The Value of Art

            As I was leaving for class on Wednesday, September 28^th, I was informed by the guy that’s been renovating the apartment at the top of the stairs that a locksmith would be coming later to change the front door lock, so we’ll all be getting a new key.

            At College and Ossington there is an A&W, and it has a sign on the outside that reads, “Good Food Makes Good Food”. Doesn’t that mean that their cooks are also edible?

            I was slightly overdressed this time with leather jacket and long pants, and the jacket is not something I could take off and stuff in my backpack, because it’s just too big.

            Our lecture was on the value of art.

            First we had a review question to answer with our iclickers. I always get these things wrong. It’s a good thing we are only marked for participating.

            What is the value of art?

            He projected the image of the controversial “Voice of Fire” painting that hangs in the National Gallery in Ottawa. In 1990 our government spent $1.8 million of our tax money on a painting that consisted of three vertical stripes of different colours.

            The value of art is not found in how much it cost, how much it entertains us, its history, or its ability to educate. What is its value just for being art?

            He projected the image of an outdoor sculpture In Halifax that he found when he searched for “ugly sculpture”. He asked us vote with our iclickers on whether it was good or bad art.70% thought it was bad art. He asked for a comment from someone that liked it, so I raised my hand. I said it has a good form, and added that it looks like a penis that is vomiting and eating its own vomit. A young woman two seats away said, “Ewww!” Someone else said they like it because it’s funny.

            He then projected the image of an American Abstract Expressionist painting by Jackson Pollock.

            The Empiricist view is that good art makes us feel good and bad art makes us feel bad. He told me earlier that I was an empiricist. Based on that, I don’t think so.

            An Aestheticist’s view is that good art aesthetically delights while bad art aesthetically disgusts. When we develop taste we develop a distinctive feeling and not just mere pleasure.

            A Cognitivist says that good art enriches understanding, while bad art does not. Some literature, for instance, is not about taste, but craft, like good shoemaking.

            He projected the image of a barren red hill, at the bottom of which was a red grave with a cross stuck in the mound and a sad dog waiting beside it. Devlin offered that it doesn’t make us feel good. But then again, we can enjoy feeling bad, frightened or sad.

            Empiricism does not pick out a distinctive value that could be replaced with another.

            Aestheticism explains that the value of art actuates taste that is not replaceable by something else. Art can be valuable and abhorrent at the same time. This explains the distinction between pop art and fine art. Most pop songs are not aesthetically interesting. What about conceptual art like Fountain or paintings with words on the canvas?

            Non-aesthetic content such as sentiment can affect value.

            He projected the image of a photo of a black and white photo of a baby in a white woolen cap. The content is mundane and sentimental rather than deep or complex. The image does not say anything important. But if the baby picture had a story behind it, it could increase its aesthetic delight.

            Aestheticism can’t explain conceptual art, but maybe we have too narrow a concept of aesthetic delight. Aesthetic delight cannot be formed by content. A deeper worry is that it seems to be a purely intellectual component.

            The title of a work can have value, and intention can inform aesthetic delight.

            A Cognitivist would say that art is a craft that engages our intellect. But this doesn’t explain art’s distinctive value. Philosophy and science can also engage us intellectually. The Cognitivist would answer that art is a distinctive means to engage our intellect. But a cognitivist can’t explain aesthetic value.

            These three systems cannot be hybridized because they conflict.

            We can say there isn’t one value. Some we can measure in one dimension and some in another.

            When I got home I saw my next-door neighbour outside, waiting for the locksmith. He told me that the whole reason for changing the locks was because the guy on the third floor that was evicted hadn’t given his key back.

            That afternoon, Jonquil came in from out back, crying in the hallway, but wouldn’t come in. I went out and patted her a bit and then she came in to eat. She went to the ledge of my small eastern window and sat there for an hour or so, until I heard a loud noise and she started crying again. She’d knocked over my garbage can and was limping at the other end of the room. She was lying on her side and whining. She really looked like she was dying. Finally she quieted down and went to the bathtub to sit there.

            The landlord’s brother came and gave me a new key for the front door and asked for my old one. I liked the fact that my daughter had an extra key to the place where she grew up, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to get away with asking for an extra key, since she obviously isn’t living here any more.

            I finished watching the complete Honeymooners series. I think it was special not only because it was funny, but also because it was dark and even a little depressing. There were always the empty threats from Ralph of doing violence to Alice, and on top of that, the geometry of his violent gestures was always off. When he would mime punching her and exclaim, “Bang! Zoom!” The punch was always in one direction and the gesture he would make of her flying to the moon as a result of the punch was always in the opposite direction.

            I also recently finished listening to the entire David Bowie studio discography. The solid quality of his body of work through the 70s and 80s is extremely impressive. To consistently produce songs that were not only innovative, but also sounded good over a period of two decades was, I think, unprecedented. I can’t think of anyone else that did it in history. Not even the Beatles matched that achievement. His 90s and 21^st Century work however, though still interesting, didn’t have the aesthetic of his previous creations. He leaned heavily on overproduced material, and even when he came up with a good song, like for instance, 1999’s “The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell”, which could be done much better as a straight rock and roll song, he technoed the shit out if it.

            Jonquil went back outside at some point that evening but didn’t return. She’s showing the signs of being in her last days.

A Canadian is Someone Who Knows How to Make Love in a Canoe

            On Tuesday the guy who’s been renovating the apartment at the top of the stairs knocked on my door to tell me that his “brother” had called the exterminator to come on October 25. I didn’t know he was Raja’s brother. He doesn’t look anything like him.

            Jonquil came down the hallway from outside, crying, as I was getting ready to leave for Canadian Poetry class. She wouldn’t come into the apartment though, but rather ran back out onto the deck. I went outside to pat and reassure her She liked it, but still wouldn’t come back inside. Under my hand I could feel that she’d lost a lot of weight.

            I saw David in the hall and he asked me if I needed the money back today that I’d leant him the day before. Since I wouldn’t have time to stop at the supermarket after class, I told him that I didn’t need the money. He gently punched my shoulder and went upstairs.

            It was a pleasant evening. I wore an open long sleeved shirt over my tank top, but I could have ridden to campus without it. I expected it to be colder on the way home, so I had my hoody stuffed into my backpack.

            As I was going up Brock Avenue, I had to wait for the light at Dundas. A woman in black came quickly around the corner with her hand to her mouth. She looked like she was upset and about to cry.

            I rode along College, listening to the angry language of car beeps and then up the cobblestones of King’s College Circle to University College. I locked my machine to the wrought iron fence beside a pastel blue bike with a wide white seat that had blue floral patterns around its edge. The bulb of its horn was pastel pink, while the reed and mouth were a transparent pink. I expected Barbie to come out of her class, unlock it and ride away.

