Faithful in My Fashion

            On Wednesday morning I heard the 5:00 alarm and got up. I went to the washroom as usual, peed and did my ablution. Off in the distance I could hear the mournful sound of sirens like a howling wind or brush wolves up in horse country. I had this sense that it was very early and that maybe I hadn't heard my alarm after all but rather the sirens as thy went by. I finished washing and checked the time. It was 2:30, so I went back to bed. When I got up again at 5:00 I didn’t have to wash and so I started yoga two minutes early.

During song practice I bit my tongue. It was the first time I’d bitten my tongue while singing. It seems to hurt more than beating one’s tongue while eating. Fortunately it only smarted for half a song.

I finished posting my translation of “Vu de l’extérieur” (From the Outside) by Serge Gainsbourg and began memorizing “Pan Pan Cul Cul" (Literally more like “Whap Whap Ass Ass" but meaning A Good Spanking) by the same writer. The idea seems to be that bouncing up and down in an old jalopy is like being spanked and so it serves as foreplay.

I did some research about the Woodstock First Nation for my Indigenous Studies essay.

I took a siesta from 9:30 till almost 10:48.

I left home at noon and rode to University College in the cold rain. I put my range rider gloves on when I was over halfway there.

There were only two students in the room when I got there and neither of them was chattering and so I was able to read most of a chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray before the talkers arrived. I finished reading the chapter before class started but it was an exercise in concentration.

We finished up with Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

Pater is interested in the spirit of the past rather than historical facts. History is cyclic. He’s a historicist taking all the details from a particular moment through the art of the inexact. The contradictions of historical fact and historical spirit require readers to be existential about what they believe. We must look into our interest rather than at what it gets us. It is a more instrumental and less exterior approach that is still valid today because it forces us to examine what we take for granted.

Oscar Wilde is less subtle as he takes on morality in full strength.

What is morality? Is the conventional the right way of doing things? The power of being moved lies not in the morally right or wrong path but in how we approach our experience. We never step in the same river twice. We cannot help but be moved and so we should soak it up. This is Pater’s higher ethics. The temperament of being rather than doing is the correct principle of living. It's artist's temperaments that appeal to Pater more so than the physical art that they produce.

He says that Michelangelo must be approached through his predecessors. It is a way of understanding the present. Pater is prescriptive when he says, “must".

The ethos of Victorian prose is that one must trust the author’s character.

We began looking at Decadent poetry.

The materiality of ornately decorative classically rigid form is everywhere in Decadent Poetry. But form was used for impact rather than meaning. One of the forms was the villanelle and another was the alexandrine. She quoted what I said in my essay about the alexandrine causing the reader to have to catch their breath.

Swinburne writes of loss, isolation and incompleteness.

Thinking had become conventional and desensitized and so the Decadent poets made use of what was considered unnatural imagery to wake up the reader. They used artificiality to penetrate the reader’s comfort zone. The idea that what is natural is good is a man-made assumption.

The Rhymers’ Club was founded by W.B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys. Among the large informal membership were Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson. 

They and especially Yeats served as a bridge to Modernism.

The French Symbolist poets were a major influence on the Decadents. They opposed the domination of realism and gave priority to the implicit over the explicit. They used suggestion to convey sentiment and symbols were ascribed to distil a private mood and evoke subtle affinities between the material and the spiritual.

Literature these days is about things. The Symbolists transcended things and explored musical properties of language through sound relationships.

Dowson is licentious and likes complication in form more than Swinburne. His favourite diction is pale, cold, passionate, wild, and dreamlike with silence and lilies. Lilies are haunting and emblematic for the Decadents.

The Modernists valued the work of the Decadents. Both Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were admirers of Dowson. Eliot considered Dowson to have been underestimated. He said his monosyllabic pattern was unpredictable and therefore disorienting.

We looked at Dowson’s “Villanelle of the Poet’s Road”.

“Wine women and song ... gather them while ye may” Someone said that it came from “gather rosebuds while ye may”. I said I thought it was also a Biblical reference, as in “gather ye lilies while ye may". Professor Li said that someone named Christian should know and everybody laughed. But it turns out that I was wrong. It comes from the poem “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time" by 17th Century poet Robert Harrick. But it also turns out that I was accidentally almost right, since a similar sentiment was expressed in an ancient Jewish text called “The Wisdom of Solomon” in the line, "Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither".

Dowson’s villanelle is a carpe diem poem, much like Harrick’s but with more irony.

Professor Li said when we show sympathy we put ourselves above the other.

Decoration is just as important and the content.

Does the line “Yet is day over long” mean “long over” or “too long"?

I said that every other verse is a reversal of the other except at the beginning and end. “Wine and women and song” appears at the end of every other verse as a positive endeavour while "Yet is day over long" always closes the opposite stanza to convey the reverse sentiment. But within each verse the closing line opposes what is said in the rest of the verse.

“Three things garnish our way". Most of us agreed that to garnish is to decorate but someone said there is also to garnish someone's wages. The rest of us thought that it was “garnishee" but I see she was correct. "Garnishee" used to be a verb but now it's a noun, as in the person whose wages are garnished. 

The poem challenges the conception of pleasure with paradox.

Trochees dominate. The poem is mostly in trochaic trimetre with the first syllables stressed. It’s artfully metered.

I said that a villanelle is traditionally about lost love but I’d forgotten that it’s actually about obsession.

We looked at Dowson’s “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae”. I volunteered to read it and after I read the title Professor Li said I should teach her Latin. I told her I had no idea what I'd said and everybody laughed.

The speaker is haunted by guilt.

Guilt and immorality are different. The Decadents tried to recognize the effect of these feelings.

Dowson converted to Catholicism a year after this poem was published.

I mentioned that Cole Porter wrote a song called "I'm Always True to You Darling in My Fashion" based on the poem. It’s from the musical “Kiss Me Kate”. There's also a movie from 1946 called "Always Faithful in My Fashion" starring Donna Reed but it wasn't a hit.

