The Defence of Guenevere

            On Sunday morning I started memorizing “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian.

            I memorized the first and most of the second verse of “La noyée". It’s about the speaker trying to save someone from drowning in forgetfulness of him.

            I washed a section of my bedroom floor that’s covered by the foot of my mattress at the southwest corner of the room.  There actually wasn’t much dirt in that area but there were lots of little splatters of white paint to scrape up.

            I answered the reading questions about “The Defence of Guenevere” by William Morris.

            What type of mindset is created through bodily images in this poem?

            In stanza one: “She threw her wet hair backward from her brow /Her hand close to her mouth, touching her cheek // as though she had had there a shameful blow”. The image conveys defiance and shame combined.

            In stanza five: “To my unhappy pulse that beat right through my eager body”. “Unhappy” and “eager” together shows that she is conflicted. She is restless.

            In stanza seven: “hair like sea weed” gives the sense that she has a sub-human beauty.

            In stanza nine: “Both our mouths went, wandering in one way / and aching sorely, met among the leaves / our hands being left behind, strained far away”. It creates a sense of tension between infidelity and chastity.

            In stanza eleven: “Blood upon your bed … Your hands are white lady, as when you wed / Where did you bleed?”  It is as if she has become virginal again and lost her virginity again.

            The rhythm is iambic pentameter and the rhyme is terza rima with a scheme of aba; bcb; cdc and so on. It makes the narrative continuous as it moves forward but looks back at the same time. It could only work as a song without a chorus and without an instrumental break. It has to keep going until the end.

            Guenevere is defending hers and Launcelot’s honour.

            The poem is explaining, justifying, revealing, confessing, excusing.

            This poem is ripe for parody. I imagine Matt Lucas from Little Britain performing as Guenevere through his schoolgirl character Vicky Pollard who talks very fast and makes up ridiculous excuses to never take the blame for anything.

            The poem fits the definition of a dramatic monologue as long as there are no other voices. I think she was quoting Gauwaine and so it’s still hr voice. She’s speaking not to the reader but to unseen lords and revealing things about herself.

            For John Ruskin the grotesque is fundamentally two-faced like the Melpomene and Thalia masks of Greek tragedy and comedy. It has to be a combination of the ludicrous and the horrible resulting in laughter and anger in response to the human condition.

            I did some exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Andy gets kicked out of his room for making too many demands of his landlord. Kingfish wants Andy’s $10 and so he offers his couch for a week but Sapphire won’t have that bum in her home. Kingfish knows she won’t turn Andy out if he’s sick and so he has him fake an illness. They try to figure out an illness that will fool Sapphire and look in a veterinary book, which they figure is about medical treatment for veterans. Sapphire takes Andy’s temperature and he heats the thermometer with his cigar and so when she sees how high it is she becomes alarmed. Kingfish calls Shorty the barber to pretend to be a doctor but Sapphire is not convinced. She ends up kicking them both out.

            I went out to dinner with my upstairs neighbour David downstairs at Sho Izakaya. I learned that he’s Jewish and wondered why he hadn’t gone to Israel instead of Canada. He said he was philosophically opposed to the required military service. He’s been in Canada for almost thirty years and worked down at the port lands for twenty-one years.

            He had a bowl of noodle and vegetable soup but he didn’t even eat half of it. He said it was too salty. I had the sashimi chef’s plate and had expected a lot more for $20. What I got was a little plate of three kinds of raw fish, including salmon. It was good but I’ve gotten larger portions and more variety at other Japanese restaurants. For a while I thought that what they’d given me was just an appetizer and something else was coming. David tried to get the waiter’s attention several times and he ignored him. I finally turned once, said, “Excuse me” and he came over. I wonder if there was some racism there. It was nice to get together with David but I think he was pretty disappointed with Sho Izakaya. I was too and I won’t go back there.

             I answered the reading questions about “Aesthetic Poetry” by Walter Pater.

            He says poems like “Defence of Guenevere” are coloured through and through with Christianity while at the same time rebelling against it. This can be seen in stanza three where an angel offers a choice of beautiful fabrics of long blue and short red. One chooses the heavenly colour of blue but it turns out to represent hell.

            During the Middle Ages Europe was constantly at war. Aesthetic poetry resets itself in those days but uses Christianity to sweeten and calm the violence. Everything is made more genteel and calm than it probably really was.

            I was going to skip dinner at home but what I’d had was so insubstantial that I made an egg and toast and had a beer with it while watching Annette. At the barbecue Steve is dancing with Annette when Laura reminds him that he’d brought her there but he tells Laura that nobody brought anyone. Laura begins to make her insinuations about Annette stealing her necklace and suddenly Jet blows up. She tells her to say what she means and Laura finally says that Annette took her necklace. Jet comes forward with clenched fists and tells her to take it back. She backs her up to the pier and punches her as they both fall in. Jet thinks she’s ruined the party but Steve tells her she didn’t and he was rooting for her in the fight. Annette comes home very upset thinking that she has caused all the trouble. She rights a note, packs her things and heads for the station to take the train back to Beaver Junction.  It’s only when Mike comes to see her that Uncle Charlie discovers that Annette is gone. Mike rushes to the station and convinces her to come home. The next day is the entertainment committee rehearsal at Steve’s place. Annette goes even though she knows that Laura will be there. Steve invites Laura to do her song first but when she begins to play the piano one of the keys makes a strange sound. Steve looks in the piano and finds Laura’s necklace. Laura apologizes to Annette and Jet apologizes to Laura. Laura sings a song called “Don’t Jump to Conclusions” and everyone joins in. Mike walks Annette home and they have a date the next day. That’s the end of the series because that was the last season of the Mickey Mouse Club.