            The air conditioner was off in room 161, so I removed my long sleeved shirt. There were only two other people in the lecture hall and the only noise was of a woman behind me munching loudly on something from a loudly crinkling bag.

            George arrived right on time, once again full of energy. “Yes! We may begin, for cryin out loud! Let’s see if we can get to page 90! Holy smokes! I gotta stop sayin that!”

            He handed out sheets of paper containing the choices of topics for our first essay.

            He passed around two books to show us from his collection. One was an antique Gustafson book of poems and the other was a 1989 edition of a book by Irving Layton, illustrated with sketches of nude women.

            We began with A. M. Klein’s “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape” in which he argues for the importance of the poet in the era of World War II. As Shelly said, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

            The poet is a dissenting figure, invisible as phosphorous at the bottom of the sea, radiating into mythologies that may influence.

            He mentioned Gustafson’s book, “Rivers Among Rocks”.

            “To find a new function for the déclassé craft/ archaic like the fletcher’s …”

             A fletcher is an arrow maker. George added, that there was a crossbow murder in Ottawa twenty years ago.

            What is déclassé? Fallen in status.

            What is the craft? Poetry. George exclaimed, “Shout POETRY!”

            A neologism is a newly coined word. I guess George should know about that, since he coined the word “Africadian”.

            The poet becomes an invisible, anonymous background figure.

            Klein’s view revisits Pound’s declaration that artists are the antennae of the race.

            The task of the poet is to keep language vivid, clear, palpable and concrete so that the masses will not be deluded by the perverting tendencies of the political and commercial speech of demagogues and marketeers.

            In last night’s debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump there was vigour of language use.

            Klein says, “Somehow pay back the daily larcenies of the lung”. “Larcenies of the lung” are theft of the lung, as in white lies and propaganda that use language to hoodwink. It is the poet’s vital task to resist this. Shout the outrageousness of vivid speech, of poetry beyond entertainment. This poem was written at the birth of rock and roll. He was competing with Audrey Hepburn and Rock Hudson. How dare he!

            “Halo” of “anonymity”; “phosphorus” in the darkest depths.

George said, “Sock hop!” I added, “Roller derby!” though I meant “roller rink”.

            Pristine source of radiance of thought.

            Not just Ezra Pound but also as in W. H. Auden’s line from “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”: “Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives”. Yeats’s own political interventions were farcical.

            Klein’s poetry is quiet but radiant and transcendent. It keeps language true but it won’t raise any armies.

            “The world – he, solitary man – is breath to him” presents a vision of the poet as Adam: An individual given the task of naming.

            All poets radiate and create the world as an extension of their own being. “Poet” comes from a Greek word that means “maker”. The poet is a divine being, writing, speaking, and singing. Poets are all Adams, atoms, cannons of phosphorous pieces radiating to U of T students only.

            George took roll call, and he still said, “Thank you!” and “Welcome!” to each student that responded. For every name of a student that had enrolled in the course but had not showed up he said, “Not yet!” after calling their name.

            The next poet we looked at was Earle Birney. George noted that the editor of the anthology referred to Birney as having been controversial, but he didn’t say why. George said that it was perhaps because Birney was a Trotskyite. Trotsky had a cool look, and he had been the lover of Frida Kahlo, but he was assassinated with an ice pick.

            Birney was born one year before British Columbia became a Canadian province. He went to U of T; he spoke foreign languages; he was cosmopolitan; his poems reflect travel; he studied and was influenced by old English with its many compound nouns; his novel, “Turvey”, reflects on the Canadian army’s liberation of Holland.

George said that’s why Canadians get special treatment in Holland. I guess that since I’m not the type that puts maple leaf flags on my backpack, I got treated like I was from the US when I was there.

The first of Birney’s poems we looked at was his narrative poem, “David”. It’s written in quatrains or four line verses like a folk song and it’s very straightforward.
            I offered the view that it would make a great movie, and George agreed, comparing it to Deliverance. Margaret Atwood mentions the poem in her book, “Survival”.

The word “inimical” shares roots with “enemy”.

Trump said, “Hunky dory”.

George said that “David” has an anapestic rhythm, but when I looked that up I couldn’t see how that’s true. The lines are consistent, but I can’t see how a line like “David and I that summer cut trails on the Survey” has a “da da dum da da dum da da dum da da dum” rhythm. It seems more to me like iambic pentameter, as in “da dum da dum da dum da dum da dum da dum”.

The poem is ballet on the mountains with a full flask at first and lots of compound adjective nouns. Real Canadians are dancing over the mountains. Now they want to run pipelines through that range. It’s terrible! At this very moment, William and Kate are out there. The duke and duchess of … the woman behind me said, “Cambridge”. George continued, “With their children, George and …” The woman behind me said, “Charlotte”.

Boy scouts camping. “We reached to the slopes above timber and won”. “Won!” George exclaimed. “To snow like fire in the sunlight”.

When David dies, he’s a type of martyr. I said, “His life of going over is over.”

George said, “Make sure you test your handhold!” and then added that it sound like a Canadian Tire ad. Then he told us, “You can’t trust all-season! Get the real thing!”

He suggested there is a homoerotic element to the poem. I pointed out that it does say, “ … The two of us rolled in the blanket”. George seemed sure that Bob had pushed David over the cliff after he was injured, because he’d asked him to. It doesn’t actually say that, but maybe it subtly implies it.

The romance of mountain climbing.

“My feet squelched a slug and horror rose again in my nostrils”. George sees a symbolism here because he said, “Slugs eat dead things”, but it seems to me that would only work symbolically if slugs didn’t also eat everything else.

The imagery of horror films: buzzing flies, the scent of death, and the smell of decay. That’s what we’ll experience, George said, “if Donald Trump wins!”

“I saw the glimmer of tents”. All that’s left is the glimmer of civilization. “The last day of my youth.”

The poem has a babbling rhythm that is classically structured like a folk song.

Someone observed that it has no periods.

I offered that “David” is a reversal of the Biblical story of David and Goliath, in which Goliath slays David. George said, “Why not?” and then added that it could be seen as an anti-psalm; an anti psalm 23 poem: “The lord is my shepherd … I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …”

We then looked at Birney’s poem, “Bushed”, which presents a vision of insanity in the form of cabin fever. George said that his own mind slows down when he’s in Banff and he feels claustrophobic. He added that it is spooky at night because one can’t see the mountains.

Our next poet was A. J. M. Smith. George commented that his photo in the anthology looks like he’d taken “absinthe with sugar! Holy smokes!”

Smith was part of the McGill Movement that included A. M. Klein and F. R. Scott. There is some debate about his importance to Canadian poetry. He was a Modernist, combining Imagism with Classicism, using both free verse and rhyme.

We looked at his poem, “The Lonely Land”. I read it for the class.
            George said the poem aligns with the Group of Seven, Emily Carr and Tom Thompson’s “Jack Pine” painting. The spirit of the lumber oriented towns. It’s a simple and spare poem that looks like a scraggly pine on the page. The verbs are clear, sharp and lean. The sky is curdled from the north.

