Goodbye to the Bread Lady

           

            On Wednesday morning I called my doctor’s office, because I noticed on my phone that I’d been called from there the day before. The nurse told me I need an abdominal ultrasound. I hope I don’t find out that I’m pregnant again.

At 11:00 on Wednesday I went down to the food bank to get a number. Last week I came a little later, walked in the door, got a number and left. I’m not sure if it really pays to get there early and to have to stand in line with people smoking cigarettes. One woman brought a wooden chair from near the door and hobbled back with it so she could sit while waiting. She sat there smoking and playing a game on her smart phone until the line moved. She murmured “Ow!” as she walked with the chair. She was about my age or younger, and definitely overweight, but she wasn’t as old or obese as her difficulties made her appear. I guess there is something wrong with her legs.

I my two neighbours’ empties to the beer store so I could buy some three percent milk later on.

When I got back to the food bank, my number was called almost right away. I was reading Peter Pan while sitting in one of the chairs that line the wall. The door person wanted to call five more people in but before that she approached me to ask me to move further down. I looked up from my reading and told her, “No, I’m going to be staying here.” She said, “Okay”, but didn’t appreciate my lack of cooperation with her useless plan. She let five more people in and they filled the seats in the area where she had wanted me to move. Then my number was called and I went to get my food.

A young guy who I hadn’t seen before was my volunteer, but after I’d selected my items from the first shelf, he stepped aside and there was a young, bright faced woman managing the second shelf and another minding the third. These people stuck out like bibles in a porn shop, so I knew they were part of some outside organization. I asked, “Where are you guys from?” One young woman answered, “Achievers, we’re just down the street.”

I had to look them up later on. I had expected to find some ultra sunny gang of Christers, but it turns out that they are with one of those modern organizations that companies hire to train their employees to become better team players. There are phrases on their website like “behaviour driving engine” and “the greatest gap: the state of employee disengagement”. I’m sure there are all kinds of ritualistic methods and that it’s almost a bit cult-like. It all gives me the willies just to think about it. I guess this group might have been either Achievers employees or those of one of their clients, out on a team-building mission.

Sue was not in her normal place with the cold items, but there were two more “achievers” there as well. I found Sue by the bread section. I had been wondering what had happened to the old white lady with the dyed black dreadlocks who usually manages that section. Sue informed me that she died. She would always say, “What can I get for you my dear?” and tended to promote the bread as if she was actually getting paid to push it. “You’ve got to try some of this!” and “Take a few more of these!” I would always end up with way too much bread. I’ll miss her.

She Was Staring At Me

            

             
            When I arrived for class on Tuesday, September 22, a pretty young woman of East Indian descent was sitting halfway up the stairs, waiting for the earlier lecture to be over. I was standing at the foot of the stairs, doing some writing in my notebook. When I looked up though, I noticed that she was staring at me and didn’t look away like most people would when I looked back. I smiled slightly at her and she smiled slightly back, but I went back to my writing. Maybe she was expecting me to talk to her.

            I haven’t figured out yet what the subject is of the class before ours. The instructor has either an eastern European or a Slavic accent. Before she erased the blackboard, I could make out the name Visigoths among the jumble of other words that covered the board. There are a lot more older students in their class than there are in mine.

            Professor Baker was wearing a blue suit with a short, collarless jacket. Her skirt was wrinkled and loose fitting at the hem. Two of the course TAs were sitting in the middle of the front row and when the professor came over, she stood up and gave her a hug. They’ve probably worked together over several years, as is often the case as the TAs work toward their PhDs.

            In the first part of the lecture, Deirdre finished talking about E. Nesbit’s “Story of the Treasure Seekers”. She said that neither the children in the book, nor the world in which they live are idealized. It reflects Nesbit’s own upbringing and her domestic environment with her own family. The real power in the world of these children is in their imagination.

            In the text, Nesbit both pays homage to children’s literature of the past but also mocks the conventions that have been established based on those works. The texts that she cites generates creativity that lands against the wall of realism. The stories mock improbably endings.

            The treasures that the seekers acquire are far less than what they imagine they will gain, but it is appreciated as if it were greater. They often misread the messages presented by their environment but that misreading ultimately results in a traditional fairy tale ending, similar to Cinderella. They are elevated to affluence. And so after opposing conventions throughout the book, Nesbit bows to them in the end, thus fulfilling our expectations.

            The children are self-parenting, using as a guide a sense of honour acquired from reading. The message is that the British are designed and equipped to be the caretakers of the world.

            Their uncle reads the language of the furniture in the children’s home.

            Only imaginative and artistic adults have the ability to win the children’s respect. Imagination is presented as a power than derives from being open to childhood.

            I asked the professor to clarify what she said was anti-Semitic in the way the moneylender is presented in the book. It seemed like a fairly light sort of racism to me in that Rosenbaum is presented as a stereotype. I pointed out that there is a much more extreme case of racism later on when the children’s uncle declares that he would have wanted to have been seen to be behaving like a “nigger”. She said that when Rosenbaum is about to give the children a coin, he stops to caress it first and then decides to give the children something less valuable. In this way he is presented as a “grasping Jew”. In the end, when the children’s fortunes change and almost everyone they encountered in all of the stories shows up at a celebration, the kids ask if Rosenbaum will be coming. The adults dismiss him as having gotten his money back and so he wouldn’t care to be there.

            At this point, I could smell that someone behind me in the class had farted.

            After a short break, Professor Baker began to lecture about J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan”. Referring to the film, “Finding Neverland”, she said that Barrie never looked even remotely like Johnny Depp, but he might have led a much happier life if he had.

            The work began as a play for adults, entitled “The Little White Bird”, many years before it was published in 1928 as “Peter Pan”. In the original story, a man emotionally appropriates a little boy from another family. This is very similar to the real relationship between J. M. Barrie and George Llewellyn Davies. Barrie, at the time was already the best selling author of his time even before publishing Peter Pan, but the fantasy was a survival mechanism for him, because he could not deal with the adult world.

            James Barrie was the youngest and considered by his mother to be the least brilliant of her children, especially when compared to her oldest son. Ironically it was his brother who never really grew up because he died before he had a chance to. She made it clear that James was a disappointment to her and so his childhood was haunted by a lack of maternal love and acknowledgement. He was obsessed with trying to please her and kept a tally of every time he was able to make her laugh. Even in adulthood he was only 1.2 meters tall and in school, because of his height and because he had a very high voice, he was always cast as a girl in school plays. Coincidentally, Peter Pan was traditionally played by young women.

            Even after marrying, Barrie was asexual and incapable of adult passion. He was happiest with other people’s children. The Llewellyn Davies children’s father found it often annoying that he came around so much, but when he died, James became their benefactor. He even had the mother’s will altered so that when she died he would become the children’s legal guardian. Three of the five boys grew up to commit suicide and the rest were just unhappy. Their play consisted of long narratives that continued from day to day. He spoke to them about fairies as if he had first hand knowledge of them.

            The narrator of Peter Pan is very untypical, in that he is prickly and expresses opinions about the characters he is describing. He says at one point that he despises the mother of the Darling children.

            Peter Pan cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is not, and even pretend meals are just as satisfying to him. This confusion of real and unreal has proven to be infectious with children’s audiences when the story is performed as a play, especially in the scene where the audience’s clapping is that which saves Tinkerbell’s life.

