Shelley Fabares

           

            On Sunday I read Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, about a drifter that married an old woman’s developmentally challenged daughter just so he could get the woman’s car and drive away. O’Connor had a unique descriptive style. The daughter’s eyes were blue as a peacock’s neck.

            I also read O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” which is my favourite of the three stories of hers I’ve come across. A young man rides with his mother on the bus. There is a general bitterness among the White people of his mother’s generation because the busses have been desegregated. The young man is a liberal and rejects his mother’s attitude but he is in an awkward position because he lives with and depends upon her. A big Black woman gets on the bus wearing the exact same ridiculous hat that his mother is wearing.

            I re-read, this time aloud, the second essay of Nietzsche’s “A Genealogy of Morals”. The bad conscience has resulted from the turning of our will inward. The only hope for humanity is the Superman.

            In organizing the files in my new external hard drive, I accidentally deleted an entire video folder. It was weird how fast it happened. I was moving things into folders and deleting other things and when a message came up saying there was no room for the long names of the videos in the recycle bin, I ended up clicking “OK” to just deleting it forever, thinking it was something else. I thought that I still had all the files on my main drive, but it turned out that I lost all the Alfred Hitchcock films that I’d archived because I had specifically moved those over on Saturday to make room. I guess I’ll have to download them all over again, though I recall it was a long process.

            I read Donald Barthelme’s take on the Bluebeard fairy tale. He made the character of Bluebeard a lot less horrible and a lot more bizarre.

            I read Douglas Glover’s “Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon”. It’s the story of a break-up told in a highly complex, academic and intellectual way. The writing was both impressive and annoying at the same time.

            I watched the last episode of the first season of the Donna Reed Show. Although there was nothing earth shaking about the series, it was a charming and well-acted show. Instead of Donna playing a madcap fumbler like Lucille Ball or someone who’s emotions are out of control, like Mary Tyler Moore, Donna tended to be the calm one who always saved her family from chaos. There was also something special about Shelley Fabares, who played Donna’s daughter, starting at the age of fourteen. She later had a hit record with “Johnny Angel” and I only just found out that she’s been married to Mike Farrell for thirty years. She’s still quite attractive even in her seventies. 

Supernatural Forces Turned Two Beds Into One

           

            I usually keep my computer on all night because it’s the best time for downloading and uploading torrents. Since the café across the street from which I get my signal is closed at night then there’s no competition. I turn my computer off at 6:00 to rest it for a while and then back on a little after 8:00. On Saturday though, when I started my system I got a message asking me if I wanted to run system repair or to start normally. Since “system repair” was recommended, I chose that option, but it went nowhere. I tried restarting and choosing “start normally” but that didn’t work either. I was starting to worry that my system had crashed and that I’d need to get another computer so soon after the last, but then I wondered if this had something to do with the new hardware I’d bought. I noticed that the external hard drive was still powered on, so I shut it off and restarted my computer. It started normally.
            That night while watching an episode of the Donna Reed Show, I wondered when that strange practice of TV married couples sleeping in separate beds came to an end. I looked it up and found that they didn’t have a couple sleeping in the same bed on a regular series until 1964 when Herman and Lily Munster on The Munsters shared a bed and also Darrin and Samantha Stevens hit the same sack together that same year on Bewitched. Obviously then, it took supernatural forces to turn two beds into one.

Slave Morality

           

            Friday was the first day of my fast. I always feel weak on the first couple days but I think that a lot of that is psychological. My fasting diet is now raw fruit and vegetables, though back in the 90s I used to fast on water for eleven days. I have to pee a lot because of the fruit.

            That morning I went to my Continental Philosophy tutorial. About half of the students that are supposed to be in the group didn’t show.

            Sean started by mentioning the series of books that, with his wife, he’d been reading Steven Erikson’s “Malazan Book of the Fallen”. He said that he’d gotten so used to reading science and philosophy that it’s neat to discover stories.

            Sean said that he’d been sick for the last several weeks and on top of that he’d had to meet with teachers at his son’s school because another child threw a brick at his kid’s head.

            Sean began the tutorial by explaining that Nietzsche is not saying that we should all become Vikings but that we should see that sympathy and pity are weak. The Vikings had no stress and no worries because they had the capacity to execute their will in an unimpeded way. They were happy and terrible people. When Christianity took over, good became evil and bad became good. Cleverness and repression became weapons of conquest.

            Just then, Sean heard a familiar tone coming from the laptop of the guy to his left. “That’s Facebook!” he told him without looking at him, “You’ve got to turn that off or we can’t be friends!”

            The Jews were masters of spiritual hatred, but the Christian priests that inherited this refined it into psychological hatred. Nietzsche shows you respect by attacking you while the priest hides his hatred and says, “I love you!”

            Christian morality has burrowed deep into our consciousness.

            Phenomenology describes what it is like to be a person but this is an endless task because the world and people are always changing.

            Greek philosophy was about awe and wonder, but Nietzsche rejected this, claiming that one can’t step outside of the contingency to grasp the eternal.

            Sean then stopped to rant a bit about people that put down Freud. He said, “Freud was a genius! Don’t dismiss him unless you’re smarter than he was!”

            Nietzsche wants to disturb you.

            The Jews were the first to will nothingness. The Jews in Egypt developed a slave morality and a moral psychology counter to the master morality of the Vikings or the Samurai. The Jews hated their Egyptian oppressors but the Christians loved their enemies.

Of the will to nothingness, in this book Nietzsche is against Nihilism, but in Thus Spake Zarathustra he is in favour of a type of active Nihilism because he wants to clear away the detritus.

The moral inversion brought about by Christianity cannot be overcome, except by the Superman. So be aware.

That morning, prior to leaving for tutorial I had looked for a file I’d downloaded a year or so before of a collection of songs by Boris Vian. I wanted to start learning to sing his “Le Déserteur”, but I couldn’t find the file on my computer. I realized then that when I borrowed Nick Cushing’s hard drive dock to recover my files that I must have forgotten that one. Since it would take too long to re-download the songs I decided that on the way home I’d stop at Modcom at College and Spadina to finally invest in my own hard drive dock. I went first to Canada Computers, but their cheapest one was $35.00 and I expected Modcom would be cheaper. The thing was though I couldn’t find the store. I remembered it being just a few doors west of Canada Computers but there were just a couple of closed down businesses in the spot where I thought it should be. I went to the next block to Hi Tech Direct, which is owned by the same company as Modcom, but the only hard drive dock they had was one for two hard drives and it was $65.00. The clerk advised me to go to Modcom at their new location, which is across the street from the old one. Considering the empty stores on that northern block, I guessed that they’d be tearing it down soon to build condos. When I got to Modcom, the guy behind the counter confirmed for me when I asked that they are indeed going to build condos across the street. They didn’t have any hard drive docks, but what they did have were casings for turning hard drives into external hard drives. I ended up paying $23.44.