            George said that the last four lines: “This is the beauty/of strength/broken by strength/and yet still strong” could advertise an athletic team.

            The Group of Seven and these poets saw themselves as nationalists.

            Canadian troops were feisty, took no prisoners and did not back down. The war gave Canada pride and “unity”.

            The poem may refer back to Pratt’s “Shark” in its simplicity. Smith was characteristically a poet of the 1920s and 30s.

            We looked at his poem, “The Wisdom of Old Jelly Roll”. “Jelly Roll” is mostly argued to have been a euphemism for a woman’s vagina, though some argue that it’s symbolic of heroin. Smith, in this case probably leans towards the sexual reference. I suggested that he was specifically referring to Jelly Roll Morton. George agreed that could be the case. He said that it’s very Canadian to join African American culture with classical references. It’s a Canadian idea that a poet should be proficient in many forms.

            “How all men wrongly death to dignify.” George exclaimed, “How dare they conspire to dignify death!”

            Smith edited an anthology of Canadian verse, for which his introduction is important.

            At half time we took a break.

            Our next poet was Al Purdy. Purdy was an autodidact, which is an important word in Canadian poetry because there are many self-taught poets like him in our country. For Purdy, writing was a craft rather than an art. He tried it out and decided to pick up the trade.

            George said that autodidacts have a tendency towards mysticism because they don’t know any better.

            Purdy’s poems are rambles with no fixed subject. The subject is the process.  There is an indeterminacy that also relates to the above-mentioned mysticism. His poem “The Country North of Belleville” is canonical.

            Purdy was a poet of the every man. Some say that he was the Canadian Walt Whitman, but George says the claim is exaggerated and implausible because the average Canadian does not recognize him as its national poet. He added that “the average Canadian” is an NDP phrase. The editor of the posthumous collection of Purdy’s poetry was obviously comparing Purdy to Whitman when he gave it the title, “Starting From Ameliasburgh”, drawing the similar title from Whitman’s poem, “Starting from Paumanok”.

            Purdy’s poem, “Home Made Beer” is a love poem that is sort of a Bukowskiesque Streetcar Named Desire.

“I had to distribute the meals she prepared among the neighbourhood dogs, because of the rat poison” This reminded George that sometimes rats fall on the heads of people riding in gondolas in Venice.

It’s the kind of poem you could overhear as a real story in the right kind of Tim Hortons. It could very well have been a real story overheard by Purdy that inspired the poem. It’s Popeye and comic books. If you keep your ears open you will hear the greatest stories. Then George said he’d heard somebody say once, “That bitch is wearing my underwear!”

Our next poem was Purdy’s “Arctic Rhododendrons”. George asked for a volunteer to read it and a young woman raised her hand, but she ended up reading the poem next to it, “Wilderness Gothic” instead. George went along with it like that had been the plan all along.

I pointed out that Purdy used the word “yodel” in two poems in a row. George said that he evokes a country and western feel in his poems; though there is a classical feel as well. It’s a Canadian literary version of the painting, “American Gothic”. The frontier of the United States closed long before that of Canada. The church behind the couple in the painting is not under construction. He refers to a church steeple as “god’s belly scratcher”. George said that the image of a man hammering in the sky is an inversion of Christ. It sounds more like Thor to me.

George mentioned seeing elk going at it on the streets of Banff.

Then he told the story of a couple that owned a resort in Northern Ontario. She found that her husband had been killed by a bear but she saved her own life by beating the bear back with an umbrella.

“Sky navigation and mythopoeia.” Mythopoeia is a reference to Northrop Frye.

Our next poet was F. R. Scott. He was an Anglo-Quebecois and a learned man. A poète. Then George said there could be a girl group called “The Poettes”.

            Scott was one of the founders of the CCF, which later became the NDP. George called them “the knee dippers”. He was a mentor of Pierre Elliot Trudeau and a father of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. George said that Scott’s parody of Victorian poets; “The Canadian Poets Meet” is unfortunately not included in this anthology. I looked it up and found that it’s called “The Canadian Authors Meet”.

            We looked at the poem “Saturday Sundae”. The drug store that is described in the poem reminded George of Reid’s Drug Store (maybe Reed’s or Read’s, though nothing with any of those names shows up in a search of drug stores in Moncton). He said it’s a “grrreat drug store, with a phenomenal soda fountain!” He mentioned also, a New Brunswick made vodka called Snowfox. I guess New Brunswick has changed since I ran away.

            George said there’s the spectre of Freud in the poem. Maybe he meant in the line, “Sit sipping succulence and sighing sex”. References to marketing and packaging are a critique of capitalism. Escapism. Got caught up in Enquirer gossip before someone intervened. “What did he do? P Diddy did it!”

            I commented that although this poem is supposed to be a critique, he kind of makes it all very attractive.

            We looked at the poem, “Bonne Entente”. It was written before the quiet revolution. It’s a secular critique of Catholicism in Quebec. Profound apple pie.

            Our next poet was Irving Layton. He was a superstar in the 1960s. He was charismatic. George says that he thought he was the messiah. Maybe that’s because he was born circumcised. He had chutzpah and cojones. He joined the Canadian army in 1941 but left by 1943. George thinks Layton had a sense of guilt about not taking part in the war and that made him become hard edged later on. The editor of the anthology says that Layton was not a sensualist, but George disagrees. He was a bare-chested poet who wanted to match his cojones with yours. William Carlos Williams praised Layton. He was a Nietzschian, an Appolonian and a Dionysian. George recommends his book, “Fornalutx”. He was a Decadent poet.

            The poem, “Look, the Lambs Are All Around Us!” is an attack on prudery. Then George quoted the saying, attributed to Pierre Berton: “A Canadian is someone that knows how to make love in a canoe”. It’s an anti-WASP poem. “You toss me in the air”. Layton knew his Latin and Greek and taught them. This is a free love propaganda poem.

            Canadian Prime Minister W. L. McKenzie King talked to his dead mother through his dog and went to hookers every night.

            A harbinger of the flowering of Canadian poetry.

Taste

            It was raining on Monday, September 26th when I left for my Philosophy class, I wore my hoody with my motorcycle jacket zipped up tightly on top of it. I also wore my spring and fall leather gloves. My ass was wet before I even got north to Dundas.

            Since our lecture this time would be on taste, I showed Professor Russell and overlap with his course from my Canadian Poetry course. I’d found a quote on the subject of taste from Irving Layton, who my Philosophy instructor had never heard of: “High culture is that underarm perspiration odour of old men” and “Good taste is something to wipe our unstodgy behinds with.” Devlin commented that it made him curious to find out what Irving Layton’s poetry was like.

