbing

of the street’s collective mind.

I filter everybody’s emotional trash,

I’m the bend in the pipe

that the shit has to pass

           

Vivian thought my rhyming of “shines” and “mind” was interesting.

Someone said of “the street’s collective mind” that “collective mind” implies plural and yet my street is singular. She misunderstood and thought that I was implying that the street itself has a mind and that there have to be several streets for the mind to be collective. My point is that the street itself is a collective mind of all the people on it.

Matthew singled out “I’m the bend in the pipe

that the shit has to pass,

and though I do find gold

you know it aint the kind

that makes me worth a lick of a woman’s time” and declared it was a powerhouse.

Of the second stanza:

I make a smash with this uptight-rope circus act

I do upon this bench.

I’m an ambidextrous lighthouse

warning every side at once

to maintain a safe distance.

cause they would scrape like a rasp upside of my mind 

like the curious stares

of many passers-by

that like the leaves of fall

that scratch along the road

will only serve to satisfy a dying itch.

            Someone said that the tone changes here and it stands out awkwardly from the rest of the poem.

            Instead of “I do upon this bench” Matthew suggested, “I perform on this bench”.

            Someone else suggested I replace “cause” with “otherwise” in “cause they would scrape like a rasp upside my mind”.

            I said both those changes would screw up the rhythm and Albert added that he thought both “do” and “cause” are fine.  

Of the third stanza:

I’m in the cold because it serves much more comfort

than lonely heated rooms.

It’s just where my life escapes me,

Do I even have a choice

of get away cars or routes?

Do I make things happen from this pivotal place

or just weakly mimic

some kind of female strengths?

It seems mostly women

can make events happen

even when they’re sitting in one place alone.

There was some criticism, as I expected there would be, about my reference to women in the lines: “It seems mostly women / can make events happen / even when they’re sitting in one place alone …” but Ashley didn’t think it was sexist. She thought it was true. In the same vein there was argument over my lines: “Do I make things happen from this pivotal place / or just weakly mimic / some kind of female strengths?” Lara said that it does not sound like the speaker in the poem is a feminist. Someone said that it comes across as misogynistic. Blythe added that my use of “female strengths” might be offensive to a transgender person. It was suggested that maybe “feminine” would be more accurate than “female” and I think that I agree. Matthew however declared that it’s a great stanza and it should not be altered.

There was also a question as to whether in “mostly women can make events happen even when they’re sitting in one place alone”, whether “events” is the right word. I agree that “events” feels wrong.

In the fourth stanza:

Now a guy that I’ve seen but I hardly know,

invades my Space here at my sidewalk home

& the storm of his conversation

keeps droning

on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

and when anyone sits with me on this bench,

my static journey begins to tailspin

and the tumour of their presence

 starts to drain upon my life again.

Someone said that my use of repetition in the lines, “ … the storm of his conversation keeps droning on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on …” and “ … the shooting gallery where I perfect my endless, endless, endless, endless stare …” helps the poem to hang together, helps it be understandable and the whole poem has a lovely rhythm. Vivian thought the repetition was too much.
            Vivian thought that my line “tumour of their presence” was interesting.

Matthew thought that the fifth stanza was great:

He makes me less handsome

by association and

my aim is deflected by his invasion

of the shooting gallery where I perfect my endless, endless, endless, endless stare.

            Of the sixth stanza:

This talking man’s become a blemish

on the face of my spaceman vanity.

I know that he’s schizophrenic,

yet those psychiatric drugs

just seem to plug his sanity.

            Vivian thought the first two lines were interesting but someone else said that they imply some kind of relational character development but sudden and unclear. She added that she felt a bit uncomfortable with my use of mental health.

            Someone liked the phrase “psychic mayday” from the seventh stanza.

            Of the eight stanza:

I’m convicted of shyness

when my clumsy heart gets tangled up inside my mind,

but maybe that restriction

is what holds me back from serving any institution time.

            The person with the most critical comments said that this stanza has a different tone from the rest of the poem and it’s a bit out of place but Vivian thought it was interesting.

            Of the final stanza:

The projector light of sunset

 shoots a golden beam

above my aisle-way seat,

while theme music of evening

begins slowly moving in upon the gentle sunset breeze.

I pour time into space

as I wait in the street

for just one kind word

or else anything sweet

to fall from a woman’s mouth

so I can swing on home upon its memory.

            Vivian said it was very rich. Matthew thought the ending was great.

            I was also told that my use of slant rhyme or what Albert calls “occasional rhyme” really works. I said that I think that effective rhyme is like the perfect crime: it has to look like an accident.

            Albert praised the musicality of my poem and said that sound is equally important.

            Jenny commented that it has a Bob Dylan vibe and qualified that she meant that as a compliment.

             Nathalie said that the way I break the pattern for a while and then return to the origin pattern is very satisfying.

            Someone pointed out that I had written “upside of my mind” but when I read it out loud I left out the “of”. I said that when I read it out loud it became organic and proved that “of” was unnecessary in the poem.