When I got home and tried to use the hard drive casing, I couldn’t figure out how to open it up. Other than the connections, it’s all plastic, so I didn’t want to break it in my efforts to pry it open. There were no instructions, so I decided to call Modcom. There was no answer so I kept trying over and over until I gave up and tried to open the casing again. This time it worked. It immediately created a G-drive and my files were right there, so that was a good thing.

I went to teach my yoga class and had two students. Michelle came on time and Anna was late as usual. Michelle told me that she’s 77 years old. I’ve been trying to get her to learn to do the sun salutation warm-up exercise by herself but she says she does it better when I do it with her. She claims she’s a follower and even said that she’s stupid.

I was guiding them through a pose when Michelle asked if she should breathe. I said, “yes” but added that sometimes I teach this class at the bottom of a swimming pool, and in those cases she should not breathe.

Anna was telling me that she makes her own Tiger Balm with camphor and petroleum jelly. I never use any of that stuff because it doesn’t fix the problem.

I had always thought that mothballs were made with camphor, but Anna corrected me that they are made with naphthalene. I looked it up though and found that not only are we both wrong, but I’m also right. Mothballs used to be made with naphthalene, but now they are made with dichlorobenzene. However, camphor is also used as a healthier alternative for repelling moths.

Everyone Needs to be Offended

           

            On Thursday, Naomi arrived late for Continental Philosophy class. There is a nerdy guy who took her usual seat when she wasn’t there on Tuesday, and he’d claimed it again this time before she showed up. When she came in though, he was perhaps in the washroom. When he came back he informed her that he was sitting there. She moved to the seat next to mine, but pulled up the swivelling, flag shaped fold away writing table that was attached to the right side of his seat so she could have a place to put her coffee, until he asked her to move it. When she turned her computer on I noticed that she spells her name “Naama” so I can’t see how it would be pronounced like “Naomi”. It made me wonder if she has two names: one for Canada and one for Israel.

            Professor Gibbs began the lecture by telling us that he believes that methodology should always follow the work of science, and so students that have yet to hand in their essays will not receive a mark for them until they do so.

            He took a moment to explain to those of us that heard his previous lecture, that Nietzsche is horrifically offensive to not only readers of our day but of his day as well. His aesthetic is designed to shock and this is true to some degree even for Kierkegaard. Nietzsche thought that niceness needed to be disrupted with a rhetoric that was offensive to everyone.

            Kierkegaard was a great psychologist and so were Nietzsche and Plato.

            Plato observed that though honour tells people not to feast their eyes on the dead bodies when they walk around the battlefield, there is nonetheless an erotic desire to do so.

            We are drawn to the disgusting but we won’t admit it. We would never look at someone being tortured unless it’s on film.

            Nietzsche wants to connect us with the contradictions in our psyche.

            It’s good to have a bad conscience because it’s better than feeling like a loser.

            What we ought to do comes from what we owe. The word “ought” is intrinsically relational. ”Ought” emerged from owing. A lot of what is owed to us is not based on equalization.

            The professor then quoted Jennifer Neville Lake’s victim impact statement in Marco Muzzo’s drunk driving trial – “My kids paid for your drinks with the price of their blood.” Then he asked, “How do you punish someone for three children and a grandfather?”

Someone said, “Cut off three limbs!” The professor wasn’t sure of that, but he admitted that the cutting off of the hand for theft made some sense. But returning to the death of three children, he said, “You can’t hang someone three times.”

Anger has no limit, so there is no easy proportionality as to what is owed. There was a time when satisfaction could only have been derived from making he, his children, his family or even his whole town suffer.

So we have unlimited debt, infinite guilt and maybe even sin if we’re not careful.

Crowds used to go to hangings and took delight in participating in public torture.

Memory comes from pain.

The pagans saw war as something the gods enjoyed watching humans engage in.

Then Christianity came along and said that people could be saved. Debts became normalized and what was owed was given measured limits, as in a pound of flesh. People acquired values and ordered capacity. But it was our inherent desire to have others under our thumbs that led to this ordered violence.

The criminal emerged as a breaker of rules.

The bishop of Rome has called for global prohibition of capital punishment.

We now insult evil by overlooking it          with forgiveness, grace and mercy. We don’t recognize that forgiveness is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Law is an impersonal weapon against resentment. It’s not about your feelings. But law nonetheless comes from the powerful that command.

There’s an origin and there’s an end. But there are several ends along the way. There is a sequence of meanings over time. The origin generates the string.

Anton Scalia said that the meaning of the law is not in its origin.

Inherent in existence, things do not have fixed meanings or ends. Nietzsche’s philosophy is rooted in the idea that things keep moving, but also that it’s important to know the origin so that one can measure the drift of the ends. The string of meanings is not exhausted at the origin. The ends relate to one another and get their passion and energy from the origin because the origin has more in it than any of the ends.

The will to power, one of Nietzsche’s main doctrines is deeply undemocratic. Each new end overcomes the previous one because it has more power.

This is not about power though but rather the will to power.

The origin does not produce bad conscience, which is the result of turning the will inward and against itself. There was no bad conscience in the days of torture. Barbarian power was supplanted by a perverse turn against the self. We build our own cage and punish ourselves for being normal. The Viking raiders are a condition for turning against the self. We found freedom in self-punishment. Selflessness is a form of self-cruelty.

We owe a debt to the founders, to our ancestors and to our parents that we will never be able to repay. We can’t assuage the origin. We owe infinite debt just by existing and not paying it makes us feel guilty. Payment is done in sacrifices of perhaps one’s first born. But Christianity came along and told us that god can suffer on our behalf. God can pay back both god and the ancestors. We internalize this in the will to self torture.

Is an ideal set up here or torn down? What do we lose or gain from it? The extinction of the will.

The 21^st century is more Nietzschean than the one before. Smart bombs and swords.

Has the bad conscience taken root so deeply that there’s no way out?

After the lecture, I told Naomi that I really enjoyed writing my paper on the last day of the. She said that she struggled with hers right up until the end. She told me that it is frustrating for her not to be able to write in Hebrew. She complained that English is such a lazy language. I thought that was an interesting thing to say, so I asked her to explain. She pointed out that people don’t use their mouth muscles and barely even open them when they are speaking English. I confirmed that my mouth certainly gets tired when I try to speak properly in French. She informed me that in Hebrew, words like “that” and “it” are all covered by the same word.

There was something that I’d been curious about for a while. How did Hebrew become the official language of Israel when most of the Jews that came there didn’t speak it? She confirmed that Hebrew is a revived language that needed the help of the rabbis and scholars to bring it back.