We looked at “Mystic and Cavalier” by Lionel Johnson.

Both Edward and Ayesha did their seminar starters on this poem.

Edward said the rhyming couplets quicken the pace and reflect the poet’s desire to reach death quickly.

Ayesha thought the poem is about salvation through Christian mysticism.

Professor Li said that the poem is criticized for using conventional language.

We finished the class looking at the essay "The Decadent Movement in Literature" by Arthur Symons.

I was the last one in the room with Professor Li and she asked how I was enjoying the course. She was glad when I told her I was.

It was still raining a bit on the way home. I stopped at Freshco to buy fruit and got three bags of grapes. I had to squeeze the contents of several bags before I found three that were somewhat firm. I bought ten Ontario Empire apples and three containers of Greek yogourt.

My cashier was talking with the woman that manages the other cashiers. The manager told her that the store wouldn't be giving out candy to kids on Halloween this year. The cashier offered to put in $15 of her own money towards some treats. The manager seemed to think it would be a good idea for them to all put money in for that.

I had a late lunch of cheese on toast and took a siesta.

For dinner I made oven fries with the last of my cheese whiz melted on top. I ate them with a beer while watching an episode of Wanted Dead or Alive.

This story begins with a religious ceremony in which the men all look Amish but the women just look like regular farmwomen. A woman named Sarah steps forward and Abraham the leader tells her she’s been chosen by lot. He gives her a rifle and tells her that she must kill Josh Randall. Dressed as a man she goes to a town that Josh has stopped at. He’s in a barbershop about to get a shave. She aims from an alley across the street but fires just as the barber tilts the chair back. Josh goes after his assailant and catches her trying to ride away. He is surprised she is a woman. She gets away but he catches her outside of town. She explains that she is from a religious group called The Angels and that Josh killed one of theirs who happened to be the son of their leader. Josh remembers the man and explains that the man drew on him and Josh killed him in self-defence. Josh says he wants to go to the Valley of the Angels with her to explain this to their leader. They camp for one night and she tries to kill Josh again with his own gun while he is sleeping. He wakes up just in time to divert her shot. After that she seems to be on his side. She takes him to Isaac, the old man that helped found the Angels. He explains that Abraham is the son of his co-founder and he has taken all the power. Abraham finds out Josh is there and bursts in to arrest Josh. Abraham gives Sarah a chance to redeem herself by killing Josh. Isaac says everyone knows Abraham’s son brought his death on himself. No one is willing to kill Josh and so Abraham is about to do it when Isaac shoots Abraham.

It's Sobering to Deplaster a Floor

            On Tuesday morning I posted my translation of and the chords to “Vu de l’extérieur” (From the Outside) by Serge Gainsbourg on my Christian’s Translations blog but since I hadn’t found a video to go with it yet, I didn’t publish it.

            I washed another section of the floor where my bed sits. In terms of dirt there isn’t that much in that area but there was a lot of plaster caked into the floor near the baseboard and I had a hell of a time scraping it off. If getting plastered is being drunk than removing the plaster must make the floor sober.

            I had heated frozen French fries for lunch.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Andy has met the girl of his dreams in Nancy Simpson and she accepts his proposal of marriage. The problem is that a woman named Hildegard Jackson sends Andy a telegram telling him she’s about to arrive in town. Before meeting Nancy, Andy corresponded with Hildegard and got carried away to the point of proposing. She’s come to accept his proposal. Andy arranges with Kingfish to convince Hildegard that Andy was eaten by a whale. She falls for it but stays in town to be the maid of honour at the wedding of her best friend Nancy. Now Andy and Kingfish plot to have Hildegard arrested for murder. They go to the police and tell them she is a notorious poisoner. On the day of the wedding Nancy is walking down the aisle with Hildegard behind when the police arrive and arrest Nancy.

            I wanted to go and buy fruit and tea at the supermarket but I had to get caught up on my journal.

            I grilled more chicken drumsticks and had two for dinner with a potato and gravy while watching Wanted Dead or Alive.

            In this story Josh is trailing a bounty named Jo Collins. He stops for water at the home of a man named Bannister and shows him the poster. After Josh heads toward the mountains Bannister compares the wanted poster with a picture in his drawer and then he heads for the mountains as well. He gets ahead of Josh because of a shortcut but then has to fix a horseshoe and Josh catches up. Bannister admits that Collins might be his son and he’s come to find out for sure. His son supposedly died in the war but now he thinks he might have survived. They go to an old hunting cabin that Bannister’s son would have known about. They find Collins in bed with a bullet wound and banister says he’s not his son. The bullet is removed and Josh plans to take Collins back the next day but when Josh is out of the cabin Bannister tells his son that he’ll help him escape. He pretends that Apaches clubbed stole all but one of the horses and says he’ll wait there with Collins while Josh goes back to his place for more. Bannister has only hidden the horses and he is helping his son escape when Josh returns having figured out it was a ruse. Bannister pushes Josh and aims his gun but can’t shoot. When Collins says to kill him Bannister knows that his son really is a murderer and says he’s taking him in. Collins runs out and Josh goes after him. Collins grabs a rifle and is about to shoot Josh when Bannister kills his own son.

Iron Eyes

            On Monday morning during song practice there was a guy panhandling from cars with a paper plate. He was wearing one black shoe and one white shoe.

I finished working out the chords for “Vu de l’extérieur” (From the Outside) by Serge Gainsbourg, and ran through it in French and English.

I tried to take a siesta between 9:41 and 11:00 because I would have class that afternoon and then that evening I would have to pose for OCADU. I wanted to make sure I didn’t fall asleep at work. I dozed a bit but I couldn't sleep and so I got up at 10:26.

There was no class ahead of ours in the lecture hall but there were some students from another class hanging out at the back. Some of my class were sitting in the fall and I guess they thought there was a lecture going on but I went inside. I read chapter three of The Portrait of Dorian Gray while I was waiting for class to start.

