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.