            Neverland is an internal and personalized space that is different with every child.

            After class I went up to the Admissions and Awards office to ask about my grant and about my student balance. I was given a fairly good assurance that I will definitely be getting the other half of my grant in January. That means that I have to find out how much a half course is so I can save half of that from my grant refund until I have the other half in January. When I told the counsellor about the $7,000 balance on my student account, she was surprised and said it must be a glitch. She advised me to go to Student Services on Huron. I had trouble finding it and then I had trouble finding a free locking stand for my bike. I had to walk half a block down to College. At Student Services I was told I had to go to my registrar’s office and change my billing to “per course”. On my way up St George I passed a young man with very skinny legs under vertically striped baggy trousers riding a bike by pushing it along with his right leg. At Woodsworth College, the guy at the registrar’s desk simply gave me a slip of paper with a URL on it so I could change my account to per course billing. I guess I was supposed to have already done that.

            I rode down to OCADU for my first job of the new semester. I was fourty-five minutes early, so I went to the models lounge to nap. While I was there, my ex-landlady, Helga walked in. I didn’t talk to her and haven’t for years because I have bad memories of her devious tricks that resulted in me getting evicted from her place back in the mid-nineties.

            I worked for Bob Berger, who is one of my favourite instructors at OCADU. He’s genuinely interested in the people he talks to and enthusiastic about life and art. I just did one head pose for his class and he suggested I just read, so I got through two chapters of Peter Pan, reading from my laptop.

            After work, I went to the washroom for a while and while I was there, I checked my phone. There had been three calls from my doctor’s office that day and one the day before. Dr Shechtman had told me that if there was no problem with my second lab tests, he wouldn’t call me, so I guess that means I have to get an ultrasound done of my kidneys. I would have to call on Wednesday to find out for sure.

Getting My Head Out of Summer

            

           

            I think I’m still trying to get my head out of summer and the routines I established during my time off from school. On Monday I’d finished reading Edth Nesbit’s “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”, but not until that night. When the writing assignments start soon, I’ll have to free up more work time by cutting away at my holiday habits. For a start, I decided to stop reading the news every day online.

            Of  “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”, although it’s a children’s book, I think that it’s about class. In particular, it illustrates the financial deterioration of the British middle class as the British Empire began its decline. Nesbit seems to be setting up a reclamation of middle class values, education, cooperation and a sense of adventure as the cure for the decline.

            Throughout the book, she keeps the middle class separate from the other classes, but allowing a window of communication with the upper class through its oldest and youngest members. As for the working class, they are pretty much all portrayed as faceless and undeveloped characters, only slightly more discernable than the adults in a Peanuts comic strip.

            The only working class character with a personality is the family’s housekeeper, Eliza, but she is mostly presented in a negative light in being irritable and not very good at her job. She is considered so unimportant that when the family’s fortunes change and they move to a mansion in the country, Eliza simply disappears from the story.

            That evening I rode up to Heath and Mount Pleasant and then east to where Heath stops at the woods. I was wearing shorts and an unbuttoned long sleeved shirt. It was not so warm that I felt the need to remove the shirt.

I Do NOT Have A Moses Complex! : a review of the Plastiscene reading series for September 20

           

            It was a much cooler evening than the month before as I rode on Sunday, September 20^th to yet another new location of the Plastiscene Reading Series. This time it was at Habits Gastropub on College Street. It took me eight minutes to get to College and Dovercourt from my home in what is pretty much the centre of Parkdale. That’s one minute longer than it took me to get to The Belljar Café in Roncesvalles Village for last month’s reading. I guess that this venue of the month club is fun and interesting to some extent but it’s probably better to be in one place in order to build recognition and so people don’t have to use their secret decoder rings in order to find the event.

            Susie Berg, David Clink and Michael Fraser were already at a front table when I arrived. Susie told me that the reading would be in the back, but she didn’t yet know exactly where.

            I sat down at their table and asked Susie if she had a Moses complex with all this wandering around from venue to venue from month to month. She didn’t seem to appreciate the humour of my suggestion and was a little testy when she responded, “No I do not!” She added that she just wanted to end all this work and find one place. I said, “So did Moses!”

            They all had piles of paper beside them and it had the look of a group of actors working on a play as they looked down at identical pages that they each had in front of them and made comments about the text. It turned out that they were workshopping one another’s poetry. Kathleen Zinck arrived and joined us, and then she also added a poem to be tweaked by the comments of others. For my part, I’m always willing to listen to other people’s suggestions about my poems and offer mine about theirs, but I find the concept of workshopping a little weird. It seems formal and artificial to me.

            Kathleen’s poem was about being locked up at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. CAMH is an oddly named place because one would assume they work for mental health and against addiction and yet the name implies that they are “for” addiction. It seems to me that they should find a word that means the opposite of addiction for their name. The problem though is that there aren’t very many antonyms for addiction that would fit here. Perhaps “independence” would work, as in the “Centre for Independence and Mental Health”.

            Charlene Challenger said she knew someone who had tried to commit suicide and ended up with a psychiatric record that prevented her from working with children.

            We all moved down to the back. Habits Gastropub is long and narrow, and at the back, behind a glass wall, is a living room sized brewery with six shiny cylindrical stainless steel canisters, each about two meters high. Nicki Ward decided to set up the performance area at one side of the back end, facing a long picnic style table with two detached benches.

            Someone who I didn’t recognize said spoke to me by name, asking how I was and how my summer had been. I told him that it had been interesting but I never get as much done as I want to. He said he didn’t either, but added, “It was a nice summer though.” Someone else said, “It’s all over tomorrow!”

            Nicki seemed like she was chomping at the bit to get going, as she started to address the audience about half an hour earlier than usual to let them know we would be underway shortly.

            I was wondering where Paul Valliere was as I signed up for the open stage.

            There were about twelve of us there when Nicki said, “Okay, lets get going!” but Susie said, “It’s so early! We start at 6:30!” “What time is it now?” “6:20.” “Okay, everyone return to their pre-poetic state for another ten minutes.”

            Paul Valliere arrived just before start time. He said he’d gotten the wrong address from the email that Plastiscene sent out.

            As Nicki began mistressing the ceremonies, she had to stop and walk over to tell Paul to be quiet, as he was having a conversation at his table. He hadn’t realized that we’d started, probably because there was no microphone this time to give more authority to Nicki’s voice.

We began with the open stage slash poems from a hat segment and Nicki reminded us to keep it down to three minutes and so not to read anything too Joycean. David Clink quipped, “There’s no Joycean in Mudville!”

As Nicki has done for the last several months in a row, Nicki asked me to go first. I said I was going to do several short pieces that included some thoughts, some haiku, some short poems and a tanka. Nicki asked, “Thirty-one syllables?” I told her that I don’t do all that neurotic syllable counting, and that a tanka is basically a haiku with a couple of lines thrown in at the end. Of the thoughts: “If god doesn’t want me to masturbate, the pervert should stop watching me do it.” Of the haiku, “Above the cleared sidewalk a man walks the tightrope of the snow bank.” The tanka was, “ice plated snow reflecting the alley light glows pearlescent on the roof, breathing the cold air I toss the bag of cat shit.” Of the short poems, I finished with, “It would be a gas for someone to do me a solid and buy me a liquid.” Nicki said that I should title the last one “The Triple Point of Water”.