We were the last two students in the room and she stood chatting with me as I was getting ready to leave. I asked her if she wanted to go for coffee but she said she had to meet a psychology study group. We walked out together and she stopped to converse with me for a while beside the bike stands. I opined that there seems to be a contradiction between Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity inherited it’s “the meek shall inherit the Earth” philosophy from the Jews, while at the same time talking about the Jews of the Old Testament being more savage like the Vikings.

She told me about how Solomon gathered up the great scholars of Jerusalem and gave them the mandate of writing the Bible.

She commented that Christianity is a fucked up religion because it corrupted itself with so many pagan ideas along the way. I admitted that it’s been a very adaptive religion but suggested that it’s Christianities initial flexibility that eventually made it so powerful. I pointed out that this is also true of the English language.

I went home, did some writing, slept for an hour and a half and then rode back downtown through a fluffy wet snowfall that stopped when I was about halfway to University College.

The lecture was on the topic of the last two stories from Gabrielle Roy’s “The Road to Altamont”.

In “The Move”, Christine travels from nowhere to nowhere, illustrating the active stasis of the prairies. The little girl considered it the height of romance that her friend’s father was a mover and got to carry the possessions of families from one home to another in his horse drawn wagon. It served as a window to the past of the stories she’d heard of her mother’s move as a child from Quebec to Manitoba.

The actual move is a rude awakening but Christine the adult storyteller tries to rescue the situation from the future.

I thought it interesting that, although the mover, Monsieur Pichette was working poor; the super poor people he moved were an English family.

The move took place from morning till evening, the same as the trip to Lake Winnipeg and back in the previous story. A microcosmic lifespan.

All of the stories in this book involve travelling, and I pointed out to Andrew that even the doll that the grandmother made for Christine was a travelling doll because the grandmother had made a hat for her with the explanation that one couldn’t travel without a hat. Andrew liked that.

All stories are fiction because it’s impossible to tell any story exactly as it happened.

In the other stories, Christine the child talks about being bored with the prairies, but as an adult in the last story she speaks of her “beloved prairie”. She writes of hiding in the prairie and this seems like an ironic statement because there is nowhere to hide. I pointed out that when I was hitchhiking through Saskatchewan and standing on the highway in the middle of the prairie, while looking off into the infinite distance I had this sense that if I stepped off the road I could wander forever and never be found.

When our parents stay alive they shield us from mortality.

I learned that our essay topics have been posted since the beginning of the course, but I want to get all the reading done anyway before I focus on writing.

The temperature had dropped since I’d ridden downtown and so the snow that had melted on my bike had apparently gotten into my gear tube and frozen my bike in the last gear I’d used, which was two down from the high gear, so I was a bit slower than I was used to.

On the way home, I stopped on Queen between Spadina and Bathurst to go to the bank. I was on the sidewalk when a tough looking drunk guy was staggering towards me. He said something incomprehensible to me and gently punched my shoulder to emphasize whatever his point was, and then moved on.

The horizon was striped with wine dipped clouds that were layered with others that had been stained with strawberry.

Food Bank Fruit

           

            On Wednesday I didn’t bother to go to the food bank because, as I approached my fast, my diet was not only vegetarian but also starchless and free of beans and nuts. Most of what one gets at the food bank is starch, so there didn’t seem much point in me going there. As far as what they have that I could eat, the idea of standing around and waiting in the slush for slightly overripe fruit and withered vegetables seemed a bit depressing, so I stayed home to get some writing done instead.

            There was still no sign of my cat, Daffodil.

Did Christianity Create Feminism?

           

            Reading Week seemed to last a very long time, though not in the sense of it being boring. It just felt full. It was nice not to have to leave home at 9:00 for a Tuesday, a Thursday and a Friday.

            When I arrived at Philosophy class the door to the lecture theatre was shut and when I opened it I saw the room was full of students taking an exam. I sat down in one of the chairs in the hallway. The exam was over at 10:00 and so I had less time to get my computer set up for class.

            My TA, Sean, was wearing a suit. I asked him if he had a meeting afterwards. He told me that he had to give a speech relating to his fellowship, but there would be free food.

            Professor Gibbs came in and stopped to talk to Sean, who was sitting behind me, about the Nietzsche text we were currently reading. He said, “It makes you wonder why people find Foucault interesting when Nietzsche does it so much better and with verve!”

            He began the lecture by welcoming us back and telling us that if any of us went to someplace warm, “we hate you, but that’s good! In the Nietzschean world that’s as it should be.

            He told us that all of his illnesses had cleared up except for having a cold, but he hoped that he wouldn’t leak too much. He added that the suffering we experienced during the cold snap was also very Nietzschean.

            He said that our second essay topics would be uploaded soon and reminded us that there are strict rules against using our previously submitted philosophy essays. I was thinking that there’s something ironic about being forbidden to plagiarize oneself.

            He told us that Nietzsche is not interested in the story he is telling but rather in the way we think. It’s bad enough that morality has a history, but piggybacking on that is the history of thought. Philosophy itself is permeated by the moral story. Nietzsche asks in the preface, “What does it mean to be a knower?” It is to be part of this moral story.

            Democracy is vulgar and exists as a type of revenge for the weak.

            The people of the land were fine doing their thing in harmony with the land until the noble conquerors came along and took charge. The Norman knights took over and changed everything. They ruled with a good versus bad system. Their chief interest was going and doing so they went and did what they wanted and enjoyed doing it.

            In many cultures, even in Europe during the Middle Ages, the priests were warriors. Part of their power was to engage in practical abstinence. Rather than pushing, they pulled back in a physicalized exercise of power that is really not a very healthy thing to do, because healthy people do what they want. The priests turned against the self and elevated negation. They had the energy to stop. They had the power to do nothing and to make others do nothing. The Vikings didn’t know this kind of power. The Vikings only knew violence but the priests had hatred and knew how to crush with it.

            Nietzsche was not an Aryan warrior. He was an academic. The professor then confessed to us that he has a fantasy that he will one day become a hockey player, but not right now. The professor is around seventy years old.

            The Jews staged a revolution thanks to Jesus and the meek inherited the earth. The slave revolt was so successful that we don’t even see it anymore.

            The story is not as simple as it looks. We can’t become Vikings again but can we survive as slaves?

            Christianity elevated hatred to love. When Nietzsche says that Christianity is the greatest error in history he means that it is great.

            Secularism is so last century. The end of god is a Eurocentric Protestant skew but it’s wrong. People think that democracy displaced Christianity but the secular world is embedded in Christian values.

            The Christians were too weak to exact physical revenge and so they enforced imaginary revenge in which their enemies would suffer later. Their resentment was fecund. But there is an acoustic illusion here because Christian society still depends upon powerful overlords.

            Christians do nothing. They are secretive and clever. The Viking just does, but for the Christian reaction is action. The weak plot and maintain a private morality, hating their enemies, while the nobleman loves his enemies because he takes them seriously.

            Nietzsche rejects resentment.