            At the beginning of class we had a review question to answer with our iclickers. The question was, “Can Danto’s barbarians appreciate the red squares that are works of art. Most of us said no, but it was a trick question. They can appreciate them, but not as art. We’ll have to watch out for this instructor come quiz time.

            What is taste?

            Sibley says that taste knows how to apply aesthetic concepts.

            Taste is a capacity to have a certain kind of sensory experience in response to sensory cues. It’s not purely contemplative. You feel something that has positive or negative valance, like pleasure and pain, but not pleasure and pain. This capacity is not merely natural receptivity like pleasure and pain, but must be cultivated and developed through practice and training and repetition of experience. Taste is a sensory property to feel positive or negative towards sensible properties.

            He showed us two images. One was a piece of colourful pop art and the other looked like a photograph of a magnified round metal object. He wanted to know if the images evoked nice feelings or disgust. I preferred the coloured one for the colours but the photograph for its shape.

            He told us that what we had just dome was exercise taste.

            He showed a slick photo of the new iphone beside a straight photo of the old Blackberry. Then he showed us two dresses worn by women at the Emmy awards. One was a sexy red dress in a classical style with one shoulder exposed. The other was a green dress with intricate embroidery that I thought made it more interesting but most people voted for the red dress.

            He then showed us an expensive bottle of wine beside a cheap one.

            Good versus bad taste. Given that capacity is a sensitivity, it can be more or less sensitive, depending on practice. Wine tasting requires developing the palate.

            Good taste is high functioning, sophisticated sensitivity.

            Bad taste is low functioning and unsophisticated.

            There are tastemakers, standards of taste and right or wrong aesthetic reactions to have. But there are no rules for taste.

            For Hume, good taste is the consensus among sophisticated critics with high functioning, practiced and developed sensitivity.

            Devlin mentioned Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes as being examples of this regarding taste in films. He opined that they offer a pretty good rough estimate.

            Why is sensitivity equated with good taste? One could be sensitive to colours, for example, and yet be considered to have bad taste by the world’s standards. Hume would not have a good answer to this question because for him, taste is related to culture.

            For Kant, taste is not a consensus. For him, good taste and aesthetic delight is a harmony between form in the world and form in the mind. The sophisticated perceiver contacts with properties of structure and in the mind of rational perceivers there is rational structure.

            After class I headed home, but stopped at Freshco to buy grapes, cinnamon bread and yogourt.

            When I got to my building, the landlord was coming out with the guy he’s hired to renovate the apartment at the top of the stairs. I told him that I’d seen a bedbug. He told me that Orkin had already come about the cockroaches last week, but I wasn’t home. He said he’d call them again.

            Jonquil came in from outside crying, after the rain. I think she’s been spending her time under the deck. When she comes home she acts distressed and goes places where she’s been trained not to go. I caught her lying with her stinky body on top of some clean laundry that was piled on the kitchen table, just as my upstairs neighbour, David knocked on my door. A few days ago I discovered that he’d left a bag with some cans of beer inside my door, and I’d been waiting to see him in the hall in order to thank him. He asked if I’d gotten the bar and I thanked him then. Then he asked to borrow twenty dollars. I didn’t hesitate, even though I only had thirty-three dollars and change. I gave him the twenty. He once gave me twenty dollars to buy a guitar tuner when all I did was ask if he had one I could borrow. Over the two or three years I’ve known him he’s probably given me a hundred dollars worth of beer. He’s also donated quite a lot of stuff that he’s acquired from the warehouse that employs him. He told me after I’d handed him the twenty that he’d give it back to me on Tuesday, plus ten dollars interest. Then he handed me a big bottle of olive oil in a PC bag. I don’t think that had been his intention at first, but rather a spontaneous thing. I found a cigarette in the bottom of the bag that I took out and threw it in the garbage.

Russ Meyer

            When I was getting ready for bed early on the Sunday morning of September 25th, I saw a bedbug for the first time since last November. It was an adult and when I killed it, it had blood inside, though the blood wasn’t fresh. I spent the next half hour searching all the old nooks and crannies near my bed where I used to find bedbugs during last year’s infestation. I didn’t see any trace of bedbugs anywhere. I grabbed the vacuum cleaner and cleaned the whole area of the baseboards that connect with my futon, and then I dumped the contents down the toilet. The best-case scenario is that I perhaps picked up one of the monsters when I was either sitting very briefly at the food bank or sitting for a whole hour in my classroom at U of T. I can only hope there was only one and that it didn’t have a chance to lay any eggs. One of the worst scenarios is that they are back in the building in other tenants’ apartments and that they have ventured back into my place while expanding their food horizons. I didn’t sleep very well that night.

            Since I have a choice to do my weekly Philosophy writing assignment on Sunday, Tuesday or Thursday, I’ve decided to always to mine on Sunday. This time I was responding to an essay entitled “Taste”, and here’s what I wrote:

            Carolyn Korsmeyer’s essay, “Taste”, outlines a history of the use of the concept of taste as a means of discerning aesthetic value. While she offers no conclusions of her own, she does acknowledge that Frank Sibley has achieved a more comprehensive analysis of the logic of taste than earlier thinkers on the subject. But all the philosophers Korsmeyer cites generally agree on two points. The first is that, because of the complex variety of aesthetic factors involved, the rules of taste within any given context or genre of art cannot be concretely defined. The second is that exposure to, combined with sensitivity to a wide variety of artworks within a given genre, such as music, will cause the student to develop that which would be considered “good taste” in discerning the value of the products of that genre. This could be applied, I think, to any area of artistic interest within which a variety of products exist, including artforms that are widely considered to be in bad taste. So one can effectively develop good taste about what is considered bad art, thus elevating critically shunned works, such as the pornographic films of Russ Meyer, to a higher qualitative assessment that recognizes them as works of art.

            At bedtime it had been a full day since I’d killed the one bedbug, and so far I had not found another.

Cats are Weirdos

            Even though we no longer get much sun on the back deck this time of year, on Saturday, September 24th I took advantage of the nice day and did my laundry again in the bathtub. Soon I’ll have to start taking it all to the Laundromat, but this time I thought I’d save money and time. Everything takes a lot longer to dry though out on the shadowy deck.

            The north-south streets were chilly as I headed for my bike ride, reminding me that I won’t be able to go out in shorts and a tank top much longer and that I should start carrying a long sleeved shirt in my backpack. I was fairly comfortable once I was in the sun, but I definitely felt motivated to move to maintain heat.

            On the Bloor bike lane, a man stepped out ahead of me and was casually walking at a very long angle. Firmly but without irritation I called, “Watch out behind you!” He exclaimed, “Oh! Sorry!” and did a little dance forward out of my way.

            At Bay Street there was a four or five piece jazz band playing, with drums, bass and a couple of saxophone players.

            The east end of the Bloor Viaduct smelled like oil. Maybe there had been an accident earlier.