A guy leaned his bike against the Dollarama entrance and put on a sweatshirt but then walked halfway across the parking lot while adjusting the shirt underneath it which looked like a kind of awkward upper body dance. Then he walked back to his backpack and pulled out a jacket, which he also put on while walking halfway across the parking lot.

            Safia told us that Professor Kevin White had urgent personal matters in the United States related; it seems to him moving to Canada. That explains why our reading material for this week seemed so last minute.

            Our lecture topic was stereotypes.

            “Squaw” is a degrading term. The Algonquian expression “squaw” has never been a word by itself but always a part of longer words. The Ojibwa word for “woman” is “ikwe”. In Cree it’s “iskwew”. In Haida it’s Jaadaa.

            Stereotypes have consequences and are harmful to children. The victims of stereotyping internalize and begin to believe it.

            There was a suicide of a young black child in the southern United States because of teasing about a disability.

            Stereotypes are as old as humanity.

            Some stereotypes: that black people are physical and unintelligent.

            Thomas Flanigan, who worked as an advisor to Stephen Harper, wrote a book called First Nations? Second Thoughts that supports various racial stereotypes.

            Eugenics arguing that white people are a balance between smart Asians and physical black people.

            She asked us why we might “other” someone. I said for territorial reasons. She agreed and said it serves coloniality.

            The “savage” is a colonial trope.

             Racialized people as sidekicks, stoics, criminals or saints but never ordinary people.

            Robert Picton’s victims were mostly Indigenous.

            Indigenous people are only named in the news when the news is bad.

            Ben Johnson was called “Canadian” when he was winning but “Jamaican” when he was caught cheating. I don’t know if that’s true. He was always spoken of as “Jamaican-Canadian” before and after the doping scandal.

            Buffalo Bill’s wild west shows re-enacted battles rather than massacres.

            She showed us a slide of the text of a newspaper story from 100 years ago about white men canoeing with Indians when three is an accident. The white men are named but the Indians are not. I pointed out that the Indians are also not referred to as “men” and so their humanity is diminished.

            She showed us slides of comic book covers, including one of Superman wearing a chief’s headdress while his invulnerable body deflects Indian arrows.

            She showed us an image of fans doing the tomahawk chop.

            The tension is about land while the racism is just a tool.

            Things are gradually changing.

            Safia said that her old Indigenous Studies professor is now part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

            At Christmas when the racism comes out, knock it down.

            Go to comments sections if you really want to see racism.

            APTN is more prone to good research and they are controlling their own voice.

            We watched a clip from the movie Reel Injuns.

            Pine Ridge Reservation is the poorest in North America. It’s the site of the Wounded Knee genocide in 1890 when 300 were killed by US soldiers, two-thirds of them women and children. The chief is a direct descendant of Crazy Horse. A memorial is being built there that will be the largest statue in the world even though Crazy Horse refused to have his image captured and all photos purported to be of him are fake. It will actually be the second largest statue since the largest is the Statue of Unity in India.

            There was a clip of a Native comedian: "Where does this road go?” “Road stay. You go!”

            The Silent Enemy is a silent film shot in 1930. It was about the Ojibwe of Ontario before the settlers came and used real indigenous actors. One of the actors was Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance. He was a mixture of Cherokee, black and white. According to this documentary he concealed the fact that he was part black and when that background was revealed he was shunned. According to my research it was also the fact that he wasn’t really part Cherokee that caused him to lose popularity in addition to being black. He ended up committing suicide.

            In the 1930s, after The Silent Enemy, when talking pictures came in, Indians became transformed into savages. Every Indian became either a Plains Indian with a feathered headdress or they all wore single feathered headbands like some tribes of the northeast woodlands.

            There was a funny clip from the film A Distant Trumpet in which the hero is talking to a Navajo who is speaking his native tongue for authenticity. The documentary shows subtitles of what he really said, “You’re a snake crawling in your own shit".

            Iron Eyes Cody was one of the most successful portrayers of native characters on screen, having done more than a hundred westerns. He was really of Sicilian descent but behaved like an Indian off screen. He played the Native American shedding the tear in the famous Keep America Beautiful ad. He married Bertha Parker Pallan, who was of Abenaki and Seneca descent. They adopted two Native American boys. His children stand by their father as having been a true Native despite his real ancestry.

            Our tutorial had a lot more students than the four we had last week. One student explained that she’d been working for Elections Canada that day.

            Safia said there are copyright issues with the readings she scanned for us.

            We split into two groups. Our group consisted of six of us and three of us were Native. I learned two of the Ojibwe dancers named Nicole and Robin.

            We discussed whether the depictions of contemporary Natives have changed over the last several decades. I thought they had changed in the movies over the years but the Ojibwe women didn’t think so.

            Another question was, “Are the depictions of Native characters uniform across North American media. I thought they are more positive in Canada like Pat John on The Beachcombers but they thought they are all the same.

            Safia said some people are more outspoken than others and she pointed at me. She said she wanted to hear from some other people this time and pointed at a helpless white guy who seemed embarrassed by the attention.

            When we related what we’d discussed the one Ojibwe woman who spoke just said we all agreed there had been no change.

            Safia said that stereotypes are not as blatant now as they were but they are still there.

            Safia talked about cognitive dissonance, saying that it was when one has core beliefs and refuses proof. That's not what cognitive dissonance means at all. It's when someone holds more than one conflicting opinion.

            Nicole and Robin go to schools and put on traditional dances. Robin said that when she performs she gives a talk first and especially at French schools they basically tell her to shut up and dance.

            Nicole expressed the opinion that Indigenous Americans did not come across on the Bering Strait. I was relieved when she said that a lot of Ojibwe people get made when she says that. As long as she doesn't think they were always there or were created supernaturally I think there are other possibilities. There's certainly no evidence that Native Americans evolved independently over here so they must have gotten here either by way of the Bering Strait or by boat.