            Then Professor Gibbs asked, “Has anyone seen the new Star Wars movie? …. So few? I’ve seen it!” Someone else called out that they’d seen it four times. Gibbs said that the movie has lots of blowing stuff up and heroes not being meek. We take revenge in imaginary worlds.

            With all of our energy turned in upon ourselves will we eventually burn out?

            Nietzsche was one of the best diagnosticians of Nihilism.

            To be a spy in the factory where ideals are made. Are ideals apparent? I’d like to be better than I am! That’s not where ideals come from. The factory makes a lot of lies. Ideals are vengeance on the powerful. The strong will be punished and the end of time is a convenient holding place for our frustrations.

            Nietzsche talked a lot about the smell of ideas.

            The Romans thought the Jews were unnatural. When the Jews became Christians they changed the name of hate to love and now all of Rome bows down to four Jews. The Renaissance tried but failed to raise Rome above Christianity.

            Nietzsche was not a fan of democracy.

            Napoleon was a short Viking that did what he wanted.

            Is the slave revolt over? There’s Viking in all of us. Good and bad is a part of our heritage. What happens when you are used to being Christian? Nietzsche says that you can’t win forever.

            We like to hurt people, but that’s not bad.

            To be able to keep a promise means that we have the power to forget or to dismiss, which is one of the greatest powers to have. Intellectuals work on what is hard for them but historians have the ability to forget.

            Ethics struggles to overcome ethics.

            The essence of morality is the promise, but promising that you will do whatever you want is not a promise. Morality wants to be predictable but children are not moral or predictable. Children have no customs until they are trained to dominate themselves and exercise freedom against their instincts.

To have conscience one needs memory that is sourced in pain. Nietzsche says the Germans are good at this but he has nasty things to say about everybody. All the great thinking cultures come from torture and violence. Schools with corporal punishment produced generations of great thinkers. How do any of us remember anything now that we are not whipped at school anymore?

Naomi didn’t come to class.

I had enough time to ride home, sit in front of the computer for twenty minutes and then to take an hour and a half siesta. Now that the bedbugs are gone I can be decadent again and just flop myself down in bed for a nap with my clothes on. I didn’t even remove my boots but rather just put an old towel under them so I didn’t muddy my mattress cover.

While I was waiting for class to start, I heard a student complaining about having to read a 600-page novel in two weeks for his Russian Literature course.

Just before beginning the Short Story lecture, Andrew was discussing film adaptations of comic books, and though most people thought that Green Lantern was a horrible movie, Andrew didn’t think it was that bad. I felt the same way about Daredevil. Andrew agreed that the latest Fantastic Four film was pretty bad.

In class we talked about the first two stories from “The Road Past Altamont”. Andrew said that Gabrielle Roy is his favourite Canadian writer and added that she is almost Proustian. He had to get special permission to cover her book in the course because, since it was originally written in French, it is technically not English literature.

“The Road Past Altamont” is about the rediscovery of the past simultaneously with the future told by a Janus faced narrator. Andrew said, at the risk of sounding clichéd, that the book is about the circle of life and death.  The title contains the “past”. The first story takes place past Altamont, where the last story ends.

The past is an imaginative idealized refuge constrained by practicality.

Roy’s own father was working poor and he called her “Petite Misère”

            Creative imagining equals creative recall and falsity. Memory is fragile.

            The past here represents youth and joy. It anticipates the future.

            The future represents old age and sorrow. Contains the past in retrospect.

            Both have abiding ties to the family.

            Experience is tied to the self.

            Loss and consolation are prominent in every story and love is intertwined with it. One consolation is the telling of the story. There is danger if the pain persists so relief can be transient.

            There are three kinds of loss: the pain of leaving; the pain of the death of a loved one; and the pain of contemplating one’s own death.

            In the story about her grandmother, Christine’s boredom at sunset is consoled with a doll.

            The grandmother’s regrets are consoled with usefulness and later by the family album, which also consoles the mother.

            In “The Old Man and the Child”, Christine travels to the mountains in her imagination and reconquers the west for the French.

The old man takes Christine on a journey to Lake Winnipeg, which becomes a metaphor for the human lifespan with one end being youth and life and he other being death and the imagined other side. The lake is both permanent and restless like the philosophical river. Both the old man and the child are fragile. Christine, in telling the story, brings the end and the beginning together.

            “The Move” prepares her for her own travels.

            The Prairie ironically draws one forward in its sameness.

            During the break, I eavesdropped on the conversation of a couple of students behind me. She told him that she was taking a course on Christianity and Feminism. He was snacking and talking with his mouth full when he said that Christianity and feminism had always seemed to him to be mutually exclusive. I found this interesting because of the lecture that morning where I heard Nietzsche’s idea that only Christianity could have created modern democracy. It occurred to me at that moment that feminism could not have come into being without democracy and so if Nietzsche is right about Christianity leading to democracy, then it follows that Christianity created feminism.

            After the break we talked about the final story from the book of the same name, “The Road Past Altamont”.

The Altamont hills only show themselves when one climbs them. There is a need to take action.

Andrew asked if we thought that Mount Royal is a mountain, then said, “It’s not a mountain!” I’d always thought that it was, and so I looked it up later. There is no universally official measurement as to what constitutes a mountain. It just has to be impressive and notable when compared to its surroundings. But the United Nations has its own criteria based on height in relation to sharpness of the angle of elevation, and since they don’t recognize any elevation lower than 300 metres as being a mountain, by UN standards, Mount Royal is not a mountain. For me though, when I compare it to the little hills in the part of New Brunswick where I was raised, it seems like a mountain to me.

We talked of memory being a lens. The memory is how we catch up with one another.

Andrew returned our tests. One anonymous student had their “exemplary” test placed on Blackboard to show us how it’s done. I managed to squeak an A-minus. 

King Crimson

           

            On Monday, Daffodil had been gone for three days. I went out on the roof , looked around and called for her. I didn’t step off the roof of my landlord’s property onto anyone else’s because they get upset, but besides under his deck there would be nowhere for a cat to hide on our roof. There’s a fire escape next door that descends to a back courtyard behind the Cube Chinese restaurant. The previous restaurant owners used the area in the summer to grow herbs for their kitchen. At the other end of the courtyard is a storage shed that has a door that exits to the alley behind our building but of course they keep that locked and so Daffodil couldn’t have gotten to the street that way. As I was looking down into the courtyard, an employee of The Cube was moving something in or out of the shed, and so I called down to him to ask if he’d seen a cat. His response was just to very quickly shake his head. I don’t think he appreciated being suddenly questioned from above.

            Female cats tend to stay very close to their home base, so I really doubt if she would have ventured down to street level. Both females, whenever I’ve put them outside have tended to hide underneath the deck. I think that Daffodil must still be on the roof, but the roof stretches the full length of the block. If I’m right then there are three possibilities. She’s either cowering somewhere hungry and stupid until she recovers the good sense to find her way home; or she’s been taken in by someone else that has access to the roof from the second floor of another property; or maybe she encountered a den of raccoons.