            I rode up Broadview to O’Connor and then across to Coxwell, where I went north to explore the handful of residential streets with mostly upper middle class houses, just north of O’Connor.

            I stopped at the Starbucks in Old East York Village. Both washrooms were occupied, so I had to wait. I guess I was distracted looking at the products they have on display, like gourmet beef jerky of all things, that I didn’t notice one of the people leave the washroom. Another guy came in and walked right past me to open the washroom door that was locked when I tried it. If I’d walked in I would have noticed that someone else, like me was waiting, but maybe this guy was more unaware than inconsiderate.

            The jazz band was still there when I got back to Bay Street. They were playing Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”.

            My favourite cat, Amarillo has been gone too long for me to expect him to return. All I have left is Jonquil, who in the last week has started to behave strangely for her. While most of her life she has desperately clung to the apartment, except when she’s sure the door is open, now she goes outside and stays there all night long. Sometimes I go out back and see her just sitting there and staring like an old woman on a porch. She usually just comes in to eat, but when she does she stands outside the open apartment door for a while and cries as if it’s closed. When she does stay in the apartment for a while she goes to sit in odd places, like the bathtub.

Getting Old Aint for Sissies

            On Friday, September 23^rd, as Aesthetics class began, Professor Russell talked about the essays we would be starting to write in a few weeks. He urged us to deep dive into something in which we are interested.

            He reviewed the type theory by giving us the example of two red chairs. Their colour is their type, while each chair is a token or instance of red. They each instance the colour.

            I was relieved when the professor told us that we don’t lose marks for wrong iclicker answers. I’ve gotten every one of them wrong so far.

            He spoke about the source of art properties.

            Sibley says that the source of aesthetics is in taste.

            Walton categorizes essential art.

            Dicky says it’s art only if it is made to be art.

            Carny says it is art only if it reacts to past art.

            Aesthetic properties come from us interacting around an object until it becomes art. What is the obsession with us?

            Arthur Danto says that art properties come from art practices. The six identical red squares that he describes are distinct because we ascribe different properties to each one.

Six identical red squares were projected onto the screen. Each one was lettered and accompanied by a different story:

A.     A painting of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea.

B.     A painting depicting Kierkegaard’s psyche

C.     “Red Square,” a Moscow landscape.

D.     A still-life called “Red Table Cloth”.

E.      An unfinished painting that is just a surface primed in red

F.      Just something made that it is not intended to be a work of art.

Then we had an iclicker question, asking if our perceptions of the paintings were changed by the stories behind them. Only 25% said “a lot”. Devlin said that that quarter of the class are the ones who get Arthur Danto. I wasn’t among them, but I think I get him.

Danto says that story creates aesthetic and knowing different stories for identical works of art should give a different aesthetic for each one.

Spartans were trained to be fearless warriors and the legend is that they were also unaffected by emotion.

Professor Roberts asks us to imagine another society, but this one has no art. He says, let’s call them the Nartans. Danto would say that if the Nartans were shown the six red squares they would react the same to each one.

A five-dollar bill has value, but only depending on our currency practice. Our currency practice is a story that ascribes the value of five dollars to a certain coloured piece of material. It is the same with the red squares. They take on the value ascribed to them by the practice.

I stayed after class, since there was no other class waiting to get in. A few of us were asking him questions about the lecture. I told him the story of when I was fifteen and going to Anglican Church Young Peoples meetings. Our group was asked to create a work of art for the next meeting and then to bring it in to discuss it. I was lazy and waited till the last hour or so before I had to show my work of art. I went into my father’s workshop and grabbed three pieces of different coloured wire, and then I twisted them together. When I got to the meeting I just made up something on the spot as to what my work of art meant and what the different colours symbolized. Everybody thought that my sculpture was the best. I asked our instructor if that was what his lecture about the identical red square works of art with the different stories meant. He said it wasn’t because the different stories all describe a process. I’m not sure if I agree with him. I mentioned how non-minimalist works of art like Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” don’t need a story. He argued that more complex works do have a story behind them but that we just don’t notice it. I countered that no one was going to take several copies of Dali’s painting and offer a different story. He said that they could though, and offered that he didn’t know if anyone has done it but that someone could take an unaltered replica of the Mona Lisa and present it as something else. I suggested that they could call it “Hitler”.

            An old man in the supermarket asked me to reach for the 3% yogourt on the upper shelf for him. He thanked me and declared that there are advantages to being tall, but also to being short. I was going to say that an advantage to being short was being able to have sex in the back of Volkswagens, but I didn’t. He said that it’s no good being old though. Then he added, “You’re getting up there!” I thanked him for reminding me. He assured me that I’ve got another fifty years to go. I told him, “That would make me a hundred and eleven!” He said, “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Mind Over Matter

            When I arrived at the food bank on Thursday, September 22^nd, the delivery truck was backed up in the driveway. Since parking my bike in the usual place would cut through the unloading relay line, I locked it instead on the wrought iron fence across the street.

            The wrestler was holding court near the brick wall around the corner with an entourage of three smoking women (though as far as I can tell, he doesn’t smoke). The closest person who wasn’t smoking was a woman with white hair. I asked her who the last person in line was and she pointed to a grey haired man in a beige t-shirt and a blue baseball cap. I made sure I knew where he was the whole time I was waiting.

            A car pulled up with a bread delivery from St Francis Table. Some of the guys from the line-up walked over to help carry the bags into the food bank.

            The truck pulled out, so I moved down the driveway.

            I was on the last few pages of the French language tween book, “Klonk”, which I’d been reading all summer. It had taken me so long because most of my reading time had only been while waiting at the food bank. A guy with an arm cast was sitting over by the wall on the other side of the driveway. As usual, I was reading the book and looking up words in a French dictionary as I went along. The guy with the cast called out, “It must be hard to read two books at the same time!” I explained what I was doing.

            A few minutes later, he got up and walked over to a tree that was near where he’d been sitting. There was a strip of cardboard sitting across some of the branches. He began moving the cardboard with a stick, and at first I thought he was trying to remove the cardboard from the tree, until I realized that he was adjusting the cardboard’s position in relation to the movement of the sun so that the cardboard would cast a shadow onto him where he was sitting. Very clever.

            A group near the door were having a conversation about searing around children. A woman related that she’d heard a mother on the street tell her child to, “Shut the fuck up!” Joe, the manager, told them that he’d seen a mother hit her kid so hard that she fell into the street and got hit by a car.

            The same group later talked about male erectile dysfunction. The wrestler insisted that it’s just a matter of mind over matter, because he’s pushing sixty and he’s never had any problem. If he’s never had a problem then how does he know it’s a state- of-mind-based problem? One would have to have had the problem and conquered it with one’s mind in order to be able to have some credibility in making the claim that it’s a matter of attitude.