            Robin said people have been lining up for their little bit of money from the treaty. I asked, “What treaty?” She pointed at the floor and said, “This treaty!” Again, I asked what treaty is this treaty. She said, "Treaty 13. The Toronto purchase.” I said I thought everybody got $20,000. Nicole said they didn't get $20,000. It's more like $500 a month. What I’ve read is that 1700 Mississauga got $20,000 and the rest was put in trust for future generations. Nicole would have been thirteen when the settlement was arrived at so maybe the $500 a month is part of that trust.

            I rode home and had lunch. I tried to sleep for half an hour before leaving for work but couldn’t.

            I worked for Shavon Lewis at OCADU. Also painting in the class was Kima Lenaghan, whom I’d worked for the previous week. I think they are both teaching assistants. I started with one-minute poses for the first set and then did two and a half sets of five-minute poses leading up to the long break. I worked on my journal during most of my short breaks but tried to snooze for the fifteen minutes of the long one. I didn’t really sleep but I got enough rest to help me stay awake for the rest of the class.

            On my way home another cyclist rang her bell behind me and then asked in an annoyed voice if she could pass, as if I was somehow preventing it. I asked, “Why not?” and she passed.

            It seemed to be an angry night. I passed the scene of an accident where two guys were standing in front of a dented vehicle and the shorter man was threatening the other with a club-like implement and demanding to know, “Why you hit me?”

            It was almost 22:00 when I got home. For dinner I had two cold drumsticks and a bowl of potato chips with salsa while watching an episode of Wanted Dead or Alive starring Steve McQueen that seemed pretty silly in the context of my earlier Indigenous Studies class.

            A man named Albright hires Josh to marry his daughter, who was kidnapped at an early age and was raised by Apaches. She is about to be courted and married in some fake Apache tradition and Albright wants Josh to be one of the courters. The former Doris Albright is now called White Antelope. Why would Apaches name someone after an animal that is not native to the Americas at all and that they probably wouldn't have heard of? At first White Antelope rejects Josh but he charms her and competes for her hand. He beats the other suitor in combat and kills him. White Antelope chooses Josh. He takes her back to her father. She wants to go with him but he leaves her.

            White Antelope was played by Lori Nelson, who was a child star as a dancer in New Mexico and when her parents moved to California she was voted Little Miss America and worked as a model until getting into films in her early teens. She starred in “Hot Rod Girl” and some other pictures and was in the first season of the TV series “How To Marry a Millionaire”.

           

            

Turning Point

            On Sunday morning I had a stomach ache resulting from what was probably food poisoning from having eaten rancid nachos the night before. It bothered me to a too slowly diminishing degree all through yoga and song practice until it subsided before breakfast.

I worked out the chords for the first verse and chorus of “Vu de l’extérieur” (From the Outside) by Serge Gainsbourg, so next all I have to do is place the same chords in their corresponding places in the rest of the song.

            I washed another section of my kitchen floor from the beginning of the wall at the right side of the entrance to the living room to halfway around the curved left end of the mantle. My cleaning project has literally reached a turning point.

            I had old cheddar on toast for lunch.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to a February 1947 episode of Amos and Andy. This show was unique because it was done in metatext. The three characters of Amos, Kingfish and Lightning that are voiced by Freeman Gosden, are missing. The characters of Andy, Gabby and Shorty go looking for them but not in the context of their fictional reality in Harlem but rather as characters in a radio show looking for the other characters so the show can go on. They travel through various NBC radio studios and first encounter the other radio characters Fibber McGee and Molly who are wondering why they can’t tune into Amos and Andy. Then Gabby the lawyer talks about having played Uncle Remus in the 1946 film Song of the South. Gabby is played by James Baskett, who did play Uncle Remus and he sings “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah". They then go to the Bob Hope Show where we hear some of his performance. Most of his jokes are topical and not very funny out of the context of that era but a couple are not bad. He talks about having bet on a horse that was so slow the saddle converted into a Murphy bed. He tells another about coming back from Palm Springs where in one week you get healthy enough to go back to work and poor enough to have to. They go to another studio and see a man that looks like Red Skelton but he is in character as Clem Kadiddlehopper. His jokes are pretty lame as well except for the one about having filled up his car with gas and having moved from the country to the city. He says it was a terribly hot drive. Andy asks why he didn’t open the window and he says, “What, and let all the gas out?” Finally they learn that Amos is in the hospital after having an operation and so Andy calls him up and we hear from Andy, Lightning and Kingfish.

            I read the first two chapters of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. In the first chapter Lord Henry is visiting his friend, the painter Basil Hallward. Lord Henry is full of the many ironic sayings that pepper Wilde’s work. Basil shows Henry his portrait of Dorian Gray, which Henry says is his greatest work. Basil tells him about meeting Dorian Gray for the first time. In chapter two Dorian arrives to sit for the portrait. Henry gives a speech that shocks Dorian’s consciousness with the fear of growing old. The portrait is finished and it is declared a masterpiece. Basil does not plan on selling it but gives it to Dorian. Dorian and Henry leave together even though Basil begs him to stay.

            I heated some frozen fries and for the last fifteen minutes melted cheese whiz on top of them. I had them for dinner with ketchup, hot sauce and a beer while watching Wanted Dead or Alive starring Steve McQueen.

            In this story Josh comes to an unspecified town and checks into a posh hotel called The Outrider. He’s there to meet an old friend named Jesse who manages the hotel. Jesse’s girlfriend Meghan owns the hotel but Kovack, the self-proclaimed mayor is trying to take the place away from her. He had given her a loan in exchange for the gambling rights for a year but now he wants it all. He has his men trash the saloon. When Jesse goes to confront Kovack he returns severely beaten. Josh goes to see Kovack and slaps him around and then he forces him to sign his interest in the hotel over to Meghan. Kovack’s men are waiting for Josh outside the office but Jesse, who can barely stand shows up and has a shootout with them, taking them all out. Distracted by the shooting, Josh is knocked out by Kovack who takes his gun and goes after Jesse. Jesse sees him first and kills him before collapsing. Josh leaves the happy couple as they contemplate their future in business and marriage.