            I’ve been watching a concert film of King Crimson in Japan during their “Three of a Perfect Pair” tour.  It’s interesting to have a visual after hearing the music so many times because when a band has two lead guitarists it’s not always that easy to discern which parts are being played by Robert Fripp and which by Adrian Belew. Robert looks odd compared to the rest of the band because he sits very straight and still while everyone else is moving around. Even the drummer, Bill Bruford is not always sitting. Belew is all over the place, jumping around, dancing, switching instruments and manipulating electronics while Robert smiles at him either out of amusement or satisfaction. I’m not sure why Robert sits when he plays. This concert took place a month or so after I met Robert in West Virginia so I know he had no problem standing. I looked at some old concert photos and so even when he was a young long haired freak he still sat down when he played.

Highway Death; Cast Adrift and the Bosco Verticale: a review of the Plastiscene Reading Series for Sunday, February 21st

           

            By Sunday it had been two days since my cat Daffodil had been away. Hopefully she’s all right and she’ll find her way home. She’s sixteen years old and has been out on that roof a considerable amount of times over the years so she should know how to find shelter out there or to come home.

            I read for a second time “Good and Evil, Good and Bad”, the first essay from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “A Genealogy of Morals”. It seems to be mostly about how weak the members of our society have become since Christianity has had control over it.

            On Sunday evening I was riding east along Bloor on my way to the Plastiscene Reading Series when a young man passed me. That was fine because he probably had a lighter bike than mind, but when a few seconds later his girlfriend passed me in her effort to keep up with her beau’s bike, I wasn’t going to stand for that. If a guy’s girlfriend passes me it makes me feel old, which is something I don’t want to feel till I AM old. So far women rarely pass me unless they are either athletes; obsessively gung ho girls on super light bikes; putting on the steam just to pass me and then slow down (I assume because they want to show me their asses); or if they are keeping up with a boyfriend. I suspect that when the latter are riding alone they don’t care about keeping up. I charged ahead of them between Dovercourt and Ossington.

            When I got to the Victory Café I wasn’t surprised to find the door to the second floor locked, so I went back downstairs to wait in the entryway. A woman I vaguely recognized from a previous night at Plastiscene came out of the main bar. She asked if the door upstairs was open yet and I told her they never open it right away. I asked her name and she told me it was Sophie, then I introduced myself. I asked if she was from South Africa because that’s what I picked up from her accent but she informed me she was English but that she was raised in East Africa and went to boarding school there, so her accent was a mix. I was about to say that there are boarding schools in Canada that seem to give their students British accents, but before I had a chance, Cad came out from the main bar, saying that Plastiscene had already happened in the late afternoon. He said Margaret was in the main bar and she’d gotten an email that it was happening at 16:30. I accused Cad of always having the wrong information, since last time he’d come out and declared that someone had told him that Plastiscene wasn’t happening that night at all, though it did. A guy came out from the main bar that seemed to be attached to Sophie, and they went upstairs to wait for the door to be opened.

Cad was cold standing by the entrance so he suggested we go into the main bar. Margaret Code had a table to herself by the window and so we joined her. She said she had gotten an email from someone earlier that day informing her that Plastiscene would be happening at 16:30. She told us she’d been there since that time. I suggested that whoever sent the email might have misunderstood the 24-hour clock, thinking that 16:30 was the same as 6:30 p.m. instead of 18:30.

I’d gotten a message from Nick Cushing before leaving home, saying that he might come to Plastiscene for a while, since he was in town from Hamilton. Cad confirmed that Nick had called him to tell him he would be there.

Cad said, “Nick dropped Bruce March off at …”

“At Sunday school” I said.

“Sunday school?”

“Yeah”, he goes to the Depressedbyterian Church. You didn’t know that?”

I said, “That’d be a good name for a band!”

“Depressedbyterian?”

“Reverend Beverage and the Depressedbyterians.”

Nick arrived and sat with us.

Cad was talking about a friend of his whose wife doesn’t like him. I asked if any of his married friends’ wives like him. He answered that none of them like him.

Nick explained that women become the gatekeepers of their husbands’ social lives, especially when they have friends like Cad.

Nicki Ward, the hostess of Plastiscene, hooked her phone up to the amplifier and played some choral music by Mozart.

Nick went downstairs to buy a beer and Cad went out in the hall to use the washroom. The Victory Café has a very inconvenient set-up. Although there is a bar upstairs they do not always have a bartender working there and so people have to go down to get their drinks. The waitperson will bring them ordered food though. As for the washroom, I’ve seen women climb the stairs from the main floor to use the washroom, so I don’t know if it’s just a way to avoid a line-up or if there is no washroom on the main floor. 

Nicki began playing Middle Eastern music from her phone.

Nick returned with a beer, commenting that the stairs was really going to cut down on his drinking.

Cad told me that JewsNews pays him to post their articles on Facebook. I said, “Then since ISIS is paying JewsNews, ISIS is paying you!”

“ISIS doesn’t pay JewsNews!”

JewsNews is the most reprehensible online news service that I have ever come across. There’s nothing wrong with being right wing or even extremely right wing as long as one is posting arguably factual information. But what JewsNews often does is to post photographs they’ve stolen from other sources and then they make up a story around it that attacks Muslims. One example is when they posted a ten-year-old picture of a little girl that had been mauled in the face by a pit bull terrier and claimed it was the photo of a little European girl that had been sexually molested by a Muslim refugee. Cad consistently posts these JewsNews articles on his Facebook Timeline and since it’s time consuming to disprove the claims the headlines are making, I don’t often bother. But almost every time I do, I find that the real source of the photograph has nothing to do with the anti-Muslim slander of the headline. For instance, one photo showed a pretty young well-dressed blonde woman being spat upon by a dark haired young man, while some other men were looking on. The claim was that this took place in Sweden and that these were Muslim refugees having their way with Swedish hospitality. I tracked the photo down to Austria, a few years before. What really happened was that there was a Communist protest taking place outside of a highly upscale annual ball. The blonde woman was on her way into the dance when one of the protesters spat at her. I’m only half joking when I suggest that ISIS pays JewsNews to make these kinds of posts. The thing is that when people see a photograph accompanied by a headline that looks like it is describing what’s going on in the picture, most of the people that read these posts think that it’s real news. Hence there are thousands of people that believe that Syrian refugees are at this minute storming through the cities of Sweden like hordes of Vikings, raping and burning as they go. It seems to me that encouraging non-Muslims to hate Muslims plays right into the hands of ISIS, since an alienated Muslim may be ripe for the picking by radical Islamic groups.