            David Clink read a poem from the hat. It was Peter Balakian’s “The Children’s Museum at Yad Vashem” – “ … The candles have laughing faces. The sun is sealed across. My mother turns into dust. My hand disappears. I walk across some stones. A scroll of a viola is a Nazi cross; the sky is a cave of faces …”

            Next was another poem from the hat, and this one, selected by one of the featured readers, and read by another member of the audience, was “A  Sea Monster Tells It’s Story” by David Clink – “ … the seas boyancy holdin my skeletun aloft, holdin this oshun enclosd by skin … In the mornin the water is gone. I can hear the ancient creek of my bones, my skin gettin crispy …”

            Returning to the open stage, we heard Sharon Berg reading her poem, “Willow” – “ … all things begin in dust or the memory of dust … my father’s father … not allowing the midwife to assist his wife … my grandfather became the ghost of himself, the bible spread over his knees …” The poem continued on for well over three minutes.

            Then Nicki called on Paul Valliere, who began by telling us that he learned on his recent trip to the Maritimes that at 74%, Prince Edward Island had the highest voter turnout in the last federal election. Paul then did a poem he wrote called “Votin In The Free World”, that was inspired in form by a Neil Young song- “ … Keep on votin' in the free world. I see native women without rights and I cannot understand why they are murdered so easily …” At the end of each verse he repeated the title phrase three times, just as Neil Young does in his song. The problem with such repetition in a spoken version is that it becomes tedious and awkward. It would have been more effective if he’d simply said the phrase once at the end of each verse.

            After Paul was Kathleen Zinck, who read her poem, “The Drifter”, which she said was an “Invisible poem about god …”

            Kathleen was followed by Lisa Richter, and she read her poem, “Visitation in Kensington Market” – “ … Still they lie in incandescent stupor …” and another entitled “Storage Space Contents” – “ … memories of ashtrays …”

            Next someone read George Bilgere’s “Beautiful Country” – “ … the two of them are about to embark upon a long and dangerous pilgrimage … down into a rocky valley
called Couples Counseling … They’re x-raying their relationship like a couple of art collectors trying to figure out if the Rembrandt they bought last month is a fake. They’re giving their love the third-degree under a hot and blinding light, and by God they better get some answers. Meanwhile, every day that tongueless little sachet of cells is finding more and more articulate ways of saying, What about me? But I’m just strolling in my garden with a glass of cold white wine, watching the daisies wave their yellow flags
from that beautiful country called Not My Problem.”

            With the open stage over, Nicki called a fifteen minute break.

            When we returned, Nicki commented about the light shining down on the performance area. She said that a light shining in your eyes changes your prescription while your reading, in the same way that a camera changes its aperture.

            Nicki then shared a quote: “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” She wasn’t sure who it was from, but someone suggested Oscar Wilde. It was Mark Twain, but there is a phrase with a similar meaning written much earlier in French by Blaise Pascal.

            I looked behind me and saw that the pub was empty other than us.

            Before introducing the first feature, Nicki, as she sometimes does, added her own voice to revisit a poem that had been read earlier. This time it was Lisa Richter’s “Storage Space Contents” – “ … Forked lizard tongues … the forgotten tails of tadpoles …”

            Nicki referred to the first invited writer, Brian Purdy, as the “fifth Beatle”. She said that five Beatles had gone to see the Maharishi but only four came back.

            Brian began with a poem called “Nervously Smiling”, about himself and his father – “ … You are the same … not one hair is out of place … Soon, like you, I will be embalmed in photographs …” From another poem – “ … Plath could not escape the sucking vacuum, Lawrence rides his rocking horse forever …”

            Brian told us, “What most people don’t know about Al Purdy is that he was a breed.” He explained that this is an old term, meaning that he was part Native. One quarter Cherokee to be specific. Brian read “Bastard Race” – “ … Their women stitched blue mountains in the sky …” At this point there was a sudden loud clattering from behind the nearby kitchen door, and Brian stopped reading to comment, “My friends in the kitchen are making sound effects!”

            Brian’s next poem was entitled “Tin Can Creek”, and when he was finished, the audience applauded, as they had done after every poem. This time though, Brian said, “I’m worried, with all this clapping that you won’t have anything left at the end. He then read “Recalcitrant” – “ … Suffering child, come to me, for comfort given clumsily … If there is not perfect passion, still it will suffice for ration …” He followed this with “Song of the Impractical Poet”, and when that was done he exclaimed, “Now I miss the clapping!” and so people applauded and he said, “I have to be honest! It’s been a long time since I read. You’re a good audience!”  After that Brian read “Home Run, Exhibition Stadium, Toronto, 1985” – “The blood deep roar of a thousand lions …” He talked about having been so swept up in the excitement that he was still holding his lukewarm drink as he left the stadium. He took it home and placed it on the mantle as a souvenir. His next poem was “Egyptian Blues” – “ … There’s a concubine riding my camel …” Then he read “The Ishtar Gates of Babylon”, and then “Sultan Bounce” – “ … The cats wind through their legs like nine mixed blessings … Banging an empty cup against a hydrant … The guests uncoil their question marks …” Brian finished with a poem called “Song At Sixty” – “Bring fireflies to the wedding feast …”

            Brian’s Purdy, when he uses rhyme, shows a talent for it, and while his poetry has, from time to time, some well conceived phrases, they don’t often flow together well as a complete poem. There’s something sentimentally dusty about his style that is more about craft than art as if he doesn’t feel like he has to try to break ground our burn as a poet in order to penetrate to the core of what he is trying to communicate.

            After Brian was finished and Nicki began to speak, a clatter of noise from the dishwashing area near the door rang out. Nicki commented, “In addition to competing with bad lighting, we are also competing with good hygiene!”

            The second feature of the night was Charlene Challenger, who began right away reading from the manuscript of a novel that seemed to represent an alternate world similar to our own but with different names for the societies within. There was tension between westerners and easterners – “ … Five golden loaves of bread … do you think westerners bother to take the maggots out? … Besides our tour group there are no civilians … we were told not to photograph … Six western soldiers point their rifles at me … they wait on edge for the crackle of gunfire, for my blood to hit the dust … Blind soldiers so hungry they can barely hold their guns …” This must have been the end of the chapter, as Charlene changed direction and began reading a story from the point of view of the ten year old daughter of a high ranking official – “ … Vincent told me my birth was never announced because I am a girl … No sense in painting the bud before it blooms … “ The story lingered for a long time on the spoiled girl whining about wanting her aunt to lend her the medals from her uniform until finally the girls father insisted that the child be given what she desired. Charlene had already gone well past her allotted fifteen minutes when she began delving into the rivalry between the girl and her brother. Finally Nicki intervened and cut Charlene short, adding that a good rule of thumb when reading under a time limit is to allow oneself sixty words a minute.

            The first chapter that Charlene Challenger read of her novel for young adults that was engaging and went along at a fairly good pace. She painted a good portrait of a military society keeping up a good front while its people were wasting away. Her second chapter though indicated that she could profit from paring down her narrative to keep it from becoming tedious.

