Every Incantation Holds a Built-in Mistake

           

            On Tuesday I got up for a while at around 3:45. I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d make use of that energy to go on a search for bedbugs. I looked in all the nooks and crannies along the doorframe where they used to go, and there were none. The northern baseboard, which also used to harbour a large number, was also vacant. The western baseboard that meets the side of my mattress didn’t even have a bedbug corpse. All along the southern baseboard there was nothing, until the very end, when one medium sized bedbug came out of a hole I poked with a skewer stick. When I killed it, it was black inside and almost dry, so I found that encouraging. I haven’t seen any of them crawling in the open for a month now, but sometimes when I’m sitting at my computer I detect a bedbug odour in that area. The exterminator is coming on Friday. It would be a nice Christmas present to finally be free of bedbugs before the new year.

Later that morning we had what was essentially our last Children’s Literature lecture, because on Thursday I think she will be just talking about our December 22 exam and how we should prepare for it.

            The focus of this talk was the power of words.

            In Frances Hodgsen Burnett’s “A Little Princess”, Sara’s greatest power, even when she is wealthy, is combined in her ability make up and to tell stories. Language is power and also a kind of magic. Burnett herself ironically became one of the richest writers of her era based on her ability to tell stories of people living in poverty.

            We looked at some examples in Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s “The Jolly Postman”, of ways of using writing towards a powerful effect. The first was the letter of apology from Goldilocks to the Three Bears. Saying one is sorry makes for a powerful message and deliberate spelling errors draw attention to the words that are misspelled, thus giving them emphasis.

            The advertisement addressed to witches uses persuasive language.

            The lawyer’s cease and desist letter to the Big Bad Wolf shows that legal language in itself is a type of incantation.

    There was a ten-minute break, after which we looked at Diana Wynne Jones’s “Howl’s

Moving Castle”. The story takes place in the kingdom of Ingary, which is a fairy tale

world where there are no books. Sophie gives into the idea that if one fairy tale convention is true then they must all be true and so she tries her best to fit in to her own story as she believes it is fixed to be. Her magical ability, unknown to her until later on, is that whatever she says will happen comes true. Howl uses language to convince or deceive others.

Howl comes from our world and a curse is placed on him using our world’s literature with the words from the verses of John Donne’s poem, “Song”:

Go and catch a falling star,

    Get with child a mandrake root,

    Tell me where all past years are,

    Or who cleft the devil's foot,

Teach me to hear mermaids singing,

Or to keep off envy's stinging,

And find

What wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,

Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand days and nights,

    Till age snow white hairs on thee,

Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,

All strange wonders that befell thee,

And swear,

No where

Lives a woman true, and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,

Such a pilgrimage were sweet;

Yet do not, I would not go,

Though at next door we might meet;

Though she were true, when you met her,

And last, till you write your letter,

Yet she

Will be

False, ere I come, to two, or three.

            All poetic language is a type of spell and every incantation contains a built in mistake to prevent accidents.

            Every fairy tale contains at least one truth.

            Sophie’s experience after being transformed into an old woman suggests that female curiosity is punished in the young and rewarded in the old. It also explores young women’s fear of the other as predator. There are similar elements to Beauty and the Beast.

            A moving castle represents a fear of commitment.

            The man who keeps becoming different kinds of dogs represents the frequent transformations that accompany adolescence.

            In light of the discussion of adolescence and transformation I told the professor that when I was twelve, I used to comb my hair like a different member of the Monkees every day.

            Between class and work I had two hours and ten minutes, so I went to the models lounge at OCADU and took a nap for a while. Then I plugged my laptop in and finished reading “Howl’s Moving Castle”, which marked the end of all the required reading for the course. I was surprised to find that I was done so soon because the e-book was much bigger than the book. The file had a chapter each of two other of Jones books.

            I worked for Nick Aoki who kind of talks like a DJ and says “All right!” a lot, plus he’ll end his sentences often with, “right?” The class ended twenty minutes early because they had to go to the computer lab and write their “course surveys”, which I assume are the same as our course evaluations at U of T. We stopped having to do ours at school two years or so ago and now the university just sends us a link by email and bugs us with additional links until we’ve done it. I still haven’t done mine yet, but probably will on Wednesday.

            I watched the eleventh episode of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe. This one was called “Lost in Outer Space”, but once again, nobody in the story was lost in outer space at all. Cody and his crew were on patrol in their rocket ship when they observed a fight between two guys in space suits on top of one of the Ruler’s rockets. One of them fell off and so Cody rescued him. He claimed to be from Mercury and that he had been trying to escape the Ruler’s enslavement. There’s a comment from Cody’s boss, Mr Henderson, about how Mercurians are an “intelligent and hard working people”, so these stories must be set in an undisclosed future when we discover a civilization on Mercury, even though all the cars and clothing on Earth are from the 1950s. They take the guy they rescued to Mercury, but he is really working for the Ruler and rendezvous on Mercury with two more of the Ruler’s henchmen with the intention of stealing Cody’s ship. Two of them also are planning on betraying the Ruler and just using Cody’s ship for their own purposes. The bad guys were, of course defeated by Cody. Gloria Pall didn’t appear in this episode, even though she was credited.

            I fell asleep on the couch after the show was over, then there was a knock on the door. Sundar, the super, had come for the rent. Maybe it’s because I’d just woken up or maybe I’m getting Alzheimer’s, but I stood there at first feeling confused. The rent? Didn’t I pay that already? What day is this? Finally I realized that it was the first of the month but also realized that I’d forgotten to go to the bank to take out the rent money. I told him to come back on Wednesday.