            I finally finished reading “Klonk”. It’s about an eleven-year-old boy with five adolescent siblings. He’s dreading becoming an adolescent because it’s obvious to him from observing his brothers and sisters that adolescence is a disease that makes one both ugly and insane. What the boy loves more than anything else is playing hockey, but then he breaks his leg during a game and winds up in a cast. While he is temporarily disabled though, none of his able friends have time for him. There is a permanently disabled boy in this class who everyone calls “Klonk” because no one can pronounce his real name. No one ever has time for Klonk. But one day the narrator sees Klonk disappear while reading a book. It compels him to approach Klonk later and they become friends. Klonk inspires the boy to start reading and loving books and that causes him to grow up to be a writer.

            I came back at 13:30 with the number 16.

            My helper was the tiny older woman from the Philippines. As I was giving her my number, another worker approached her to declare that she was, “Really tall!” “Yes!” she agreed jokingly, “I am!” Then he touched her in the chest and said, “Right here!” Then he added as if he thought there might be some misunderstanding, “In your heart!” “You think so?” Then Bruce came to ask, “Is this a kitchen meeting?” which seemed to help get things moving.

            From the top of the first set of shelves I took some raspberry Jello. There were two unmarked packages of jelly powder that she also encouraged me to take, so I did.

            Further down I took a box of energy bars made only from dates, coconut, almonds and cashews.

            She gave me a small can of chipotle peppers.

            As usual there were a few handfuls of packaged snacks, such as fruit gummies, date bars and fig bars. Among them though, I noticed later, were three individually wrapped tea bags of German fruit tea and another one of Second Cup rum tea.

            I took a bag of rice. There were no canned beans other than green string beans, but I took a can of those.

            There hasn’t been any canned tuna for the last few weeks, but I took a jar of peanut butter, even though it was the kind with sucrose. I thought I’d keep it in case I run out of natural peanut butter.

            She asked, “Do you want honey?” Of course I wanted honey. She put two handfuls of single serve containers into my bag, but when I got it home I saw that it was honey mustard sauce. It was too good to be true. I wonder if she really thought it was honey.

            Finally, from the regular shelves I took a package of honey-almond Cheerios.

            Across the aisle in the cold goods section there was a choice between some kind of yogourt with candy on top and two packages each of Astro blueberry and strawberry yogourt. I took the Astro.

            There was a choice between a container of frozen ground chicken and a package of bologna. I took the chicken, which I’d earlier heard a woman speak about in the line-up. She’d said she could figure out what it was because it was more the texture of pate than ground meat. It’s no good for burgers unless one mixes it with breadcrumbs, but it wouldn’t have all of the additives that one would get from bologna.

            From the bread section I just took a loaf of un-sliced seed bread.

            The vegetable lady gave me a red pepper, two apples, seven potatoes, five gnarly carrots, two cho-chos, two onions and a bunch of kale. Then she looked at me curiously and declared, “You’re a very quiet man!” There are several instances that I can think of in which I’m not quiet, but I just said, “Not when I’m singing.” “You’re a singer?” Maybe it was a stretch, but I nodded. “Rock?” I shrugged and answered, “Just my own stuff.”

            I went for a bike ride in the late afternoon. I figured that I might as well take advantage of the daylight while I can on nice Thursdays and Saturdays, since it’s going to get too dark soon for me to take any long trips to explore the east end.

            At Huron and Bloor a young woman was wearing ten-centimetre stilettos but wearing cut-offs, a tank top and a backpack. It looked okay from an ogler’s perspective, but it’s probably a fashion faux pas.

            At Sherbourne and Bloor, a young man standing on the sidewalk exclaimed to the young woman sitting cross-legged on the concrete, “Man! My nose is fuckin burning!” Gee, I wonder why his nose was burning.

            I rode to O’Connor and Glebemount while having had a strong urge to pee for several blocks before that. I was really holding myself as I made it for the Starbucks in Old East York Village.

            Once relieved, I went down Coxwell to the Danforth.

            At Pape, the conga drummer was there again with his toddler in the stroller. The boy was encouraging his father to play and shouting, “Bang! Bang!” Then when he started to play the child kicked his legs happily to the rhythm.

Death by Hamburger

            Wednesday September 21^st was another warm day.

Before going to Aesthetics class I went to my professor’s office to show him a hard copy of the first paragraph I’d written for the weekly writing assignment because I wanted to make sure I was on the right track. He read it and then surprised me by saying it was exactly what he was looking for.

            Additionally, I told him that I was confused by the idea, as presented on Monday, that there is a difference between Picasso’s Guernica as a painting and the idea of Guernica as a category of art. I argued that the image is still the image whether it was painted a certain way or not. I said that a humanoid alien from a society exactly like ours other than that they do not have painting would perceive and react to Guernica in the same way that we do. He told me that my view makes me an Empiricist. He said that we wouldn’t be covering Empiricism in the course but there is no particular reason why not. It’s just the way it turned out. He suggested that when I write my essay, I could argue against Walton from the Empiricist perspective, if I do a little research first.

            He stressed that the views presented in the course are not necessarily his own, but he will be arguing on behalf of each view.

            Even though it was warm outside, it was quite chilly in the classroom.

            The subject of our lecture was the ontology of art.

            An artistic medium is an action by which an artist communicates, such as through strokes of a paintbrush. A medium is not any kind of vehicle for artistic communication.

            What kind of thing is an artwork? How do we explain singular, unrepeatable artworks such as the Mona Lisa that is behind bulletproof glass at the Louvre and repeatable artworks like projections of the Mona Lisa on a screen?

            However, a reproduction of David LaChapelle’s “Death by Hamburger” is not a copy. Even though the copies are not identical, all of the particulars are together as artwork. Every time you hear Drake’s “One Dance” you are listening to the original work of art. I asked, “What about the master copy?” But maybe repeatable works are parts of wholes. But if we identify a work with a greater whole, the whole gains or loses parts with each copy.

            Particularism states that a work of art, like the Mona Lisa, is a particular thing.

            Deflationalism states that a work of art may be no thing at all. We speak of fictional things, like John Snow or Santa Clause, as if they were real. Works of art may be fictional in the same way.

            Davies claims that an artwork is not the thing we see or hear before us but the process that led to it. He would say that Drake’s song as we hear it is not the artwork.

            The type theory states that a work of art is a type of thing but not a particular thing, while instances of each type are tokens. A dog is a type of animal. Every dog is an instance of the dog type of animal. The projection of Death By Hamburger on the screen is a token of the original Death By Hamburger. In the case of the Mona Lisa, type and token are one and the same. Drakes’s song “One Dance” is a type of song and one listens to a token of it. But if we identify a token with a type, all tokens may deviate from their type.