            Nicki called a break at this point, and so I went outside, where I found Paul Valliere and Kathleen Zinck, who asked me hopefully, “Is it over yet?” Paul argued that novels should be banned from poetry readings. I didn’t agree with that. There have been a fair number of well-written prose pieces, either in the format of short stories or novel excerpts that have been read over the years by features at Plastiscene. Paul agreed that short stories can be okay but he said that even to read on his own, most novels have a hard time holding the attention. I told him about Alice Munro’s view that she’s never read a novel that couldn’t have been a better short story. He thought that made sense. I think it’s often true, but some novels, such as Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Dispossessed” wouldn’t work in a shorter format.

            After the break, Nicki read the bio of the third guest reader, Keith Garebian. After informing us that he’s published more than a thousand articles in one hundred newspapers, she commented that it’s obvious that he can’t hold down a job.

            Keith began by telling us that he believes very strongly in the oral quality of poetry. In the first half of his set he read from his book of poetry about the relationship between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, based on their letters. He began with O’Keeffe alone – “ … Words and I are not good friends … all I have are marks …” Then a poem based on Stieglitz on O’Keeffe – “ It’s the drawings … my heart stood still, I was afraid … reflect you, and you are always you … a soul like yours roaming through space …”

            Keith told us that when they were lovers before marriage, Stieglitz took nude photographs of O’Keeffe. Keith shared a poem based on these pictures – “ … Her nipples … swelling hips … probing the life of her pores … blind touch to sight …” Another poem, called “Apple Fever” spoke on the same subject – “ … Birds stalk the fruit … light that falls on her nakedness like fever …” From another poem about the photos – “ … These photos are by a detached lover … a man with a phallic camera … These photos are by a narcissist … her poses are not fine phrases …”

            Keith said the book is a meditation on desire. From another poem – “ … Foment of blooming clouds … Trusting each other as a perfect lens …” A poem called “Hands” takes O’Keeffe’s perspective – “ … He sees me as a hand curling around … hands are useful things … When I stride around, my walking stick says I am … dead cottonwood … Rorschach colours … my hands make smooth shapes … my hands unafraid … an invisible river under the earth …”

            The second half of Keith’s set featured excerpts from a book of satire aimed at the Republican right wing of the United States. It addresses several right wing politicians and poets as if they were poets. He began with Sean Hannity, who claimed, “Halloween is a Liberal holiday.” Michelle Bachman said, “Planned parenthood is the Lens Crafters of big abortion.” Mitt Romney – “Corporations are people.” Keith said that Rush Limbaugh took on the style of Allen Ginsberg with his assault on classical studies – “What the hell is Classical Studies?  What classics are studied?  Or, is it learning how to study in a classical way?  Or is it learning how to study in a classy as opposed to unclassy way?  And what about unClassical Studies?  Why does nobody care about the unclassics?  What are the classics?  And how are the classics studied?  Oh, cause you're gonna become an expert in Dickens?  You're assuming it's literature.  See, you're assuming we're talking classical literature here.  What if it's classical women's studies?  What if it's classical feminism?  Who the hell knows what it is?  One thing I do know is that she, the brain-dead student, doesn't know what it is, after she's got a major in it.  Because all she knows to do with it is go down to Occupy Wall Street and complain.” Keith then quoted Paris Hilton – “Barbie is my role model.” And “A life without orgasms is a world without flowers.” Actually, I know Keith was making fun, but I think that last one is quite beautiful. He then quoted Ted Nugent, “the Rosa Parks of gun ownership”, who, on the subject of South Africa, where he manages a hunting reserve, says – “The preponderance of South Africa is a different breed of man. I mean that with no disrespect. I say that with great respect. I love them because I'm one of them. They are still people of the earth, but they are different. They still put bones in their noses, they still walk around naked, they wipe their butts with their hands. And when I kill an antelope for 'em, their preference is the gut pile. That's what they fucking want to eat, the intestines. These are different people. You give 'em toothpaste, they fucking eat it...I hope they don't become civilized. They're way ahead of the game.” Keith finished with a piece called “Epistemology”, which he said was by Donald Rumsfeld – “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.”  This is also quite beautiful, and I remember when Rumsfeld said this, but even he has said that he didn’t originate these phrases, as they go back at least to the 1970s in quotes from various scientists in both astrophysics and in the mining industry.

            Keith Garebian is a good poet, but I find that his choice of subject matter robs him of a chance to truly shine. His voyeuristic use of the letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz as a jumping off point for writing poetry is all fine and good, but their own letters are really just as poetic in themselves and so his efforts don’t really enhance our experience of them. Keith’s use of direct quotes from right wing politicians and pundits is interesting and entertaining as found poetry, but it would have been better if he had brought something drawn from his own life, from his own ideas to share. Every poet’s life makes better poetry than when he or she tries to make poetry out of someone else’s life. We know ourselves infinitely better. Turning someone else’s writing into poetry, especially if that’s all one does, feels like an escape.

            The final featured reader of the night was James Dewar, who read two pieces. The first had been written in the aftermath of a three year affair, when a friend of his invited him out of Toronto to Pakenham to help him get over it – “ … Deer hunters clustered … faces flickering in the lights … many looked too young to be taking aim … The bartender, hiding her beauty still inside her … Stood on the only five span stone bridge in North America … We left the highway … rocks poking up like ribs … knuckles sometimes white against the doors … This a place to kill everything and put in hydro lines … My eyes immobilized me … We’re carved from this land, sometimes as hard as stone,  the cottage … I clung to the back of an old oak … “woosh!” back to the night … I lived … The first thin lines of translucent brittle ice …”

            James told us that he and his friend had drank a lot more than was mentioned in the piece, and they’d smoked 250 grams of hash.

            The dishwasher went behind James with a mop pale on wheels. James commented that it sounded like a plane coming in.

            James’s second piece was written about 9-11, and entitled “Armageddon, Come and Gone” – “ …The three remaining gods … Obliteration of all things proven and disproved before … the jarring end to technocratic ignorance … that split second of understanding that we are not immortal …Each side sacrifices their young … a land of graves … still and dead in the searing dust … bullets traded for oil refineries … helicopters aloft in black dragon arrays … consumers of misery7 … the brick and mortar of useless temples ...”

            James Dewar has some good descriptive writing, interspersed with prose that captures the mood that the surroundings inspire and his 9-11 piece captured the sentiment of weariness over the war that followed the attack and the futility of perpetual conflict spurred by greed and fanaticism.

            Nicki closed by stating that poetry can be frivolous, but it must always be intentional. “Go forth” she urged, “and be good poets!”

Tuition Confusion

           

            On Saturday I discovered that the grant money for this fall’s course had already been paid and what was left over was deposited in my account. The problem is though that only one course has been paid for and that which was deposited is only half the refund I normally get. A letter I received on Friday said that my “application will be reviewed again in January” to determine my eligibility for a 2016 grant. I suspect that they did it this way because, unlike all the previous years, I’ve only enrolled in one half course in the fall. Since the grant is meant to pay for a full course equivalent, I guess they just automatically split the award. That makes it very inconvenient for me because I’m used to paying for all my fall and winter courses right away. The refund I receive is enough to pay for an extra half course, but since I’ve only received half, I’ll have to keep it in my account until January. I’m assuming here that all I have to do to qualify for the other half of the grant is to pass Children’s Literature but it is going to be uncomfortable to have the fees hanging over my head this time around. I’m going to go to the admissions office on Tuesday to try to get an explanation and to find out how sure I can be that I’ll be getting the other half.

