It was somewhat
depressing when I got up on Wednesday to see that the snow was coming down fairly
heavily and it looked like my bike ride downtown to class would be difficult.
It wasn’t as bad as I’d expected it
to be though there were a few moments when I almost lost my balance. I rode
slowly and carefully on the side streets and road fast in the car lane of Bloor
Street until I got to the bike lane, which wasn’t cleared but it was passable.
I had time before class to put a few
tables in rows but by this time of year my fellow students have already picked
the spots where they like to sit at the back of the conference arrangement.
Only Gabriel and a few stragglers sit at the tables that I set up.
I told Professor Weisman about
Albert Moritz having suggested writing in a concerted manner and that I’d asked
if that meant writing in a style. He’d told me that the Modernists would call
it a style but the Romanticists would call it a “vision”. She just said, “That
sounds like an Al thing to say.”
This was our last lecture on Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Victor Frankenstein engages with
science, not to de-mystify it like a normal scientist but rather to mystify it.
For scientists it is a moral point to enhance understanding. He is also
circumventing the maternal for glory. He is reproducing without a woman and
appropriating reproductive privilege.
Shelley was influenced by the
philosophy and science of her day. In her father, William Godwin’s most famous
work he insists that knowledge and intelligence are poor when not mixed with
sympathy.
Victor’s actions are a transgression
against the principles of benevolence. The representation is of a man who has
taken more than his fair share of knowledge. He plays both god and the female
role.
Culture, history and poetry. The
creature imagines and we along with him that the De Laceys are conveying knowledge
in an ideal way.
The creature reads The Ruins of
Empires (appendices135). One of the professor’s colleagues teaches an entire
course on the creature’s readings. He has a full education on the deficits of
mankind. Knowledge as concrete as bad memories are conceptualized. The only
cure is death.
Knowledge is a privilege of
inheritance. Think of Wordsworth’s “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables
Turned”.
Collective memory. Victor is also
haunted. Three books are part of cultural memory. “The Sorrows of Werter”, a
novel about a suicidal artist. The creature learns about the Romantic ideals of
emotional suffering and sympathy. The idea of psychological individuality finds
its watershed in Romanticism. “Who am I?” was provoked by Goethe. The creature
is being trained by these books to become the ideal Romantic author.
Paradise Lost is about the fall from
innocence. The Romantic period sees Satan as the hero. Satan has been living
under the yoke of an unwieldy ruler. He falls in love with Eve.
The creator has a responsibility to
its creature. The creature learns he is vulnerable and identifies with Satan.
The outsider is an important motif. Nature versus nurture.
In 18th and 19th
Century theories about the mind it was believed that a child was a tabula rasa
or blank slate and that the knowledge you are given makes you who you are. The
creature is a blank slate and acquires in relation to what he learns. When
rejected, this is what leads to his vengeance. Canonical ideas of time.
She asked us, “What is the
significance of the creature’s education?”
I said that it stands counter to
that of Victor. The creature learns about the sharing of knowledge and about
mankind as a collective intelligence. Victor learns from lone wolf thinkers.
The creature learns the full extent
of his exclusion and that his rights are illusory. Education often fails. When
his educators in sympathy, sharing and virtue reject him it renders their
teachings valueless. The De Laceys, in rejecting the creature based on superficiality
illustrate they have not learned their own education.
There are multiple layers in this
book and the reader has to be active.
Robert Walton may not be reliable
nor anyone else. His sister Margaret controls it all. Mary Shelley and Margaret
have cannibalized the story from different sources like the creature was.
I pointed out to Professor Weisman
after class that Robert Walton is the only other person that describes the
creature besides Victor. He does not run away.
After class I went to the Financial
Aid office. The counter person didn’t understand why OSAP had said I was past
the deadline since the end of my term is still sixty days away. She took the
hard copy but told me that I’d been approved anyway.
I rode down St George and then
Beverley to Queen and stopped at a couple of vintage places to look for a black
beatnik style beret for a performance I plan on doing the next time I go to
Shab-e She’r. At Black Market there were a few beret’s but they were all for
people with tiny heads. I’ll swing by Kensington sometime soon, since that’s
where I bought the beret I had in the 90s when I used to do the character of
Sir Real. I don’t know what happened to that beret but I expect my
ex-girlfriend Kristeena stole it.
Riding home in the snowfall was an
exercise in concentration. There’s only so much space between the cars and the
streetcar tracks and on top of that sometimes it was hard to see the tracks at
all. Riding in the snow uses and tenses different muscles that I don’t usually
use in that way and so it can be exhausting.
I didn’t bother to stop at the
supermarket.
The model coordinator at OCADU had
offered me a job for February 28, which I turned down because it would finish
just before I had to be at the Poetry Master Class. When I got home there was
another email asking if I would take it if she could get me off thirty minutes
early. I told her it could work normally but that I wasn’t available. I didn’t
say that I couldn’t do it because I don’t want to. I have a lot of writing to
do and this job would have been for six hours. On top of that I’d have to ride
downtown through the snow again and then work. The teacher that I would have
been working for always wants short poses and so I would have been very tired
by the end and then I’d still have to go for Creative Writing. I really don’t
like these last minute jobs Tracy offers me.
I had a bagel with cheese for lunch
and a thin slice of pie with yogourt.
I thawed out a cooked ham so I could
have some for dinner.
I had a slice of ham with some very
hard cheddar cheese that had been in the fridge for a while. It had a section
of mould that I cut off. I had them on a bagel with a beer while watching
Rawhide.
The story begins with Pete getting
gored by a steer. They can’t risk transporting Pete to a doctor because the
journey might open up the wound. Gil and Rowdy go into the nearest town to find
a doctor and bring him out to the trail. The problem is that an angry father
and his three sons take over the town as revenge for his fourth son having been
lynched earlier that day. They are looking for Kels Morgan the man that
organized the hanging and when they find him they’ll string him up along with
the sheriff. They won’t let Gil and Rowdy take the doctor away or leave
themselves. The Masons make the townsmen build the scaffold. Gil and Rowdy keep
trying to get away but the Masons won’t let them. Jeb Mason’s youngest son is
trying to convince his father to give it up because it will result in a murder
charge. He reminds him that the dead son was a murderer. When the gallows is
built suddenly a rider charges out of the livery stable on a horse. Jeb aims
his rifle and shoots the man only to discover that he’s just killed his
youngest son.
I felt like I had food poisoning and
I felt very tired at around 23:00 and so I just went to bed an hour early.
No comments:
Post a Comment