            When I left the Sidney Smith building the sky was bright but overcast with high clouds. I would have been able to take a bike ride to the east end without getting sunburn. Maybe I was lazy or maybe I was tired from class, but I headed home. I turned right from St George onto College. There was a red light at Huron, and I would normally wait for it to change, but this time I got off my bike and crossed the street and then went down Huron, even though it doesn’t go all the way to a major intersection. I wasn’t thinking. Near Baldwin I saw some interesting graffiti on the side of a building in an alley, so I took my camera out. My camera didn’t work though. Opened up the battery casing and found that it’s gotten a little rusted from my riding in the rain. I switched the batteries though and it worked. I turned right on Baldwin and then walked my bike to find the next open space across the streetcar tracks. Passing the liquor store I ran into Tom Fisher, who haven’t seen in at least a year. He asked what I was doing and I said I was coming from a U of T class. He said almost proudly that he’s too lazy to go to university and that he just reads on his own, and then declared that it’s a better way to learn. He reminded me that today was Leonard Cohen’s birthday and that he has a new album coming out. Then he went into the liquor store.

            I stopped to get a few things at Freshco on the way home and noticed that suddenly there is space to park a bike there again. The worker must have passed my message onto a manager who listened and got something done about all the stranded bikes.

When the Saints Go Marching

            Tuesday, September 20^th was warmer than the week before. Riding up Brock Avenue on my way to Canadian Poetry class, I crossed Gordon Street and heard an ice cream truck that had just turned onto it playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” to lure child soldiers out for treats.

            There was a long line of busses on College Street. I finally got ahead of them, but so did the young woman with the short skirt and the skull tattoos. I was faster, but she kept cheating by going through red lights, so she stayed ahead until she turned right on Spadina.

            Zack, who I’ve been thinking is our TA, arrived. He gave me either a shy or indifferent nod as he walked past. As the night went on, it began to seem that he is just another student and not actually a TA. I think George is just handling the whole course by himself.       

            While I was waiting I edited E. J. Pratt’s “The Shark”, because I find that it’s two verses too long and I didn’t like his use of the word “tubular”. It seemed to me that too much description robbed the poem of atmosphere and the shark of mystery. Here’s how I think it should go –

           

It was tapered

            and smoke blue

            and as he passed the wharf

            He turned

            to snap at a flatfish

            that was dead and floating

            and I saw the flash of a white throat

            and a double row of white teeth

            and eyes of metallic grey

            hard and narrow and slit

            I also tried to write a modern urban version, based on my own experience_

            A rat ran across Bathurst

            on its nightly rounds

            nose like a dull dagger

            spotted like a heifer

            belly low to the ground

Its back was so much higher

than its scavenger’s beak

            hence that rat-slant forward

            but it was much bigger

            than any rat I’d seen

            So I started to wonder

            if it was really a rat

            and on my computer

            searched “Large rat shaped creature”

            and it wasn’t what I’d thought

            It was a southerner

            perhaps escaping politics

            when it crossed the border

            playing possum up here

            to avoid the rednecks

           

            George Elliot Clarke arrived, full of energy, exclaiming, “Days are getting shorter! Holy smokes!”

            Zack told him about a gallery show on September 24, made up of portraits of poets.

            George moved away from the podium on the far right to a table in the middle of the front of the room. On top of that he placed a portable podium.

            When he took roll call he said, “Thank you! Welcome!” after each response. When he called out “Christian Christian”, he told me, “Cool name!”

            Of all the Canadian poets we would be covering in the course, he told us to think about ways of putting poets together.

            He said that the full poem “The Titanic” was not done justice by the excerpt in our anthology.

            E. J. Pratt was born in what was then not part of Canada, the separate British colony of Newfoundland. He was 22 when Alberta and Saskatchewan were created.

            In 1905 the Canadian government gave big chunks of the north to both Ontario and Quebec.

            Pratt was one of the chief modernists coming to the craft as Canada was coalescing.

            It’s in the Canadian constitution to continue to create provinces. Our constitution is still not complete because we have no signature from Quebec.

            George asked us rhetorically if we would be happy with Canada having a King Charles and a Queen Camilla. He mentioned Harry’s Nazi armband joke and asked if we’d be happy with a King Harry.

            Pratt was a minister in Newfoundland and so in having to bury drowned fishermen, he was well aware of the risks of the sea and the toll of storms.

Beginning with E. J. Pratt, the University of Toronto became and continues to be the epicentre of English Canadian poetry. George stressed that he was not just bragging because this is just the truth.

Pratt had a BA in Philosophy and a PHD in Theology.

English Canadian poets have a history of knowledge, so you could put them in the Cash Cab and they would walk away with all the money.

Pratt wanted to use epic poems to tell the story of our nation.

His poem, “Brébeuf and His Brethren” was a WWII propaganda poem that used the problematic casting of equating the Jesuits with the Allied army and indigenous people with the Nazis.

His poem, “The Last Spike” leaves out the people that actually built the railroad: the Chinese.

            An Epyllian is a mini epic.

            George says that “Titanic” is a very successful poem that addresses the dilemma of humanity. The iceberg is a response to hubris.

            T. S. Eliot said that poetry must be reasoned and anchored in fact. He found Tennyson to be preachy and gooey with sentiment. George said, “He wanted to replace sugar with acid and honey with LSD! Just kidding! A prizefighter of test tubes! Just kidding!” A poet needed to be seen as modern and not sentimental. Pratt brought scientific vocabulary to Canadian poetry.

            “The Shark” is an Imagist poem. Imagism is about clarity of the description of the image. It has to be concrete. It needs concentration. It was a rebellion against the 19^th Century use of grandiose terminology about qualities such as love and faith. They got rid of steady meter, which allowed them to write in the rhythm of speech, move away from abstract nouns and to experiment with free verse. They moved away from Victorian metaphors such as guns being projectiles of love. They denied the oppression of war. Repetition is also a feature of Imagist poetry. Haiku became an important part of the Imagist movement.

            Pratt’s “The Shark” uses an economy of description and industrial imagery, such as describing it as metallic grey. This made me think of the shark he was describing as a robot.

            George said that the shark sounded like Spielberg’s shark in the movie, “Jaws”. “It knows the harbour!” he exclaimed dramatically.

            He said, “Who has not been to the Ship Inn in St John’s has got to go, but it has very steep stairs. St Johns is a hilly town and Telegraph Hill would be an easy place to commit suicide from.

The word “base line” in Pratt’s poem is architectural. Pratt shows that he can take on Eliotic principles.

The description of the shark as “tubular” reminded George of Tubular Bells, but he though that was by Deodato. I had to correct him that it was Mike Oldfield.

The phrase “smoke blue” calls to mind factories.

Of Pratt’s poem, “Sea-Gulls”, I commented that called seagulls the “wild orchids of the sea” was beautiful way to describe them. But Patrick disagreed, saying that was making something beautiful out of an ugly bird. I think he’s not being objective in referring to seagulls as ugly. If there were a hundred thousand pink flamingos or white doves that lived on the streets of Toronto, we would begin to think of them as ugly as well.

