Diane Pugen

            I was scheduled to work at OCADU on Tuesday at midday, so at 9:30, after doing all of my usual morning tasks that started at 5:00, I decided to lay down for an hour to ensure that I wouldn’t feel sleepy while posing. I didn’t seem to need that much rest so I got up after 45 minutes. Before leaving for work I packed up my new laptop with the intention of working on my essay during the breaks. As soon as I was going out the door I had to use the toilet, but I didn’t have time to go at home so I held on during my ride downtown. I got to work with at least fifteen minutes to spare, as usual, so after dropping off my stuff in the classroom I went to the washroom. Holy crap! I must be bigger on the inside like the Tardis!

            When I came out of the Loo, a different teacher than Diane said hi to me. I had worked for her before a few times but had forgotten that her name was Echo Raillton. She informed me that Diane Pugen was in the hospital after having had a stroke. I wondered if she’d ever had a stroke before and Echo answered that apparently she had but she is expected to make a full recovery again. I told Echo that Diane had been the very first art teacher I’d ever posed for back in 1982.

            I turned on my laptop, relieved that I had one again with a functional battery. I stuck in the flash drive that contained my essay, but when I tried to open it I realized that I’d forgotten to install Word on the new portable. This was the second time in three days that I’d been stymied from using my laptop for homework at work. I worked instead on rereading Armand Ruffo’s “The Thunderbird Poems”. I still don’t think the poetry is very good.

            Echo’s teaching style is very different from that of Diane. While they are both very encouraging of their students’ efforts, Diane is more driven towards getting lots of drawing time in and not wasting model hours that are much more dear than they used to be. She also likes to have the class draw lots of short poses and so I’m usually bound to have a workout when I model for her. Echo is more relaxed and likes longer poses. She did mark someone as absent when they came in half an hour late though.

            During my coffee break three students gave presentations, one on Goya, another on Warhol and a third on the Stone Age statue known as the Venus of Willendorf. The first two students sat by Echo’s laptop and gave their talks in almost impossible to hear voices. Only the last one stood in front of the screen to project his oration.

            Echo provided a sheet of newsprint for students to write greetings to Diane. At the end I asked if I could write something and I wrote: “Dear Diane, I think that you misunderstood. We wanted you to demonstrate your brush stroke.”

It was an easy gig.

I stopped at Freshco on my way home where I bought grapes, milk and yogourt. I was hoping that they still had their deal on 925-gram cans of Maxwell House coffee for $6.99. I saw someone carrying one but there were none that I could see on the shelf. I walked around for about ten minutes to see if there was a display, then I went back to the coffee section, bent a little further over and saw there were two left, and that they were the dark roast too. The line-up for each cashier were quite long, but luckily the head cashier walked up to me and told me she was opening number five. She’d probably singled me out because I was halfway down the express line but it made me feel special anyway. 

Ukulele

            In a dream I was working on ideas to fix the United States but none of them worked.

            My left knee was still a little tender on Sunday, five days after I’d banged it on my bike, but it didn’t impede me from putting weight on it for the yoga poses that required that I do so. 

            I spent most of the day getting caught up on writing about the many events of the last couple of days and so Sunday was not very eventful.

            That night I watched another episode of Laramie. It was a pretty typical western of the late 50s with nothing really outstanding about it. Two men run the stage stop in Laramie, Wyoming. They have a hired hand that is played by Hoagy Carmichael and the owner of the business also takes care of his little brother, who is about twelve. Every episode, Carmichael sings part of a song and this time he sang some of his own “The Ballad of Sam Older”. The song seems to always be played during a highly emotional moment in the story and since this particular song is about someone shooting his friend in the back it was meant to convey to the boss of the stop that he had abandoned his partner. His partner’s brother had shown up at the stop after having deserted from the army and he wanted help to escape to Canada. The owner did not approve of deserters so he refused to help by giving them a map to a certain trail that would get them safely across Montana and into Alberta. They struck out on their own but it seemed the song helped the guy decide to help them. Carmichael plays the songs on a ukulele. But at the time that these stories are supposed to take place the ukulele was only just being introduced to Hawaii by the Portuguese. The ukulele didn’t hit the west coast of the States until a decade into the 20^th Century so I doubt if Hoagy’s character Jonesy would have had one.

Queue Jumping is Not an Olympic Sport

            On Saturday there was a smaller group than usual gathered outside the back of the food bank when I arrived. I assumed that this was because the monthly social services, Ontario Works and ODSP cheques had been issued, so some regular food bank clients temporarily had the means to acquire groceries without standing for a long time in the cold. I asked a small group that were standing in the middle of the driveway who the last person was and I learned that it was the large, friendly woman with the glasses.

            I passed most of my time reading “The Thunderbird Poems” by Armand Ruffo. The poetry was inspired by the life and work of Norval Morriseau, though for the most part I don’t think it’s very good. It reads more like editorial commentary in verse form than it does a poetic work of art. This is my second reading of the book because I plan to write about my idea that writing poetry merely as a supplement to a given subject will always fail to elevate it. It was cold, so I took my glove off each time I needed to turn a page and then quickly put it back on to read.

            Not a single person in the line-up was smoking for most of the time we were waiting.

            Angie came out to yell at a man that was sitting by the door drinking a coffee. She told him that he’d thrown something in the wrong garbage can and not to take food that he didn’t want to eat. Before she stormed back inside she declared, “And that was your last coffee!” As far as I could tell, what happened was that he had gone inside to get a coffee, took one of the many pastries available to everyone, but decided that he didn’t like it, threw it away and took another one.

            There were two dogs there that day. One that looked like a white German Shepherd was with a young, tall, somber caregiver over by the fire escape. Whenever anyone asked questions about the dog, he’d answer in a very low voice in as few words as possible. The canine was whining nervously and the man complained that it was because everybody was bothering her. All people were doing though was looking at the animal from a distance. The other dog may have been a toy poodle and the woman that had brought it there was not it’s principle caregiver, since she told “Nina” that later they’d be going to see her “mommy”. She went inside to get a coffee and came out as well with some kind of golden, crumbly pipe shaped hollow pastry that I think is supposed to be filled with cream. She broke off a piece and gave it to the dog, saying, “Your mommy’s not going to like that I gave that to you!” The dog was very excited and wanted more, but the woman exclaimed, “Nina, you act like you’re fuckin starving, man!”

            A couple and two kids with a medium sized dog that looked like a rat way ahead of them on a leash were passing by on the sidewalk. The woman asked them what kind of dog it was and the female half of the couple answered that it was a Jack Russell and that he was a handful. The woman commented, “That’s because it’s smart!” She agreed, saying that it was so intelligent that it was stubborn. I don’t think the dog was a Jack Russell though, but rather a bull terrier. It made me wonder if they were walking their own dog if they didn’t even know what breed it was.

            A car pulled up in the driveway and the African guy whom I’d stood behind in the line-up the week before got out of the passenger side, put his red gym bag down behind the other bags to mark his place in line, then he got back in the car and they drove away.

As the line started to form there was a guy from the back standing by the door. He explained that he was just waiting to go in and get a coffee, but when the door opened to let the first five people in he went right up to the desk to get a number. The clients at the front of the line called inside to let the desk know that he’d butted in. I heard it said that he was given a high number for his rudeness.

When I got in I saw Angie sitting behind the table where they display the pastries. She pointed at the guy in front of me and shouted, “You’re butting in!” It was the guy that had left his red gym bag in line and drove off. I don’t know how he got in front of me.

“Rappers Delight” came over the radio and suddenly Angie brightened up. She started moving to the music and exclaimed, “This is the Sugarhill Gang!” They did one of the first rap songs! Didn’t they Bruce?” Bruce was sitting on one of the now empty waiting area seats. Without looking up from his reading he nodded. Angie was smiling widely and moving from side to side. The Jamaican vegetable lady was laughing with surprise and appreciation at seeing her normally more subdued sixty year old white colleague grooving to hip hop.

Just as the guy who’d jumped the line stepped forward to see one receptionist, the other was free to serve me. I pointed out to him that the guy had cheated the queue. He said they knew and that it would be his first strike. He assured me that if it happens again he’ll be cut off. He gave me number 17.

The other intake guy asked where Angie was, insisting that she couldn’t leave her post. I wondered why that was important. Maybe she was supposed to be sitting there and guarding the food from the thieving clients. As I was leaving, Angie was coming back in. The guy asked what she was doing. She said, “I was taking out some garbage and giving somebody a piece of my mind!” He said, “Angie, you’ve gotta relax!”

I unlocked my bike and was rolling out of the driveway when the guy that had butted in approached me to try to explain himself. I don’t know why he felt the need to explain himself in particular to me, since he’d jumped ahead of lots of other people. He said the person had given him a ride but then wanted to go buy cigarettes. I failed to see how that justified either putting his bag in the line-up and leaving or betraying everyone that had been waiting in the cold ahead of him. He repeated the same thing twice though as if it explained everything.

