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.