            I’ll also need to get an explanation for why my student account has a balance owing of almost $7,000. As far as I can tell that amount is a flat fee that is automatically charged to every student’s account at the beginning of the term and then it, hopefully, disappears when the system gets the information that the student isn’t taking a full course load.

            Since it rained in the late afternoon I didn’t take a bike ride that evening, even though it had stopped by then. I figured there might be lots of puddles to ride through and it also might start raining again, so I stayed in.

            That night I watched an episode of Bonanza that started with the lynching of someone suspected to be a cattle thief by a group of masked ranchers. The wife of the victim was shot in the back as she tried to run for help. Hoss, on the way home from courting a girl named Cameo, discovered the bodies after seeing several unmasked men riding away from the property. Among the men, he recognized his friend, Jim, who was also sweet on Cameo. Jim was later arrested on suspicion of murder, but Hoss was reluctant to give the evidence that he’d seen Jim near the scene of the crime because he didn’t want to incriminate his friend if he was innocent. This was all further complicated by the fact that cameo was certain Jim was innocent and Hoss didn’t want to make it appear that he was just trying to get Jim out of the way so he could be with Cameo.

            The brother of the lynched man organized a lynch mob of his own made up of farmers who were fed up with being bullied by ranchers. Jim escaped from jail and ran off with Cameo but the lynch mob caught up with him and took him to the same tree from which their leader’s brother had been hung. They allowed Cameo to go for help because they knew she wouldn’t be able to get the sheriff in time. She ran to Hoss and begged him to save Jim. He agreed to go there and found Jim on a horse with a rope around his neck. The men were about to make the horse run out from under Jim when Hoss arrived. He forced the lynch mob away from the horse at gunpoint and was standing beside it, about to cut Jim free when the lynch mob’s leader gave the horse a verbal signal that caused it to run. Hoss jumped in to catch Jim’s fall, but he was trapped. All he could do was hold onto him and keep his weight from causing the rope to tighten around his neck.

            The lynch mob rushed in to try to get Hoss away from Jim, so he had to fight them off and hold Jim up at the same time. Hoss was shot in the arm, but still refused to let Jim go. He was told to let him go or die. Finally, Jim kicks Hoss away from him to keep his friend from being killed.

            It seems that the most interesting episodes of Bonanza were directed by Robert Altman.

Fat Bike

           

            On Friday I was prepared once again to leave PARC early because I didn’t think that anyone would come to my yoga class. I was almost disappointed when Lee walked into the room. Lee is the very first student I had when I began teaching at PARC three years ago. I asked him if he’d seen Shelly and he said that he had. It was good news to hear that she’s fine, but she’s just doing something else on Fridays these days.

            That evening I started my bike ride, half expecting or at least fourty percent expecting rain. As I headed north I started to feel little insect kiss raindrops once every few seconds. While climbing Dufferin I felt it increase to a steady tickling of rain, but not enough to make me turn back. At Oakwood and St Clair, a couple in their late middle age were crossing in front of me when the woman looked up and said to her husband, “It stopped raining!”

            I continued along St Clair to Mount Pleasant and then went north one block to head east on Rose Park Drive until it ended a few blocks later.

            On my way home, at Queen and John, a young man was riding a bike with tires three times wider than those of a mountain bike. Apparently this is called a “fat bike” and it’s a trend these days. The advantage is more for off road riding and because of the tires there is less reason to have shocks.

            At Shaw and Queen I waited what seemed like a very long time for the light to change because a guy was leaning on the lamppost on the corner puffing very quickly on a cigarette. It seems to me that quickly smoked fags produce much more second hand smoke.

Who gives a fuck? It's Parkdale!

           

            On Thursday I left for class at 10:00 just in case I might find that there’s no lecture before mine on that day.  There was, so I sat on the floor out in the entryway, plugged in my laptop and plugged the flash drive in on which I’d loaded “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”. I had hoped to finish chapter two before class, but there was no time. It didn’t seem to matter for this lecture anyway, plus, I had already correctly deduced which of the siblings was the narrator of the story.

            Deirdre said that “The Story of the Treasure Seekers” is a book about books and makes reference to some previous piece of literature in every chapter.

            Since the narrator is a child there is no all-knowing storyteller and Nesbit deliberately has him make mistakes as he passes judgment on events.

            The children often play at being shipwrecked mariners but this is also a metaphor for the financial state of the family and the children’s sense of abandonment from having a dead mother and an emotionally distant father.

            The only adult the children feel affinity with is their next-door neighbour’s uncle, who is a writer. The implication is that only adult artists are able to align themselves with the minds of children.

            The children are voracious readers but they can’t see through form and formula. There is no difference for them between a newspaper advertisement and a fairy tale. They take everything at face value. When they see and ad placed in the paper by a moneylender, promising, “worry free loans”, they perceive the shark as a benefactor. I haven’t gotten to this point in the story yet, but apparently the normally ruthless businessman is so moved by the children’s belief in him that he becomes a benefactor after all.

            The book criticizes the false expectations set up by previously written children’s literature. Boys adventure stories of the 19^th Century were exciting but improbable. Alice’s world was sealed off as a dream. But the Treasure Seekers is realistic.

            The story doesn’t really build towards a conclusion, but rather they go from one adventure to another and so it’s more like beads on a string.

            Thursday’s lecture only lasts an hour. and so we  were done at noon. As I turned to head out, a student who had been a row or two behind me called out, “Christian!” I was just starting to recognize the guy with the reddish brown beard when he explained that we knew each other from the Tranzac open stage on Monday nights. It was Brian, the guy who sings Irish songs, sometimes in Irish and who lately has been playing reels he learned on the penny whistle during his recent trip to Ireland. We were both surprised to see each other, as I thought he was majoring in Irish studies and he thought I was majoring in French. It turns out that Irish is just a minor for him and English is a major for him as well.  We walked out together while he told me about a relative of his whom the RAF killed in an illegal air raid during the war between Ireland and Britain. This is the first time I’ve ever had anyone I’m remotely acquainted with in the same class as me, though I don’t know if we’ll hang out at all.

            I rode up to Eglinton and Yonge and then east through the ironic construction chaos between Yonge and Mount Pleasant.

            I was about to walk my bike across the street when a young woman accosted me. She said, “I see you’re on your bike! What are you going to do in the winter?” I answered that I’d be riding my bike. “What a trooper!” she said and then started telling me that I could go inside and get a free pass. Since I’d thought we’d been discussing transportation, I assumed at first that she was talking about a Metropass, but she was hawking for Good Life Fitness. I said, “I don’t live around here.” Because I thought that would end her sales pitch, but she asked, “Where do you live?” I said “Parkdale” and she said, “Oh, we have centres near there!” Finally I told her, “I get plenty of exercise.” And she got the message. She wasn’t even in such great shape herself to be trying to attract customers to a fitness centre.

