Too Tight Bike Tire

            On Wednesday morning I finished posting my translation of “Classée X” by Serge Gainsbourg and memorized the first verse and chorus of his song “Mélo mélo. This one is fairly simple so it probably won’t take long to learn. 

            My brain was misfiring during song practice and temporarily forgetting or getting wrong lyrics and chords. They came back to me right away but it was happening throughout the rehearsal. This is different from how I sometimes forget an entire line of lyrics and can’t get it back until the next session when it's there like it never left.

            In the late morning I tried out the three webcams that my upstairs neighbour David gave me a month or so ago. I still have the webcam that I bought for $40 works but it’s not very bright. When I move it tries to refocus and gets quite dim. Sometimes it readjusts but very slowly and so I don’t think people can see me very well. Two of David’s webcams didn’t work at all but the bulky Logitech one works better than the one I’ve been using. The only problem is that it has a base and no clamp and it’s really designed to just sit on a desk. But I don’t want my video shooting up my nose. So I put the little tonga drum on top of a big hard cover dictionary behind the monitor and put the Logitech cam on top of the edge of the drum, slightly leaning forward and that way it’s close to perfect. 

            At noon I logged on for my Brit Lit 2 tutorial. We discussed the possible change of the syllabus. I told him that as a fourth year student I find these little assignments annoying because I am used to writing essays. The jury’s still out on whether it changes because the poll closes on Friday. Carson suggested that students that prefer an option might be able to keep it and just be marked accordingly.

            We looked at George Eliot’s insistence on reality in novels. I brought up the point that her argument is the opposite of Oscar Wilde’s in which he says art must exaggerate. I added though that from a middle class perspective the real peasant life would appear like an exaggeration. But I think Eliot is othering the peasants with her perspective. She’s singling them out for the reality fetish of middle class readers. The peasants’ reality would be very different from the middle class perspective of the peasants no matter how hard she tries to be realistic in their portrayal. Even the peasants’ own stories would be full of extreme exaggerations and fantasy. There is also the fact that she creates a love triangle between peasants and nobility while claiming to be ruthlessly realistic. 

           She falls into romantic tropes. Reality is easier said than done. She is gesturing towards a solution without arriving. 

           Carson asked what we think of Eliot’s insistence that art must have a moral. I said that I totally disagree. The artist’s job is to create what they feel inspired to create. Art is not supposed to have a moral agenda. Obviously all art has meaning but the meaning is for the audience to draw out and not for the artist to consciously inject. 

           Carson said he agreed with me on that point. 

           Some genres of art may be moralistic but we could still take a different message from them. 

           Toru Dutt lived from 1856 to 1877. She was Bengali and from a wealthy family. She had the luxury of travel and studied in Europe. 

           Matthew Arnold was a poet and critic. He was a school inspector and very passionate about educational reform. 

           Carson asked what Dutt’s poem “Our Casuarina Tree” and Arnold’s “Dover Beach” have in common. I said that both poems mention shingle beaches, since Dover Beach is a shingle beach. But the sounds they describe are very different. Both are sad but her shingle beach murmurs while Arnold’s grinds. I think the waves must come in a lot harder on Dover Beach. I said that Arnold is distanced from the nature he is inspired by. He is looking at it through a window in a temporary situation. He is on a honeymoon and this is not his life. Dutt’s casuarina tree contains the history of her family and her life, even when she is far away from it because the places she goes produce sounds that remind her of the tree. It is through the tree that her brother and sister continue to live, even though they are dead. 

           I joked that Arnold really knows how to jazz up a honeymoon with romance. The world is a shithole but lets be true to each other. Arnold’s poem is a response to alienation from everything.

           Someone said that he concludes that the answer is truth and love, but I pointed out that he only says “Let us be true to one another other”. When he says “Ah, love” he’s addressing someone. 

           Arnold’s alienation is not necessarily because of Darwin but there is a disenchantment that Engles touches on in his Sociology of the English Working Class. It comes from modernity and the conditions of life. The world is bigger and smaller at the same time. Dutt is away from her homeland but is alienated when she returns. One can never come home. 

           I pointed out that Arnold’s rhymes in the first stanza seem to create a deliberate disconnection. The rhymes are there and noticeable but there is no rhythm to connect them whereas in the final stanza the rhymes tighten up to indicate togetherness or one could say the lines become true to one another.

           Carson said that we’ll be able to talk more about reality in art when we cover Oscar Wilde in a couple of weeks.

           I had guacamole with plantain chips for lunch.

           In the afternoon I went to take a bike ride and discovered that I had another flat tire, this time on the front. There was a hole in the tire as well and so I went next door to get a tube and a tire. The guy wanted to charge me $51 for the tire but I reminded him that I paid him $45 for the other one. He said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with my head today” and said I could just give him $50.

           What followed was the ordeal of trying to get the tire and tube onto the rim. This was a very tight tire and I struggled with it for hours. My fingers felt raw from the effort of trying to pull the final quarter of the rubber onto the rim. I’ve never had this much trouble with a tire before. I looked up tight tire instructions on YouTube and I think I made progress but I still didn’t have it done by dinnertime. 

           I had the soup I’d made the day before and the rest of the strawberry-rhubarb pie while watching Andy Griffith.

           In this story Andy wants the mayor to approve the budget of sending the Mayberry band to Raleigh for an annual festival. But the new mayor says the band is horrible and he won’t pay for the trip. Andy gets the mayor to listen to them but they really are horrible. There is a beatnik jazz band passing through Mayberry. They are friends of Andy’s but Andy has to force them to pose as band members to play and impress the mayor. It’s a success and he approves their budget, not knowing about the ringers who won’t be part of the trip. They go and sound horrible but they have a good time.