I went home for a few minutes and ate a bowl of Raisin Bran.

When I got back to the food bank there was hardly anyone standing outside. At 11:30 the first five numbers were called but 4 and 5 weren’t even there. He let in three more whose numbers ranged up to 10. At that point there were just three of us in the driveway. About five minutes later he called numbers 10 to 20 and I went in.

The seats were full, the elderly Filipino volunteer called number 14, with no response, then 15, with no one getting up, then 16, still no bingo until she called 17 and I got up. I noted that her height reaches between my belly button and my chest.  As we approached the first set of shelves I considered insisting that she hand me my selection from the top according to what at least one volunteer had insisted to me was the protocol, but I decided that would be pointless and perhaps a little rude.

I took a can of beef gravy from the top, a kilogram bag of chocolate chips from the next shelf, the following shelf just had some kind of pound cake mix which I skipped, but she gave me a couple of single serve containers of some kind of blueberry puree snack from the bottom shelf.

I usually pass by the pasta, rice and sauce shelves, but this time I saw an Alf redo sauce from President’s Choice so I grabbed it. From among the canned food shelves, which were well stocked this time, I picked some beans with brown sugar and bacon. There was no tuna this time but a few jars of natural peanut butter. I had a jar and a half of that at home, so there was no reason to overdo it. I took a box of butternut squash soup and since I hadn’t taken much from the other shelves she said I could have another. From the cereal section the choices were two sugary kids’ cereals and some single serving packages of Fiber-1, so I asked for the Fiber-1 and she put three in my bag. She also gave me another bottle of Aveeno shampoo. I still hadn’t tried the shampoo and conditioner that I’d gotten the week before because I have other stuff to use up.

I noticed that Angie was not anywhere to be seen. I wondered if she’d gone home because she was pissed off or if she’d been sent home. She was replaced in the cold section by a tall woman in her early middle age that I’ve seen there a few times. She gave me a half-liter of 2% milk, a half-liter of chocolate soymilk, two small fruit bottom yogourts and a bag containing five eggs. She directed me to the other end of the freezer, on top of which was a bin containing three kinds of frozen ground meat rolled in sealed plastic containers. At the other side of the bin, with his elbow on the freezer top and with his head leaning on his hand was a bored and drowsy looking boy of about ten, who I assumed belonged to the woman I’d just encountered. As I selected the only container of ground pork I told him that he looked like he needed some sleep, but he didn’t respond.

The bread section was very well stocked, but I just asked for a small loaf of non-sliced multigrain bread that looked attractive. I already had some bread at home and really hate to see it go moldy because I didn’t get through it fast enough.

The vegetable lady had already divided up her slim selection equally into little fancy black Danier bags with cloth ties. She handed one to me and it contained five potatoes, a medium sized yellow onion and a small red onion. Before I left she asked me if I wanted some bags, so she gave me six of the Danier sacks.

I think that was the least amount of vegetables I’ve ever gotten from the food bank.

As I headed home I noticed that my back brakes had failed again. I had planned on going over to Bike Pirates with my old bike after putting my groceries away, but since this bike was the most functional I took it there instead. Dennis walked up to me right away demanding to know where my old bike was. The brakes were a quick fix but he told me that where I had wrapped my lock chain had it pushing against the cable and impeding it. I had previously wrapped my cable around the cross bar but had been told by the guy at Duke’s Cycle that it was the wrong place if I wanted my brakes to function. Then I wrapped it around my handlebars but with Dennis telling me that was wrong too I felt like my chain was a refugee being kicked from place to place. I asked where the best place to put it would be and he told me around my seat post. With that fixed, I took the Cushing 2000 (I don’t know what its brand name actually is, but since Nick Cushing gave it to me, it’s as good a name as any) and brought back the Phoenix to see if we could get the seat post out.

The first thing that Dennis did was to soak the bolt on the ring that held the broken seat post in place in “magic juice”. I asked him what magic juice actually was. He said it’s really Liquid Wrench. I had to look it up to see exactly what it is and found that I it’s a type of penetrating oil. He applied it and told me to wait fifteen minutes, so I went home to drink my cold coffee. When I came back, the bolt on the ring still wouldn’t turn, even though we tried an Allen key with more torque, so we soaked it again and I went home again. Since it still wouldn’t turn when I came back, Dennis brought out an electric drill. I’d heard that they weren’t insured to use power tools at Bike Pirates but Dennis claimed that he was allowed to even though clients aren’t. He tried to drill a hole through the bolt but the bit was not sharp enough. I asked if banging it with a hammer would help. Dennis agreed that it might, so he told me to get a ball peen hammer and to start hitting the ring to turn it back and forth. It did move. Then he got a chisel and we started banging upward to try to move the ring off the post. That wasn’t very effective but then suddenly Dennis said we should put the bike upside down on the post because that way I could hammer the ring downward. Dennis said he had to go to class but that on the way back he’d stop at the tool library to get a decent drill. He said that I could keep on banging away until I was tired then leave the bike there and go home until he returned at 16:00. I kept working around the ring with the chisel and then two minutes after Dennis left, the ring popped off. I made a few attempts to get the post out on my own with various grip wrenches but it didn’t work. I decided to go home until Dennis came back but it didn’t seem right to leave my bike there on a post when there might be people needing to use the space, so I took it down. While I was rolling past the kitchen I asked the volunteer who does most of the cooking if they ever bake cookies. She answered, “Sometimes.” I offered to giver her a large bag of chocolate chips and she was glad to hear it, telling me that they bake a very nice banana chocolate chip cookie sometimes. I told her that I’d bring the bag when I came back.

Shortly after getting home I went to bed, but first I took a towel from the laundry basket and laid it down on my sheet so I didn’t have to remove my boots. I slept for a little over an hour and headed back to Bike Pirates with my bike and a bag of chocolate chips for their kitchen. The woman I’d handed it to ask me my name and where I lived. After I told her she asked if I’d like her to knock on my door when they make the cookies. I answered that it didn’t matter, and then she nodded and walked away.

Dennis was already there. He had the idea to turn the bike upside down and to put the post in the vice, then to try to yank it up. Others though thought that might just crimp the post and break it off more. Dennis put some magic juice around where the post was fused to the seat tube and told me to wait another fifteen minutes, so I took that opportunity to go across to the liquor store to get my two cans of Creemore for the weekend. I took them home, put them in the fridge and went back to Bike Pirates. Dennis must have gone for a very long smoke or a washroom break, because I had to wait about fifteen minutes for him. When he appeared he tried the same wrenches that I’d tried to no avail. The short, older volunteer who looks like an elfin Santa Clause arrived and Dennis picked his brain on our problem. We decided to try drilling a hole through each side of the post, then to run a cable through and try to pull the post out by pulling upward. This time Dennis was advised that people might have a fit if he were to use a drill in the shop, so we went to the back in the work room where it looked like several project bikes were being stored. Dennis couldn’t make a dent in the post with the drill from the outside. I suggested trying from the inside where the surface was more rough but almost immediately the bit broke and Dennis gave up on the whole thing. Santa had a few suggestions for trying at home. He said I could soak the post in vinegar or ammonia then plug the hole and turn it upside down. He also suggested that I just do the slow prison escape method with a hacksaw blade. He said it might take me a few hours but if I were to saw through one side of the pipe from inside then the post could just be torn out afterwards. He gave me a dull hacksaw blade to keep for that purpose. I’m starting to think that it might be better to just try to find a similar but bigger frame for fifty dollars at Bike Pirates and use most of the parts the parts of my old one to build a new one from scratch.

I heated up a piece of the pork sirloin that I’d roasted the night before, boiled a potato and made gravy from the drippings with a beurre manié which consisted of butter and flour mixed together and formed into a dough. I heated up the drippings with an equal amount of water and dropped little balls of the dough into the liquid. It almost always makes perfect gravy but in this case it was amazing because the drippings were already perfectly flavoured by the spices that I’d rubbed into the pork before cooking it.

            I watched the second episode of Laramie, one of the fifty or more westerns that were on television in the 1950s featuring cowboys with perfectly coiffed pompadours as if guys in the Wild West really wore their hair that way. One of the costars was the great songwriter, Hoagy Carmichael. It looks like he sang part of a song in every episode, but in this case it wasn’t one of his own but rather “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”. Ernest Borgnine guest starred.

Monster in the Sewer

            I went to bed just after midnight on Friday, and though I am usually able to go right to sleep, I found myself still conscious an hour later. I decided to get up and take a shower, since I was still greasy from working on my bike for five hours at Bike Pirates and I did have to work at OCADU that morning and also because I also that I’d feel sleepy after getting cleaned and sprayed by hot water. It didn’t help me sleep but it was a good use of the time I would have spent lying awake anyway. I think I finally drifted off at around 3:00, but I was pretty sleepy when it was time to get up.

