Beachcombers with Kites

            On Tuesday morning I woke up at 3:20 because I had to pee. The apartment was cold and so when I got back into bed I pulled the comforter over me. I usually just keep it bunched up in the corner of my bed because the cotton sheet is most of the time warm enough if not too much. After I went back to sleep the heat came on and so once the 5:00 alarm started crowing I woke up to find that I'd been doped by the warmth. It took a while to clear my head.

That afternoon I worked on editing a story that I wanted to read that night at the Shab-e She’r poetry reading. I tried to take a siesta in the early afternoon but I only lay down for half an hour. I think I couldn’t sleep because I had the story on my mind, so I got up and finished it.

Just before leaving I printed one page of the story, then I flipped it to print the other side but instead of going to “File” and then to “Print”, I made the mistake of clicking on the image of the printer on my tool bar, which caused the entire 26 page document to print. I thought about stopping the printer but I was afraid that would cause paper to get stuck, so I just shrugged and let 26 pages get wasted.

It was drizzling as I rode west on College Street, but not enough for me to get wet. When I stepped into the St Stephen in the Fields Church, Bänoo Zan greeted me with a hug because it had been two months since I’d been there last. If I’d come at the end of February I probably wouldn’t have gotten the grace of an embrace.

On this night, in addition to the regular poetry event with two features and an open mic, Shab-e She’r was also celebrating the Persian New Year, or Nowruz, which means “new year”, but also “new day” and “new light”. The actual date for Nowruz this year was the Tuesday before, but since Shab-e She’r falls on the final Tuesday of the month they couldn’t have feted the event on that date. A week late is a reasonable range of tardiness though for still grasping the spirit of an event. I would be okay with people celebrating my birthday up to a hundred days late.

On the right side of the seating and against the wall was the traditional Persian New Year table setting, or Haft Seen, consisting of seven food items. The most prominent display was a pot containing what looked like live green grass. Arranged in relation to the grass were smaller, cup sized bowls holding: some kind of dark pudding; some of what looked like dates to me but I think they were the fruit of the oleaster tree, a bulb of garlic; an apple; and some coins. There’s supposed to also be sumac berries and vinegar, but I didn’t notice those. There were two candles, several drinking glasses and off to the side of the table was a bowl holding what looked like a punch made from nuts.  From what I could find on Wikipedia this seems to correspond to the Haft Mewa, which is an Afghani table setting consisting of raisins, oleaster fruit, pistachios, hazelnuts, prunes, walnuts and almonds. Although I didn’t see any in this display, I’ve read that the tradition also includes painted eggs and that the Easter eggs of western culture have their origin in Persia. On top of all that there is an old man with a white beard that brings presents for children. If I find out that the Persians invented Halloween too I am going to scream.

I went to the washroom, which smelled like toenails. In the gym there were a lot of little girls of about nine years of age, some of them wearing bunny ears, all running around and playing some kind of vigorous hopping and running game. Maybe it was a Brownie meeting.

On the way back I ran into Cy Strom. He reached with his right hand to shake mine but I gave him my left because my right was still wet. He said he often doesn’t dry his hands so he doesn’t mind. I told him that for some strange reason my left hand always dries quicker than my right after I’ve washed them. He couldn’t wrap his head around why that would be.

I stopped to chat with Tom Smarda and Sydney White. Tom was reminiscing about when we first met in Vancouver. He’d thought it had been the early 70s but I didn’t arrive in Vancouver until May 26, 1978, so it was probably sometime after that that we started hanging out. He was busking with an electric guitar in front of a bank tower and he would always say, “Greetings!” instead of “Hi”. I recall that in our first conversation he had said something about people not being able to see the forest from the trees, but I argued that it’s more accurate to say that the masses can’t see the trees for the forest.

Sydney was talking about how she’d recently paid $5000 to a publisher to get her book of poetry published. I told her that publishers aren’t supposed to charge money to authors to publish and distribute their works. She was indignant and insisted that she’d gotten a good deal. I didn’t argue with her because it would have been a waste of time, but what she’d gone with is a vanity publisher and it’s the loser’s way to go. Nobody takes your writing seriously if you had to pay a publisher. They are supposed to publish it because they think they can make money off the merit of the work.

As the reading was about to start at about 19:10, Bänoo discovered that neither of the two microphones was working. They would phase in and out, but mostly out. Tom decided to try to fix them from the amp and so Bänoo delayed the kick off for five minutes, which turned to ten ineffectual minutes. Finally we did the entire night without microphones and it worked fine, although there was a tendency for poets to read at floor level and throughout the night to edge further and further back until some of them were actually standing behind the front row.