            That night I was trying to transcribe the poem "Au lecteur" by Charles Baudelaire but Word kept locking down for editing and so I would have to close it in my Task Manager in order to reopen it. I tried to save the document after every word but sometimes it would shut down in the middle and I would have to retype what I'd lost once I got it back up again. This has been happening every few days for the last several months. This time after having to close Word and restart it three times I was fed up and I downloaded Apache Open Office. I’ll keep it as a backup for now but if Word continues to screw up I’ll just get rid of Word altogether.

            My second Waterpik seems to have died and so I’ll have to go and buy another. This time I think I'll go back to the plugged in kind because the battery was too much of a hassle on this last one.

Modern Love

            On Saturday morning I finished translating “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian. The translation will probably change as I start memorizing the french lyrics. I sang along with it once and it has a lot melodic changes, so it's going to take a while to memorize it and to work out the chords.

            I tried to write down the lyrics to the parody of “Que je t’aime" by Serge Gainsbourg but I couldn't catch them all. I also looked for his parody of “Chanson d cour” but couldn't find that either. So that finishes 1972 of my translations of Gainsbourg. I moved on to 1973’s “La noyée” (The Drowned Girl) and sang along with it a couple of times.

            I went down to No Frills where the grapes were not in great shape but they were cheap enough that I could pick through them. I also bought strawberries, raspberries, three steaks, some yogourt, coffee mouthwash and Murphy’s Oil Soap.

            I took another stab at washing the glue from the floorboards on the threshold of my living room and kitchen. It was hard to se what I was doing while cleaning under the bookshelf because it was cloudy and rainy outside and so I wasn’t getting enough ambient light to see the gluey spots. I just scrubbed all the boards back there over and over and over and hoped I was getting it. It looks like I was mostly successful. There are just a few small glue spots left under the shelf but nothing worth spending a whole session on. When I tackle the adjacent southwest corner of the kitchen floor I’ll reach around and give the threshold another quick scrub, but all in all, at last in the dim light of a rainy day, it looks pretty good there right now.

            I had cheese and crackers for lunch.

            I did some exercises in the afternoon while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish wants to prove how ridiculous women’s Easter hats are by designing one with Andy and getting Miss Fifi's Hat Shop to sell it to Sapphire. They make one out of a straw hat that had been worn by a horse. Amos says that no woman would buy that hat and certainly not his wife Ruby. They add all kinds of things to it and then they pose as French hat designers from Paris. The dialogue between the two men trying to sound French to Fifi it pretty funny. She asks, "Are you free French?” George answers, "We ain't exactly free but we is very reasonable". She wants them to tell her about Paris and he tells her that it seems like yesterday they were in Paris at a sidewalk café sipping cokes with a couple of coquettes. Of the bank of the Seine Kingfish says he has his savings account at the main branch. "Me and André know Paris inside and out!" "Yeah we is real Parisites all right!" She asks if Paris was occupied while they were there and Andy says, “Oh sure, you could hardly get a seat on the bus". Madame Fifi isn't sure what to think of their hat but she agrees to put it on display and try to sell it to Sapphire Stephens. The next day Amos is with them when Sapphire reveals she didn’t buy the hat but his wife Ruby did.

            I didn’t take a bike ride because it had been raining.

            I answered some reading questions that Professor Li gave us about George Meredith’s “Modern Love”.

            What is modern about the relationship?

            It’s really as old as the hills but it was modern to write about the love affair.

            These sonnets are uncommon in that they have 16 lines instead of 14. None of them come with a resolution and in fact there is no real resolution throughout the poem. The sonnet format serves to convey a sense of being trapped while at the same time taking liberties within the enclosing form. The speaker's will is contained in 16 line moments, most of which are not entirely pleasant for him. It’s a stretched sonnet and he is stretched in this love triangle. He is bound by duty, love and guilt. The poem is bound to a sequence. The poet is bound to finding rhymes in abba, cddc, effe, ghhg for fifty sonnets.

            A question claims that there are two speakers but I think there is only one. “He” is usually in the past tense and I think the speaker refers to another man that was the woman’s lover. "I" is mostly in the present tense.

            How does Meredith make the “fleshly” felt?

            Meredith is subtler than Rossetti.

            In stanza IX: “He felt the wild beast in him betweenwhiles / so masterfully rude, that he would grieve / to see the helpless delicate thing receive / his guardianship through certain dark defiles ... Here thy shape / to squeeze like an intoxicating grape …"

            In stanza XXVII: “O lady, once I gave love: now I take / Lady, I must be flattered, shouldst thou wake / the passion of a demon …”

            Buchanon pointed out Rossetti's "Nuptial Sleep" as an example of fleshly poetry:

At length their long kiss severed with sweet smart

And as the last, slow sudden drops are shed

From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled

So singly flagged the pulses of each heart

Their bosoms sundered with the opening start

Of married flowers to either side outspread

From the knit stem, yet still their mouths burnt red

Fawned on each other where they lay apart

Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams

And their dreams watched them sink and slid away

Slowly their souls swam up again through gleams

Of watered light and full drowned waifs of day

Till from some wonder of new woods and streams

He woke and wondered more, for there she lay

            Buchanon would probably give Meredith a pass for the most part.

            The last two lines of Modern Love are saying that love tears through a person’s being like a charging warhorse but only leaves behind faint traces of understanding.

            Stanza I: “Sobs that shook their common bed” They share despair but no longer love.

            Stanza XXII: “Her tears fall still as oak leaves after frost".

            I had a fried egg with a piece of toast and a beer while watching four episodes of Annette. Annette brings Jet home for dinner and Uncle Archie is delighted to have her because he used to be close friends with Jet’s father. Aunt Lila is less enchanted because she doesn’t believe Jet advances Annette’s social standing. Jet invites them out to their farm the next Saturday. Later Steve asks Annette to be his date for the hayride and barbecue he’s throwing at his parent’s ranch but she has to turn him down because she doesn’t want to disappoint her uncle. On Saturday the gang are enjoying a sing-along on the hayride when Steve gets the idea to swing by the Maypen place to pick up Annette and Jet. Laura is not happy about including them but everyone else insists. When they arrive at Jet’s place at first Annette is reluctant to go but Uncle Archie insists she go with them while he catches up with his old friend. They rid and sing their way to the barbecue where Annette dances with Steve, much to Laura’s chagrin.

