Lilith

           

            Thursday was our last Children’s Literature lecture.

            Professor Baker started by pulling out a stack of unclaimed essays and started calling out the names, including Leanne Van Oosterhaut. I didn’t notice a single man’s name on the list. Only one young woman walked down to claim her paper.

            Deirdre said she’s be posting the marks for our second prose analysis in a week or so, explaining that she can’t mark too many of them in a row because that would not be good for the world.

            She began to go through the exam with us. There will be two prose analyses of passages from two different books. She suggested that we treat each passage like a poem we are analyzing. She advised us to spend about twenty minutes each on the prose analyses. There will be one short essay in which we will compare two texts that should take about fifty minutes to write. The final ninety minutes of the exam will be taken up with writing an essay that compares three texts.

            She gave us all of the possible essay topics in advance so we can work on it at home and try to remember our argument on examination day. Of course, we can’t use any aids or bring written material into the examination hall.

            One of the topics for the short essay will be the idea of the wicked witch. She then gave as an example, the White Queen in C.S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. She said that Lewis drew her out of the misogynist tradition of Lilith, the supposedly evil first wife of Adam. It’s interesting that she is considered to have been made of the same earth as Adam, while Eve is said to be a piece of Adam. Talk about second hand goods! One story has her abandoning Adam because he would not accept her as his equal and leaving the garden to partner with the Archangel Samael, who was god’s assassin. In this account Eve was only created as a replacement and damage control. Other sources say she was half genie and half giant. The White Queen is also considered to be half giant and half genie, so she’s lifted directly from the Lilith myth. Her magic wand is a phallic symbol that must be broken in order to defeat her. C. S. Lewis was totally against women having political power and it was apparently tied up with his phobia about insects. Insects represented for him two negatives: repugnant socialist governments and female dominance.

            Professor Baker talked about the building at McCaul and College where we will be taking our exam, which she said smells of generations of nervous students.

            After class I shook Deirdre’s hand and told her that in the light of her lectures much of the material became more interesting to read.

            I rode to Danforth and Broadview and then north to Pottery Road, then back down to Chester Hill and west to the lookout over the Don Valley because the last time I was there my camera battery ran out of power.

            On the way back, a nervous middle-aged guy passed me, pedaling like his life depended on it and bobbing his head as he went. I passed him at several points along the way but he kept going through red lights. At Yonge he stopped but I got off my bike because there was a walk signal. I was just in front of him when he saw the signal, realized he could advance and bumped my bike without apologizing.

            I went down to College and took it to Dovercourt, where I met Thomas Hendry. We stopped to chat about my courses for a while and then went our separate ways.

            I spent a few hours going through all of my emails on G-mail to collect all of my correspondences with Paul Valliere since 2013. I ended up with a Word file that takes up 332 and a half pages. He sent me a lot of poems and stories to get feedback on and there were lots of chats on various topics both serious and silly.

            I watched the first episode of Radar Men from the Moon. It seems to be an earlier version of the Commando Cody series. The rocket ship, his rocket suit and many of the locations and sets are the same. Commando Cody is played by an older actor that doesn’t wear a mask. The only actor in both series is Aline Towne, in her role as Joan. The plot is very similar to early episodes in the other series but there is no Universal Ruler, but rather a ruler of the Moon, who wants to conquer Earth because his world is dying. When they first head for the rocket ship, Ted expresses disapproval of “a woman coming along.” Joan says that they’ll be glad she came along when they have someone cooking for them. The other series had no cliffhangers, but this one ended with Cody getting shot by a ray gun.