            Shortly after beginning my yoga floor poses, I became very dizzy. I didn’t know what had brought it on but though the room wasn’t spinning it was making steady quarter turns and I also felt a little queasy. The only thing that helped was just to push ahead with my exercises, which helped me to notice slightly less that I was experiencing vertigo.

The feeling seemed to ease off during song practice, which I had to cut short to get ready for work. I was about ten minutes late getting out the door and my trip downtown was the first long-range test of the replacement bike. It took a while to figure out how to figure out the gears and it was also clear that the seat was not high enough. Along Dundas everybody including women were passing me. I felt like a child on a little bike.

I usually get to work at least fifteen minutes early, but this time I was only a minute early by the time the elevator arrived. I skipped signing in because I didn’t want to be late. I walked into room 615 and saw Bob Berger just inside the door. I reached out my arm to put my hand halfway to his shoulder and he tentatively raised both arms like he was about to give me a hug. He stopped and informed me that I wasn’t working for him that day. I checked my backpack for my appointment book and realized that it was still at home on my couch. He suggested that I might be next door in 617 with Nick Aoki and it was starting to ring a bell that that was my booking. I went over there and Bob came with me to see if the error was on his side. When I saw Nick I remembered that he was definitely the one I was supposed to be working for. I thanked Bob and he left then I started getting ready. Nick told me there was plenty of time because he’d be showing some slides.

I had brought my laptop along because I wanted to work on my Canadian Poetry essay, but the machine didn’t boot up. It just showed an index of various booting options or that of restarting. I tried several times but concluded that Windows XP had crashed.

During the coffee break I went to sleep for fifteen minutes and that kept me awake for the rest of the class.

In the first half of the class Nick had his students create a black pigment out of several other colours and then paint me in monochrome. In the second half he showed more slides to instruct them in doing the same thing in colour. During that time I went to the washroom to unleash a monster. It made me wonder if it had a connection to the dizziness I’d experienced earlier. If so, what terror and havoc is it wreaking in the sewers of Toronto as I write about it now?

My first plan after work was to swing by Modcom at College and Spadina to inquire about my laptop, but as soon as I started riding my bike and used the brakes at the Dundas lights, my back tire seized. I decided to go down to the Urbane Cyclist at the top of John Street. I was able to get my bike rolling sometimes but then it would freeze again, so most of the way I walked while lifting my back wheel. I discovered that Urbane was no longer there anymore. I discovered that once the back brakes were unlocked I could ride and just use my front brakes. I was looking for a bike shop as I rode west, but stopped to take some money from the Bank of Montreal between Spadina and Bathurst. Just a few doors west of the BMO was Duke’s Cycle. I told the guy behind the front desk my problem. He had a look and told me that one of my problems was that I had my bike chain wrapped around my crossbar along which was running my brake cable, but there were also adjustments to be made on my brakes. He noticed also that one of my brake arms was missing a screw that is part of the brake arm, so I needed a new brake arm. He asked the bored looking mechanic at the back how much it would cost to fix a bake and he said fifteen or twenty dollars. I asked if there was a discount for poor people. The reception guy made a few quick adjustments and charged me five dollars.

With my bike rolling again I headed up Bathurst, stopping twice to heighten my seat, and then east on College, stopping one more time until I felt like it was the proper height for me, which is pretty high and just a little past the safety mark. I went to Modcom and showed my laptop to the guy that had sold it to me. He said the internal battery was dead. That would cost about $65.00 but he immediately advised me to just get another refurbished laptop for $150.00. I had walked in there ready to be convinced of that anyway because I had not been satisfied with my first laptop from the beginning. It had required an adaptor in order to go online and even then it was problematic in that regard. It ran on Windows XP, which is obsolete. The rechargeable battery had died permanently two months after I’d bought the computer and besides all that the thing was very slow in general. He offered me a newer, faster IBM ThinkPad for $150 plus tax. I made sure that the wifi worked without an adaptor this time and I bought it.

I rode towards home, finding the new old bike to be much slower than my old old one. I stopped at Freshco where I bought clementines, grapes, apples, a boneless pork sirloin half, some old cheddar, yogourt, cereal and canned peaches.

I slept for about two and a half hours, then I prepared the pork sirloin by rubbing it with a combination of olive oil, paprika, salt, rosemary, sage and quite a bit of Mrs. Dash herb and garlic seasoning blend. I use an oven pan to roast meats but I place a barbecue rack on top of that so the pan catches the drippings. This time though I put two cups of water in the bottom of the pan and it worked out great. I think I will do that from now on because otherwise the grease just dries up at the bottom and there’s nothing for gravy.

I watched the last three quarters of Rod Serling’s Emmy award winning corporate television play from 1955, “Patterns”. I found it kind of boring. A young executive with the rare combination of drive, vision and conscience gets hired by a corporation run by a ruthless man who cares nothing about the people that work for him other than what they can do for the company. The vice president is a good man past his prime who has run out of ideas. The younger man hits it off with the vice president on a human level and works well with him in generating ideas but the president is a bully toward the vice president and since he cannot fire him he treats him brutally in hopes that he’ll retire. The young man discovers that the president’s plan all along was to have him take over as vice president. He protests because the old man has become his friend and when the vice president hears of this he has a heart attack and dies. The young man and the president lock horns and the young executive warns him that if he stays he will fight him every step of the way. The president tells him that is what he wants because the company is more important than he is. The play ends with their agreement to have the right to sock each other in the jaw if the need arises. From what I’ve recently read about Rod Serling, he was very much like the fiery young executive in this play. He apparently had so much trouble with higher ups censoring the scripts he submitted that he finally started his own show so he would have control. That’s how the Twilight Zone came into being.

           

Rod Serling

            The knee that I’d banged against my bike frame when my chain came off while I was riding standing up was a little less sore on Thursday morning, though it was still very difficult to go onto my knees during yoga.

            At noon I took my bicycle over to Bike Pirates where I found a young woman waiting with her velo outside of the locked gate. Dennis arrived at least ten minutes late but we were his only clients for the first hour or so and so we had lots of attention, in between Dennis’s frequent nicotine breaks.

            We had problems right away trying to budge my broken seat post from inside of the seat tube. I couldn’t even get the bolt untightened on the ring that secures the seat post to the seat tube. Dennis told me to soak it in “magic juice” and then wait five minutes. The little bottle had “magic juice” and “not lube” written on it in magic marker. The bolt still wouldn’t budge. Dennis gave me a longer Allen Key and a longer tube to put over it for extra leverage but there was still no movement. I had already told him that I had another bike at home to fix up. He told me to soak the bolt and the seat tube again and while I was waiting I should probably go get the other bike.

            So I went home and got the bike that Nick Cushing gave me about a year and a half ago. I had always intended on fixing it up but when I had the time I didn’t have the money and when I had the money I didn’t have the time. Now I had the necessity. I told Dennis that my main concern off the top was to have a post of the proper length. He had me go through the post drawer and I found one that both fit and would extend my seat. I took the old seat post off and put the extension on, then tested it out for the height and it seemed pretty good.

            The next thing I noticed was that the back wheel was dragging and the brakes were not catching very well. So we worked on adjusting the brakes. The end of the cable was frayed so Dennis persuaded me to splurge three dollars for a new one. The chain was deeply rusted so I bought a new string of links as well.

            There was a young woman there trying to fix a flat tire but she was an absolute novice. Dennis was very encouraging and nice to her but she expressed dismay about her difficulty working the air pump.

            For the first three hours Dennis was the only volunteer and all of the stands were occupied. I had never seen just one person helping the clients for that long on a Thursday. I asked him about it and he told me that none of the volunteers make any pre-commitments to come in. He confessed that he had almost not come himself. I inquired what would have happened if that had been the case and he responded that we would have been screwed.

            Volunteers started to trickle in at around 15:30, including those that do the cooking. I suspected that there was a connection between when the volunteers showed up and the meal that would happen after closing time.

            I had been there for almost the whole five hours they were open before I was ready to take a test drive. But as soon as I took the bike out into the alley, the pedals froze. I informed Dennis, and then he got on my bike and seemed to ride it with no problem. He explained that I’d started in the wrong gear. I just took his word on it at the time and didn’t ask him to elaborate, but it seemed strange to me that one could start driving a bike in the wrong gear. There might be difficult gears to start in but I’m pretty sure there are no gears that make the wheel freeze. I think that’s what the brakes are for. When I got back on to resume the test, the bike rode fairly smoothly up the alley, then across the O’Hara and back down to Queen, but the seat definitely wasn’t high enough. I came back into Bike Pirates from the front and as I was walking back into the shop I was confronted by the short, muscular, very stern looking volunteer in the short peaked mechanic’s cap. He never smiles and everything he says to me sounds like an accusation, like, ”Are you already in?” I nodded. “Test drive?” I nodded again.