While people had been waiting for things to start they had begun engaging in several conversations, which Bänoo had to ring a set of silver consecration bells in order to get the audience to concentrate.

Bänoo announced that it was Persian New Year and indicated the table setting, telling us that it followed both Iranian and Afghani traditions.

We began, as usual with the land acknowledgement recited by Laboni Islam.

The first open stage performer was Norman Allan, who started with a short poem – “She carried her wounds with no frailty … The impermanence of her beauty is a lullaby …”

His second poem was “A Sreetfighting Man in the Middle of Grover Square” and he explained that he was reading it because Bänoo encourages political poems. Hmm, I know she leans towards political poetry, but I’ve never heard her encourage it. From the political poem – “I went down to the demonstration … I was telling my therapist about it … two girls, like two ghosts … They stood as victims … a horse over a fallen body … a flurry of hooves … over her … Sure, they try to step on the sturdiest surface, not on a body … I never caught him … That’s an example of class interest … My ex-therapist thought that … was youthful posturing … I said what I thought I saw … Why indeed did I say, ‘trampled under hoof’? Why is she after my balls? I asked her why she denied death and blood outside her door … A short while before the police broke up the demonstration … what could a poor boy do but to play for a rock and roll band, cause in sleepy London town there’s just no place for a street fighting man.”

Ruby read – “To email or not to email in the vacant space of three months … my heart could not compete … The possibility of messaging you again … Places that felt like you in Toronto … I felt like I was peering into your summer childhood … vividly remembering you as a dusty ghost … A house with warm walls … Paintings of the freedom of the heart … A place that felt sacred … like walking on the soil of an Indian burial ground … You explored the music of everything ecstatic and yellow.”

As Bänoo was about to introduce the next open miker, Maggie Helwig, the minister for St Stephen in the Fields, came pushing a bike between the audience and the stage and called out, “Excuse me!” as she took the bike back towards the gym. Helwig is a very good writer but she only read on the open stage the first night Shab-e She’r was at the church. Since then she hasn’t even sat in the audience.

Jeff Cotrill read “How to Write for the Internet” – “The 73 most totally overrated things like ever … Citizen Kane … who cares? We know all along that Rosebud is a sled … 2. The Beatles … their music was so pretentious … especially Stairway to Heaven … 3. Pizza … gross with pineapples … 4. Europe … What a useless, dumb continent! Nobody speaks English right …  not even in England … Ad: Date Russian women with one leg … 47. Sleep … so boring … 48. Laundry … Boring and pointless … It’s just going to get dirty again … 49. Monty Python … Weird people doing things that don’t make sense … 72. Opposable thumbs … So overrated … not even real fingers …73.The Godfather … Never seen it but boring …”

Janeen Yusuf said she had a sore throat but would do her best to project. From her first poem – “You and I are like snow on needles … Your dense softness a magnet to my spine … snow on needles … only for a season.”

From Janeen’s second poem – “She who takes infinite forms will bond with you like a sister … She will invoke and inhale you through the blessings of her ancestors … A canvas in constant change … Open your eyes to more than form and learn to hear silence … I am guided to hear a soul sequence.”

From her third poem – “Potent scenes … softness shielded … a lover’s call unheeded … Spring where the silver river streams … Its essence nourished potent seeds … sprouting softness as supreme.”

Sydney White read a sequence of three poems. From the first – “You didn’t make us and then punish us for not being perfect … We made you in our image … You are never not…” From “No Thank You” – “I’ve been in churches and mosques … arguments, fisticuffs, wars … I have no interest in going to heaven. I know it’s empty.” From “Armageddon Outta Here” – “Putin retaliates … another cold war heating up … Get your iodine ready … Free speeches all die on a special ed planet … Kiss your apathetic ass goodbye.”

Homa explained that her name is that of a bird that brings luck when it flies. I looked this up and saw that it’s a mythical bird that never lands and flies so high that it’s invisible and it brings luck to anyone that is touched by its shadow. She told us that she would be reading in Persian because when she read about this event she assumed that everyone here would be speaking Persian and so she hadn’t bothered to translate it. He recounted that her poem was inspired by a Chinese film called “Iron Road” in which a girl poses as a boy and gets work helping to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. She becomes friends with the railroad construction contractor’s son and when she reveals her true gender to him they fall in love. The message of Homa’s poem is that a woman shouldn’t have to pose as a man to be accepted.

Bänoo explained that she called this event “Shab-e She’r” in order to draw Persians out into more than just Persian spaces.