            Vivian pointed out my use of one ampersand although I use “and” everyplace else. I explained that the poem used to be all ampersands and that I’d just missed that particular one when I changed them.

            Matthew said of the whole poem that he absolutely loves it. It’s profound through astute self-reflection and deprecation. “You did a great job of knowing where and when to rhyme and how to set the scene as a poignant sort of purgatory. You’ve mastered the art of drama without being melodramatic.

            Someone else said she loves the rhyme and rhythm. It flows nicely and just works.

            Blythe said it was beautifully done.

            The person with the most critical comments said she liked the tone of the piece.

            Someone else added, “Super cool poem”.

            We broke up into our groups. Because of the diminished size of our class Matthew moved to another group to balance things out. Our group now consisted of four people: Vivian, Blythe, Margaryta and myself. We only had half an hour left and so it was a bit rushed and so we only had time for one of my poems and so I chose “Failed Launch for the Rocket of the Day”.  Someone thought it was cool that I’d written a ghazal but someone else had written on my poem “not a ghazal”. Both Blythe and Margaryta said they’d had to look up what a ghazal is. My impression from a lot of the comments were that they didn’t understand that the verses of a ghazal are not obligated to be conceptually coherent with one another but to all convey the same mood. Some comments kept on asking for a connection of ideas.

            Of the fourth stanza:

Not connecting with the sad uglies

that stare me down with their mad slug eyes.

            Someone said they loved the matching of “uglies” and “slug eyes”. Someone wrote next to “sad uglies” the comment “women”. Huh? Why would she conclude that I was talking about women? No gender is mentioned in the entire poem.

            Of the whole poem someone said that the rhyming distracts from the narrative. But there is no narrative and a ghazal is supposed to rhyme. Someone else, I think Vivian wrote that it was interesting but wondered if it follows the form of a ghazal.

            I didn’t find the critique very satisfying. It seemed rushed and the comments were mostly on elements that have nothing to do with how a ghazal functions.

            We exchanged our written comments about each other’s poems.

            Of my poem “Maroon River”:

Business is unusual as usual

tonight on Parkdale’s streets:

The endless search for jagged cracks

to fill with future heart attacks

hardly ever skips a beat.

Testosterone’s tapping

the pussies like trees:

two fins for a swim in the estrogen sea.

and every space cadet is a nervous wreck,

twisting to watch their backs

as they float with the other space debris

in a twitching, spinning hoedown

around the quaking planet Crack.

            Blythe said the first stanza is really charming.

            Margaryta liked lines three and four but thought five feels out of place.

            Of “Testosterone’s tapping the pussies like trees” Vivian said she couldn’t review it because she keeps laughing. She said she loves it though. She thought that “two fins for a swim in the estrogen sea” doesn’t fit but I wonder if she understood that there is a double meaning there and that a fin is a five-dollar bill.

            Of my poem “Feather Tongued Dodos”:

When we are together we know we are lost

We don’t know each other any more

than ourselves and so we die by the way

we talk, but the chatter, it’s not

supposed to mean anything together

The word reflects until it dulls

like a bull-bell like a wall-well, a wind-war,

or an aptitudinal appetite whether askew or not

We don’t place blame on ourselves until we find

our missing loss but then it’s too late

to communicate, we’re sorely in need

but too sore to soar so we do

not fly with these wings but we flap a lot.

            Margaryta thought the title was fun but she thought “We don’t know each other any more than ourselves” is confusing. Vivian thought “die by the way we talk” is unclear. Blythe said the stanza is great.

            Vivian loved the complicated lines and rhymes of the second stanza.

            Blythe suggested I put “we flap a lot” on its own line and I think I will. She also said that of the phrase “sorely in need but too sore to soar” that “sorely” pushes it too far.

            Of “our missing loss” Margaryta asked, “What is it?”

            Of the whole poem Vivian said she really likes it but doesn’t find anything in it. It seems every stanza is stand-alone and that even internally the thematic is struggling.

            On the way home I stopped at Freshco because I was out of fruit and needed some potato chips to have with a quick, late dinner. The red grapes there were too soft and so I settled for green grapes but they kind of tasted like medicine. I also bought cherries but they were a bit dry and withered. I grabbed a mango, some Greek yogourt and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips.

            I had the chips with a bowl of spicy black bean soup. It was from a carton but it was pretty good.

            I watched an episode of Peter Gunn. This was basically a simple cat and mouse story. A mob boss pays a hit man with white hair and dark glasses to kill Peter Gunn, but the stipulation is that it has to be done far from town because Gunn has too many friends. The killer captures Gunn in his own apartment and forces him to drive his car out to an abandoned mine that for some reason still has working machinery. Gunn escapes after suddenly accelerating and slamming on the brakes. The impact of slamming forward against the front seat stuns the killer long enough for Gunn to run from the car. The chase goes through a mine, out the other side of a mountain and then through various equipment of a mining operation until Gunn disarms the assassin and becomes the pursuer until the hitman falls and dies.