            I raised the seat and took it for another test. It seemed better. When I came back in, another volunteer sternly advised me to use the new automatic door button to avoid struggling with the door manually.

            I took my old bike home and then came back for the newly fixed mountain bike. The chain was twelve dollars and the cable was three, so I gave them twenty-five, which was pretty much all I had.

            I certainly do appreciate Nick Cushing having given me that bike, because it saved my ass to be able to fix it up the day before I had to be downtown the next morning for work.

            I don’t even know the brand name of the bike that Nick gave me since nothing seems to be written on the frame. The seat says “Supercycle”, which is a Canadian Tire brand.

            I thought about riding to the bank and then the supermarket because I was out of fruit, bread and yogourt, but when I got home I was tired. Since I had to work the next morning I decided I could make do with what I had for the night and just go grocery shopping on my way home the next day. I went to sleep until the evening.

            I heated up some frozen egg patties that I’d gotten from the food bank along with some frozen French fries. I watched the rest of the Kraft Music Hall Friar’s Club roast of Don Rickles, which included George C. Scott and Milton Berle. Carson said that it’s only fitting that a cheese company would sponsor a dinner for a rat. When everyone had spoken, as usual with roasts it was the guest of honour’s turn. Rickles tore into everybody, including one audience member that was innocently sitting in front row center. He said that Alan King likes to go to health clubs and rip people’s towels off. He was paying mock homage to George C. Scott and he ad libbed, “Let thy spot be thy spot!” Then he said, “What worries me is that George is nodding like what I just said made sense!”

            I watched the first half hour of a live television play for the Kraft television Theatre from 1955 called “Patterns”. It was a corporate drama with a small part played by a young Elizabeth Montgomery. The only other actor’s name I recognized was Ed Begley, mostly because I know who Ed Begley Jr. is. The play was written by Rod Serling and it was apparently his first television breakthrough, although he’d been writing for radio since he’d returned from World War II. Serling won an Emmy for “Patterns”.

Rickles

            On Wednesday morning I’d expected to have a sore back from having ridden my bike while standing up all the way home the night before, but there was no backache at all. I did have a sore left knee though from having banged it against the frame on a sudden downward thrust when the chain came off. I suspected though that it was only a bruised kneecap because it didn’t make me walk with a limp and it didn’t impede any of the knee bending I do during yoga. The one considerable limitation though was that it hurt when I put weight on it and so all of the poses that I did with the front of my body on the floor were difficult. After years and years of these kinds of injuries though I’ve gotten pretty good at self-diagnosis and I am pretty confidant that this is an injury that will heal fairly quickly.

            I spent a lot of the day writing about the previous day. In the evening I stepped out to the liquor store to buy a can of Creemore.

            I watched the first half of a Friar’s Club roast from the early 60s of Don Rickles, hosted by Johnny Carson. The speakers in that first half hour were Chet Brinkley, Alan King, Dick Cavett and Henny Youngman. Unlike the others, who made funny insults at Rickles’s expense, Youngman just did his regular routine. There was a joke about a guy who knocks on a woman’s door begging for something to eat. She asked him if he minded eating yesterday’s soup. He said he didn’t mind, so she told him to come back tomorrow.

Little Red Monster

            I woke up at 4:58 on Tuesday, decided to lie there till 5:00, but was woken by the alarm at 5:07. My apartment was very hot and so I had to open three windows just to make it tolerable while I did my yoga. I was sweating anyway during the locust pose, which involves me lying on my stomach with my arms underneath me, then I push down on my arms and pull my hips and legs up as high off the floor as I can. It’s not a swarm of locusts. There are only three locusts and six half locusts but still they are a pestilence, though admittedly they are a plague that is good for me.

            I was supposed to have taken some library books back to the OISE library on Monday but I didn’t want to ride downtown just for that, so I took the day of grace and left for Canadian Poetry class half an hour early on Tuesday evening.

            I was riding east along Bloor Street between Ossington and Christie when suddenly my bicycle seat wasn’t holding my ass up anymore. I was surprised that it hadn’t caused me to wipe out as I stood up, slowly put on the brakes and pulled over to the sidewalk. My seat and my broken seat post were dangling at the side of my bike, only attached by the electrical tape I’d used to wrap around the post to hold my back flasher on. It looked like fifteen years of rust from riding in the winter had finally taken its toll.

            I walked along Bloor, looking for a bike shop, but didn’t find one until Sweet Pete’s, a few blocks past Bathurst. The mechanic had a look at it and saw that the broken part of my seat post was fused by rust inside the seat tube. He offered to try soaking it in something he named but that I don’t remember and that it might help to loosen the post, but that it would have to soak for an hour. I had to be in class in an hour so I didn’t have time for that. He said that it’s possible that my bike is a write-off if the post can’t be removed. I wondered out loud how I was going to get home and he suggested that I could ride it standing up. It’s funny that I hadn’t thought of that when it first came off. It would have saved me a long walk.

            I headed for OISE while riding my bike standing up. It was awkward and tiring, but I managed. The only times I’ve ever ridden without sitting were years ago when I was taking extremely steep hills north of Toronto with my ex-girlfriend. With a seat on I can just throw myself onto the bike and start riding, but without a seat, to get started each time I had to make sure no one was behind me, then position my right pedal just so and after that it was okay. After OISE, I made it to University College without too much of a problem but I was really dreading the ride home. I thought that there would be a good chance of me being quite sore the next day, perhaps in my back, because of the unusual body movements involved in riding while standing.

            When I got to the classroom and started getting my books out of my backpack, I realized that I’d forgotten to bring my lecture notebook with me. So I went on a scavenger hunt to look for paper. I lifted a garbage can lid and looked down into several others because sometimes people throw perfectly good scrap paper away with only one side printed. I walked to the end of the nearest northbound hallway and then back, then I walked to the office, but it was closed. At the west end of the building I went up another northbound hall where I found a little bookshop with the creative name “The Book Shop”. There were two people working there, a lady and a gentleman who looked like they might have been there when the college was first built. I looked it up later though and found that the little store was founded by volunteers in 1999 and has been run by the same since then. They sell donated books at a range from $2.00 to $10.00. I asked the elderly woman who looked like she was the heart and the soul of the place if she had any scrap paper I could have. She warned me that what scrap paper was there was really scrap paper but found several one sided sheets for me with advanced math equations printed on the other side. That looked like just enough for me so I thanked her very much and went back to the classroom.

            George arrived pretty much on time and then immediately took roll call.

            We jumped right into talking about Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red”. The book won the A. M. Klein Poetry Prize. George said he was the judge that argued against his colleagues to help Carson’s book win the award. She is a professor of Classics at McGill University. She knows Greek and Latin and is in tune with rhetoric. Rhetoric used to be essential for learning poetry, but nowadays it is more associated with an entirely different and usually political meaning related to persuasive language such as when politicians say things like, “Make America great again.”

            Rhetoric is really about how to employ language. The art of metaphor is essential. George recommended “A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms” by Richard A, Lanham.

            Carson knows how to work with tropes and understands the beauty of adjectives, which she refers to as “latches of being”. The deployment of surprising adjectives make us think twice about the nouns we are reading.

            Ovid was all about the power of metaphor. He gave the example of a water bottle being a microphone. I commented, “Unless you’re hallucinating”. He argued that hallucinating might help someone with their metaphors.

            Startling original adjectives in common use: the Dead Sea, the Red Sea, the Black Sea and Pink Lake. Are they really dead, red, black and pink? Carson is asking us to understand unexpected adjectives.

            George said he blames Modernists for a lot of crimes, but the worst is that they wanted to get rid of adjectives. “There are thirty-nine people here. If I say ‘coffee cup’ there are suddenly thirty-nine coffee cups being envisioned.”

            “Your love is like a red, red rose. It was Robbie Burns Day yesterday. I was helping celebrate it at the Caledonia Pub. There were flights of scotch.” Some people didn’t show up and so there were extra samples of scotch that George did not allow to go to waste. He said he poured some over his haggis and it was very good.

            The Modernists wanted to avoid clichés by cutting down on adjectives. Carson thinks that they went too far. “Maggot ridden corpse” is a cliché, but both the adjectives and nouns can be refreshed by applying the adjectives to a different noun such as “maggot ridden Trump administration” or “maggot ridden Samsung Seven”. “Brilliant mind” could be renewed with “brilliant chair”.

            The wildest metaphors may be reality.

            The task of poets is also to imagine contemporary myths. “Autobiography of Red” is a 90s love story about a little red monster finding romance. It’s Postmodernism rooted in classicism. Classical mythology is about divisions. But myth moves to the hyperreal and so it is also surrealistic.

            Unlike Ondaatje’s “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid”, Carson’s “Autobiography of Red” is sequential. It can be called a narrative lyric sequence.