            That night I heard an argument outside my window, though I don’t know exactly how it began. Someone had disapproved of something a woman had done and she shouted out, “Who gives a fuck? It’s Parkdale!” The woman who complained said she cares, because she lives here. I looked out my window and below me saw a tough looking woman, who I’d seen around for years, holding a two litre plastic pop bottle half full of something that didn’t look like pop. The woman who’d complained about whatever it was the drunk woman was doing was a casually dressed middle class white woman in her thirties accompanied by a man and woman of similar background and age. The drunk woman threatened them and the man scoffed, saying, “Oh, like you’re gonna beat us up!” I think I’ve seen that woman fight and I’m pretty sure she could take two guys like that. From what I’ve observed, there are no tougher women on the street than Africadian women. She came towards him saying, “You wanna try me?” Just then, her friend, who seemed sober, came running up, got between the drunken woman and the trio and calmed her down. As the trio walked west though, she followed after them, calling them out and mocking the woman’s declaration, “I live in Parkdale!”

No Kissing!

            

            
            I had thought last Wednesday that it was going to be my last chance to get help from the food bank because I was under the impression that my Children’s Literature course would be running on Wednesdays. I guess I was still in summer mode because I hadn’t looked in my calendar to see that my classes would be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So I went down to the food bank on Wednesday after all, but this time without intending to take notes. I brought the first few pages of  “The Story of the Treasure Seekers” to read while I was in line, but the line moved fairly fast and so I didn’t get very much read before getting number thirty-one.

            When I came back, I sat in my usual spot behind the bins, but the ground there is now all littered with empty cans and food packages. It looks like maybe homeless people are living behind the food bank.

            Once I was inside and was called, I lingered at the tea because there was a selection in a baggie and I couldn’t tell what kind it was. My volunteer opened it up and I could see that it was decaffeinated black tea, so I took some red tea instead.

            I got cereal (sort of like Shreddies, but organic) , pasta sauce, some yogourt bars, sardines and chicken broth. They actually had some canned pop for the first time. I’ve decided to not buy it anymore but I took a couple of cans of Coke. In Sue’s section there was a choice between milk and yogourt but she slipped some yogourt into my bag anyway. The high point of the haul was a frozen pork roast. As I was walking away from Sue, the guy behind me tried to kiss her, though probably not in an overtly sexual way, but more of a European style greeting. She good naturedly but firmly told him, “No kissing! You can look at this body, but don’t touch it!” There wasn’t much for bread this time around, except for a few buns. For vegetables there were a couple of corncobs, some gnarly carrots and a few Granny Smith apples. After I’d walked out onto King Street, Sue came running out with four eggs in a plastic bag, saying she’d forgotten to give them to me. One of the eggs broke on the way home, so I poured the white from the bag where it had spilled and dropped the broken yoke from the cracked shell into a pan to cook it right away.

            It was a bright, hot, cloudless evening as I rode east on St Clair, in fairly heavy traffic. At Russell Hill Road all the eastbound traffic turned left for some reason, as if there were a detour up ahead. I guess it was just a coincidence, because, as I continued on the traffic got busy again. I went up to Soudan and Yonge, just south of Eglinton and then across to Mt Pleasant. Mt Pleasant, in that part of town seems to be a hub of a trendy little middle class community. There are a couple of live theatres within blocks of each other; each showing three plays a night. It was almost dark by the time I got home. I roasted the pork, but only ate some of it before putting it away, as I’d also made some spaghetti and sauce and that was plenty. 

Introduction to Children's Literature

            

           

            Around ten o’clock on Tuesday I left for my first Children’s Literature lecture. It took me some time though to find the correct location of the classes. I had “RW 117” written in my calendar and I knew that was in one of the laboratory buildings. I checked on the U of T map and saw that the building marked “RW” was across from the Robarts library. My mistake though was that I associated the RW building with another lab building nearby on Wilcocks, where I’ve also had lectures. That one is called the Lash Miller building, or “LM”. I went inside and started looking around for RW 117, thinking that RW must take up a section of LM. After walking around for a while I finally asked someone. As soon as I said, “Excuse me!” I could tell the guy, who looked like a professor, felt tiredly burdened by the prospect of having to talk to me. I asked if he knew where I could find RW 117. He looked puzzled. “This is chemistry!” he said, hoping that would clear things up and relieve him of me. I tried to explain my problem and that I thought RW was part of the LM building but he didn’t know what the hell I was on about. Finally I left and went outside to see if there was a sign with RW on it in front of another building. Once I was on the street it dawned on me that I wasn’t on Harbord, where Robarts is.

I went back to my bike and rode it to Harbord where I found the Ramsey Wright zoological labs. Lecture hall 117 was just inside, but there was another class in session. Some of my fellow Children’s Literature students were waiting outside in the hallway. I would say that 80% of those students were women of about twenty and the rest were men of the same age.

The other lecture ran late. When we piled in a lot of the students from whatever class it was were still there. The professor from that class was at the front with her three TAs and one of them was wearing a bow tie. I’ll bet he thinks bow ties are cool.

Our professor’s name is Deirdre Baker. The first thing she told us was that she is comfortable with books but not with computers, so she might have problems changing the slides with her laptop.

Deirdre spent the first half of the lecture going over the syllabus with us. The first work will be E. Nesbit’s “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”, which she says uses an old kind of writing for children, but at the same time looks forward to the realism that will later become the trend.

The second piece we will be studying is J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which she told us began as a play in which the story would change from performance to performance.

The third book, Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons” is one that was totally unfamiliar to me. This is considered to be the first summer holiday story in children’s lit and the author was actually suspected of being a double agent for the Russians.

Next will be Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”, which she said played with the Victorian adventure style and changed what was possible for children’s literature. It was one of the type of books that Ursula Nordstrom, an influential children’s book editor called, “Good books for bad children.”

Rounding out the first month of the course will be Elizabeth Wein’s “Code Name Verity, which Professor Baker told us harks back to an older style but the imagery is absorbed in the text.

The first four weeks fall under the heading of “Islands, Survival and Empire”. For the second four week set, she gave it the category of “historical fiction”.

The first of these will be a “A Coyote Columbus Story” by Thomas King, whose work I encountered in my Canadian Short Stories course, and who I found to be very a very good and creative writer. “A Coyote Columbus Story” was later adapted as a children’s picture book.

The second will be “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing” by M.T. Anderson.

Deirdre said that both of the above novels boldly confront taken for granted patterns.

Of all the texts, she encouraged us to read them before researching them.

The next story will be Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”.

At this point our instructor demonstrated her opening statement by getting a student to help her move to the next slide. I think the only English professors I’ve had so far that didn’t fumble at least a bit with the technology needed to give lectures was the one who taught Digital Text and the one who taught Science Fiction.

The heading for week seven was “Fragile World, confronting mortality and time” and the works under that title were “Charlotte’s Web” and “Tom’s Midnight Garden”.

Week eight’s heading is “Friends” and she said it serves as a compliment to “Where the Wild Things Are”.

“Harriet the Spy” broke ground because the protagonist is a child without a traditional sense of propriety and her story does not have a comfortable moral ending.

She told us that all the texts work in conversation with one another.

George Macdonald, who wrote “The Princess and the Goblin”, was a friend of Lewis Carroll and a big influence on C.S. Lewis.

She told us that this course requires two essays, two prose analyses, some in-class writing and a couple of non-graded writing projects that we need to do to get our ten percent mark for participation. Of the prose analyses we will need to do close reading of a segment of text and talk about how it carries its weight and meaning. We should also talk about how what is not said affects the meaning of the story.