            Jesse was played by James Coburn, who will star with Steve McQueen one year later in The Magnificent Seven. Apparently McQueen faked a car accident to get time off from the show to shoot The Magnificent Seven.

Light Plays on the Guitars

            On Saturday morning I finished memorizing “Vu de l’extérieur” (From the Outside) by Serge Gainsbourg and did a search for the chords. I found one set but didn’t check to hear if they fit.

            I did a bit more work on gathering historical data on Shiktehawk for my Indigenous Studies essay.

            I washed another six-board wide section of my bedroom floor. Now my feet hit the light part when I get out of bed.

            I went to No Frills where I bought three bags of grapes, twp pints of strawberries, three bags of milk, a bag of kettle chips, liquid detergent, Murphy’s oil soap, mouthwash and a big bottle of ketchup. My cashier was the young woman with the weaponized eyelashes and she had her very short hair dyed with a hint of green.

            I had cheddar cheese on toast for lunch.

            I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish’s sister-in-law Floresca comes from the country to stay with them and Sapphire says she’ll have to stay until she gets married. Kingfish tries to marry her off to Andy but he doesn’t find her attractive because she’s very big and doesn’t war shoes. Kingfish finally takes her to the beauty parlour and she suddenly becomes attractive and popular. Andy wants her now but now she has better choices.

            I finished my goal for today of gathering a page of historical information on the Beautiful River people around Shiktehawk.

            I heated some blue corn tortillas with some cheese whiz on top and turned off the oven, figuring the food would stay warm while I posted my blog. I think the text that I pasted into my blog came from websites with different colour codes in the HTML and so I had to spend about half an hour correcting it. By the time I was done my food was cold an on top of that the chips turned out to be stale. I had them with salsa and a beer while watching two episodes of Wanted Dead or Alive.

            In the first story two hobos hop a boxcar. One of them is a teenager named Slim. The older tramp takes him under his wing and gives him money to bribe the brakeman for both of them. But while the older hobo is sleeping in the boxcar Bruner the brakeman wakes him up, says he got his money but clubs him anyway. He takes his money and wallet and it turns out that the tramp is a Pinkerton agent. Bruner tosses his body from the train and at the station, to collect the $200 reward, he has Slim arrested for killing the Pinkerton agent. Josh happened to have been a paying customer on the train and he sees the arrest, thinking it a bit fishy. Pop Michaels, the livery stable owner who's been watching Josh's horse, informs him that there have been a lot of cases of brakemen collecting rewards lately but he also warns him about investigating that railroad people stick together. Josh doesn’t listen, goes to the railroad telegraph operator and forces him to tell him the name of the brakeman that collected the reward and where he’s located. As soon as Josh leaves the telegraph operator sends a message to Bruner. When he gets to the town it's night and her hears a woman call his name. He follows the voice down an alley where he is clubbed over the head. He wakes up at a campsite with Pop looking after him. Josh finds Bruner’s girlfriend Francie dealing blackjack in a saloon. She gives a verbal signal to the bartender, “House is buyin!” and he pulls a shotgun but Pop draws Josh’s gun from under his coat and holds him off while Josh talks with Francie. When he hears Josh say Bruner murdered someone she's shocked and wants to find out if it’s true. She takes Josh upstairs to stand outside the hotel room door while she confronts Bruner. He admits it and tells her to keep her mouth shut about it. Josh busts in and takes Bruner to the sheriff.

            Francie was played by Kasey Rogers, who got the nickname Casey in grade school because of how far she could hit a baseball. She played Irene Tate on the show Bewitched and her best-known film role was in Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train. She later took up competitive motocross racing and started PURR (Powderpuffs Unlimited Riders and Racers). 

                                        

            In the second story Josh is hired by Stella Winter, a famous opera singer whose sister Amy has been kidnapped. She wants Josh to deliver the $5000 that is being demanded. Josh goes to the location and meets a man named Mason who says he’s only the middleman but demands the money. Josh insists on giving the money to the kidnapper after he’s sure Amy is safe. He leaves, waits outside and follows Mason to a saloon where he talks with a piano player named Henri. After Mason leaves Henri plays “10,000 Cattle" even though this is 1871 and the song would not be written for another 35 years. Josh approaches Henri, buys him champagne and requests him to play Chopin’s E flat Nocturne. He tells Henri that he thinks the opera must be in town because he just saw Stella Winter's sister get on a stage for Denver. Henri looks surprised. Josh leaves and shortly after Henri exits the saloon. Josh follows him to a women’s rooming house where inside a room he finds Henri and Amy smooching. Josh breaks it to Amy that Henri sent a ransom note to Stella. He gives Henri the $5000, he leaves and Amy goes back to Stella with Josh.

            Stella was played by June Vincent, who started out at seventeen as a model for Harper's Bazaar, where she became friends with Lauren Bacall. Most of her film work was in B movies. 

People of the Beautiful River

            On Friday morning I had all but one verse of “Vu de l’extérieur” (From the Outside) by Serge Gainsbourg memorized.

            I read Arthur Symons’s essay, “The Decadent Movement in Literature”, some poems by Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and Constance Naden.

            I started organizing some preliminary notes for my Indigenous Studies essay.

            I washed another section of my bedroom floor on the west side of the room. There are white splatters that I have to scrape up left over from when our former superintendent painted the room without a drop sheet. My cleaning job doesn’t show up as well this time because the wood is darker in that section, but that takes care of a third of the area where my futon sits.

            I worked a bit on getting the information correct in the “Home” part of my “Finding Places” Indigenous Studies essay.