            Obviously Anne Carson is from the intellectual, ivory tower side of Canadian literature. She makes us think and like Canadians in general she is interested in puns like Shakespeare. I added that the French are also very interested in puns. George wanted to know which French. I answered that the language in general is very conducive to puns.

            George said the text of “Autobiography of Red” is red meat thrown before the scholars who are starving for meaning. In “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid” things are already torn apart. A text is always an excavation. We are all archeologists. The ordinary becomes bizarre. Could living roses set on fire sound like running horses? Surrealism could be realism if we understand its context.

            The book begins with some text translated from classical Greek poet, Stesichoros. The translation mentions a glowing hotplate. Patrick challenged, “The ancient Greeks had hotplates?” George responded, “Of course they didn’t, but they may have had hot stones glowing red”.

            George said that he deliberately selected “Autobiography of Red” to follow “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid”. The book is anachronistic and it is based on Classical Greek meter. It’s a work that depends on juxtaposition. One long line is always followed by a short line. The story is also cinematic. George suggested that David Lynch could make it into a movie and then he named a few other possible directors. I added Terry Gilliam. I noticed after a little research that “Autobiography of Red” was put on as a play by Luke Mullins in 2006.

            The opening lines of the book call the rest into being like the blank photo at the beginning of “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid”.

            Mythology only works if it might be true.

            The word “each” is scrambled reformed as “ache”. This playing with language is a nod to Gertrude Stein. It turned out that at least three students, including Zack and Patrick, had taken part in a class on Gertrude Stein earlier that day. There was a several minute discussion about her work in our class and a general conclusion that she is very hard to get. George doesn’t find her work to be engaged enough with the world in order to make an adequate linguistic intervention. Stein made language too plastic. George prefers playfulness with language. Though influenced by Stein, Carson comes back to narrative.

            We were already past the halfway point and so George called a fifteen-minute break. I suggested a change in the syllabus and that instead of “G. E. Clarke and films” for the last class, I proposed that we have “G. E. Clarke and a class poetry reading”. He said it was a great idea and that he’d give it serious consideration. Last week he brought up the poetry of mine that I’d sent him. I’d thought he’d forgotten about it. He assured me that he hadn’t and promised me that he’d give me some feedback this week, but he didn’t mention it.

            When we returned we dug deeper into the text of Carson’s book. George said there are mixings of high and low registers. It’s not the cliché that is bad, but that the cliché must be changed.

            She uses synesthesia in referring to “The smell of velvet”.

            I commented that she seems to deliberately avoid saying that Geryon, the lead character is Canadian. The only Canadian geographical landmark she refers to is the Churchill River. But I see that it was that Geryon’s fourth grade class had gone to an aquarium to see beluga whales that had been newly captured from the Churchill River, so it doesn’t really mean that he had to be in Canada. George explained that in the 1990s when the book was written, it was post NAFTA. There was a sense that borders didn’t matter and it ate into our national identity.

            To write a queer love story was unusual, even in the 90s.

            Geryon is a photographer. The story is full of flashes and glimpses. Geryon is a creature of fire. The Heraclitean Cycle says that we are born in fire and we are reborn in fire. Geryon writes postcards, which is a medium in which the message changes before it reaches its destination because thousands of people can have read it first.

            To be translated is to be moved through space to a different context.

            Volcanoes figure prominently in the story. George mentioned Mount St Helens going off in 1980, but he though that it happened in Alaska. I corrected him that it was south of the border. Zack said that it was Washington. I recounted how I’d been in Vancouver at the time and I woke up to see what looked like snow on the ground but it was white volcanic ash.

            George said that he saw the smoke coming out of Mount Etna in Sicily.

            Time is made of the eruptions of events.

            George offered that “Autobiography of Red” is really an old fashioned love story.

            I mentioned I thought that Geryon’s hiding of his wings from everyone represented him suppressing his homosexuality. George agreed.

            The song “Joy to the World” was mentioned being sung two or three times early in the story and I wondered whether it was the Christmas song or the Hoyt Axton song. George wanted to know how the Hoyt Axton song went so I sang the first line, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog …” George thought it was probably the Hoyt Axton song.

            I started riding home but before I’d even made it a few meters along King’s College Circle, I guess my chain wasn’t used to the force and the angle of thrust that riding standing up involves, but my chain came off and my left knee banged against the frame of my bike. It was hurting a bit but there was nothing to do but to put the chain back on and try again. I pedaled in spurts and coasted when it was possible. I took College to Beverly and Beverly to Queen. Around Ossington I instinctively tried to sit down while riding but of course found nothing to sit on and came back up. There were about three red lights on the way that gave me a chance to rest. It was really not an ordeal that I want to repeat. I almost felt that I wasn’t going to make it and strangely I felt that way most when I could see the landmarks of home, like the Dollarama. . When I got home I could feel myself panting heavily, but it looked like it only took me about five minutes more than usual to get home.

I'm Just Here to Read the Meter

            On Monday I finished reading Giovanna Riccio’s “Strong Bread”. I like the poems in which she writes about herself, but those about other people read more like lists.

            I started and finished Soraya Peerbaye’s “Tell”, which has poems both about her childhood and about the murder Reena Virk in Saanich, British Columbia in 1997, as well as poems about the trial of her schoolmates that were accused of killing her. I think Peerbaye’s poems about herself are often quite good. They are tactile and access strong imagery. The poems about the murder and the trial feel too distanced from the event to conjure up any strong poetic relationship with it.

            I started writing down ideas for an essay on Armand Ruffo’s “The Thunderbird Poems” and El Jones’s “Live From the Afrikan Resistance”. I want to show how in their books they neuter their message by putting the subject matter above the poetry. A poem is not just a vehicle for a message. It’s your message on steroids if the poem is good.

             In the afternoon I heard someone knocking loudly on my building’s street door just below my west living room window. I looked out and I answered, “Yes?” then he looked up and I saw that it was the guy from Orkin. He asked if I’d let him in to check the meters. Isn’t that a line from a hundred porn films?  I went down and opened the door. I was curious what the meters were. It turned out that they are two cockroach traps in the two second floor hallways. Checking them just involved seeing if there were any bugs in them, which of course there weren’t because they are in the hallway, away from food and water. He used a device similar to what I’ve seen in supermarkets on a bar code that had been pasted to the wall beside each “monitor”. Then he got me to sign his apparatus with a digital pen. He asked how my apartment was. I told him that I tend to see one cockroach about every one or two weeks. I asked if he had any of those traps for the apartments but he said they were only for the hall.

Ludwig Van Flintstoven

            On Sunday morning the thickest fog I’ve seen in years kept the city extra dark until well after sunrise which of course could not be seen through the fog.

            I’ve been listening to a lot of recordings of Leonard Cohen concerts. There’s one song he always played at his shows since the mid 70s, called “I Tried to Leave You”. He would play the song near the end of the night and in each of the recordings that I’ve heard, when he sings the lines, “Goodnight my darling, I hope you’re satisfied” the audience starts cheering.

            I finished reading “Types of Canadian Women” by K. I. Press and enjoyed it. I’ll bet she writes even better poems about herself though.

            I started reading Giovanna Riccio’s “Strong Bread” and found it to be a lot better than I expected. I’ve heard her read from her book about dolls but I didn’t find it to be as good. In this book when she writes about herself and I find it to be sensual, with often strong imagery. Some of the poems on other subjects are not bad, but not as good. Besides Albert Moritz, Giovanna is the only one of the poets I’ve read in this course that speaks to me by name. I’ll have to get her to autograph the book for me the next time I see her.

            I watched two episodes of Johnny Ringo. The first guest starred a young Burt Reynolds as a nasty character. Another character was shown to be an expert in the “ancient art of karate”. I guess karate was fairly new to TV audiences in 1955, since the writer of the story was a bit naïve about the discipline. The expert said that he had not yet achieved the black belt, which required the achievement of inner peace. Black belts in karate are pretty common now, even among eight year olds, but I doubt if most of those that earned them achieved much serenity beforehand.

            The second episode guest starred Martin Landau as a former alcoholic turned farmer who continued to have extremely bad circumstances in his life.

            The theme song for Johnny Ringo, written by the star of the show, Dan Durant, sounds a lot like a slowed down, twangy version of the Flintstones theme song that was written five years later. It looks like both songs take their melody from a section of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata number 17. I scanned it and you can sort of hear it in the middle, though the classical piece is a hell of a lot faster.

