Rain On My Smart Phone

           

            When I entered the lecture hall someone was already sitting in my usual seat. I didn’t notice her coming in, but it turned out she was another TA.

            We finished talking about Peter Pan.

            In the play, the father of the Darling children and captain Hook are traditionally played by the same actor.

            The professor stopped lecturing for a moment and walked up the aisle because she mistakenly thought that a student was doing something other than taking notes on her laptop.

            A child is an indeterminate person and childhood is a time of identity experimentation. To fly is to not be grounded. Adulthood is presented as a disappointing time in which possibilities are narrowed. Adulthood is loss.

            Peter Pan is an emotionally detached wild child. He has the power to imitate others but Peter Pan never changes.

            The narrator is schizophrenic and sadistic. Sometimes he is chatty, sometimes sentimental and sometimes resentful. Sometimes he acts like he doesn’t know what will happen and at other times he promises a good outcome. The story is told carelessly. At one point he says, “Let us murder a pirate” to show how Captain Hook treats his men. At another point he tosses a coin to decide which story he will tell. He is not telling the story of Peter Pan to children. Sometimes he acts like he detests children, but it’s false hostility, almost like the response of a jilted lover. He says he despises the children’s mother but later declares that he likes her best. The narrator is barred from unconditional love. Saying that a fairy is born from a baby’s first laugh or that Wendy “made herself cheap” in being intimate with Peter is meant for adults. The narrative carries in it vestiges of its various evolutionary stages as it developed as a play. The result is that the story flies in the face of realistic expectations. “How delicious to spoil it all.” “Nobody wants us, so lets watch and say jaggy things in hopes that it will hurt.” The narrator serves to keep the reader from relaxing.

            We are peeping toms of Neverland but Peter is a voyeur of our world.

            The period in which Peter Pan developed as a play was one in which playwrights tended to present their own hang-ups in the work. Oscar Wilde also identified with the god, Pan.

            The 1880s and 1890s were a time when men identified as boys. Later, during the First World War, many boys went to war and never had a chance to grow up. They would name their trenches after places in children’s books.

            The TA next to me seemed older than the others and also a little standoffish.  It turns out that her name is Christina and she is my TA.

            After the half time break we began talking about Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons”. When Ransome went to public school he lived in Lewis Carroll’s old room. He apparently proposed to every woman he ever dated until finally a mentally ill woman said “yes”.  Because of his bad eyesight he could not fight in world war two and so he joined the press corps and was sent to Russia, where he developed sympathies for the Bolshevik cause. He played chess with Vladimir Lenin on a regular basis. He was suspected by some in Britain of being a double agent. He might have had an overblown sense of his own political importance.

            The map Ransome made of the lake on which the children are vacationing has east at the top. This is apparently an old style of orientation because the most important place in the Christian world was considered to be Jerusalem.

After class, I took advantage of the student network on campus and sat on a bench outside the Ramsey Wright Building to go online with my phone. I managed to make it so I could check my online banking by smartphone, but I couldn’t figure out how to make the numbers large enough to read. Then it started to rain on my phone and I so I rode home.

            At home, I tried to figure out the math on my student account, and I managed to do so, but I still don’t know how much money I’ll have in January.

            All my laundry that I left hanging on the railing of the deck was being soaked in the rain, but there was no point bringing it in, because it wouldn’t dry inside anyway. I’d just have to leave it for a sunny day and hope for the best.

            That night I watched the Roscoe Arbuckle silent film, “The Hayseed”, co-starring Buster Keaton. Arbuckle ran a general store in a small town and the store served several functions, including that of post office. In one scene, Arbuckle is delivering mail and trying to fit a large letter into the slot of a mailbox. Since it won’t fit, his solution is to rip the letter into four pieces and then put them in.

            On Saturday nights the general store serves as a dance hall and afterwards they have a talent show. Roscoe is supposed to sing but he tells Buster that his voice is not up to it, so Buster tells him that if he eats a lot of onions it will make his voice strong. He eats several bunches of green onions and then sings a very sad song that makes everyone cry.