Cad told me that ISIS exists because there are too many homosexuals in the world. He explained that Gay sex used to cause “tseptsumis” but now it causes Islamic terrorism. “Tseptsumis?” I asked. He said, “Whatever they’re called.” “Do you mean tsunamis?” I asked. “That’s it!”

Nicki was playing Moe Koffman’s “The Swingin Shepherd” when she announced that the open stage list was ready for sign-ups. I approached Nicki and she said she’d write my name down. Cad got up to sign up and came back complaining that he’d had to write his own name. “Ya have ta do everything around here!” he grumbled, “Ya have ta write yer own name on the list and ya have ta read yer own poetry!”

Nicki played “Changes” by David Bowie.

We started a little after 18:30.

Nicki described the Plastiscene Reading Series as being, “eclectic, in a mainstream kind of way. We’re accessible! One of the things we do” she continued, as she looked directly at a small group that were chatting loudly about five tables back, “We listen!”

With Susie Berg’s help, Nicki went through a list of the art councils that are currently supporting Plastiscene.
            “Ontario?”

“Check!”

“Toronto?”

“Check!”

“Canada?”

“No comment!”

The guy sitting with Sophie declared, “Stephen’s left, so it’s all gone to hell!” He had to explain to Nicki that he meant Stephen Harper. And I’m pretty sure he was also being sarcastic about Harper’s patronage of the arts.

As she usually does, Nicki called me to the open stage first. I’d brought my guitar this time and I performed my translation of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Jeunes Femmes et Vieux Messieurs” – “ … Before there’s a chance to put a wrinkle in her lace by laying her down upon your bed, first of all you might have to lay down her name on your last will and testament. Young women and older men! If she’s flat broke, well, it’s not important! Young women and older men! Cause he’s got enough dough for both of them …” I fumbled my guitar chords on the same transition twice. It’s funny, because I’ve played that song flawlessly at home more than a hundred times each in French and English, and if I screw up it’s occasionally on the words and not the chords. It just goes to show how different the context of playing live is in comparison to practising at home. I admit that I do get nervous just enough to push Murphy’s Law into effect. I would probably need to put in a lot more live playing before I can play as confidently in front of an audience as I do at home, and I really only get that kind of practice during the summer.

After me, Nicki invited Cad to read. I had planned on getting out my camera and trying to shoot a video of him but he was too ready and started reading from his phone right away – “What are you livin for? You’re nothin till your dead! … You have to be somebody to be here …”

Next was a poem from the hat, brought in by one of the featured readers and read by an audience member. This one was Carolyn Smart’s “Clyde at Buster’s Party” – “ … when she walked in the air itself just turned to somethin new, blonde hair flyin firecracker eyes explorin everythin & when she seen me, her face it just blossomed with clear intentions …  she was quick as a hiccup …”

Then, Nicki asked Margaret how she was feeling and Margaret, getting ready to get up, said, “Fine!” “Good!” replied Nickie, “Could you ask Sophie to come down please?”

Sophie read two poems. The first was called “Thoughts on a Parallel” – “This time … this immediate living … kaleidoscope … where we live our bliss … Open arms that are each other … Which unspent fury? … Which lives are ours? All … The parallels right here … What unbound possible? …”

Sophie’s second poem was entitled “Nightingale: after John Keats” – “The night wanders as if … itself bewitched … the sky breaks in great darkling dreams … as if I cannot live without this beautiful … there rises … a flighting joy … this song bliss … brings a dream … When I take this last breath softly … what joy to think … in death I will fly at night …”

Perhaps as an apology for the tease, Nicki asked Margaret Code to the stage after Sophie. She read two poems as well. The first was based on a writing challenge on the theme of “I never saw it coming” – “I’m going for a walk … Where’s my key? … What will you do at the traffic lights? … I want to go alone … Alzheimer’s, I never saw it coming, I don’t see it now.”

Margaret’s second poem was called “Chemistry” – “You walk with my long lost lover’s gorilla gait … spotted your doorknob knees … don’t know your name, but I love you.”

For the next reading we returned to the hat. Someone read a poem with the name “Signs #1”, but I don’t think that the reader gave the author’s name. I thought about asking him when he was finished, but it seemed to me that would have been a good thing for the hostess to do – “When stuck to a lamppost, lift plough blade … we long to lift the purple from the plums … we are not standing at any time … have you considered the gravity of holes … we can only stand unumbilicaled … so we await the violence of ploughs …”

Back to the open stage, we had Lisa Richter reading two poems. The first was called “Inscriptions” – “At your father’s beach house near Shediac … slivers of bottle glass … the words from blacked out text the wind redacts. Lisa’s second poem was “Blinded Date” – “The treadmill of talk begins its grateful decline … I search for artefacts … concert t-shirt of a band I’ve never heard of … and just like that we’re back to the weather …”

The final poem from the hat was “Graduation Notes” by Sonia Sanchez – “ … Tired of tiny noises your eyes hum a large vibration … At this moment your skins living your eighteen years suspend all noises …”

This was the end of the open stage. Before introducing the first feature, Christine Fischer Guy, Nicki gave us her own reading of “Clyde at Buster’s Party”, which was the poem that Christine had selected for the hat. She read it in a cartoon southern drawl as only someone from Great Britain can.

In her introduction, Nicki continued on her roll and joked that Christine is a southern belle, fresh from a cotillion. But then Nicki went off on a rant, which may or may not have been serious, about how annoyed she is when people pronounce Austin, as in Austin, Texas and Austen, as in Jane Austen the same way.

Christine introduced the short story, “Salt”, which was the only piece she would be reading, by telling us that she had read it in Austin, Texas, but had o explain to people who the Habs were. She was glad to be reading someplace where the explanation was unnecessary. “Salt” is a short story centred on a couple driving through the night. Michael, who works for Doctors Without Borders, is driving. He is distant and mostly the subject of his passenger’s thoughts. Their journey is showing elements of a recurring dream she’d been having. The Beastie Boys were blaring on the car’s sound system. He would be leaving for Darfur soon. The story flashes back to one of his missions – “He’d driven as fast as conscience allowed … The patient died a mile from fresh saline …” Michael is driving above the speed limit and so they are stopped by a highway patrolman. She lies to the officer that he is on the way to the airport to go on a mission right away and so he lets them go, telling him that they need more people like him. As they drive on she remembers the spontaneous sex she used to initiate with him and wants to do it then and there. “Why waste conversational currency on banal exchanges … The steady, gradual climb of the speedometer … I think I’m exothermic … A deer crossing sign whizzed by …” She remembers an incident where a car hit a doe and the driver was killed instantly – “A dream posing as memory … Reaching into the swollen belly … she swallowed as Michael laid the baby on her belly …” Then a doe steps out on the road – “ … there was a curious lack of echo.”

Christine Fischer Guy tells a story well and makes effective use of shifts from present to past; dream and reality; and internal and outer dialogue. Her prose however is not dazzling and her descriptions are not particularly creative.