The Parkdale Food Bank Should Not Be Confused with the Yorkdale Food Bank, which does not exist

            For the last two weeks I didn’t go to the food bank because I had work on Saturday morning, but this Saturday I went. It was a relatively warm day; much warmer than the last few times I’d been there. After locking my bike to the tree I walked to the back of the diffuse line and looked at the man in the red coat and red cap that was the furthest one furthest back. I was about to ask him whom the last person was when he anticipated my question and pointed to himself. I inquired as to which people were directly ahead of him so I could have a sense of how the line looked one he indicated one guy and then another. We chatted a bit about what is available at the food bank. He told me he likes to get some tuna and some salami. He said he really likes it when they have French bread. I said that I think all or a lot of the bread comes from the St Francis Table on Queen Street. I didn’t ask but he looked like he was from Ethiopia and he was talking amicably with two other guys who looked like they were from the same general area but they were talking in English so I assumed they were all from different countries like maybe Somalia and Eritrea. He pointed his umbrella at one of the men’s running shoes and was amused because one could see behind the Velcro strap that he wasn’t wearing socks. The guy explained that he just likes to put them on and run.

            There were not any smokers nearby when I arrived. That and the fact that it was warm enough to eschew my winter gloves allowed me to comfortably read the book I’d brought with me. It was one of the required reading books for my Canadian Poetry class, Jeff Dirksen’s “Vestiges”. It is for the most part a tedious collection of poeticized Marxist criticisms of the deterioration of worker’s rights and of urban areas as living spaces for workers. A lot of the verses are made up of various quotes from Socialist philosophers combined with what looks like excerpts from news reports and lines jump back and forth over several centuries. I find it very annoying because I really don’t think it works as poetry because I don’t find that the poet is engaged with what he is writing. He should put himself inside of the poem and make it his experience instead of keeping the work so coldly intellectual. There was one piece of information serving as a line in a verse that got my attention though: “At two dollars a day, a European cow earns more than a billion people.”

            Someone not too far behind me lit up a cigarette, so I moved closer to the door for a while where a young man was having a conversation about cats with an older woman. He was bragging that he keeps his cat so well brushed and his litter box so clean that some friends of his with cat allergies can visit him without even noticing that he has a cat. He explained that the reason that some fixed male cats still spray is because they undergo the procedure at a point when their hormone levels are high which causes them to maintain the instinct. He repeated a story he’d hear his father tell of a woman he had dated before he’d met his mother. She had invited him over for dinner at her place where she had two large dogs. When she served him a helping of mashed potatoes with dog hair in it he knew she wasn’t the one for him.

            It was almost 10:30 and Desmond came out to have a smoke near the door. Because it was close to number time, the line started forming, so I went back to my place. Some Gypsies already in line that knew their place was behind me politely but in a strangely formal manner invited me in ahead of them. One of the men swept his hand in welcome like a maître d’hôtel and said, “Please sir!” Maybe it was because he’d noticed me reading a book.

            A tall young man a few places ahead of me was telling someone that during a storm that happened a week or so ago he had walked in the wrong direction in his effort to make it home to Parkdale and had ended up in Yorkdale. He said that he’d taken shelter in a hospital but his clothing had gotten so torn and wet that he went into the washroom and threw most of them in the garbage. He related that he also throws his clothes away after he comes in contact with someone that has bedbugs.

            I got number 24 and went home for a while. I did a French grammar exercise, drank some cold coffee and headed back to the food bank.

            I heard the tall guy who always throws his clothes away tell someone that women cause more diseases than men. As I suddenly tuned in I realized that he was explaining to someone what he believed was the reason why Trump had beaten Clinton in the recent election in the United States.

            Numbers 21 to 25 were called, so I went inside. There was some confusion because the number 17 was being called by a volunteer as it had not been checked off the list on the clipboard but the lowest number in the room was then 21. She called for 18 and we tried to explain to her that we were past those numbers. Suddenly I called out “15” as a joke but that just added confusion. For some reason she called out 28 and skipped all the numbers in between. I protested that my number hadn’t been called and so she served me.

            From the top of the first set of shelves I took a jar of Old El Paso salsa. Below that was a lonely bag of walnut halves among bags of cookies, so I grabbed the nuts. From the bottom she gave mea handful of coconut cream Larabars.

            I skipped the pasta, rice and sauce shelves. Every volunteer seems surprised when I do that. From the well stocked this time shelf of canned beans I picked some sweet peas and from the tuna and peanut butter shelf I chose a can of tuna. From the soup shelf I snagged a box of organic creamy butternut squash soup. I was a little worried when I got that home because the best before date said last September, so since it was organic I played it safe and stored it in the fridge. I assume though that since the food bank hadn’t refrigerated it, if it was going to go off it would have done so months ago. From the cereal section I asked for a box of Cheerios but when she handed it to me I saw that it was peanut butter flavoured, so I put it back and opted for a bag of cinnamon-coconut flax Cheerios Plus.

            Just before passing me over to the next volunteer, she suddenly remembered that there was also shampoo and conditioner. Before I could answer she stressed enthusiastically that it was Aveeno. I’ve heard the name though I wouldn’t have been able to vouch for its quality, but when a woman shows enthusiasm for a hair or skin product I usually trust their judgment, even though lots of women disagree on what is best. I got one container of shampoo and one of conditioner.

            In the cold section, Angie gave me a half-liter carton of 2% milk and four small Activia yogourt containers. I didn’t notice until I got home though that the yogourt contained stevia extract so I wasn’t going to eat it. I got two bags of frozen egg patties, a package of chicken wieners and a small pepperoni and olive pizza from Pizza Pizza.

            There wasn’t much besides white bread in the bakery section, so I skipped it.

            The vegetable lady had a much sparser selection than usual. She gave me an unopened bag of carrots, a bag of green beans, two potatoes and two onions.

            I immediately rode to Freshco to get a few extra things. I noticed they had Old Dutch chips on display and on sale, and I thought I might get some to go with the salsa I’d gotten from the food bank. I decided to get it inside though. The store still had cherries from Chile on sale so I took a bag. I bought some raisin bread that I stupidly placed on the bottom of everything else and so some of it got scrunched. They had packages of chicken drumsticks all for $5.00 each but all of different weights. I took the heaviest one I could find. I bought two liters of milk, three containers of yogourt and two cans of peaches. On my way out of the store I looked at the display of Old Dutch chips again and realized that I’d forgotten to buy a bag.

            I had everything I’d bought in an extra large shopping bag from President’s Choice. The only problem with riding my bike with a full extra large bag on the right handlebar is that I keep kicking the bag with my right leg as I pedal.

            I noticed a dark grey police car on my way. I haven’t seen very many of those and I couldn’t tell what division it was from. Apparently the plan had been to switch from the white ones to the grey but the general reaction was that they looked too sinister so they’ve changed their minds.

            I bought two cans of Creemore at the liquor store and went home.

            I read the first half of “Types of Canadian Women Volume II” by K. I. Press. Each poem is accompanied by the image of an antique photograph of a Canadian woman of the Victorian age, although none of the women are named. The idea that this is volume II is a bit of a joke. There was a volume I that was published in 1903 and it was kind of an encyclopedia that contained recipes along with beauty, health and well being tips and articles that was meant to be of interest to ladies of that era. Press’s post modern “sequel” is satirical and often quite funny though with an undertone of sadness sometimes. There are quite a few poems about women drowning and others about women riding horses. In one poem a woman talks about waking up in bed after a riding accident and discovering that the mishap somehow turned her into a very impressive man. I’m finding most of these poems to be quite well written and both entertaining and disturbing.

Are Blue Eyes the Eyes of the Devil?

            On Friday I finished reading Wayde Compton’s “Performance Bond”. There’s some good writing there and some interesting accounts of what used to be a Black neighbourhood in Vancouver. I guess the reason that I never saw it was because they tore it down a few years before 1972, which was the first time I was in Vancouver. I actually lived for a while not far away from what used to be called “Hogan’s Alley”. I remembered that besides the Black guys from Seattle that beat me up in the late 70s, around the same time I did encounter another African American who said he was a Black Muslim, except that he didn’t wear white like the guys from the Nation of Islam, but rather dressed extremely colourfully in African derived garb. I had seen him at a drop-in center and thought he was very interesting and so I was looking at him. He asked me not to look at him but arrogantly I refused to stop staring. He wanted to kill me. I ended up having an indirect conversation with him though because though he refused to talk to me, when I asked him questions he answered them by talking to my friend. He said that the Qu’ran says that blue eyes are the eyes of the devil and that all white men are snakes. When I look this up it seems to be one of the many nutty misinterpretations of the Qu’ran by Elijah Muhammed, the founder of The Nation of Islam. Apparently the Qu’ran that he had was a mistranslation and that the Arabic word in question actually meant “blurred” and not “blue”. A few weeks later I saw the little guy on Granville Street and he came up to me, gently kicked my shin and said, “Let’s go!” I calmly told him I didn’t want to complicate my life by fighting with him. “C’mon, complicate your life!” he urged. I just turned and continued on my way.

            On Main Street just north of Broadway I think, near the area that apparently used to be Hogan’s Alley there was a fantastic record store with a lot of rare disks. A couple of friends of mine and I discovered it when we were walking south to Queen Elizabeth Mountain. The owner was very friendly and when he found out we weren’t from the neighbourhood  he pointed out the back of a white house across the street and a little off Main. He said that Jimi Hendrix had lived there with his mother for a while. Looking it up now I see that it was Hendrix’s grandmother’s house and that it was indeed part of what used to be Hogan’s Alley.