Puppy Love

            On Friday morning I translated a few more lines of “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian.

            Word shut down on me twice and twice I had to close it in the Task Manager to get it started again. I think maybe I punched a wrong key and called up an editor I didn’t need.

            I finished posting “C’est la vie qui veut ca” by Serge Gainsbourg on my Christian’s Translations blog.

I tried to find the lyrics or at least a recording of "Je t'aime aussi” by Serge Gainsbourg but it doesn’t seem to exist online. I think it was one of those things that he threw together for a TV show and that it’s a parody of his own "Je t'aime, Moi non plus”.

I looked for “Que je t’aime" which I think is a parody of Johnny Halliday's song of the same name. I found one video of it. I’ll look for the lyrics to the original and then listen to the parody to see if I can figure out how it was altered.

I made a third attempt at washing, scrubbing and scraping the glue from the floorboards on the threshold of my living room and kitchen. I ended up scratching my right elbow a few times against the corner of the bookshelf as I scrubbed underneath it. It seemed to me I’d worked from the same position the day before that without scratching myself. Maybe the elbow grease I used was more abrasive. The result was that I got a lot more of the glue off but there’s still some there. I’ll give it another try. Maybe it's because I built that part of the floor in the first place and it’s my baby that I'm being such a perfectionist about it.

I had a slice of roast beef for lunch.

I got caught up on my journal.

In the afternoon I did some exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Andy gets a telegram telling him he's been made a sales manager for a clothing company and he’ll be making $75 a week plus commission. This would be the 1945 equivalent of over $1000 a week today. Kingfish and Henry Van Porter try to convince Andy that he'll need a manager so they offer him $25 and a contract that would give them half his salary. Andy refuses but later when he receives another telegram telling him it was a mistake and they meant a different Andy Brown, he decides to teach Kingfish and Henry a lesson and he signs the contract.

I took a bike ride to Bloor and University, south to Queen and home.

I read the long poem “Modern Love" by George Meredith once silently and once aloud. The speaker is recounting his relationship with his lover and with his wife.

I had a potato, the last three slices of roast beef and some gravy while watching Annette. The first part was the continuation of a documentary about her. I hadn’t known there was a Canadian connection in that she'd dated Paul Anka and that he’d written "Puppy Love" about their relationship.

While having yogourt with honey and blueberries for dessert I watched two more episodes of the show. Steve is the head of the entertainment committee for the school and he’s put Annette in charge of the sophomore part of the group. There is a meeting at Steve’s house and Laura once again gets nasty with Annette by saying that she's not qualified to be on the committee. She then again implies that Annette stole her necklace and despite everyone else chastising Laura for her behaviour Annette resigns and leaves. Mike goes after her and convinces her not to quit the committee. Later, Steady, Steve and Mike try to confront Laura but she resents them all siding with Annette and says that Annette has them bamboozled. Thy all meet at the malt shop to rehearse for the Thanksgiving show. Jet does a country song and dance number called “Pigeon Wing” while Annette and Mike do a duet called "Meeting at the Malt Shop After School”.

Jet was played by Judy Nugent, who started acting at age six in the film “It Had to be You". She played the little blind girl that Superman flies around the world in The Adventures of Superman.

            

Tomato Surgery

            On Thursday morning during song practice my high E string broke. That was probably a good thing because for the last few months I’d been using a 17-gauge B string for a 13 gauge E string, although I couldn’t really tell the difference.

I found a word for “tomato disemboweler" that rhymes with “potato cannon" and that was "tomato surgeon".

            I finished working out the chords for “C’est la vie qui veut ca” by Serge Gainsbourg and started posting it on my Christian’s Translations blog.

            I went down the street to the hardware store and bought a new bucket to replace the one that got broken and thrown out. I also bought a new scrub brush because the on I had was extremely worn out. I only realized when I got home that my landlord must have thrown away my old brush as well since it had been with the other items on the deck when he trashed them.

            I took another stab at trying to wash and scrub the glue from the floorboards on the threshold between my living room and the kitchen. I made some progress but I’ve concluded that glue is very sticky. The area looks a lot less spotty but it definitely needs at least another session.

            I wanted to get some advice from Parkdale Community Legal Services to find out if I could legally deduct the cost of the items that my landlord threw away. I saw online that they would be open from 15:00 to 17:00 that day and so I delayed my siesta and stayed awake to I could be there when they opened. But when I got to Noble and Queen the building that had once housed Parkdale Legal was now under construction. I asked a guy in a hard hat and he told me they had moved to 201 Cowan. That address is a church but I found out there are offices in the basement of an adjacent building in the back. But those were only the offices for Parkdale Legal and I was told the intake was at the Parkdale Intercultural Association between the Liquor Store and Fullworth.

            I told the receptionist my issue and he told me to take a seat. There were a lot of people waiting. I asked if this was their permanent location but he said it’s only temporary. He told me that they might be moving to the basement of the Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre.

            It was a long wait. I did a bit of reading of George Meredith’s "Modern Love" but it was past my naptime and I was finding it hard to concentrate. Lots of people were there for various issues. There was a guy trying to keep from getting deported; there was a man who needed English versions of his educational certificates from his home country for the purposes of immigration; there was a woman from the States who wanted her visa extended; there was a homeless man who’d gotten an apartment in Hamilton but had lost all of his idea and so he couldn't take the place until he could prove his identity. He had been at Parkdale Legal previously for another issue and they had scanned some pieces of his identification. He wondered if they still had the pictures on their computer. The receptionist had to call the offices on Cowan to find out if they had copies of his identification. They did have them and someone brought them over, saving him from homelessness.