There was a break, during which time I looked around to notice that there was pretty good-sized crowd at Plastiscene this time around and that they were mostly quite young. Cad called home and found out from Goldie that she’d thrown up. I suggested jokingly that she might be pregnant and asked how he would react if the baby looked like me. Cad told me what I already knew, that Goldie was post-menopausal, but I argued that a Jewish woman in the Bible got pregnant much older than she did. He said that people lived longer and matured differently in Biblical times. I told him that was a myth and that to say that someone lived hundreds of years was just a way of saying how long their immediate family was prominent, because a family was nothing but the product of its patriarch in those days. He said his rabbi told him it was true. I told him his rabbi is a dummy. He described his rabbi as looking like a cross between Tony Soprano and Alan King.

Our conversation shifted to which of our ex-girlfriends were good in bed. There is one former lover that Cad and I have in common. We differed as to how spectacular she had been in the sack though.

Cad said he’d found a big screen TV that works perfectly, which is also a good thing for his deteriorating eyesight.

Nickie was playing Count Basie just before returning us from the break.

Nickie said that one of life’s truest lessons is, “There is no destination. There is only a thing.”

In introducing Phinder Dulai, the second invited reader, Nickie informed us that he’d cycled here all the way from British Columbia and that he now has calf muscles as firm as those of John Keats. While reading Phinder’s prepared bio, she came across, “He is currently touring dream/arteries …” and wondered if “dream slash arteries” was really what he wanted to say. She continued reading until, “ … two previous books of poetry …” and wondered if the grammar was correct. She asked, “What were they before they were books of poetry?” But Phinder quickly answered, “Manuscripts!”

Phinder told us that his book, “dream/arteries” tells the story of the SS Komagata Maru, a ship that one hundred years ago brought 376 Sikh immigrants to Vancouver but they weren’t allowed to disembark. They starved on board while waiting for an official decision and were finally sent back to India. Phinder sees the ship as a metaphor for ideas around the Diaspora after having done extensive research (something that he loves to do) into the SS Komagata Maru’s history. He found that it had carried thousands of immigrants to new homes all around the world over many years.

The first poem Phinder read was called “This Stubborn Bulk” – “ … she was delivered by … we moved backward on the quiet waters … the river swallows me whole into commerce … my guide threads me through this bulbous … my body slowly eases into my transient home … I will carry each burden … anonymous journeys … slip the border … lost in the rip of tide … sisters, brothers, cousins and great ancestors pass in quiet … we curl into the confluence of the Labrador … I transmute and shift my name and become the SS Komagata Maru.”

Phinder told us that sections of manuscripts have an invisible conversation with one another.

His second poem had the line – “ … steeped in a rust filled sunset …”

His third offering, called “Temple of Prayer” was based on the attack on the Sikh temple in Wisconsin back in 2012 – “The mind semi-automatic … and the sun runs high into the day …”

From “The Rivers” – “There was no fifth finger on the baby … the dead carried the young …”

Phinder informed us that the Punjabi community has been in British Columbia since the 1890s.

His next poem had the line – “ … the sleeping basement had the sun above …”

From “Melancholy” – “ … a yoga mat … a double dose of a placebo … two tapering worms … the unrequited and unanswered kiss … a deathly synapse.”

Phinder confessed that he’d written a slam poem – “ … I am a bomb to the dead … my Punjabi nostrils curling out …”

He finished with an anagram that he said was from Cedric the Entertainer – “ … sits here ear … here in sin … s.o.s. soma … I am so sincere …”

Phinder Dulai shows poetic talent and some nice turns of phrase but his creativity becomes limited by research. The more that his imagery is drawn from archival information the less real it becomes and the less he has access to metaphors on which his subconscious can get a grip. Granted that the issues on which he writes are important for people to learn about, but he should realize that he is making a sacrifice of more powerful poetry when he chooses not to write from his own experience.

Nicki was impressed by Phinder’s anagram and tried to take a fumbling crack at reading it before handing it back to him.

She was about to call a break but seemed to either change her mind seamlessly or forgot, because she went right ahead to introduce the final feature. When I saw it was Andrea Thompson, I suddenly realized why the room was packed with twenty year olds. These were probably a lot of the (mostly female) students from her creative writing class at OCADU. Nickie continued with her shtick of making up biographical details for the featured readers. She said that Andrea is also a milliner and that she has a large selection of hats for sale in addition to her books.

Andrea told us that every Black History Month she picks a hero to focus on and this year hers was Sonia Sanchez. Andrea’s first poem was a riff based on Sanchez’s “To Blk/Record Buyers” called “To White Anthology Editors” – “They aint write about nothing … signifyin can’t see the forest monkey gibberish … dark like words you can chew through.”

She then shared a poem about being mixed race – “Who I am depends on which side of my skin you stand on … inside is all flux and flow … the question … not who I am, but what.”

Her third poem was entitled “Being Unmade Human” – “Being artefact means to be dis-played … what doesn’t matter can’t be hurt …”

Andrea called her next two offerings “non-Valentines poems”.

The first was “Frog Medicine” – “He’s got thunder in his bones … tells me he is the last Cheyenne medicine man … fox runs down my street twice in one week … They were there that weekend and later after our big drunken fight about nothing …”

The second non-Valentines poem, she admitted to us beforehand that it was silly. She sang it to the tune of “My Favourite Things” – “Guys with ex-girlfriends who still do their laundry … Credit card criminals who live like kings … Second rate liars with lame cover stories … When it’s Friday night, when it’s Valentines, when I’m feeling bad …”

Her next poem, certain lines of which she sang, was called “The Great History of Soul-Speak” – “Seemingly innocent spirituals … Swing low sweet chariot … But these words were charms … ‘Chariot’ became ‘train’ … Where to board that subterranean? … Crosses burned till dawn … I aint had nothing but bad news … Our history will not be undone … A language deep as the Euphrates …”

Andrea’s last piece, I think she said had the title “The Next Stage of Evolution: Consciousness Revolution” and at the beginning, inside the poem and at the end, she inserted verses of the Bob Thiele and George David Weiss song, “What a Wonderful World” – “ … They’ve invented a bathmat made of moss … In Milan they’re erecting an apartment building made of shrubs and trees … These are not miracles. They’re simply good ideas … We’re trained into passivity … Clicking away our freedom … How many terms and conditions? Just give me the Black Eyed Peas’ latest release! … The word ‘possibility’ teases our lips like a raspberry … The world is a big blue wonder where anything is possible…”

I wonder what kind of bugs a bathmat made of moss would attract.