            I watched two episodes of Johnny Ringo. One story dealt with the aftermath of what was referred to as the Jackson County War in Wyoming between large and small ranchers that had happened a few years before. But there was no Jackson County War in Wyoming. It was the Johnson County War. I really doubt if it would have spilled over years later from Wyoming all the way down to Arizona.

            The second story was one that involved Comancheros, who were described as half-breed whites and Indians cut off from either culture and so they’d turned to crime. But this was historically inaccurate as well. The Comancheros were white Mexican outlaws that traded with the Indians.

            I started reading and made it well over halfway through Jeff Derksen’s “The Vestiges”. What a tedious book of poetry! It’s extremely dry and cold in its attempt to present poetry about the mismanagement of cities and the oppression of its occupants by capitalism. There is even a section, several pages long, in which he has placed all of the passages from Karl Marx’s “Capital” that begin with the word “I”. Putting aside what an anal thing that is to have done in the first place, the result does not look, read or feel like poetry. It’s just a lot of text about the mathematical relationship between workers and employers and value equations. It seems to me he should have at least put the text in his own words and poeticized it somehow. He could have made it rhythmic; he could have rearranged the words with the cut-up technique; but it might have been most effective if he’d made it rhyme. I envisioned him as being a young guy with a nicotine stained beard and who sleeps in an old suit. But I found his photo and he’s light haired, clean-shaven and kind of nerdy.

Sidney Poitier

            I had a pretty interesting dream but I think I only dreamed that I was going to remember it.

I spent most of Thursday getting caught up on my journal entries.

The big, burly, middle-aged bald guy that busks in front of the Dollarama was out there again, singing in his loud voice and with that fake southern United States accent. Maybe I should open an agency to help Canadians find their lost voices.

I put a black forest ham into a container of homemade cranberry sauce, which added a nice flavour to the ham, but after I’d finished the ham, I ate the cranberry sauce with some yogourt. The cranberry sauce had the not as nice flavour of ham.

I watched two episodes of Johnny Ringo. One of the stories had a psycho farmer who’d taken a young wife before he went crazy and then did something to make it so she couldn’t speak. It didn’t say what he’d done but after she was rescued it was implied that she could learn to talk again. I can’t think of anything one could do to make someone mute that wouldn’t be permanent.

I read exactly half of Wayde Compton’s “Performance Bond”. It’s actually a pretty good book written in a wide variety of experimental styles. Some of the experiments work. There’s a poem about Sidney Poitier that almost made me cry.

Cherries from Chile are Very Cheap

            On Wednesday I spent most of the day writing, until the evening when I needed to go out to buy bread and a few other things. I rode to Freshco and was just about to make a rare clean left turn from Queen onto Gladstone when a serious fire truck came whining westward, so I veered onto the other side of Queen and walked my bike across.

            Cherries from Chile were very cheap, I guess because it’s like July down there right now. I bought another little crate of Clementines. I got bread, but skipped meat since I had a few things in that category already. I picked up some old cheddar, some yogourt, a box of raisin bran and a bag of frozen French fries.

            The express cashier is a large young woman who always wears a lot of very skillfully applied makeup that I assume includes false eyelashes. Like most of the cashiers at the store for the decade it’s been Freshco and for the decades before that the store was Price Chopper, she’s of Portuguese descent. She doesn’t have an accent but she has a personally characteristic way of phrasing the question, “Do you need bags?” Her emphases are on the word “Need” and on the “s” at the end of “bags”, so it sounds like “Do you NEEDbagS?”

            I stopped at the liquor store on my way home. In the beer room a woman was standing and contemplating which brand to buy. It sure does save me a lot of time to know what I want.

            The short Vietnamese woman in front of me was buying four cans of beer and she looked nervous and guilty about it for some reason.

            I made ham and eggs with toast and watched two episodes of Johnny Ringo. It was disappointing watching those shows after being entertained by The Big Bang Theory for the last couple of weeks.

Billy the Kid

            I went to the U of T Bookstore on Tuesday evening before class to buy the rest of the books on the reading list for my Canadian Poetry course. The day before that I’d checked my student account online and saw that it was at zero, so I knew I’d gotten my grant. On Tuesday I checked my bank account and found my refund after the course fees to be about $450.00, so I figured I’d just get all the books and pay with my bank card. I bought Wayde Compton’s “Appearance Bond”; Jeff Derksen’s “The Vestiges”; K. I. Press’s “Types of Canadian Women”; Giovanna Riccio’s “Strong Bread” and Soraya Peerbaye’s “Tell”. I paid $96.28 in total. The most expensive of the books were Peerbaye’s and Compton’s at $20.00 each, but Compton’s was used. I didn’t check what the price was for a new copy, but it comes with a CD, so I guess that’s why it was so dear.

            When I got to the classroom I started reading “Performance Bond”. The title comes from the judicial phrase, “appearance bond”. It’s a US term though because I don’t think individuals can put money down for their own release in the same way in Canada. One needs someone else to post a bond for them here. I did it for my ex girlfriend when she was arrested for shoplifting cough syrup. I think with an appearance bond one actually has to give money to the arresting officers, which I guess one gets back when one appears in court.

            The book is creative and has an original style.

            One puzzling thing is the mention of a Black community in Vancouver. I’ve lived out there twice; the last time for three years. I lived on the street and wandered all over the city but never saw a Black community. The only Black people I ever saw there were visiting from the States like the three guys from Seattle that beat me up.

            George arrived and told us that in this term we would be focusing on how texts and books of poetry are constructed. He told us that he’d brought the topics for our February 28^th essay but that he left them in the photocopy room and so he’d have to go back for them, if they were still there. First though he took roll call and then he gave back papers to students that weren’t there last week. While doing so he found that he hadn’t left the essay topics in the copy room after all because he’d found them between the essays.

            He reminded us again that we have to learn more verbs so we can write better essays. He suggested that we make a list so we don’t repeat ourselves and so we can carry our knowledge forward to other essays. George went to the blackboard and started to make his own list: “The author advises; attests; witnesses; suggests; proves; shows; asks; furnishes; imagines; says; states; demands; is attentive to; bears repeating; conveys; composes an argument; posits; postures; legislates; intimates; hints; insinuates; articulates …” George stopped to react to that one, “Whoa!” then continued with, “postulates; theorizes; elucidates; illustrates; connotes; denotes; contextualizes; corroborates; exposes; reveals; challenges; worries this image; interrogates …” I said, “embroiders”. Then there was “elaborates; sketches; schemes; dreams; muses; problematizes; hypothesizes; speculates; testifies …” George asked if those were enough. I answered, “It feels like enough to me!”

            The whole three-hour class was devoted to Michael Ondaatje’s “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid”. Narrative; focused on a hero, a real life, legendary figure humanized and explored psychologically. The book was written between 1967 and 1970 and covers what was known about William Bonney at that point. The book is not meant to be entirely accurate from a historical perspective, but also uses tropes from cowboy films that Ondaatje had seen, such as those by Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns such as “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. I pointed out that Peckinpah had actually directed the film, “Pat Garret and Billy the Kid”, and George knew it well. I added, “With Bob Dylan!” and George said, “As Alias!”

            “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid” is a postmodernist work. It has a polyphonous narrative, meaning there are many voices; there are documentary aspects with actual historical comments from witnesses presented in italics. The book is partly about how well we can know anything, and that’s what makes it postmodern. It gestures towards multiplicity in the form of a collage.

            Using outlaws as protagonists in experimental books helps us think outside the box in order to try to understand their psyches. Who is the hero? Was it the killer or the lawman that killed him? The Lincoln County War in New Mexico was going on at the time and Billy was on the wrong side. It was a fight between established ranchers supporting a big store and a collective of smaller upstart ranchers known as the Regulators, which Billy supported. It was also apparently a bit of a religious war because the established ranchers were Irish Catholics while Billy was with the Protestants. The big store, think of it as a kind of Wild West Walmart, had lucrative government contracts, which is the only thing that really made them the good guys. Since Billy was the most high profile member of the group he got blamed for killings done by other members as well as by him. After the Regulators lost the war they went on the run and survived as criminals. When Pat Garret became the sheriff of Lincoln County he went after Billy.

The morality of the story is flexible. The moral is the story itself. Suspend moral judgment to the beauty of the narrative.

Some of the photographs in the book are authentic and some aren’t. On page 31 of the book there is a picture supposedly of Sallie Chisum sitting beside a man in a hat with a long beard who kind of looks like one of members of The Band. It turns out that the photo is of Ondaatje’s friends, Canadian poet Stuart MacKinnon and his wife.