George agreed with Patrick that there are disgusting things about seagulls, especially how they destroy shorelines with their guano. I’d always thought that guano was bat shit, but it turns out that it’s also bird feces.

The poem has an abba ccdd rhyme scheme.

With the word “frieze”, abstraction enters the poem

“within green hollows” is between the waves.

George told us that he considers Pratt’s poem “Erosion” to be successful. Just as storms have over the centuries eroded the landscape, in killing her loved one, a storm has eroded a woman’s face in an hour.

Pratt’s poem “The Titanic”, from line 40 to the end, is very tight, well informed and put to good use. Because he was a minister, Pratt probably found rhyme to be a good way to comfort people.

The decasyllabic lines, though not quite iambic, are a nod to classical poetry.

Dorothy Livesay was another U of T graduate. Her poetry was influenced by Symbolists such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Verlaine.

Symbolism is the idea that an object may stand for other things. Baudelaire would say that we do not need gods. A woman’s hair can be the ocean and her perfume can be transcendence in a secular divinity. For Rimbaud, vowels were colours.

Livesay was a contradiction in that she was both a symbolist and a socialist.

She founded Contemporary Verse II. George encouraged us to submit verse to CVII. He said they are currently taking poems on the subject of hair. Whenever I hear that magazines are accepting poems on a given theme, it’s never a theme on which I’ve ever written a single poem.

Socialists want to pinpoint the enemy of the people, so Livesay doesn’t want to be obscure. She uses an epyllion or documentary poem to point to the social facts and not art for art’s sake. George said, “She’s Occupy! Own the means of production, for cryin out loud! Tear up the seats in the lecture theatre and throw them at the professor!”

In her poem, “Spain” she begins to talk romantic and obscure. It may be inspired by McRae’s Flanders Fields. George says she revels in abstraction and it could be a cleaner poem. He was trying to work with her inaccurate imagery.

George told us that on the weekend he was in Eden Mills where they have “dandelion ice cream!” He said it’s known as a “police village” and wondered if that means that it’s a self-policing village.

She pioneered the documentary poem when she wrote “First Fisherman” based on interviews. It is a narrative lyric suite, which captures the reportage of reality. It is an example of vers libéré, which is liberated verse like blank verse, though not iambic but rather in quatrains, like Paradise Lost. She uses vers libéré to indict the government for a federal crime.

Besides mistrust based on the war with Japan, white fishermen wanted to destroy the Japanese fishing industry.

He recommended “Obasan” by Joy Kogawa and “Hooked” by Caroline Smart

George then called a break and shouted, “Whoo!”

I showed him my translation of Lajoie’s “Un Canadien Erant”. He said, “This is great! I should get you to read it to the class!”

When the break was over, George told the class that I’d brought a French Canadian poem, but before he had a chance to ask me to read it, I told him, “Let’s wait till a time when we’re not behind schedule.”

He thanked me for being sensitive to our needs and then we moved on to Dorothy Livesay’s “The Unquiet Bed”. It’s a nice poem. George asked for a volunteer to read it and so Patrick raised his hand and then read it with mock drama.

George’s reaction to the poem was to start singing the spelled out part of Otis Redding’s song, “Respect” as sung by Aretha Franklin. Then he said, “It’s not Barbie and Ken!” but added, “Though Barbie is a feminist icon.”

We next looked at Livesay’s “Bartok and the Geranium”.

            George told us that verbs are the most important part of a poem, especially when they are used in the present tense. “Stories breed in the north.” Using a noun as a verb makes a poemerful impression of imagery.

The next poet was Ralph Gustafson. He was an Anglo Quebecois. Some of Gustafson’s poetry was war propaganda. Patriotic rhetoric. His syntax was tortured, sometimes convoluted and messed up.

The date at the end of “S.S.R., Lost at Sea.” The Times was September 3, 1939, which was the date of Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

In the poem “Wednesday at North Hatley” there is a line, “The garden fills with white”. George wanted us to offer suggestions as to the significance of “fills”. I suggested that it might imply completion.

George says there is less strain in this poem. It’s a good example of sensitivity to place. Gustafson is moving towards a more philosophical approach here. Not striving for effect or skewing speaker’s world. It’s an uncomplicated slice of life poem.

George recommended that we read Gustafson’s “Rivers Among Rocks”.

Stéphane Mallarmé argued that sound is more important than words in poetry. He says that Mallarmé’s poetry is a kind of sonic surrealism. Gustafson was influenced by Mallarmé, but starting around 1960 he began to write about himself.

George challenged us to interpret the poetry of Wallace Stevens.

We looked at Gustafson’s “The Newspaper”. George says it’s inconsistent. The reproduction of the speaker’s consciousness throws us out of the poem. It’s too focused on the speaker. There was lots of discussion about this poem until I finally intervened and declared that Gustafson’s “State of Affairs” deals with the same idea of public complacency much better. George agreed, because of it’s shock effect it drives the point home much more clearly.

As we got to A. M. Klein, it was clear that we were way behind schedule.

Klein was a multilingual poet from Montreal, which in his day was Canada’s most diverse city. Cosmopolitanism infuses his verse. He was Canada’s first multicultural English poet. He catalogued and deciphered like Dionne Brand or Gwendolyn MacEwen. He was a socialist and he experimented with Joycian playfulness.

A yahrzeit in Jewish tradition is the anniversary of a relative’s death.

The Bel Shem Tov was a mystical rabbi.

Heirlooms are books inherited from the father.

Read the lines the lines of “Heirloom” in connection to the Anglo French rivalry. The poem pushes back against ethnocentrism.

George recommended John Porter’s “The Vertical Mosaic”, which paints a portrait mid-20^th Century Canada in terms of wealth and power and the lack of it.

Klein’s poem “Autobiographical”. This poem draws on all the language and energy of Montreal. “The jargoning city …” The audible cinema of the streets of this working class part of Montreal. It’s Keatsian because of its sensuality.

George said the loonie is a sweaty coin and the loon is a psychological viper, so we need a different animal on our dollar coin.

As George was reading parts of the poem out loud and was getting into the rhythm, he suddenly started singing, “When The Saints Go Marching In”. He said, “Music draws us back!” The poem has Beat elements.

Then George shared a “Factoid: By the age of 21, you will have already heard all the music you will be nostalgic for, for the rest of your life.” I think he’s wrong about that one. There are songs that I’ve heard since I turned 21 that I have nostalgia for.

He told us that there is a video on YouTube of Luciano Pavarotti and James Brown singing “It’s A Man’s World” together. “Holy smokes!” He also mentioned being nostalgic for James Brown’s “Lost Someone”.

We finished by looking at Klein’s poem “Sisters”. George commented that crossing cultures is a very Canadian thing to do.

            As we were packing up, I told George that I’d heard an ice cream truck playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on the way there. He thought that was an interesting coincidence.