It was now time for our first feature, Weeda Salehi Shareqi.

Weeda said, “Happy Nowruz! It’s summer in Persia.”

She told us that her first poem isn’t done yet and that it’s about women. She introduced it by saying, “I don’t want to go very deep because makes me upset … Muslim women are presented as weak objects … People want to hear about abused Muslim women … We have very strong women … Very independent … They don’t need men …”

From the first poem – “Women have loved long before I have loved … She dreams of a red rose tree, but the dearest rose is her … When they need to show the power, her laughter will make fire …”

Weeda’s second poem was “You, Me and Us” – “The world ignored it … trying not to spread the truth … Another holocaust … happening again and again … How much will I make today … tomorrow … We all have the cellphone … we do nothing … Innocents getting killed every second of every minute of every hour of every day but we just ignore it … The newspaper give them a different headline … They all give a different headline … and again we are silent … try not to spread the truth … Fingers are moving from right to left … Does the queen sleep at night? The leaders would walk to their speech, paper in their hand and fix their tie …”

From “Woman” – “I will rise … You might want to write me off … I will rise … as a woman … I’m not gonna let you make me history … I will rise with the moon and with the sun … With each love song that plays I will rise … I will rise with each spring morning, with each summer day … You can shoot me with your eyes, I will rise …”

Weeda clapped at the end of the poem and she did this for several of the pieces that she read. She asked with a smile, “Is it boring?”

From “Say Salaam” – “My name is immigrant … Her name is immigrant … Like so many others going around and around … There are so many of us: Muslims, aboriginals … black eyebrows, black hair … Women giving speech on woman abuse they have never experienced … If hate knocks on your heart, answer it with love. Do not put out welcome mat … Write love in empty pages … If hate says ‘god damn it’ answer ‘have a great day’ … If hate knocks on your heart and tells you of 9-11, tell them to have a great day … Sing them anthem of love.”

From “Let’s Vote” – “ … It’s me with my tired life, my old eyes and my weak body … I will walk the way to change the rules … Choose the king that we have always dreamed of … then we will fly the kites to celebrate freedom.”

Of “Sorrow” Weeda said, “It’s a little bit depressing but it’s a short one” – “We have seen it, lived it, know hoe it looks … Our heart welcomes more sadness … allowing our soul to bond with it … They all grow up in the place where hate changes to love …”

From Weeda’s last poem – “Think of us as a bird … one that’s hungry for love … Who wants to fly, to sing a song?”

Weeda Salehi Shareqi’s poetry reads like it was written in another language. I suspect that the basic meaning of each poem survives the translation to English but that the poetics of the original language are lost in the transformation. While each of her poems has a valuable message, none of them make for very good poems in English.

Instead of the usual break after the first feature, Bänoo immediately introduced the second invited poet, Jacob McArthur Mooney. Just before Jacob began to read, a young man came from the back of the church a bike with a back flat tire that was squeaking against the floor as he passed in front of the stage and then continued on to the exit.

Jacob informed us that he’d grown up in a church. I thought at first that he’d meant that he’d lived in a church that had been converted to a home, but he meant that he’d been an altar server in the Catholic Church.

While Weeda had stood just at the foot of the steps leading up to the stage, Jacob decided to read while standing right next to and almost touching me where I was sitting in the front row. This worried me slightly because he announced that he was just getting over a cold.

Jacob informed us that on the advice of his therapist he was trying to let go of control and so for almost every poem he had people in the audience call out page numbers for which poems he would read. He asked Norman to start things off and was given the number 13. The corresponding poem was “Creep by TLC is Better than Creep by Radiohead” – “ … I’m learning to walk backwards, to kiss the compulsions / in a sentence’s façade … Let it glow within the argument … I have grown / proper old. I can wet the bed for science … All plainspoken punditry / is dress shoes for your teeth …”

To introduce his second poem, Jacob let us know that Levittown, New York was the first suburb in the United States. From “At the Initial Settlement of Levittown” – “ … This is the room’s cultural echo … Here is the cool teacher … Here are demographic models … This is where the clichés / will have you fuck the other woman. These / are her torch songs for the shift in public morals … This is the small room … for all the novels that live in your novels.”