            I did my exercises in the afternoon while listening to Amos and Andy. I skimmed through the 1946 Christmas show because it was only a slightly altered version of the 1945 Christmas show. The one I listened to came about from Kingfish hearing that someone went homesteading in Alaska, got free land from the government, developed it and after a few years sold the property for $40,000. Kingfish figures that if he sends Andy up there, when he comes back he will split the money with him. But Kingfish has to convince Andy that it’s not cold there. He has fake Alaskan travel brochures made up showing palm trees and girls in bikinis. Andy is almost convinced but finds out it’s not true. When Kingfish gets home he finds that Sapphire has looked at his fake brochures and proceeded to sell all of their furniture in preparation for moving them both to Alaska.

            I worked a bit more on my Indigenous Studies essay.

            I had a potato, two drumsticks and gravy for dinner while watching Wanted Dead or Alive starring Steve McQueen.

            In this story someone puts a private bounty dead or alive on Josh Randall for $1000. After the first attempt by someone to claim it Josh goes to the source. It is a wealthy man named Sam McGarrett who explains that if Josh hadn’t survived to come see him he wasn’t the man he was looking for. McGarrett wants Josh to guide him into the desert following a treasure map that he’s acquired showing the location of Spanish gold. After he ups the price to $5000 Josh agrees. McGarrett brings his son and daughter along whom he does not treat very well. Beth can’t make it and is dropped off with a friend. They are being trailed by two crooks hoping that Josh and the McGarretts will lead them to the gold. Out of water and food they find he caves on the map but the chests are empty. McGarrett is devastated. The crooks corner them in the cave and demand the gold. Clay McGarrett acts as a decoy while Josh kills the crooks. Everybody’s happy.

            Beth was played by Nan Leslie, who starred in a lot of B movies and westerns.

I worked a bit more gathering historical data for my essay:

In New Brunswick, twenty kilometres east of the farm where I was raised and five and a half kilometres south of Bath, where I was born, is what is now the town of Florenceville-Bristol. Bristol was previously a small village five kilometres north of the village of Florenceville. Bristol was previously known as Shiktehawk, from the Wəlastəqwey language, until the railroad came through in the late 1800s. Because colonial railway officials were unable to pronounce “Shiktehawk” it was renamed Kent Station and shortly after that it was changed to Bristol.

Shiktehawk is the area between where the Big and Little Shiktehawk streams, shortly after splitting from the Shikethawk River, empty into the Wəlastəqw (known better now as the St John River). At the mouth of the Big Shiktehawk there was a popular salmon pool that was fished up until recent years. This intersection was an important stopping point for the Wəlastəqwewiyik people and other indigenous travellers because it was the beginning of the cross province route. They would canoe fifteen kilometres up the Shiktehawk to its end and then make a twenty-three-kilometre portage to the Miramichi River, which flows to the Atlantic Ocean. This was the shortest route between the Beautiful River and the Miramichi River.

Before the white man the worst enemies of the people of the Beautiful River were the Kanien’kehá:ka (commonly called Mohawks) or the people of the Flint Stone Place. War parties of Kanien’kehá:ka would portage from the Kaniatarowanenneh (which means "The Big Waterway" but is now commonly called the St Lawrence River) to the head of the Beautiful River which they descended and attacked Wəlastəqwewiyik settlements. The Wəlastəqwewiyik would sometimes light several fires in the woods to fool the Kanien’kehá:ka that there were more of them.

“Shiktehawk”, “Sigtahaw” or “Sixtahaw” means, “Where he killed him” in Wəlastəqwey.  According to oral tradition it was on the perdue between the big and small streams that a Wələqwewiyik chief and a Kanien’kehá:ka chief fought for a whole afternoon on behalf of each of their tribes. The Wəlastəqwewiyik chief finally killed the Kanien’kehá:ka chief and he was buried there.

To Shiktehawk the Wəlastəqwewiyik would bring large pieces of special stone from other places like the Miramichi to make arrowheads, spearheads, scrapers and other tools. The archaeologist Dr. G.F. Clarke found some unique double pointed blades at Shiktehawk that have not been discovered anywhere else in New Brunswick.

Five kilometres north of Shiktehawk where Munquart stream flows into the Wəlastəqw, it is said that two Wəlastəqwewiyik elders fooled a party of Kanien’kehá:ka into thinking there were more Wəlastəqwewiyik than there actually were. The two men would paddle past them up the Wəlastəqw around the bend in the river. Then they came ashore, carried the canoe through the woods back down river, and then paddle up the river past them again. They did this over and over until finally the Kanien’kehá:ka met with them and the chiefs made a peace agreement by burying a hatchet in the ground. Every year after that Wəlastəqwewiyik and Kanien’kehá:ka chiefs came to this location to ratify the treaty. The last meeting was held about 1857.

            The Maliseet Nation Conservation Council continues to assess the Shiktehawk stream to evaluate the health of the fish population there.

            The course of the Beautiful River as it flows from Tobique and past Shiktehawk to Woodstock is fast but with few rapids. 

            There would probably have been crops of perhaps corn growing along the shore as that was the area for planting and cultivation for the people of the Beautiful River.

Diaphanous

            On Thursday morning I had half of  “Vu de l’extérieur” (From the Outside) by Serge Gainsbourg memorized.

            I washed a six-board wide section of the western side of my kitchen floor in front of the entrance to the living room. The strip kind of looks like a golden doormat now.

            I went to Freshco where I bought two bags of grapes, a bag of Old Dutch potato chips, a bag of frozen french fries, a bottle of shampoo-conditioner and a pack of paper towels.

            I had a chicken drumstick and some yogourt with honey for lunch.

            I finished the Winkelman chapter from Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. The main point seems to be that Goethe’s writing was influenced by classical Greek literature that had been written about by Winkelman.

            I would like to get started on my Finding Places essay for Indigenous Studies but my TA has yet to pick two from the four proposals I uploaded. I emailed my TA about it.

            Also next week’s reading for Indigenous Studies has not been posted. This is a shoddy course for various reasons, including the way things tend to be posted at the last minute.

