I finished working out the chords to the chorus of “Malaise en Malaisie” by Serge Gainsbourg and most of the first verse. I might have the chords finished on Wednesday.
During song practice, I saw Bea out panhandling in the cold. She’s walking with a can now while she wasn’t last month. She was blocking cars that were trying to turn off Brock onto Queen and so they had to swerve around her. She looks eighty but when I spoke to her last fall, she said she was about to turn fifty-nine.
I weighed 87.2 kilos before breakfast.
At 9:45 I logged onto Zoom for the Global Modernisms lecture. I had my journal document open for taking notes but when I closed the document containing the Zoom meeting password, I ended up also shutting down the one for my notes. It took a few minutes for the document to start up again and so I had to handwrite some of the lecture.
Lora started off with her presentation on “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness” by Edward Said. Said is a Palestinian activist for independence. He says that Marlow in his unreliable narration illustrates the limits of language. The author Joseph Conrad shows the limits of language. The Europeans in the story perform imperial mastery. Conrad wants the reader to know that the business of empire became the empire of business. The professionals listening to Marlow’s story represent society. Said says that Conrad does not lead us out of imperialism.
Marlow is on the fringe. He represents empire. Imperialism monopolizes representation. The accountant represents imperial enterprise. That which should never be shared of the colonial world. The Russian has no ideas of his own. The colonized are not sharing. Conrad’s Eurocentric view is wrong. Iranian writers opposing colonialism brought about the revolution. She talks of the conflict between vaccinated and anti-vaccinated.
Apala asks for Lora’s reflections. She says power can get out of hand. She’s in the States right now and she’s in shock over what’s happening in Canada. Conrad couldn’t escape imperialism.
Apala says Modernists knew they were caught in imperialism. Postcolonial scholars look at modernist literature suspiciously. She agrees with Gikandi. The politics of post-colonial literature are happening under the purview of modernism. Postcolonialism is expressed through modernism. Various forms of postcolonialism could be alternate forms of modernism. Doyle says looking at the long perspective helps us see the postcolonial experience. We live in a postcolonial world. Postcolonial experience responds to modernism. Said is a founding father of postcolonialism. His reading of Conrad is crucial to his scholarship.
Concluding Heart of Darkness. Zoya says Marlow represents Englishness.
I mention that Marlow is probably not speaking English in most of his conversations in Africa. That means that when he is telling the story he is translating and so he is not only an unreliable narrator. He is an extra unreliable narrator.
Apala says there are no bonus points for the keyword assignment. Someone asks for a sample thesis.
Apala says “Thesis: In relation to (name two texts), I will argue …” A thesis is true but also contestable. Modernist texts are self-aware. Modernist characters are classless and raceless. A thesis must be specific.
Apala says where she comes from a state of emergency is far more dangerous than in Canada. She’s distanced from Canadian politics. There is polarization all over. How to think of these events in terms of the course.
Laura Doyle’s essay is postcolonial. She uses studies of temporal expansion to understand how conditions of imperialism come from a series.
There was a discussion on the state of emergency. Sam lives across the bridge from Mohawk territory. He points out the contrast between indigenous protests and how hard the police came down on them as opposed to how they are now handling the truckers with kid gloves.
Eliza says the goal of settler colonialism is the erasure of indigenous people.
Apala says politically south Asia is postcolonial. But settler colonialism is still present. Marxist critics push back against postcolonialism. Accommodating indigenous people. Transnational and postcolonial studies are postcolonial. We have to think about comparative colonialisms. Some people are angry if one calls Israel a settler state. There are no right answers.
George says the Oka crisis protest and the truckers’ protest are an extreme contrast.
Laura Doyle. Looking at inter-imperiality. It challenges the Eurocentric view of empire. The definition of empire is that it is an expansionist state using leverage to negotiate with other powerful states. Empires are not necessarily the main engine of history. Medieval vs Middle Ages. As much as the west was medieval some societies are still medieval. Other economies have funded the west to rise to modernism.
We took a break and just as we were starting on Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable my screen froze again. I waited a while, but I didn’t know if I should wait or leave and come back. I decided to leave, and it took fifteen minutes to get back in. When I returned my screen froze again almost immediately but this time I waited, and it eventually started moving again.
Mulk Raj Anand has Modernist commitments.
He was one of the first few Indian writers in English. He was Joycean. He went to England to study. He had Socialist leanings and was an anti-colonial activist. He spent time with the Bloomsbury group. He was not part of the group but visited the members. TS Eliot saw his race before his art. Anand returned to India. Gandhi was enormous between 1920 and 1940. Anand wanted to be more experimental. Natives had no civil rights and were beaten up by authorities. Anand was not very politically active but used literature to work out problems. He became more realist in his writing because it was necessary to represent the postcolonial condition. Untouchable takes place in one day like Ulysses.