Jacob confessed that he had been a boy scout and informed us that the organization had been notably militaristic for the first twenty years of its existence. But Baden Powell felt guilty because of WWI. From “The Fever Dreamer” – “I have made the boys … cruel and handsome … like new carnivores … I’ve had my boys go post-European / and sew their pockets shut … made / and remade by boy … Want armament contracts … I have become my boys’ / sincerity … I will / wear them hats … You’ll taste how / I have egged them on … In their sucralose blood / of comeuppance … I’ve shown them to suckle on / the nearest teat to tongue … their badges and banners / torqued into hieroglyph … I apologize / to Europe for the invention of the boy … I have brokered boys / bankrolled their littleness and lust … built hives in their minds / freeing them of history …”

I think in calling out a number someone was clever and asked for the square root of 81, which Jacob said was 9 and added that he’d better be right because his wife is a math professor. He explained that the poem on page nine was inspired by Kennedy assassination videos and two characters that conspiracy theorists have identified: the babushka lady and the umbrella man. In Jacob’s poem “Babushka Lady to Umbrella Man” they are in love – “I have limp hair … I will give you / humid Dallas love and Dallas children / Step into my silo, darling. Let’s not let / these fêted Irish brains get between us / Pull off your soggy tie, and I’ll strip / the slick American shirt from your back … love is underlit, the rain cloud you carry / like a shawl …”

Jacob said that we almost live in a megalopolis. It was hard to hear him at that point because two older women that were sitting next to the gorgeous young woman on my right were chatting loudly as if they weren’t aware they were at a poetry reading.

From “Megalopolis” – “Only noted by the breaths of suburbs at their centres. / Surrounding highways, theirs is a giving up of self … Folk tales for the fill that reduces former freeways … The capitalism under which Quebec City is a frontier … Let dustbowls buff the backs of final billboards … the chat is post citizen …”

Jacob did a cover of “Some Men” by Troy Jollimore – “A man wakes up … and cries out, ‘Dammit, / I’m still me!’ … A priest, a rabbi / and a Zen Buddhist / live in different neighbourhoods / and never meet … A man wakes up / in America, filled / with joy at living / in this land of opportunity / where anyone, regardless / of class, race or religion / can grow up and / assassinate the president / A man puts a cat / in a box, connects / the box to a tube / that contains a toxic / substance, connects / the tube’s lid to / a mechanical arm / that is, in turn / hooked up to a computer / that monitors an isotope / that may or may not / decay in the next / twelve seconds. The cat’s name / is Simon …”

Jacob shared that the person who inspired his next poem recently passed away. He added that it is a pantoum. He didn’t explain what a pantoum is, so I will. The modern pantoum is composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line is often the same as the first. From “A Guide to Chord Progression” – “These mice are ancient … They see patterns that we don’t … They will need you to plough snow … death blurs the boundaries of our bodies.”

Jacob told us that he has a four year old named Oliver.

He finished with the title poem from his most recent book, “Don’t Be Interesting” – “My friends are sculpting down the major works of tiny canons … working on translations … … be bifurcated, um-tied. Go fog your rover self into looped repudiations, non-belief, anonymity and art … The book says that people are art … Know that you were born in Yorkville and this cannot be changed … When I sing of you I mean you … The semiolis of the beard is in disarray … Whatever you do, don’t be interesting … I may have gotten drunk and joined the Liberal party of Canada … There can be no gentle easing into spectacle … A gender neutral youth will not protect you …”

There are a couple of parallels between Jacob McArthur Mooney and David Byrne. The title of Mooney’s poem “Don’t Be Interesting” is similar to Byrne’s “Stop Making Sense” and both writers share an interest in cities and suburbs as subject matter. I wonder if these are coincidences or if Mooney is actually a Talking Heads fan and was influenced poetically by Byrne. Jacob has an interesting style of disjoining the intellect, using sounds and arrangements of words and phrases in decohesive ways in order to convey an elasticized point of view as if each part of a poem came from separate places and were connected later more like notes in a musical composition rather than attempting to produce a sensible narrative. The overall effect is similar to poetry derived from the cut up technique. It doesn’t always work Sometimes it trails into a desert of disinterest but hearing him read is like finding odd-shaped or shiny objects while beachcombing.

We took a break.

I went to the washroom again and stopped again on the way back to chat with Tom. I asked him if he was able to hear the poets read without the microphone. He said that he could if he focuses but he finds that a lot of readers don’t have a centre. He gave me the example of a guy last month that stated that there’s nothing worse than eating alone. Tom said he’d felt like shouting out, “What about starving?” I suggested that he probably didn’t mean that eating alone is the worst thing imaginable but was rather just trying to convey that he doesn’t like to eat alone.

Tom also shared a story that his father related to him from his childhood in Czechoslovakia. He said that women used to hug trees to leave messages for other women that would embrace the same tree later and pick up what had been communicated.