One of the non-graded projects will be to write about a picture book that affected us. I asked if we could use a comic book and she said “Absolutely!” She said she should have a graphic novel as part of the course material but there’s only so much space.

Also for our participation mark we are expected to send her by email our thoughts about the stories, but preferably before the lecture that covers it.

She said that children’s literature is very new as a field of academic study. It’s also unique in that it’s the only literature defined by age. We should be asking ourselves though, questions like, “Does it work for children?” and “Is it appropriate for children?” We should also keep in mind that these authors are adults writing for children and adults have power over children.

She told us that children’s literature tends to maintain an explicit liaison between instruction and delight. It has its roots in books meant entirely to instruct children in proper manners and religion. But it began to move away from this when children began to make choices according to what they liked from among what was available in adult literature, such as stories of King Arthur, John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” and Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”.

She says that there is a lot of bad writing these days as hack writers try to churn out imitations of popular trends.

She gave us a list of reasons why authors write books for children. One is out of didacticism. A sense that children need to be instructed.  Another is nostalgia for one’s own childhood, as was the case for A. A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame and J.M. Barrie.

Another reason that writers find their muse in children’s lit is simply because a child needs a story, as was the case for Astrid Lindgren, whose daughter was sick and so she just began making up the story of Pippi Longstocking to entertain her.

Sometimes authors are just driven by the need for money. Lucy Maud Montgomery got tired of writing about Anne, but she couldn’t afford to quit.

Another reason children’s stories get written is because that’s just the way the stories come out.

She told us that the most powerful children’s stories don’t talk down to children, and so when we are reading them we shouldn’t look down on them either. She urged us to avoid the word “cute” when responding to these works. 

She reminded us that many of us are only recently out of childhood ourselves. I assume she was referring to me, but I couldn’t tell how she knew.

During the halftime break I introduced myself to Deirdre Baker and brought up the idea that these stories are written by adults. I told her about the stories that I had my daughter make up and how they reminded me of the Native oral tradition stories in which things appear and disappear suddenly and that they were a lot more violent than the stories that adults write for children.

After the break, she talked about our first author, E. Nesbit. She said that her work is inspired by British adventure stories of the past in which authors convey that the whole world would be a better place if they all learned to be like the British in both religion and manner, but looks forward to the post Victorian era. She keeps the adventure but leaves out the British evangelism.

Nesbit was an unconventional Victorian lady, who bobbed her hair, didn’t wear corsets, she rolled her own cigarettes and smoked like a factory and was pregnant at the time of her marriage. She grew up playing with her brothers and turned out both adventurous and headstrong. “The Story of the Treasure Seekers” is based on her own experiences growing up. Her own children have said that she was often very childish even among them. She would throw tantrums at the dinner table and then would stomp away like an angry kid.

Nesbit’s husband, Hubert Bland, secretly had another wife that he would spend part of the week with. When Nesbit was recovering from a stillbirth, the woman who was hired to take care of her somehow got pregnant while she was staying there. Bland’s business partner absconded with their company’s funds, leaving the family dependent on Nesbit’s book sales.

Nesbit and her husband were Fabianists, who strived towards socialism through democratic means as opposed to revolution. Oddly though, Nesbit was opposed to women achieving the vote. Her and her husband were two of the nine founding members, which attracted prominent public figures such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. The meetings were at their house in the country where members would go to spend an exciting weekend of discussion. H. G. Wells said that there was always a rush to get the earliest train out of London, because those who arrived first would actually get a bed.

We read the first two paragraphs of “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”. I was surprised that so many students had a lot of astute observations about it. I thought it was interesting that the children set about to find treasure in order to save the family from its fallen fortunes.

After the lecture I rode up to Yonge and Hillsdale, across to Mt Pleasant and down to Davisville to get back to Yonge again. As I was descending the hill where Yonge Street dips beside the graveyard, a woman in black passed me. She was large and short but with most of her weight divided equally in her chest and her hips in such a way as to be considered voluptuous. Her movements though were not particularly sensual. They were jerky and desperate as she pumped her short legs frantically to try to stay ahead of me.  Passed her during my ascent from the cemetery and though she almost caught up with me a few times along the way, I stayed comfortably ahead until south of Bloor Street, when I became more interested in the buildings than our little race.

That evening, after I’d finished doing some exercises, I went out to the kitchen and saw that several cans of cat food had been left for me at my open door. Later on when I saw my upstairs neighbour, David, I thanked him. He was very upset at the guy who lives at the top of the stairs on my floor. David has been keeping a covered e-bike outside on the deck for several months. The guy at the top of the stairs is the only tenant with a door that opens out onto the deck and I guess he had been annoyed that David had been keeping the bike on the end of the deck where his apartment happens to exit to. It’s not as if he has some sort of right to that part of the deck but he decided to move David’s bike to the other end and inadvertently broke the mirror and the pedal. David tried to talk to him about it but he apparently refused.

That night, I heard shouting out on Queen Street and there was a verbal altercation going on between Bernice Sampson, a woman I’ve known in Parkdale since the late 80s when she was a crack addict and prostitute. I even mentioned her in a poem I wrote back then. About six years ago her daughter was killed by some people she trusted to care for her, but Bernice is still the loudest person on Queen Street. I know she volunteers at PARC and she knows everyone on the streets of Parkdale. The person she was arguing with is the West Indian guy who gets drunk almost every night and shouts at people, quite often challenging them to fights that never happen. On this night the guy called Bernice a “nigger”. Bernice’s response was, “I know what your mother is!”

Transfiguration

           

            As it had only been a week since I’d last prepared my place for the exterminator, I figured on Monday morning that there would be less work getting ready, so I took a little time after yoga for song practice. Once I started my preparations, the only really time consuming chore was vacuuming my couch. It’s amazing how much cat hair shows up on a black futon when one’s cats have white bellies.

            When the Orkin guy came just before 11:00, he asked me to move my bedroom futon out into the living room.

            On my way out, I talked to my new neighbour Greg. He was getting his place sprayed for cockroaches but told me he’d only seen a few “teenagers”.

            I rode over concrete that was blazing in the midday sun, up to Yonge and Manor. I then headed east, dipping down the southern streets to Belize. This was the first neighbourhoody area that I’d explored north of the graveyard. Everything else had been mostly high-rise apartment buildings. This residential section was a bit of a rollercoaster maze of dipping, turning shorter streets.

            I rode into the parking lot of the Anglican Church of the Transfiguration and looked around in curiosity but it didn’t transfigure while I was there, so either the transfiguration already occurred or else the transfiguration is pending.

            When I got home I’d eaten up almost half the four hours I was supposed to stay away from my apartment. The kitchen isn’t sprayed during these bedbug treatments, so not many of the fumes had crept out from the living room. I had laundry that I’d washed, rinsed and drained by the time the technician had come and so I thought I’d better take advantage of the nice weather and get my wet things hung up on the railing out back.

            After that I took a chair out on the deck and sat out there for half an hour or so. I went back inside an hour before I was supposed to but the air didn’t feel that toxic.

