Dylanland

            I had to work around midday on Thursday so I planned on going to sleep for an hour before leaving. But just like the day before I felt exhausted while memorizing a French song and so I took a siesta early and conked out for an hour and a half. I was actually still tired when I got up at a little before 10:30. I think that the reason that I’ve been feeling run down is that I stopped eating protein for a while and I’m off coffee as well.

            I was scheduled to work for Robert Akow at OCADU but Terry Shoffner’s class was just finishing up when I arrived. On the stage was a dressed up skeleton. I told Terry that I was going to call the union because of all the fat shaming models like the one he was using that are putting me out of work. He knew I was joking but he informed me with regret that the university only lets them have eight models a year and that if they hire the same model twice it counts as two models. I asked what was the highest number of models he remembers being allowed to have and he answered that it was twelve. I recounted that in the 80s I would occasionally pose eight sessions in a row for some painting classes.

            Terry asked, “You’re a musician aren’t you?” I explained that I‘m a songwriter and though I’m not a great guitarist I learn how to play my songs. He told me that my name had come up in a conversation he’d had on the subject with Bob Berger. He’d heard that I played music with Brian Haddon and so I imparted to him the story of my collaboration with Brian when he was in my band.

            Robert came in wearing a Wolverine t-shirt. I haven’t worked with him for a couple of years and yet he remembered that I’ve been studying French and inquired about it. He seems like a nice guy. He was very conscientious of my comfort, which was nice. He started with an anatomy lesson and had me do two standing poses of almost twenty minutes each so he draw me and show where all the major muscles and bones are. I’ve probably covered up those bones with more fat than the last time I’d worked with him, but hopefully that isn’t a hindrance to me getting more work.

            After the anatomy lesson I just did a regular set of poses.

During the break I overheard a very large student, who looked about ten years older than his peers, was telling somebody about his mother’s curved sword and how she uses it. I assumed his mom is some kind of martial artist.

At the end of the class the big student and his friend thanked me. He said that most models move when they pose, but that I’m very still and she told me that my poses were very good. I explained that I’ve been doing it for a long time and added that when I was a kid I used to stare off into space a lot, so that probably helps too.

After work I rode over to Staples to buy a new pack of pens, since I was done to just one with a steady flow of ink and didn’t want it to go dry in the middle of a lecture. I feel sad when I throw dead pens away. I noticed that you can buy drones at Staples now. The most expensive was a thing with four propellers about three-quarters the width of a bicycle wheel for a little over $2000. They seemed to have tiny ones too though for less than $100. If everybody’s buying them now I wonder how often they collide.

On the way home I stopped for more grapes, avocadoes and orange juice, plus a cucumber. The Freshco parking lot has a sign telling people that parking is free on “these premises” only for customers. I’ve often heard and used “this premises”, so I wondered which is correct. It looks like people do use “this premises” a lot more, but “premises” is plural because it refers to all the buildings and the land of a property.

When I got home there was an email from George Elliot Clarke responding to my previous message to him. I’ve been trying to understand why I got such a low mark on my recent essay and so I’ve been arguing with the comments that he’d written in the margins. He keeps saying that I should consider El Jones’s poetry in terms of the fact that she wrote it to be heard rather than read. I keep insisting that I do take that into account but that one can be fooled into thinking something is better written than it is when it is performed well. I always read poems aloud when I study them because it helps to catch the nuances. George had also suggested that I should consider Jones’s skewing of the truth in some of her poems to be a literary trick. I argued that if that is the case she executed the trick poorly. When an author lies they have to create a context in which the untruth works as a reality, as in Michael Ondaatje’s mostly fictional portrayal of Billy the Kid. Jones did not create such a context but rather just lied to add power to her argument.

George’s response said that he’d be happy to discuss it when we both have time. He told me that some of the criticism I level against Jones has also been levelled against songwriters like Bob Dylan, where reviewers accused Dylan of lying about the facts regarding the murder of Joey Gallo in his song “Joey”.

My response to that is that Dylan’s “Joey” is not a good comparison with the Jones pieces I criticized because it has a different agenda that demands a different context. “Joey” is meant to be a romantic song about a historical figure rather than a protest song and so the lack of truth is less of a flaw. A better song with which to compare Dylan and Jones would be “Hurricane”, which is a protest song with an agenda to fight against Rubin Carter’s false imprisonment for murder. Dylan though made even more irresponsible lyrical choices in writing “Hurricane” than Jones did in writing “Light Skinned Girl”, such as his incrimination of two real living people by name with having robbed a corpse, even though there was no evidence that they had done so. It didn’t serve his agenda at all to do this and he could have easily written the song using just the facts. But his mind slipped into Dylanland as it so often does and he decided that it would be neat to say that the guys that found the body robbed it.

George informed me though that I did not lose any marks for my arguments against Jones but rather for my writing. I definitely want to meet him to discuss where that went wrong, since I worked longer and harder on that last essay than I did on the previous ones on which I got higher marks.