            When I finally saw a law student she told me that it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to just unilaterally deduct the cost of my lost things from my rent. She said one option would be for me to file an application to the Landlord Tenant Bureau for compensation but she said that would be an arduous process. Because of the legal clinic’s current unstable status they only have one supervising lawyer present on a given intake day and on this day that lawyer was not a housing expert and so she told me she would talk with her supervisor about my options and email me next week.

            After leaving Parkdale Legal I ran into my former yoga student, Anna. We chatted for a few minutes. She kept on urging me to come out to some of the regular local events that she goes to. I told her that I’m busy with school.

            It was already 16:20 and so by the time I took a siesta and got up it would be too late to take a bike ride downtown and back, so I decided to just go to the supermarket skip the bike ride. At Freshco I bought a small watermelon for $2 and I’m getting pretty good at picking a good one. I didn’t bother buying nectarines or grapes because they didn't have any good ones. I got some one-year-old cheddar, three bags of milk and three containers of Greek yogurt.

            In the evening I did some exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish is just preparing to start a bank that just keeps people’s money without giving it back when a woman comes into his office thinking it’s the lecture bureau. When she says she has the $50 to pay for the lecturer Kingfish tells her she's in the right place. He arranges for Andy to memorize a speech on the psychology of homemaking but the day of the lecture it turns out that the first lecturer is the man that wrote that speech. Andy fumbles through an alternative lecture but it’s a big success because they think he's being deliberately funny.

            I had a potato, three slices of roast beef and some gravy for dinner while watching Annette. The story begins with Annette's first day at Old South High School. As she expected, since her rural schooling did not have Latin or Algebra, Annette will be held back in Grade 10. But she gets to share a classroom with her new friend Jet. However, because Jet is a farm girl she is not part of the in crowd even though the popular girls would accept Jett if Laura didn’t object to her. Laura still believes that Annette stole her necklace at the party and at lunchtime in the malt shop she insinuates that accusation. Annette confronts her and Laura backs down. We learn that Jet has a major crush on Steve. Aunt Lila tries to steer Annette away from hanging around with Jet because the other girls would advance her social standing. Uncle Archie reminisces about how he and Jet’s father used to be close and he wonders how people drift apart. Steve appoints Annette the entertainment chairman for her class and she asks Jet to be her assistant.

            Those were the last episodes on this digital copy of CD1. The rest is a documentary about Annette, featuring the full Mickey Mouse Club episode that contained the first episode of Annette. It was mentioned that she was the first ethnic teen idol. I hadn’t really thought of her as being ethnic when I was a kid but I guess she did stand out from all of the other Mouseketeers.

            That night I hard some shouting, “Leave me alone!" I looked outside and saw two bike cops hassling a guy in the bus shelter in front of the Elaine Fleck Gallery. He repeated, “Leave me alone” several times and then, “Don’t touch my stuff!” Then, “Let me go!" I heard slamming against the glass of the shelter. He was then outside the shelter and down on the sidewalk as he pleaded with them to leave him alone and told them he wasn’t bothering anybody. People gathered around and someone called to the cops, "He's not fighting back!" The guy being hassled finally said he’d tell them his name. I hope it wasn’t the guy that had been at Parkdale Legal earlier ending up in more hassles that would keep him homeless. 

Christina Rossetti

            On Wednesday morning I tried to find a translation for “l'éventre-tomates" and settled on "tomato disemboweler” but now I have to find a word for "disemboweler that rhymes with "cannon".

            I worked out most of the chords for “C’est la vie qui veut ca” by Serge Gainsbourg but I was stuck on the last one. I’ll approach it with a fresh brain on Thursday morning.

            I worked for over an hour on close reading some more Rossetti poems and had a quick lunch of corn crackers and cheese before leaving for Aesthetics and Decadence Movements class.

            There was another class in our room again and so I waited outside and did some more close reading.

            We started off with our first seminar starter, which involves a student having written a short paragraph on one of the week’s poems. Olivia was our premier presenter and she had written on the sonnet “Soul’s Beauty” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She said it was about spirituality and so when it was time for us to answer questions I asked if she’d just seen it as spiritual because of the word “soul”, since I couldn’t see anything else in the poem that pointed towards spirituality. She confirmed it had been the word “soul”.

            Professor Li said that if the word “spirituality” was really the word she was looking for it’s fine but we should always be sure of what we really mean.

            There would be another seminar starter but first we looked at a couple more sonnets, starting with “Vain Virtues”. In the sonnet he talks about virgins going to hell when they die. I said that he’s saying that it’s a sin to not enjoy oneself while one is alive. It’s also right in the ironic title that one can maintain virtue out of vanity in such a way one’s very virtue becomes a sin. There is also a double meaning of “vain” as in it not only representing someone being self-important but also of vain actions being useless.

            We discussed “Autumn Idleness” after I read it. Professor Li commented that my reading had captured the sense of idleness in the poem. A lot of people thought of idleness being a negative thing but I said poets like being idle. She asked about the line, “While I still lead my shadow o’er the grass”. I pointed out that if he is leading his shadow he must be walking toward the sun and so his darkness is behind him.

            The other seminar starter was by Elizabeth and she had chosen to write about Christina Rossetti’s “Another Spring”. She said that the poem is about sounds of nature but symbolically about the sound of art. I told her that I could only see the second stanza being about listening, whereas the first is visual. She argued that the last line of the first verse, “to blow at once not late” refers to sound but it really only continues the visual of flowers blowing in the wind without touching on the sound.

            Professor Li said Christina Rossetti was influenced by her brother but “Another Spring” is one of her many departures from his influence.