            I did my exercises in the afternoon while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish gets Andy to become partners in a cigar stand in the lobby of an old building. But when they start making money Kingfish wants the business all to himself and so he convinces Andy that it’s losing money and so he’ll take it off his hands. But later Andy finds out from Lightning that the stand has been making a profit. Next Kingfish sees a surveyor making measurements in the lobby. He tells Kingfish the whole building is being torn down. Kingfish then tells Andy that he’s discovered that he’s allergic to cigars and he’ll sell him the business for $50. Afterwards Andy says that it really cost him $55 because he had to pay a guy to pretend to be a surveyor.

            The guest star on this show was Al Jolson, although he wasn’t part of the story. He was promoting the movie, “The Al Jolson Story” and he sang a medley of his most famous songs.

            I finished the Conclusion to Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. It’s there that he uses the slogan “Art for art’s sake”.

            I read Pater’s chapter on the painter Giorgione. It’s ironic that Pater declares that music is the ultimate expression of art and yet he doesn’t mention a single composer in the whole book.

            I read Diaphaneiete the final chapter of Pater’s book in which he talks about approaching art and life with openness or being diaphanous.

            My TA got back to me and thanked m for reminding her to post the choices. Apparently she’d made her selections last week but they didn’t become visible until she’d released the grades and comments for the proposals. She picked the two Toronto locations on the Humber River that I wanted to work on.

            I had a potato, two drumsticks and gravy for dinner while watching Wanted Dad or Alive starring Steve McQueen.

            In this story Josh is in Almagordo eating a steak when a fellow bounty hunter named Foley approaches and warns him not to go after Ted Nelson because he's his bounty. There is a fight and Josh throws Foley out. The sheriff, Pat Garrett, turns out to be an old friend of Josh but he doesn’t want trouble and asks Josh to leave town. Josh is approached by Anne Nelson, the wife of Ted Nelson and tells him that Ted wants to turn himself in but only to Josh, because thy are old friends. Josh rides with Anne to their home but Foley follows. Josh ambushes him, there’s another fight but Josh wins and ties Foley up. Josh meets Ted and Ted agrees to turn give himself up to Josh the next days as long as he’ll give Anne half the reward. Since Ted is not wanted for murder he would not be hung and might only serve a few months in prison. Josh goes back and frees Foley and then he goes to town to tell Pat about the deal. The next day Ruth the barmaid rides to the edge of town with Josh before he goes to meet Ted. After he leaves she sees Foley on his tail and so she rides back and warns Pat. Pat heads out after Foley. When Josh arrives Ted sees the other men and points a gun at Josh. He fires and creases him and Josh instinctively fires back, fatally wounding Ted. Before he dies Ted says that he made Josh shoot him because he’d decided he couldn’t go back to prison.

            

The Careless Habit of Accuracy is the Murderer of Beauty

            On Wednesday morning I had the first verse and chorus of  “Vu de l’extérieur” (From the Outside) by Serge Gainsbourg memorized but I had to make more adjustments to the translation to fit the rhythm. There are also a lot of slang words for the female anatomy that I needed to find English equivalents for. Some lines have a lot of syllables that are spoken very quickly and so I have to fill my translation with English words that can serve the same purpose.          

            I did a bit more reading of Pater’s “Studies in the History of the Renaissance” and then I took 45-minute siesta before getting ready to leave for my Aesthetic and Decadent Movements class.

            There was no class ahead of ours but there were a couple of women chatting. I tried to read but it was hard to concentrate and when they left a couple of women from our class came in and were talking in an animated way and then two more. Perhaps it was a good exercise in concentration for me.

            Kaitlin, who was presenting this time was very nervous about it. She would be doing her seminar starter on Pater and asked me what I thought of the book. I told her that he’s a very good writer but not a good composer of prose, as he rambles like someone distracted and loses track of his point.

            When we started there were only ten students in class and I think only one more showed up while we were underway.  Professor Li was disappointed by the turnout.

            She reviewed a bit of Swinburne and said that he is adamant about art being for art’s sake and yet his poem “Hertha” is quite political. I suggested that all art is political but it just shouldn’t be so consciously.

            The rest of the class was spent discussing Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. She said that if Pater had submitted this book as a PHD thesis he would not have gotten it. And yet Pater was the theorist for the Aesthetic and Decadence movements.

            Pater forces us to think about our own style. His style is the art of the inexact. We never know what he means. He calls the non-ethics of art for art’s sake “higher ethics”. He needs the reader to give him structure.

            Why does he write this way?

            In the 1870s Victorians were split between the mind and the body. A lot of “isms” came into being such as utilitarianism. Pater’s writing is a consequence of the industrial age’s playing down of sensory responses. Nietzsche calls this “weightless society”. I think he said that when god dies from a culture it becomes weightless.

            In a world of achievement and of studying or working towards a goal, literary works force you to rethink your own views.

            Victorian society had developed to the point where the moral approach was the only approach.

            She asked us to describe Pater’s style. I said that he flows and that it’s like interpretive dance.

            His work is creative writing rather than a rational treatise. The book raised eyebrows at the time. His essays border on fiction and use metaphorical language. His art criticism is imaginative prose that is an art in itself.

            In those days the boundaries of discipline were not laid out. Victorian men of letters were all polymaths.

            For a long time the study of literature was exclusively a classical discipline.

            Pater’s theory of art for art’s sake is the most organized idea in the book.

            We have to go to the inexact to recover from Victorianism.

            Pater is after the experience of the moment. His book is more like a romance than a history. Creative writing is a style of living, temperament and disposition. Art and life are identical. It’s not the criticism of today.

            The purple passage of the book is the one about Mona Lisa. The professor asked me if I’d been to the Louvre to see Mona Lisa. I said I hadn’t. One student had been there several times and she said it’s disappointing. The painting is surprisingly small; one has to view it from a distance behind thick bulletproof glass and through a crowd of people raising their phones to take pictures of it.

            Pater uses imaginative reason. Everything is through the senses. It’s not just about art but artistic sensibility. He is going after the impact of form. The individual response is different and there is no one message.

            Pater’s Conclusion is controversial. Experiencing a particular moment is the end. Understanding is not what he is after. Art is supposed to be new every time.