After the break, Bänoo invited Tom Smarda to kick off the second half of the open stage. Tom related to everyone about the days when I knew him in Vancouver and he had green hair. I remember that in those days Tom used send some of the money that he made from busking to support a foster child in Guatemala. At one point he left town with the intention of hitchhiking down to Central America to meet the kid, but somehow I don’t think he made it. It was on the way back through California that he hooked up with some punks that dyed his hair green. Tom said that he used to sing, “I hope your kids get cancer!” In response to people suggesting that he write something less offensive he wrote the song that he sang that night at Shab-e She’r – “Oh won’t you please sing something normal / something that we can all relate to … like streams dat dadah and geese dat dadah and bears and fishes and frogs datdadah … And if I was the prime minister, I’ll tell you what I’d do / I’d take all of your money, and I wouldn’t give none to you … like birds datdadah and metals datdadah and forests … And if I was the president, I tell ya what I’d do / I’d blow up this whole planet and I’d blame it all on you … And if I was normal I tell ya what I’d do / I’d sing something normal, but you know it wouldn’t be true … like salamanders and coral reefs and you datdadah.”

Iman announced that this was her second time at Shab-e She’r and that it was her second time reading poetry in public. Her poem was about her late father – “My own father as he gently slipped into the last good night … I still chant, ‘Father, please do not change …”

Her second poem was “Forms of Vanishing” – “When the cast of your molten lover dries … Dear world, I am two dimensional, you are three.”

Her third poem was “Untamed” – “Like a turtle, I never forget … Like a dinosaur, in the end I am fragile … Like green grass, this heart can be crushed.”

Jerome read “Partial” – “It is as if Dante opted out … his remaining days … his dreams would be stone and of an iron colour … I gambolled with a neighbour’s dog … Nothing resolved … I rooted in the brush the dream of a tongue licking an eyeball … When he took me to the graves it was too dark to read the names … We spent the night crushing air between our lips … I have cracked open that night and found a body there … I stepped on it … betrayal that burns … You are stumbling over every hungry edifice … The engine shudders … In a café in Kensington a Peruvian hustler knows all there is to know about art …”

Rula read “An Introduction to the World of Motherhood” – “Where do I come from … A congestion of fears … Self only birthed through the constitution of others … A solemn word that lives on a pedestal … I am the mother … yet to be a mother.”

I was the first person that night to perform on the stage. I read “The Death of John Stadig” – “ … Stadig used his bed to block the door of his cell. He removed the mattress, twisted off a ten-centimetre piece of wire from the web of springs and tried to scratch open his wrists. Upon that failing he ventured to drive the steel wire up his arm, perhaps thinking that if he could replace his veins with metal he could stand to live in prison. When this didn’t work he broke one of the lenses from his new eyeglasses and used the biggest piece to slash his left wrist in two places. Bright blood began to flow but too slowly and so he drove the broken spectacle deep into his throat, successfully slicing and severing his jugular vein … He was already in shock by the time the guards managed to force their way into his cell and he was dead within minutes.  John Stadig may have killed himself in Leavenworth, but he was murdered by Alcatraz.”

Hanan read “Washing Away the Patriarchy” – “ … Once her husband is finished, she grabs the knife, wipes it on her apron and plunges it deep into his chest … rolls up the sleeves of her nightgown … scrapes the oatmeal out of her bowl … marvelled at its elasticity … lathers a sponge … and scrubs until it glistens.”

From Jovan’s first poem – “It took a bottle of Jack to convince me to talk to you … Sometimes my social anxieties get the better of me … Can I buy you a drink?”

From his second – “So much time is spent watching faces fade away … You said you loved Star Wars just before talking through the whole movie …”

From his third – “I don’t have Netflix, so if the chill brings us into an awkward silence …”

Deb Wiles also went up onto the stage, but paced back and forth, and sometimes up and down a step as she informed us that she has published four books of poetry, plus a cookbook and she is a Buddhist. She told us that her poem had been inspired by “The Naked Ape” by Desmond Morris. It had been a revelation for her to find out that human beings are apes. “So I’m a monkey / on a planet / Is there anything else to do / but hold on?”