            We looked at two more Christina Rossetti poems, the first being “Promises Like Pie Crust”. Since piecrust is not mentioned beyond the title we were asked what it could mean. Someone said that promises crumble like piecrust. Someone else pointed out that “promises like piecrust” is part of a longer quote from Charles Dickens: “Promises are like piecrust, they are made to be broken”. But my research shows that the saying was first recorded by essayist Heraclitus Ridens in 1681 when he wrote of acts of parliament as being “like promises and piecrust, made to be broken”. It was popularized by Jonathon Swift in one of the satirical dialogues from his 1738 book “Polite Conversation” in which Lady A argues, “Promises and piecrust are made to be broken”. It’s probably a saying that long predates it having been written down.

            I pointed out that all of the Christina Rossetti poems that we’ve read express an aspiration to live in the moment but that in the case of this poem she says, “Promise me no promises / so will I not promise you”. I said that the word “so” is conditional, meaning that the speaker requires of the other to not make promises so they can live in the moment. Otherwise if the other makes promises then she will also.

            The last poem we discussed was Rossetti’s “Yet a Little While”. I said that the final stanza continues her theme of living in the present when she says, “hope itself is fear”. I gave the example that hope in love comes from a fear of not being loved. So hope, in projecting into the future is a betrayal of the moment.

            Chiasmus is a reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases without a repetition of words. Examples: “By day the frolic and the dance by night” and “Despised if ugly; if she’s fair, betrayed".

            On the way home I stopped at Freshco to buy nectarines, blueberries and grapes. The only grapes they had were green but I got two bags anyway. The nectarines were not very good because the season is over.

            I took a siesta and when I got up at 19:00 I did some exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. This was the second episode of a two-part story. Andy had gotten his girlfriend to do his taxes for him but to impress her h wrote in that he’d made $7000 in 1944 rather than $250, which was his real income. He’d expected she would give the form back to him so he could change it but she filed it for him, which meant he’d have to pay $1200. Most of the second part involves Andy thinking that he is going to be wanted dead or alive by the government. And then when their friend Henry calls Kingfish to tell him to tell Andy that it’s no big deal and all he has to do is go down to the IRS and tell them that he made a mistake, rather than conveying the message Kingfish tells Andy that he is a certified accountant and he can fix his problem for $10. Andy gladly pays and Kingfish informs the IRS of Andy’s mistake but then they find out Kingfish hasn’t files his taxes for five years.

            I had an egg with toast and a beer for dinner while watching four episodes of Annette.

            New girl in town, Annette has been invited to a party to get to know some of the local teenagers. Her escort is supposed to be the handsome Steve but he’s taking Laura and so short and rude Olmstead is sent in his place. Steady arrives and Annette makes the best of it but her aunt and uncle and Katie are not impressed with Steady’s informal manners and his lingo, such as when he calls the party they are going to a “brawl”. One of Steady’s character traits is that he is constantly eating and so he takes Annette to the malt shop on the way to the party. There Annette meets and befriends Mike, who works behind the counter but would not have been invited to the party because he’s not part of the in crowd. Because of Steady’s detour the party has started already and Laura is entertaining her friends with a song called "The Three Rs – Reading Writing and Rhythm” in which she mentions various dances and the guests perform them. Annette and Steady arrive and Laura takes an immediate dislike to Annette. A short girl named Kitty has been anticipating Steady's arrival and although he doesn’t treat her very well they seem to be an informal couple. We saw Kitty doing the Mambo by herself during Laura’s song and later she and Steady do a very animated swing dance together.

            The whole group plays a complicated version of spin the bottle that I’d never seen. In my experience spin the bottle was a kissing game and it’s how I met my first girlfriend, Bonnie Hansen, when I was fifteen. But this game involved the bottle being spun and the spinner calls out a number. The person holding the number has to catch the bottle before it stops spinning or temporarily forfeit a worn possession. Laura has to forfeit an expensive necklace. Steady has to forfeit his shoes and Annette forfeits her corsage. To get one’s things back players have to put on a performance of some sort. Laura plays her song again, Steady dances a jig and Annette sings “How Will I Know My Love?” but in the middle Steady calls out that the food is ready and everyone walks away. Annette is standing alone in the living room but she hears Laura say from the patio, "Thank goodness we didn't have to listen to any more of that dull song!” Her feelings are hurt and she's about to leave but then changes her mind. There is dancing but then Steady has to leave early because his mother is strict and since he’s Annette's escort she has to leave as well. After she leaves Laura looks for her necklace but can't find it. She thinks Annette took it.

            Kitty was played by Sharon Baird, who won a Little Miss Washington beauty contest at the age of six and won a trip to LA to compete in the national equivalent. She came in second and her parents decided to move to LA. She started dancing and singing in films at the age of seven. At eleven she auditioned for the Mickey Mouse Club and got in. She had a famous act in which she tap-danced and skipped rope at the same time. She played Lady Boyd on “H.R. Pufnstuf” and was Frodo in Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings. 

Annette

            On Tuesday morning my B string broke during song practice but fortunately I had another and it didn’t take long to put it on.

I translated a few more lines of "Complaint du progress" by Boris Vain.

            I finished memorizing “C’est la vie qui veut ca” by Serge Gainsbourg and started working out the chords.

            Since I got my new birth certificate on Friday I planned that Tuesday I would take it to Service Canada to renew my Social Insurance card. Before going there though I decided to swing by Long and McQuade to buy three each of new B and E strings for my guitar.

            The Service Canada office at 559 College was very quiet and there was only one person ahead of me who only had a photocopy of her birth certificate and so she was told she needed some certification from an adult Canadian citizen with proper ID to vouch for her identity.

            I’d thought that since I had my birth certificate that it would be a cinch but I was told they have gotten a lot stricter and that I need to show my health card because it’s government identification with my picture. I was directed to a Service Ontario office nearby just down at 846 Dundas West. I hadn’t even known there was a Service Ontario office in the west end. There was a big line-up at Service Ontario. I did some close reading of the Rossetti sonnets for my Aesthetic and Decadent Movements course while I was waiting for at least twenty minutes. The west end Service Ontario office is decorated with license plates from all over Canada and even has the back of a vintage car on the wall. Since my health card is already still valid they have my photo on record. I had to fill out a form and was handed a paper to use in place of the card and was told I’d get the new one in four to six weeks. I guess I’ll get my Social Insurance card sometime before Christmas.