I weighed 86.2 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Bloor and Palmerston. It was about four degrees below zero and so there was a little bit of sweating around the edges of the ice banks where the sun had been shining. Palmerston is nice and wide between Bloor and College and so the snowbanks don’t feel like they are crowding as much. I stopped at Freshco on the way home to buy five kilos of potatoes. I weighed 86.6 kilos at 17:17.
Maybe I should have turned off my computer for a while in the early afternoon. It was crawling, freezing, and misbehaving while I tried to post my blog. Sometimes I had to wait five minutes to post each photo. Finally, after ninety minutes of frustration, I closed everything and restarted. Once it was back up again everything uploaded fine, but in the end, it took almost two and a half hours from start to finish to post my blog and then do all the related posting on Facebook.
I had a potato with gravy and two chicken drumsticks while watching an episode of Adam-12.
This time the background situation was drawn from the first situation. Malloy and Reed go to a hippy woman named Jane Tipton’s house to take down her information because her 1958 white Ford convertible has been stolen. She had gone to the liquor store and when she came out the car was gone. She is not very helpful because she lives removed from a lot of practical concerns that most people would care about. She doesn’t know her license plate number and doesn’t get why she should. She keeps her pink slip in the glove compartment and is surprised when Reed tells her she’s not supposed to. She wants the car back by 18:00 because she has a date, but they tell her it may take days. She is very distracted and keeps talking about dating and how most of the guys she meets are nuts. She is at first interested in Malloy until she finds out he’s a Pisces because they have hang-ups. After all that she tells them that the best way to identify her car is if they find her three-meter-long boa constrictor Arthur in the trunk.
They stop a car like hers but it’s the wrong one.
They rescue a couple of junkies from a burning building. One of them doesn’t appreciate being saved by cops.
There is also a dispute between two women over a water sprinkler from one woman’s yard spraying the other's laundry that has been hung out to dry. Reed tells them if they don’t calm down, they will be arrested and photographed in the clothes they are currently wearing. That seems to work.
They stop another convertible like Jane’s and open the trunk only to find half a key of marijuana.
Another police car finds Jane’s car and Arthur.
Jane was played by Luana Anders, who started out as a bike messenger at MGM studios along with Jack Nicholson. She got Jack to join her improv class and some of their classmates were Sally Kellerman and Richard Chamberlain. Her first films were B movies like Reform School Girl. When she was acting in Roger Corman’s “The Young Racers” in 1963 the soundman asked her to star in his first directing effort. The movie was “Dementia 13”, and the director was Francis Ford Coppola. She was Lisa the skinny-dipping hippy girl in Easy Rider. She died in 1996 and Jack Nicholson mentioned her in his Oscar acceptance speech for “As Good as It Gets” in 1998.
Adam-12 is generally boring but one thing interesting is that some good actors are cast to play quirky characters to stand in contrast to the cops who are the straight men in these comic situations.
It was well after dinner when I finished editing my lecture notes and posted my discussion comment:
Lora’s presentation on Edward Said: Marlow in his unreliable narration illustrates the limits of language. Empires became businesses.
There was a lot of discussion of the contrast between the light police reaction to the truckers’ protest and how hard the police have come down in response to Indigenous and G7 protests. There was a discussion on the state of emergency.
Laura Doyle says looking at the history of empires and their interconnectedness helps us see the postcolonial experience. She uses studies of temporal expansion to understand how conditions of imperialism come from a series of imperialisms. We have to think about comparative colonialisms.
Mulk Raj Anand spent time with the members of the Bloomsbury group. TS Eliot saw his race before his art. He became more realist in his writing because it was necessary to represent the postcolonial condition.
My takeaways:
A state of emergency in Canada is probably less dangerous than a Canadian hockey game.
I like Doyle’s approach of studying earlier empires to learn about later ones. I was disappointed though that she didn’t give examples of art and literature that might have been considered modernist in reaction to those earlier empires. I would think that The One Thousand and One Arabian Nights would be a prime example of inter-imperial literature.
As I was getting ready for bed, I found two nests of bedbugs in some of the cracks on the left edge of the frame of the old exit door at the head of my bed. They were all black and greasy and sick from having crawled over the killing dust on the floor between the wall and the bed. But the dust just seems to slow them down considerably and holds back a full infestation. There were a fair number in the nests before I killed them all.
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