Of the Bosco Verticale in Milano, to be accurate, it is not made of shrubs and trees. That would be impossible. The trees are planted in big pots, and since these trees will be on the balconies, I assume that there would have to be pretty tall fences between the trees and the abyss so that climbing juniors won’t tumble to their doom. I’m also wondering about what the wind factor during storms will do to the trees higher up if they are not extremely deeply rooted. An analyst has also asked about the extra concrete that would be needed to sustain the weight of all those trees and the soil they would live in, and whether the carbon footprint of the concrete would be offset by the trees. You can also be sure that only the rich will live in this building or any ones like it.

I have heard Andrea Thompson read on a few occasions and though she always reads well (if a little pretentiously), I recall her showcasing at those times better samples of her poetry than she did this time at Plastiscene. It seems like she was trying to contrive her writing to fit a theme and so it mostly came out as sounding clichéd.

Nickie told us that the next Plastiscene would be on March 20^th. Then she said that a cynic is someone that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing, but a poet is someone that knows the cost of nothing and the value of everything.

She closed down the night with the recitation of the first two verses of “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats – “MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains …as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains …  But being too happy in thine happiness … O for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth, Tasting of Flora and the country-green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South! … With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and purple-stainèd mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim …”

On the way out, Cad told me that Goldie had vomited again. We discussed what might be the cause. Did she have the flu? Was it food poisoning from one of those free prepared meals they frequent? Cad said that before he left for Plastiscene, when she complained of a stomachache he gave her an over the counter pill that had been kicking around for months. Hmmmm.

At home I watched an episode of Dennis the Menace from 1959 in which the comedy was drawn from the problems of having a party line. I remember those problems well from my childhood. It was annoying and yet fascinating because of the culture of eavesdropping that built up around it because you would know who was being called by the ring combination that sounded on your own phone as well, and you knew that certain people had more interesting or revealing conversations than others. This was reprised years later in Toronto when in 1987 I moved into the Lansdowne and St Clair area, where there were still party lines and an old Italian lady used to occupy the line continuously. Sometimes she would cut in on my conversations with the question, “You finish?”

Flannery O'Connor

           

            On Monday in the late morning I started reading the last five sections of Nietzsche’s last essay in “A Genealogy of Morals”, but I got sleepy and went to bed for an hour and a half. When I got up again I had no problem finishing it. It seems to be mostly an argument against asceticism, but I’m going to try to read the whole book again to get a better grip on it.

            By the early afternoon it had been a full day since I’d put the cats outside when the exterminator came. Jonquil had come back in not long after I’d opened the back door and Amarillo returned a couple of hours later, but Daffodil was a no show. I think that I recall her staying away for at least a day after one of the bedbug treatments the previous autumn.

            I received a warning message that I had less than a gigabyte of space on my computer. I burned the King Crimson Thrak box set onto a DVD, which, after I’d deleted it, freed up four and a half gigs, I deleted some TV and radio shows that I already had on disk and I also got rid of a set of Adrian Belew albums of which I’d downloaded two files because I hadn’t known for sure at the time if they were the same. There were about five extra songs on one, so I just moved them over to the other and deleted the extra file. I freed up a total of eight and a half gigs. I’ve got more things I could get rid of if I need to.

            I finished reading Sinclair Ross’s “The Painted Door”. A lonely Prairie wife cheats on her workaholic and neglectful farmer husband who has gone out in a snowstorm. I won’t give away the ending.

            I read Flannery O’Connor’s dark story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” about an average 1950s southern US family on a road trip into the deeper south while there is an escaped murderer called the Misfit on the loose. After revealing themselves along the way to be moderately (though probably normally so for the era) racist and generally unpleasant people, the grandmother manipulates them to veer off course down a dirt road to look at a house she remembers. Just as she realizes that her memory is wrong, the cat she has been hiding gets free and jumps on her son, the driver, causing their car to roll over. Then the Misfit shows up.

I didn’t know anything about the author as I was reading the story, though I was thinking that it might be a fashion conscious Gay man because of the attention to detail in the description of the way the stylish grandmother was dressed. It turns out though that O’Connor was female and a southerner and that Catholicism played a major part in her writing. I didn’t pick up anything Catholic in the story. It seemed to actually poke almost sadistic fun at the over the top Bible thumping of the US south.

Acadian Hip Hop

            

            On Friday I had to skip song practice so I could get my place ready for a cockroach treatment. I worked steadily for about five and a half hours and yet I still didn’t get everything done that I wanted to. The Orkin guy didn’t come till around 12:30. I hadn’t been sure about whether or not I should put the cats out. He asked how bad the infestation was and I told him there were a lot of roaches, so he told me to put the cats out. That took me about five minutes. I showed him the problem areas: the stove and fridge sides of the kitchen, the bathroom and the cat feeding area. He told me that he was going to use a dust treatment but that I’d only have to leave for fifteen or twenty minutes.

            I took about $2.50 worth of empties to the Beer Store and then came home. I probably should have stayed out longer than fifteen minutes. I could feel that I was breathing the floating dust even after fifteen minutes. I don’t think that he dusted in all the problem areas but rather just the main one. I don’t know much about the dust, though it might be boric acid based, but it would be nice if it poisoned their poop, since the charming creatures eat each other’s feces. I saw a couple of roaches going crazy though as a result of the treatment. I put them out of their misery, or mine. Maybe misery is too strong a word. A reflex in response to danger makes them look like they’re panicking and since they don’t really have nerves they probably just shut down when they are killed.

            I went to PARC to teach my yoga class and on the way to the Healing Centre I ran into Bob Rose, who I’d met one day when he was occupying the Healing Centre with his anti-gentrification committee and their meeting went a little too long. We’d chatted but hadn’t formally introduced one another. He was on his way outside with a cigarette when he stopped to talk. It danced around in his hand and sometimes found its way to his mouth. It was in a hurry to get out of the building so it could burn. He told me that he should come and take my yoga class because he’s been neglecting his meditation. I pointed at his cigarette and told him it wasn’t helping him any. He informed me that he only smoked for on reason: “I need the tar to fill the potholes of my soul.” And then he walked away.

            Michelle, Anna and Diane came to my yoga class. Michelle came on time but Anna is always about ten minutes late. Diane was even later this time. I don’t have the chance to teach a well-rounded class when they are tardy like that. They asked about breathing exercises and I told them that when one learns to relax, one’s breathing becomes correct and that yogic breathing exercises are a type of psychic bulimia.

            After class I did my laundry, so I wasn’t finished until early evening. It would take days to put everything away again, so I sure hoped the treatment put a big dent in the infestation.

            On Radio Canada I heard a song called “My Dance Floor” by an Acadian band called Radio Radio (I assume one “radio” is pronounced the English way and the other in French as “Rahdio”). The song begins, “I see you dancing! Why are you dancing? Get off my dance floor! Get off my dance floor!” It really captures a certain attitude of certain people that go to dance clubs. I’ll bet the song is popular on the dance floors. This particular song is all in English, but the band frequently raps in an anglicized type of Acadian french called “Chiac” that also uses some aboriginal words.