            When I got home I went to the deck to take in my bucket, my wash cloth and my undershirt that I’d put out to dry after washing my floor but they were gone. I saw my landlord down on the street and shouted to ask about my bucket. He said he had it with the garbage because it was broken. I can’t imagine how it could have gotten cracked at the bottom. I went downstairs to talk with him about it but he’d already driven away. I called him a few minutes later to ask about my washcloth and my shirt. He said he’d found them on the roof and so he thought they were garbage. I told that they had obviously been blown off the railing like the bucket by the wind but he couldn’t just throw my things away. He insisted that if it’s on the roof it’s garbage. I told him he needed to compensate me for throwing out my possessions but he seemed to think it was funny. Later I talked to my next-door neighbour Benji and he said he had been there when Raja picked up the shirt and the cloth and had told him they were mine but he threw them away nonetheless. I’m going to talk to Parkdale Legal about deducting the cost of a new washcloth and shirt from my rent.

            In the afternoon I did some exercises and listened to Amos and Andy. This story was the first of a two-part episode. Andy has pretended to his smart new girlfriend that he’s a successful businessman. It’s also tax time and so he asks for his girlfriend’s help doing his taxes. He figures that if he claims that he made $7000 to impress her and if she does his taxes he can just change it later to the $250 that he really made. He goes down to her place of work to pick up the paperwork but it turns out she works at the Internal Revenue office and after doing his taxes for him she filed them and so now he owes $1200.

            I did some more homework for Aesthetics and Decadence.

            I had a small potato, the rest of the squash, three pork ribs and some gravy for dinner while watching four episodes of Annette. These stories were fifteen-minute segments of the Mickey Mouse Club featuring a sixteen-year-old Annette Funicello as Annette McCloud who arrives out of the blue at her Aunt Lila and Uncle Archie’s house, which is run by their housekeeper Katie. Annette has lived on a Nebraska farm her whole life and Archie and Lila didn’t even know she existed. One weird set-up is that Archie and Lila are unmarried middle-aged brother and sister living together. Archie is a doctor of philosophy. They don’t know what to do with Annette and so Archie wants to send her to a boarding school but as she settles in that decision loses momentum. The first installment is actually an introduction to the first ten episodes told by Katie.

            In the second episode Annette meets a girl her age named Jet who delivers eggs and chickens to the McClouds. She’s a farm girl like Annette and they become friends right away but Jet is not part of the popular in-crowd in town.

            Annette had arrived with only one pretty but out of fashion dress and so in the third episode Lila takes Annette shopping. At the dress shop she meets Mrs. Abernathy, the mother of a popular girl named Val. Mrs. Abernathy invites Annette to her daughter’s party.

            The series was based on the young adult novel Margaret by Janette Sebring Lowrey, who also wrote The Pokey Little Puppy.

            For such short episodes the pace of the story development is very slow.

            This show had a surprising amount of familiar actors, considering how bad it was.

            Richard Deacon, who would later play Mel on the Dick Van Dyke show played Uncle Archie.

            Sylvia Field played Aunt Lila.

            Katie was played by Mary Wickes

            Mrs. Abernathy was played by Doreen Packer, who was the principal on Leave it to Beaver.

            Shelley Fabares played a girl named Moselle.

            Annette sure was beautiful!

Little Bighorn

            On Monday morning I translated a few more lines of "Complaint du progress" by Boris Vain.

            I almost nailed the last verse of “C’est la vie qui veut ca” by Serge Gainsbourg.            I got caught up on my journal.

            I did this week’s reading for my “Aesthetic and Decadent Movements” course. The poems are by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina Rossetti. I think that he was more creative in terms of word relationships but she was more philosophical.

            When I got to the lecture hall for my Indigenous Studies class there were three people in the room from another class. I didn’t know if they were doing something they didn’t want interrupted and so I stayed in the hall. But the middle aged female student with the motorcycle helmet didn’t think whatever they were doing was important enough to take up the whole room and so she went in, another followed and I tagged along a minute later.

            While waiting for class to start I did close reading of some of the Rossetti poems and made some notes.

            Professor White is a consistent dresser. He changes the colours of his shirts and ties but always wears a grey vest with jeans.

            He said he’s posted our lecture notes so far. Ways of Knowing still hasn’t arrived at the bookstore and so he’ll post another two chapters in pdf if he has to but he can’t post much more because of copyright laws.

            We don’t give weight to Indigenous knowledge as epistemology. There have only been fifty years of Indigenous Studies, three or four generations deep and so it’s a new field but developing fast.

            Can animals think? Indigenous people think so. I said that some animals can certainly innovate and problem-solve, such when crows make hooks to access food.

            Humans are scared of death but animals are not.

            We have different layers of stories. There is a difference between Indigenous history and indigenous histories.

            Seneca do not look at the world the way the Mohawk do.

            Reciprocity is a central theme. One student argued that reciprocity is different from equanimity but Professor White thinks they are the same. It’s about give and take but also acknowledgement. If we hunt we share. It’s about how we relate to the past and each other. It’s healthy minded thinking more so than good minded thinking. It's about ecosystems and kinship.

            We don’t even have time in a one-year course to study even one Indigenous group let alone all of those in North America.

            The professor used me as an example and asked what if he reprimanded me unfairly in front of the class. He asked if it would affect the whole class. People agreed that it would. Then he asked whether an apology would make it right. Without naming names he was indirectly referring to Prime Minister Trudeau’s recent blackface scandal.

            Canada is better at apologizing than the United States.

            Felicity Huffman got fourteen days in jail. A black woman that did the same thing got five years.  