            He uses the phrase “hard gemlike flame” and we discussed that for several minutes. I said that in addition to being solid “hard” could mean “difficult”. She liked that. The phrase “hard gemlike flame” comes from an article by John Tyndall on the relations of radiant heat to colour and texture. I told her that reminded me of Goethe’s theories of colour and his ideas of science being a matter of observation. 

            He is highlighting things we don’t think about. Art for art’s sake is art for the sake of the moment.

            We took a break.

            In the 19^th Century there were two ways of writing history. One was the German style of getting history as accurate as possible. The other was Thomas Carlyle and Walter Pater’s approach of uncovering the spirit of the past. Putting oneself into the events in order to feel what they were like.

            Inexactitude is political.

            Kaitlin Persaud did her seminar starter on Pater’s chapter on Pico della Mirandola. I think she was saying that all knowledge could be understood in a modern context.

            Pater’s historicism has a sense of modernity. He is interested in history’s images and feelings but he only cares about the mind.

            I suggested that history is like a dream to be interpreted.

            Critics call it historical relativism. The past is meaningful because of our response to it.

            Pater champions subjectivity.

            Oscar Wilde referred to the careless habit of accuracy. If we don’t stop worshipping facts beauty will pass away.

            Pater is against exact modern formulas. Art should represent unconscious systems that Pater calls soul-facts.

            We looked at the purple passage on the Mona Lisa. He says her pain embodies old fancy and the modern idea.

            The future also informs the past.

            We got our essays back and those of us who have already done our seminar starters got marks for those as well.

            She warned us that in her academic background the professor’s notes are supposed to be critical and not full of praise. The praise comes in the final mark.

            She liked my quote from Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” as an epigraph to my title “The Reason in the Rhyme of ‘Au lecteur’ by Charles Baudelaire”: “We got no class and we got no principals and we got no innocence / We can’t even think of a word that rhymes”.

            She thought my second sentence was too involved and I needed an example to illustrate my point.

She said I needed to set up my comparison between Baudelaire’s quatrains and Petrarchan quatrains.

In my citations I’d apparently made a mistake in citing the course pack rather than the original sources referred to in the contents page. I had just followed the MLA instructions for course packs.

Her final note was “Fantastic work! I enjoyed your translation … Well done!”

I got an A-plus on the essay and an A on my seminar starter.

When I got home I ran the water in the kitchen sink to cool it off before drinking a glass and went back out in the hall to get my bike to hang it up. My next door neighbour Benji was just on his way out and stopped to chat about the weather, that the Coffeetime donut shops are all going out of business and the one downstairs will probably move out in December, and that the Popeyes will probably move in early in January, After he left I went back to the kitchen and saw that my sink was about to overflow. I had a fruit bowl full of grapes that the water was flowing on but the bowl had been blocking the drain. I turned off the water and moved the bowl to clear the drain just seconds before there would have been another flooding disaster downstairs like there was a few months ago.

I had a late lunch of half the slice of pizza that David had brought me the night before.

I took another siesta.

I worked on my journal.

For dinner I melted some old cheddar on the other half of the pizza slice and had it with a beer while watching two episodes of Wanted Dead or Alive, starring Steve McQueen.

In the first story Josh arrives in a town where his old buddy Ned is running for mayor against corrupt incumbent Barney Pax and the strong-arm tactics of Barney’s brother Sheriff Steve Pax. Unknown to Ned it was his wife Carole who sent for Josh to help defend against the Pax brothers. Josh comes with help in hand in the form of a wanted poster as he’s found out that Steve Pax is wanted for murder in another state. Barney arranges a meeting with Josh in a room where Josh finds Steve Pax dead and four witnesses to claim Josh killed him. Josh escapes custody. Barney tells Ned he’ll back off of Josh if he writes a letter withdrawing his candidacy. Carole tries to stop Ned by telling lies about Josh’s intentions towards her. Ned writes the letter and gives it to Barney. Carole tries to get it back from Barney at gunpoint. Josh shows up and both Carole and Barney fire at him. Josh ends up killing Barney. Carole is shocked that she almost killed Josh. He gives her Ned’s letter and when Ned asks, Josh lies and tells him that what Carole had told him was true. Josh rides out of town.

Carole was played by Bethel Leslie who was a renowned theatrical performer and won a Tony for her role in Long Days Journey Into Night. For a while she was the head writer on the soap opera, “The Secret Storm” in 1954 and wrote scripts for several other shows as well.

Steve Pax was played by Deforest Kelley from Star Trek.

In the second story Josh is playing poker in a saloon when an old friend of his, Boone Morgan approaches and says he needs to talk to him. Josh asks him to wait until after that hand but then Boone collapses. It turns out Boone has been shot and so Josh takes him to the doctor.  The wound is fatal but Boone has time to ask Josh to promise to take him home. Home is a place called Cameron and Josh takes Boone’s coffin there in a buckboard. This is the closest thing to a home base that has been indicated for Josh Randall in this series, as he has lived there and everyone is glad to see him when he arrives. Meanwhile the two bounty hunters that shot Boone show up in Kenton looking for Boone. When they learn he’s dead they want to claim the reward. The sheriff tells them that the reward would go to Randall but for some reason he gives them his address. Meanwhile Boone’s father receives a telegram for Josh saying he can claim the $500 reward for Boone. This creates the misunderstanding that Josh killed Boone for the reward an so suddenly the whole town is against him. Of course Josh doesn’t even want the reward. The bounty hunters show up and tell Josh they killed Boone and the reward is theirs. He refuses to give it to them and so they beat him up. They give him until that night. Josh’s gun is at Boone’s father’s house but thinking he killed Boone he refuses to let Josh have the gun. No one in town will even sell him a gun. Finally Boone’s sister Ellie brings Josh her father’s shotgun just before the bounty hunters attack. At first Josh has to take shelter in a livery stable without the shotgun but he manages to grab it just in time and kill both men.