Can you really breed dogs to be insane and feed them on a diet of alcohol? The book pays allegiance to the tall tale. This led George to give an example from recent times of the tall tale that was spun about Sadam Hussein of Iraq having had weapons of mass destruction. In 2003, our prime minister, Jean Chretien said, in his inimitable way, “I have seen the evidence, and there is no evidence!” I can’t find that quote. What I found was, “A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It’s a proof. A proof is a proof, and when you have a good proof it’s because it is proven.”

How a legend is born. Billy the Kid’s legend is described as a jungle sleep”. We create legends with our imaginations: “Based on a true story, as told to …” There are various possibilities available to poets, such as “The Definitive Portrait of the Young Justin Trudeau: A grizzly bear was chasing him but he saved himself by throwing marijuana at it.”

The difference between the short poems in the book and the longer narrative pieces is like the difference between one painting and a series of sketches.

“The Complete Works of Billy the Kid” is a narrative lyric suite. Ondaatje wants to blur the lines between genres. It’s like a scrapbook. It’s an epyllian, or mini-epic. Imagine the lyric moments as still photos of one character and the narrative as a smart phone video of several characters.

I said that I like the poems about flowers because they read like poems that Ondaatje wrote from his own experience. George challenged me on that. I argued that poems in the book that don’t try to fit with the contrived history of Billy the Kid are better poems, with more authenticity and honesty.

George says that Ondaatje’s text is interested in the blur. A picture of something in motion will be a blur. Shooting stops the blur. Facts aren’t everything. Ondaatje worries the authentic. The subtitle of the book is “Left Handed Poems” because both Billy the Kid and Michael Ondaatje are southpaws. In the Penguin edition that George has they left out the subtitle. The very first image in the book is a blank box to indicate a yet to develop photo. Development progresses slowly until the very end when the final image is one of Michael Ondaatje as a boy in Sri Lanka, posing happily in his cowboy costume with two toy six shooters drawn for the camera as he plays at being Billy the Kid.  Full circle. This was Ondaatje’s second book, after “Dainty Monsters”, or his third book, if you include his critical book about Leonard Cohen, which was his master’s thesis.

We were at the halfway point of the class, so George called a fifteen-minute break. I told him about my cousin, John Stadig, about whom a book called “Alcatraz Eel”, was written and about whom there are many tall tales mixed in with some pretty incredible real stories.

I asked George what the difference is between stream of consciousness writing and freefall writing. He said that stream of consciousness can go anywhere but with freefall one starts wandering in one’s mind freely but once one finds a path or a theme one focuses on that. I offered an analogy to see if I had it right of the difference between wandering in the woods just anywhere from beginning to end and wandering into the woods until one finds a path and then following that. He didn’t seem entirely satisfied with that but said we could go with it.

I also asked about his pronunciation of the Persian poetic form “ghazal”. George had insisted that it’s pronounced, “guzzle” but I heard Banoo Zan pronounce it as “guzzal”. Even though she speaks Persian and he doesn’t, George says she’s technically wrong if she pronounces it that way. When I look it up though several native speakers of the word seem to pronounce it differently. I think maybe it’s not like “guzzle” but rather like “gahzzal” but with the emphasis on the “ah” part and the “a” part said very quickly but still there so it doesn’t sound like one is jumping straight from the “z” to the “l”.

Zack showed me that there is an afterword in his edition of “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid” in which Ondaatje describes some experiences in his own life that inspired parts of the book. I didn’t really read it. I looked at it for a polite amount of time then handed it back to him, saying, “Cool!” I wasn’t being dishonest because I knew it was cool. I was hoping that the ebook edition that I have on my computer had the same afterword so I could read it when I had more time. It does, and it is cool. It’s interesting that Ondaatje mentions there that the governor of New Mexico in Billy the Kid’s time is the author who wrote “Ben Hur”.

George started the second half telling us that “Sinister” means left handed while “Dexter means right handed”. I wondered if the creator of the character “Dexter” was implying that his hero serial killer is the right side of evil. I just noticed that three more Dexter books have been written since I last was caught up with the series. Maybe I’ll read them in the summer if I can get a download.

I noticed that George reads from beautiful cursive script in a hard cover notebook, so it made me wonder if he digitizes anything.

George urged us to go to Tim Hortons or bars and to eavesdrop on conversations and take notes. He said he’d once heard a man say, “My feet don’t work right. I kicked in too many doors when I was drinking!”

“The Complete Works of Billy the Kid” is un-Canadian but at the same time it follows Leonard Cohen. The narrative is natural, plain spoken, graphic and in slow motion.

Ondaatje was denounced in the House of Commons by John Diefenbaker when the book won the Governor General’s award. I told George that he might be mistaken because I thought for sure that it had been B. P. Nichol’s book on Billy the Kid that was protested by Diefenbaker. Someone behind me did a search and confirmed that it was Ondaatje’s book that was dissed. But when I searched later I found that both claims are made. It looks like the confusion may come from the fact that both b. p. nichol and Michael Ondaatje won the Governor General’s Award in 1970 but it wasn’t nichol’s Billy book that won but rather a different book of his poetry. I wonder though if Diefenbaker actually got the two Billy books mixed up, since the nichol book could be considered more obscene than the Ondaatje book. George assured me though that has read the parliamentary transcripts on the matter.

Ondaatje was young when he wrote the book and he wanted to be approachable.

There is a character in the book named Angela Dickinson. She is not a historical figure from Billy’s world but she rather seems to be based on the film actress of the same name. She did appear in a lot of westerns in the 1950s when westerns were popular. I’ve heard it mentioned that She is a favourite of Ondaatje. I just noticed that she was married to Burt Bacharach for fifteen years. George says she was a B-movie actress, but she was in a lot of major films as well, including “Oceans 11”. She starred in a TV series called “Police Woman”. George said that Dickinson was Hillary Clinton before Hillary Clinton. He said that this bringing of pop culture into poetry is very much like what the TISH poets were doing.

            Inspired by talk about B movies, George told us that one of his fondest memories of growing up in Halifax was the all B movie horror films. He said that their budgets were so miniscule that they would shoot night scenes in the daytime but in thick parts of the woods.

            George made up a Canadian approach to literature: “How to hunt a shark like a bear!”

            The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a distillation of 60s culture. Billy is a beatnik with a gun instead of a guitar. It has easy love, insouciance of youth, freeness, finding one’s voice, psychedelic, fun, raunchy and gunplay with a pen.

            Ondaatje followed this book with “There’s a Trick With a Knife That I’m Learning to do”. Narratives are tricks.

            You will reveal yourself no matter what you write, even when you think you are hiding. Billy has Ondaatje’s strengths and flaws. There is a great tension between being who you want to be over other people’s definitions. Garret accepts Billy as an outlaw. The characters are framed by imposed limitations. Whatever is living unfixed and free is blurred and also dangerous because it can interrupt and invade your space. Invasions are always violent. Verbs turned to nouns like “running” are gerunds. Ondaatje is the poet of “ing”; of the gaudy, the grotesque, the strange and the visceral. George mentioned that there used to be a “strange but true” section in the Toronto Star. He said the rats in Venice are so fat that they can’t maintain their footing and fall down on top of gondolas and tourists. He added that there is now an even larger rat problem in Halifax because of warm winters and condo developments forcing them out of their habitats.

            Ondaatje reminds us of the formula of violation: the road is dangerous and does not run on Disneyland principles. Ondaaatje is sensual.

            George said that the bravura piece of the book is the description of Billy’s torment as he was being transported in chains to prison. I volunteered to read it. George said it is an example of synesthesia, with verbs that are physical and carefully and fearlessly figured out. It is radical and violent to what becomes trapped.

            George suggested that the book may be a reaction to the many assassinations of public figures that took place in the period just before it was published: J.F.K: 1963; Malcolm X: 1965; both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy: 1968. George said everyone was shot in the head.

            B. P. Nichol helped Ondaatje lay out the prose like photos.

            No reputation can do anyone justice.

            George said that the final poem in the book is pure Ondaatje and unrelated to the Billy the Kid story. The author is always a character in every book they write. One needs to think like a psychopath to write about one. Patrick said that Nabokov would disagree. George argued that Nabokov would have had to get into the head of a pedophile to write Lolita.

            George said that the book is the collected works of Michael Ondaatje.

            Somehow Kelly Ann Conway, Donald Trump’s campaign manager came up. Patrick said she’s the only one with any intelligence on Trump’s team. I said that I’d recently seen a video of Conway being interviewed before she was hired by Trump. In the video she tears him apart and talks about what a horrible candidate for president he would be.

            George said the only thing he doesn’t get from Ondaatje’s book was the love scene where Billy leaves bite marks on a woman’s body. That seemed fairly normal to me. I argued that hickies are basically a combination of biting and sucking. George told me he’d take my word for it, but looked at me like I was amusingly weird. Does nobody give hickies anymore?