            This class has a lot of student feedback.

            In MASH, Hawkeye’s dad’s favourite novel was Last of the Mohicans and so that's why he was nicknamed Hawkeye.

            To save the future we must think further than three generations.

            I said we have to teach the young.

            He talked of the indigenous idea of shared hunting territory being a dish with one spoon. One must only take what one needs and one should not harvest deer for profit. Leave the dish clean.

            He told us that his grandfather had to taste everybody’s food at a mal, even when everybody had the same thing. His grandmother couldn’t eat her food if someone touched it. Professor White said that when he was a child he tried to stab his grandfather’s hand with his fork when he tried to take his food. He never tried to take his food again but he still tried to taste everybody else’s.

            He said that Australia has size limits for lobster fishing but from what I could find Canada has more restrictions.

            Humans are the most forgetful animal.

            Black squirrels are mean but people tell him they taste good.

            People used to be able to drink from Lake Ontario. What has changed?

            He said that Shakespearian English is altered in the United States and assumed it is here too. Some students informed him that we read the original text her. He said that threw his whole analogy right out the window.

            He asked, “What is writing?" He said if he showed us an octagon most would see it as a stop sign even without the word "Stop" written inside.

            He explained that his slides have “Belanger" and "King" rather than Ways of Knowing and The Inconvenient Indian because the storyteller is more important.

            People become professors because they are too scared to be actors.

            Windolph came in 1870 to avoid the Prussian draft but ended up joining the cavalry and was a sergeant that got shot in the ass at Little Bighorn.

            To illustrate how we frame history he had a link to a Smithsonian Channel film about Little Bighorn but we didn’t have time to look at it. He asked us if Little Bighorn had been a battle or a massacre and told us to discuss it among ourselves. I chatted with a young guy one row behind me and a little further in. I said that I didn’t think Custer and his men had been on their way to a fishing trip. If you are prepared for battle and you lose it’s just a loss and not a massacre. A massacre is by definition a slaughter of defenseless victims. I had always heard that Little Bighorn had been an ambush of Custer but apparently Custer’s men surprised the village and the Native warriors just outmaneuvered Custer afterwards.  Custer had been looking for a fight and simply made bad choices. There were native casualties in the battle.

            The Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 was one of the last battles but it was a massacre in which mostly Lakota women and children were killed.

            The professor said we need both accounts of Little Bighorn.

            Indigenous history has been written by outsiders. Many stories were extracted during the salvage ethnography. Intellectual knowledge and what should be shared is complex.

            I headed down the street to my tutorial. I’m used to taking a siesta at that time of day and so I was feeling sleepy.

            Safia asked if we had any questions about the readings and I said I was curious about a note that had appeared at the end of the preface of Ways of Knowing. Someone had predicted in 1992 that in ten years there would only be three languages left. Yes they are still endangered but they are still alive and so I wondered if the person had just been wrong or if there had been some reason in 1992 for that kind of fatalism. One attractive Native woman with the blackest hair I’ve ever seen suggested that it was because the last residential school was still in operation in 1992. It only closed two years later.

            Safia drew a circle to illustrate the indigenous worldview being cyclical and non-linear. In the indigenous worldview people are less important than their environment. There is relatedness, reciprocity, and wealth is for the community. For indigenous people the land is sacred. For Indigenous people there are many truths. She drew a straight line to indicate the European worldview, in which there is comfort in achievement, humans are more important than their environment and wealth is for individuals. Europeans need proof of the truth.

            I said that at some point and in some place in history every one of our ancestors was indigenous. I added that the cyclical worldview is at the root of everybody’s history and that to say "the European world view" ignores the indigenous past of Europe such as the Druidic traditions, which seems to have had a worldview similar to that of Native Americans. Safia explained she was talking specifically about the European colonial worldview.

            She told us about land grabs in Africa, which they call the resource curse.

            In Africa time is also non-linear and in some places they measure time by droughts. Droughts have names.

            We broke up into three groups to discuss three questions. I was in a group with all of the Indigenous women. Our question was “What was the main message of chapter one of The Inconvenient Indian?" The problem was that most of my group hadn't read it yet and I was the only one that had the book. I brought up some of the main points and we discussed them. We concluded that the first chapter shows that history is a matter of interpretation.

            Safia mentioned the phrase “terra nullius" and said it had appeared in the Thomas King book. I told her I hadn't seen it there so far. It means “nobody’s land” and was a justification in international law for colonization. A story was told to justify colonization.

            Columbus had a papal bull. The papal bull gave most of North and South America to Spain while the area that is now Brazil was granted to Portugal.

            I suggested that Columbus had gotten into trouble for his treatment of Indigenous people but didn’t have the facts at hand. What I’ve found is that Columbus was made governor of the Indies but after seven he was accused of tyranny and torture and so the queen had him removed. He and his two brothers were investigated and when they returned to Spain they were arrested and imprisoned, but only for six weeks. Then they were freed, had their wealth returned to them and Spain funded their fourth voyage. He wasn’t allowed to govern again. Later Columbus wrote a book in which he claimed that his achievements were the fulfillment of a Biblical prophecy. He demanded a tenth of the profits from the New World but never won his claim.

            I was the last one to leave the tutorial. Safia said that we should have an hour and a half rather than an hour.

            When I got home I had a piece of roast beef for lunch and took a siesta.

            When I got up I did some exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish is upset that Sapphire has run into an old boyfriend who his sent her candy after their meeting. He learns that Floyd, who has a wax mustache, is quite a ladies man. Kingfish decides the only way to save his marriage is to get Sapphire a job to keep her too busy to think of other men. He gets her a job at the Red Cross but it turns out that the first aid instructor there is Floyd.

