Miss Chief Eagle Testickle

           

            I had been very proud of myself for waiting much longer than the required four hours for the insecticide fumes to settle down or dissipate or whatever they do after the bedbug treatment. But as I was lying awake for a short while at the beginning of Thursday, the odour of poison coming from the baseboards made me feel like I was in a race with the bloodsuckers for who was going to be exterminated first.

            It was good on Thursday morning to have song practice. I had had to skip it for two days in a row because of the coincidence of my essay and the bedbug treatment turning up next to one another in the same week.

            On the way to class, along College Street, I stopped at the light at Dufferin. After it turned green, as I was building speed, a woman who already had momentum because she’d only still been approaching the light when it changed, whizzed past me. I passed her before Dovercourt, but at that light she edged up past me and sat out over the edge of the pedestrian crossing, to wait impatiently for the green to arrive, while her left leg jerked nervously on her left pedal. She took off just before the red light ripened to green. I passed her again before Ossington. Before Bathurst I had to slam on my breaks when a car suddenly decided to do a u-turn in front of me. At Spadina, where College shifts south by one lane’s width, if no cars behind me are encroaching too fast, I always stay on the same horizontal from the right land west of Spadina to the centre lane east of Spadina, so that I’ll be positioned to make a left turn on Huron. While I was waiting to turn, the nervous young woman continued on to wherever east she was rushing.

            At the Ramsey-Wright building, there’s a disposal unit for batteries just inside the entrance that I take. I’ve been saving batteries for years, not wanting to throw batteries in the garbage, I’ve been saving mine for years, with the intention of disposing of them there, but I keep forgetting to bring them in. Id forgotten again on Thursday, but I’m just writing this here to remind myself to bring them in when I come into class on Tuesday.

            When Professor Baker came into the lecture hall she complained good-naturedly that there was very low attendance that morning. I said, “Isn’t that the way it always is after the mid-term?” She mock pounded her fist on the podium and said, “That’s not an excuse!”

            We began the lecture with a little more about Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian”. In the book, Arnold Spirit’s white study mate tells him that one should read a book three times. The first time one should read it to catch the rhythm of it and ride the narrative like a river; the second time one reads it for the meaning of the words and to grasp the history behind the book; the third time one should read it for the “metaphorical boner” it gives you, that is one should try to grasp the message of the book.

            This reminded me of what George Gurdjieff advised his readers in the introduction to “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson”. He said that they should read his books thrice: “Firstly: at least as you have already become mechanized to read all your contemporary books and newspapers; secondly: as if you were reading aloud to another person; and only thirdly: try and fathom the gist of my writings.” I wondered if Alexie had ever read Gurdjieff, but I couldn’t find any connection in a search. That doesn’t mean anything though, as often people treat their involvement in Gurdjieff studies as if they were part of a secret society.

            We were told that Alexie’s book is very body focused, with the “metaphorical boner” being just one of many examples. The book also stands out from most young adult novels in that it doesn’t make everything all right in the end.

            She discussed some of Thomas King’s ideas about American aboriginal writing, as he presented them in his essay, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial”. He says that Canadian literature may be post-colonial, but Native literature is not. He divides Native literature into four categories: Tribal literature is essentially private to the tribe and kept in the tribal language. It is virtually invisible to outside cultures; polemical literature refers to literature in Native languages, or in colonial languages, that deal with conflict between Native and non-Native cultures; interfusional writing blends oral literature with written literature, the only complete example of which is Harry Robinson’s “Write It On Your Heart”. We studied a story from that book called “Coyote Tricks Owl” last fall in my Canadian Literature course; associational literature tells stories based in the Native community but that avoid serving as literary tourism.

            Then we began talking about Thomas King’s “A Coyote Columbus Story”. King was asked to write something to that told the Columbus story from a native perspective, to commemorate the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in America. He found that pretty ironic, but he did it. The result was “A Coyote Columbus Story”. He used Coyote as having created Columbus by mistake because the oral tradition often presents Coyote as creating people and creatures that she can’t control.

            When he finished the book, the people who had asked him to write it, hated it. They also said that it was inaccurate because Columbus never took Native people back to Europe as slaves. Thomas King thought that was hilarious because it was the only thing in the book that was historically accurate. On the return from Columbus’s second voyage, he brought back 1,200 natives as slaves, 200 of which died on the way to Spain. To be fair though, the taking of slaves wasn’t exactly something that Native people didn’t do to each other.

            The illustrator of “A Coyote Columbus Story” was William Kent Monkman, who is half Cree and half Irish. He has a drag queen alter ego that he uses for some of his artwork, named “Miss Chief Eagle Testickle”.

            Around this time I noticed there was a wasp flying around the lecture hall.

            In “A Coyote Columbus Story”, one of Columbus’s machine gun wielding henchmen is an Elvis impersonator wearing high-heeled pumps.

            All the publishers to which he shopped the book hated it, until finally a small Canadian publisher took it on and now it is considered a classic.

            After class, I rode up to Eglinton and Mount Pleasant and went east to Bayview, dipping down the southern side streets as I went. There is construction all along Eglinton that narrows the street and also the entrances to some of the side streets. Some of the middle class houses already have their Halloween decorations ready. Mostly it’s that white, spray-on webbing that looks nothing like webbing in the daylight, but rather like some garbage that blew onto someone’s bushes. A couple of the houses have cool looking big black spiders attached to the outside. Only one house has a big, plastic enclosed “contaminated area” for kids to enter, full of spooky stuff, although most of it looks pretty typical.

            I needed coffee and so I took twenty dollars out of the grant money I’m saving for January, but then when I went to the supermarket, I spent the twenty dollars on other things and totally forgot about the coffee. I didn’t realize that until I started making dinner, and so I headed back out to go to the bank for another twenty and a quick trip to Freshco. As I was coming out of my door, an elderly homeless woman was walking by, albeit with a fairly nice haircut. She was pushing a shopping cart. I stopped as she was going by because I couldn’t get out. She saw me and I guess she thought that I was rushing her because she repeated, “Okay, okay, okay …” several times until she’d passed. The most striking thing about her was that she was in her sock feet and the socks were white, dirty and so torn that they could be mistaken for old bandages wrapped around her feet.

            I watched a very good short film by Buster Keaton called, “Grand Slam Opera”. This was not a silent film, but rather one that even began with Keaton doing a musical number. He’s on the back of a train, leaving his Arizona town for New York City and all the townsfolk have gathered to sing about how glad they are that he’s leaving.

            The story in New York is centred on him trying to get onto a radio talent show. When he finally gets on it turns out that he’s a juggler who describes what he’s doing to the radio audience while he’s doing it. They only allow him one trick and then the orchestra starts playing but he keeps on trying to do his act, which involves balancing a broom, but he ends up hitting the conductor of the orchestra, who hits him back with his baton. The most hilarious part is when they are hitting each other back and forth while the orchestra plays along to the beat of their battle.