Zohra read “Time” – “They say time heals all wounds … What I’ve wasted on you is much grander than time will ever be … My drum beats faster … Tell me how to count higher than ten … how I can recover each heartbeat I miss when I think of you …”

From Elisha’s poem – “I have access to the branches … only three feet away … Icicle tears … I see a cage … Where are the shadows coming from … I am wearing your clothes … Have a talk with my creature … Will the key fit or am I just a fob …”

Madeh played a drum that I think is called a “daf”. It’s a disk shaped Middle Eastern frame drum that at first I thought had small particles shaking inside of it but from what I’ve read that shaking effect is produced by metal ringlets that play against the skin of the drum while it is being beaten. He played while singing a poem by Rumi – “Spring of souls, come to dance …”

The last poet on the list was Laura de Leon but she had intended to recite her poems with the help of a musical accompanist who’d stepped outside. She went to get him.

Bänoo came to the front to occupy the audience while we waited. She told us that unlike most Iranians she doesn’t think she is better than everybody else. She said, “I think we’re pretty great” but added that Iranians should be more open to and interested in people from outside of their culture.

Norman asked Bänoo to explain her scarf, which was decorated with Persian writing. She took it off to look at it and said that it’s a line from the poet, Hafez – “I tried a thousand times on this path of love to attract you / to make you the light of my insomniac memory …” Someone said he’d heard that Hafez was Rumi’s disobedient (or mischievous?) brother. Bänoo said that Hafiz was a bit more graceful than Rumi.

It seems that Laura de Leon’s accompanist went home and so she just recited three poems without music. The first was “For the Ethereal” – “Come forth from the darkness oh angel of the night … The inner voice beckons on the wings of sonnets and prayers … There will be peace in the next world as promised.”

From “Divine Magnitude” – “Perceptibility does not escape … The great expanse in time forever unforgiven … forlorn flowers …”

From “Fragile Witness” – “Upward motion cherubim … The sky above between life and death … Other worlds emerge.”

The musical feature was Nawras Nader, who wore a baby blue suit with a black shirt and played a lutelike Middle eastern stringed instrument that I think is called an “oud”. He did a few instrumental pieces and then he asked us, “You enjoy?” Then he sang some songs perhaps in Arabic. One of them was over 100 years old by someone that didn’t get famous, about working hard and being poor but happy.

Bänoo closed the event with what she said was a traditional prayer for the turning of the New Year. She recited it in Arabic, Persian and finally in English – “You who turn eyes and hearts / You who direct days and nights / You who transform conditions / may you transform ours to the best.”

Tom asked what year it is and she said 1397.

On the way out I stopped to chat with Cy. He was curious about John Stadig, the guy in my story. I told him that he had been my mother’s first cousin but no one in the family had ever mentioned him. I heard about him when I was doing genealogical research and came across a book by Darrel McBreairty called “Alcatraz Eel”. He was a legend in northern Maine and northern New Brunswick but the family seems to have been ashamed to talk about him until the book was published. I told him that John Stadig had been a mechanical genius as had been several members of the Stadig family. My great grandfather, Lars Stadig had built the first pair of Swedish rift skis in North America. I explained that one was shorter than the other for steering but Cy found that puzzling and wondered how a shorter ski would assist a skier in turning in either direction. I didn’t know. The only thing I can think of is that maybe one lifted the longer ski and turned the shorter one in either direction to steer.

When I got home I had a late dinner and watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay called “How to Get Rid of Your Wife” starring Bob Newhart as a man named Gerald with a nasty wife named Edith who is always nagging him. He asks her for a divorce but she refuses. He finds out that she has thrown out his beloved fishing equipment and so he calmly declares, “I’m just going to have to get rid of you.” The next day she sees him digging a grave-shaped and sized hole in the back yard. He makes sure that he does everything in full view and earshot of the neighbours, who hear him nagging him about the hole and telling him to fill it in. He tells her that it’s for a fishpond. Finally she says he can dig the hole but it’s because she believes he’s planning to kill her. Her suspicions are further pushed when he buys some poison for the garden and then insists that they switch roles in the kitchen. From now on he wants to do the cooking and she can do the dishes. She sees him holding a knife sometimes with a certain look on his face. She tells her sister and her brother in law that Gerald is trying to kill her but they suggest she go into a psychiatric residence for a little while. Gerald goes to a pet store to buy some rats. The quirky pet shop honour is played by Ann Guilbert who played Millie Helper on the Dick Van Dyke Show. He wants the kinds of rats that don’t look like pets, so she sells him two less attractive ones. He lets them loose in the house. When Edith finds them she screams and goes out to buy rat poison. Gerald also leaves lying around the signed photograph of a local burlesque dancer named Rosie Feathers. Convinced that Gerald is going to kill her so he can be with Rosie she decides to kill him first. She makes him a cup of cocoa with rat poison. He doesn’t drink it but goes to sleep or at least pretends to. Edith calls the cops to tell them her husband has poisoned himself. She shows them a note that he wrote to her about leaving her but it could be construed as a suicide note. But when the cops enter the bedroom Gerald wakes up and wonders what’s going on. Edith is charged with attempted murder. Several people appear in court to testify that Edith’s behaviour had been very suspicious and she is finally sent to prison. Gerald goes to see Rosie Feathers and arranges to take her to dinner but as he is leaving the club he is accosted by the pet shop owner who recognized his picture in the paper and thought it was curious that he hadn’t mentioned the rats he had bought from her. She blackmails him, not for money but rather for a relationship and so he once again is stuck with an unattractive and overbearing woman. He takes one last look at Rosie’s picture at the front of the club and sadly walks off with the homely woman.