            I had a potato, squash, three ribs and some gravy for dinner watching the 1954 Studio One production of “Twelve Angry Men". Another version was a major motion picture in 1957. This story involves a jury deciding the fate of a man in his late teens who has been accused of murdering his father. The jury enters the room to deliberate and votes right away. There are eleven votes of “guilty" but one of innocent. The one juror, played by Robert Cummings is not sure. He proceeds to argue until he gradually puts a reasonable doubt in everyone’s minds. The young accused man is of an undisclosed ethnic minority and poor. Some of the jurors argue that, "They are all like that". Bob Cummings put in a great performance. 

Gluey and the Pastemakers

            On Sunday morning I translated a few more lines of "Complaint du progress" by Boris Vain.

            I memorized the chorus of “C’est la vie qui veut ca” by Serge Gainsbourg. I reworked the rhyme scheme in my translation to match the original.

            I got caught up on my journal.

            I finished chapter one of The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King. He says Pocahontas and John Smith probably never even met and even if they did they wouldn’t have been lovers since she would have been about ten years old. Smith wrote her into his own autobiography when she later arrived in Europe as a celebrity. He told the same story about exotic women from Turkey and France rescuing him as he did about Pocahontas. He also says Louis Riel was a bit of a nutcase with a messiah complex who wasn’t a particularly good leader and is remembered mostly for having been executed. His point is that history remembers what it wants to. There were plenty of Métis heroes involved in the Northwest Rebellion but since they didn't die dramatically they have been forgotten.

            I washed the threshold between my living room and my kitchen. 

            Although it’s a lot brighter than it was there are still patches of brown glue on some of the boards and so it's a gluey kind of clean. "A Gluey Kind of Clean". Wasn't that a hit song by that British Mersey Beat group “Gluey and the Pastemakers”? 

            I think I could get more of the glue off with another hour of scrubbing, so maybe I’ll do that because it doesn’t look very satisfying when I turn and look at it from my desk.

            I had a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich for lunch.

            IN the afternoon while doing exercises I listened to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish gets a Valentine with a poem calling him a lazy bum. Sapphire says she is embarrassed to leave the house if that’s what the world thinks of her husband. It turns out though that she sent the Valentine to try to motivate Kingfish to get a job. It doesn’t work.

            I took a bike ride to Bloor and University, south to Queen and home. It was a warm afternoon and I could have worn shorts but I’ve gotten used to pants now that it's fall. Another cyclist about my age stopped beside me at two lights making conversation. He said it’s dangerous riding down here. I asked, “Is it?” The second time he said it was a nice day for riding. I agreed that it wasn't bad.

            When I came home I got caught up on my journal.

            I finished reading chapter two of Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian. He says there are more dogs with stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame than there are Indians. There are only two Indians: Will Rogers, a Cherokee who never played Indians and Jay Silverheels, a Canadian Mohawk who only played Indians and is best known for his 221 episodes of The Lone Ranger as Tonto. I don't remember hearing that Will Rogers was Cherokee, but he did have Cherokee heritage and his father was a Cherokee judge.

            I read several sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti both silently and out loud. He has some interesting internal rhymes.

            I roasted a sirloin tip because its best before date was Monday but I didn't have it for dinner. I was about to make an egg with a piece of toast when David knocked on my door. He said that he and I had an appointment but I didn’t understand. He'd offered to buy me something for dinner on Saturday and I’d said I was making something. He’d then said we’d do it on Sunday, I’d thought that he was just going to bring me something. It turns out that he had actually invited me to dinner. I’d totally misunderstood and I told him that but he seemed a bit hurt. I was embarrassed that I’d disappointed him. I told him we could go out to dinner next weekend and he reminded me that we’d had an appointment. I guess maybe it would have been totally clear that he’d invited me out in his Ethiopian culture but the words he’d used certainly weren’t obvious in mine. I sensed that he needed me to ask for another appointment and so we agreed on next Sunday. I said we could go to the Japanese place next door. He said he doesn’t eat seafood. I also heard him say recently that he doesn’t eat pork. I wonder if he’s an Ethiopian Jew. Then for some strange reason he wanted to give me $20. I tried to refuse several times but finally I accepted it. He said he wants me to write a letter for him relating to his sister’s death and he’ll talk to me about it on Monday evening. David told me that someone had stolen his twelve-string guitar.

            After David left my neighbour Benji knocked on my door. It looked like nobody wanted me to have my egg that night. Benji wanted to tell me that Cesar had told David that he’d bought our building and that he was kicking everybody out. It’s not true but Benji thought it was funny that David believed him.

            I watched the final episode of the first season of Wagon Train. One thing unique about that show for the 50s is that it followed a chronological and geographical sequence of a wagon train traveling from Missouri to California. I assume that every season began and ended in the same way along the same trail. In this story they have arrived outside of Sacramento, California. Julie Revere has traveled with her very ill father Maxwell who bought land in California with money he’d made from prospecting. While Maxwell is lying in bed, Flint takes Julie to look at the land. It turns out that what had been beautiful farmland when Maxwell bought it has been turned to swamp after being flooded by hydraulic mining in the mountains. When they get back to the wagon train Maxwell insists on seeing his land and so Flint takes him to a different location that is still pristine. Maxwell dies happy but Flint is determined to get Mort Galvin, the man that sold the land to Maxwell, to make things right, especially since he’s also responsible for the hydraulic mining. Flint confronts Galvin in his saloon but he is knocked out and taken to the docks where they plan on shanghaiing him on a boat to China. But it just so happens that the man mopping the deck is Flint’s friend Cliff Grundy, who appeared in an earlier episode. Seeing his friend locked up Cliff knocks out one of the thugs and escapes to the wagon train and shortly a whole group Flint’s friends come to rescue him. Once free Flint immediately goes back to confront Galvin. He demands that he refund Julie the $5000 her father paid for the land Galvin ruined. Galvin still refuses but suddenly Dora Gray, another character from a previous episode, intervenes. She's now a wealthy and influential woman and apparently a former lover of Galvin. She tells Galvin to give Flint the money and he gives in.