"Alzheimer's Ate My Brain"

           

            Early Sunday afternoon I packed up my guitar, printed up some stories and some writing by Paul Valliere that he had asked me to bring along and headed north on my way to the open stage in the park that he’d planned for that afternoon. It was starting to sprinkle as I rode up Lansdowne and I was beginning to regret bringing my guitar. Just as I was about the make a left turn on Dundas, my phone rang, so I got off my bike, walked it to the corner and answered the call. As I expected, it was Paul, telling me that he was considering cancelling the event, because of the weather and because several people had already called to say they wouldn’t be able to make it, in consideration of the rain. He said for me to come anyway and that he could have a few people at his place.

            It probably took me a little less than half an hour to get to Humber Hill Road. Paul’s instructions had been to follow Humber Hill Road and to turn left on Lundy, but Humber Hill stops right away, so I deduced that he really meant that we have to turn right on Old Dundas. I followed that and turned left on Lundy, then found the entrance to the park and was about to go there when I heard Paul calling my name from across the parking lot of an apartment building. I rode over to a small gathering of people that consisted of Paul, his daughter Alison, Kathleen Zinck and Brigitta and John, an elderly couple with whom Paul used to be in a writers group. We all piled into Paul’s small place, where apparently Alison is also living right now, with her dad taking the couch.

            I met Paul’s twelve-year-old dog, Kira, on which Paul had harnessed a muzzle as a precaution, because her behaviour around strangers is not always predictable. Someone suggested that she would only bite bad people, but I think that’s a little much. I doubt if there is really any good and bad among human beings that a dog can pass judgment on. Maybe nervousness and fear in a person could make a dog feel nervous and fearful. But a nervous and fearful person could actually be less dangerous than someone who is so fearless that they don’t manifest nervousness at all. Fearless people tend to be very social and therefore have a lot of friends. Studies show that those with a lot of friends tend to be more indifferent to causing harm to their friends than those who have just a few. I doubt very much if dogs or any other animal can pick up on all that. It may be beating a dead horse to remind people how much Hitler loved animals but I doubt if even the most sensitive dog would pick up on the fact that a human who is kind to them would be willing to arrange for the extermination of six million dogs, let alone six million humans.

            Brigitta was very interesting in that she was so matter of fact and so aware of her situation when she explained to us that she no longer writes poetry because, as she put it,  “Alzheimer’s ate my brain.” John explained that his wife’s short-term memory is gone. She was though, the most engaged of anyone with everyone else in the room and very aware of everything that was happening in each moment. She was especially sympathetic about Kira having to wear a muzzle, and she asked me, “How would you like it if someone put a muzzle on you?” I answered that it would depend on who put the muzzle on me.

            Another fairly consistent part of our little get together was Paul’s neighbour, David, from down the hall. I picked up, from things that he’d dropped in conversation, that he is, but he’s one of the darkest skinned Italians that I’ve seen in North America. Perhaps his family is from Sicily and he has some Arabic DNA left over from the period when the Moors occupied Sicily a thousand years ago. David could have as much as 25% Arabic DNA from that time.

            David also seemed to be an alcoholic. He was there for several hours and I never saw him without a can of beer in his hand. He would periodically leave Paul’s place, sometimes to join the group of smokers that would go outside to relieve their habits, other times he would go home to smoke a joint and then return with another can of beer. At first he was drinking the extra large cans, which he referred to as “adult beers”, but after a while all he had left was the size of beer can that his lingo suggested the beer store only sells to children.

            Another person, that only Paul knew, named Jim Snow, arrived.

            Paul’s purpose for having this event was for it to be a “thank you to summer” picnic in the park slash open stage. He asked his guests, first of all to share something from memory. Brigitta, unfortunately was not able to share anything. John recited something that was not his own. He said that he has been involved in other things of late, such as digitizing slides, so he hasn’t been writing poetry. Jim Snow recited one of the only poems he had ever written. This was for a Spanish woman that he met once. I don’t remember his words, but thematically it was sort of a “The earth stops when I look at you” poem. Kathleen recited a poem from memory as well. Paul asked me to play something, but first I recited a poem of my own: “My penis is the hotline to the red phone in the White House of my heart, and my penis is always ringing, but whenever I pick it up there’s never anyone at the other end.” I sang my song, “The Next State of Grace” and I followed that with my translation of Jacques Prevert’s “Les Feuilles Mortes” – “ … Dead autumn leaves can be raked up and collected, and so as well can memories and regrets that the north wind takes to be lost then into the night’s cold oblivion, but one more thing that I have not forgotten is when you used to sing me your song …”

            Alison was just about to read a poem from her laptop when my phone rang. It was Cad telling me that he and Goldie were on the Warren Park bus and wanted further instructions. I passed the phone to Paul so he could guide them in. He went out to meet them, and so Alison’s poem was delayed for a while. As I expected, Cad was uncomfortable with Paul’s dog. Of course though, Goldie wasn’t.

Goldie sat just around the corner from the living room, in the dining room, and because of that no one but John Snow, who was sitting in a recliner in the corner that actually faced the dining room, could see her. I insisted that she move her chair closer to everyone else. She resisted, but eventually gave in and thanked me later. I also had to encourage Cad, who was sitting in the hallway, to come into the living room as well.

Once everyone was settled in, Alison read her poem. It was addressed to her brother, Alex, who died about ten years before. She started crying and wasn’t able to finish it.
            Jim Snow left, saying that he had a date with another Spanish woman. Goldie moved to the recliner.

John and Brigitta left. When she was saying goodbye though, Brigitta apologetically explained that she would not remember us.
            With the couch freed up, Paul’s neighbour, David, came in and participated more in the conversation. He and Cad immediately hit it off because they had much more in common in terms of racism, sexism and homophobia than anyone else in the room. After hearing a few of David’s statements, Cad declared excitedly, “Everything he says is the truth!” to which David responded gratefully, “Everybody thinks I’m crazy when I say these things!”
            David said that it’s a rite of passage for men in Columbia to have sex with donkeys. I looked this up and it seems to be true in a very small, remote, poor and uneducated section of the country that has been ignored by the government for generations. The rest of the country is deeply ashamed of what they consider to be a stain on their culture.
            Another thing David talked about was the age-old myth that Orthodox Jewish married couples have sex through a hole in a sheet. I knew this wasn’t true but Cad insisted that David was right. Everywhere I look on the internet there are Jewish sites that say this is an urban myth perpetuated by Reform Jews and Christians. The rules for married couples in Catholicism are actually more strict and sexually repressive than they are for Orthodox Jews.
            Alison read another poem that I think was also a rap lyric by her late brother, Alex. I remember meeting Alex at least once when I was running the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy out of the Drake Hotel. We argued politely about rap music because I said I didn’t think it was usually very good poetry.
            Alison has a Bengal cat that cost her $700. I really didn’t notice anything in its appearance or manner that distinguished it in such a way as to make it worth more than the cats that I got for free. It seems a little high-strung and doesn’t get along very well with Paul’s dog.
            A few more poems were read by Paul, Kathleen and Cad. I sang my translation of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Strip Tease” – “ … all of these are just chimeras, from my mouth to my lower areas, because no one, not even you, will get to touch the parts they view …”
            Paul hinted that he wanted us to leave while at the same time saying we were welcome to stay, because he wanted to have dinner. Kathleen and I left and Goldie was trying to edge Cad out but he was lingering in conversation when I walked away.
            The sky was black, except for in the west where it looked like a lifted shade, letting the sun into a dark room.