I Spy

            I re-read Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People”. It’s the third story I’ve read by her and I liked every one. There’s something cartoon-like about her characters that stumbling around with their lives that have been damaged by culture and condition. Her writing is magical and her descriptions hold the attention so well by making these people familiar and fascinating at the same time. Reading her stories is like slowing down to watch an accident on the highway.

            I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour about a movie star named Lana Layne who is up for an Academy Award just when her fat, bald ex-husband George, who is supposed to be dead re-enters her life. She’d married him when she was 17 and he used to manage her career of doing the hoochie koochie at county fairs. She wins the Oscar and offers to pay George off as long as he’ll go far away and not tell anyone that he is her husband. He refuses, because in California the husband and wife own half of each other’s property and he’s not going to give up on such a good thing. When he tries to kiss her she resists. They struggle and then she grabs her Golden Globe award and bludgeons him with it. Her boyfriend, Harry comes in and together they make a plan to get rid of George’s body. They make a wedding announcement, stuff George in a trunk and leave for Mexico. They get married in Tijuana and then the plan is to make it appear that they would be travelling deep into Mexico, but they double back and recross to California where Harry has a shack in the middle of nowhere. After hours of driving, Harry is too exhausted to bury George that night so he carries his body inside to put in the basement. George’s dead body is slung over Harry’s shoulder as Lana flicks on the light and they hear a crowd shout, “Surprise!” The shack is full of friends and reporters with cameras. They are convicted of murder.

            I remember Robert Culp from the show “I Spy”, co-starring Bill Cosby, in which they played globe hopping professional tennis players that were secretly spies.

           

Bizarro Beauty Parlour

            On Sunday I got caught up on my journal.

            I finished re-reading Pat Parker’s poems. I still found them boring for the most part. They are important for their content but boring for their poetry. They just don’t go to any place new.

            I re-read William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”. A weird store about a woman that hated everybody and everybody hated her. She was a vestige of slavery and plantation privilege with an old Black servant. She poisoned her northerner lover.

            I added some sautéed onions, garlic and sweet peppers to the chipotle chilli that I’d made the night before. The fresh ingredients tones down the harshness of the chipotle a little bit.

            I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay. Some ex-cons rob a safe that for some reason has inside of it, in addition to $112,000, a canister containing highly radioactive material. The youngest of the three decides not to escape but to try to save people’s lives from radiation poisoning.

            I finished re-reading Eudora Welty’s “The Petrified Man” with the bizarre but strangely ordinary women in the beauty salon. Her characters and situations are certainly bizarrely comical. The kinds of people she portrays as living in the south are not unlike some of the people that were around me when I grew up in rural New Brunswick.

From Slave Labour to Your Table?

            It felt like I had food poisoning on Saturday morning and suspect that it came from the left over frozen falafel from the food bank that I’d cooked the night before. That fowl falafel made me feel awful. There were two more bags of the stuff in the fridge but I decided to throw them in the garbage. I’d rather live without feeling sick.

            Since last Saturday the food bank handed out the random numbers at around 10:30, I decided that I’d go there this time fifteen minutes later than usual. But when I arrived the doorkeeper (I think her name is Martina) had already handed them out. I asked her for a number just as she was going back inside with an empty box. She came back a minute or so later to hand me number 21. Then she and the manager, Valdene, got into the food bank van and drove off. One of the volunteers who came out for a smoke said they couldn’t open until they couldn’t open until they came back. They returned 45 minutes later with a load of food that looked like it came from donations to a food bank barrel in one of the local supermarkets.

            It was another bitterly cold day and I hadn’t dressed warmer because I’d stupidly expected their new system to make things go more quickly. In actuality, eliminating the line up does not stop most of us from having to wait in the cold. It just makes it unnecessary for some regulars to show up super early just to be first in line.

            There were a lot of people smoking and two classes of cigarette addicts: the ones that buy their own and the ones that always either bum smokes or scavenge them. It seems that as soon as a two thirds smoked cig hits the ground someone has already picked it up again and started smoking the rest of it. One guy that was given a fag inhaled it so hard and fast that there was still a cigarette-shaped cylinder of ashes sticking out from the butt when he was finished.

            There was a used coffee mug hanging from a nail in a wooden hydro pole by a piece of twine that had been tied through the handle.

            There was a woman with two children of about 5 and 7 that arrived in front of the Parkdale Activities and Recreation Centre at around 10:45 and looking very out of place. She was carrying three new sleeping bags rolled up in plastic packages which it looked like she intended to donate. When she found out that PARC wouldn’t open until 11:00 she stood waiting, but after a while I saw three people, each with one of the sleeping bags and the woman and her kids were gone. There are homeless people that come to PARC every day but I don’t think that a single one of the people that she gave the sleeping bags to was homeless.

            After 11:00 a tall guy in shorts came out of the apartment building next door to the food bank and went into PARC. I didn’t recognize him until he came back out and called my name. It was Justin Zaza, whom I’ve known since the 90s when he used to come to my writers open stage at the Gladstone and some friends of mine called him “Little Baby Mummy”.  A few years ago he was living in an expensive studio on King Street, just west of downtown. He was shooting an experimental film and he’d invited me to participate. I took the trouble to memorize my lines and came to do my part for free but later I found that he’d forgotten to take the cap off the camera lens. He asked if I would reshoot it but I told him I didn’t have the time. He offered me $25, so I said I’d do it, but then he decided he didn’t want to pay anything. I told him at the time that he was a douchebag for backing out on an offer. So now he’s living at 1501 Queen and he says it’s nice. He says he takes advantage of all the amenities that are being offered in the neighbourhood. He was holding a large Tim Horton’s takeout cup and told me that he gets free refills at PARC all day long. I’d always thought that Justin came from a rich family.

            It was almost 11:30 by the time my number was called.

            At the top of the first set of shelves were cake mixes and white plastic bags full of garlic seasoning. I took the garlic stuff. From the bottom I was given two cinnamon-brown sugar oatmeal squares and a handful of single servings of strawberry jam.

            The second set of shelves had lots of canned beans. I took a can of beans with maple syrup and another can of mixed beans. Further down was the canned fish and peanut butter shelf. I took a tin of “East Coast style” Millionaire sardines but on the back it says they were caught off the west coast while on the side it says they are a product of Thailand. I guess they’d have to be millionaire sardines to be able to afford to travel that much. The bottom shelf had apple juice drinking boxes but there was one larger bottle of organic 7-11 apple juice from concentrate.

            There was no broth in the soup section and no sauce on the pasta shelves, so I moved on to the cereal. There were mostly boxes of Cheerios but I got one of All Bran Buds.

            Angie had a lot of milk to offer of various percentages but I had to turn them down. There were also yogourts and some kind of fruity cream cheese dip, which I told her I could'nt eat until Easter. She said, “I see what’s goin on now!” and gave me an extra bag of four eggs. I put one back in my right jacket pocket and the other in my left and only one egg broke by the time I got them into my fridge. She gave me a litre of “not from concentrate” apple juice. Once again I eschewed the usual tube of frozen ground chicken and the pack of frozen chicken wieners. I did take the box of frozen tandoori chicken “samosas” with the both annoying and clever name of “Snak Man Doo”. The company is owned by Bellissio, which is owned by a mega food-producing corporation headquartered in Thailand called Charoen Pokphand Foods, which owns large animal and fish farms. They were accused in 2014 of buying fishmeal for their prawn farms from boats that use slave labour. The mostly Burmese and Cambodian slaves are supposedly bought for $455, are given drugs so they can put in 20-hour workdays and non-compliant slaves have been allegedly executed. It’s possible that the sardines for Millionaires were also caught by slave labour. I wonder if there’s a retirement plan.

            Sylvia’s vegetable section had a fair variety of items. She gave me a bag containing ten potatoes; a small cabbage; two cucumbers; four small zucchini; an onion; two and a half carrots; an apple; a bag containing a medley of frozen carrots and beans; a lot of little non-bell sweet peppers: 11 red, two orange and two yellow; and five soft tomatoes.

So there was still lots of standing around in the cold despite the food bank’s new lottery system of handing out numbers. While decent meat is still scarce, dairy seems plentiful, the shelves are well stocked and for the most part there were lots of veggies. When I got home though I had to toss every one of the tomatoes that I’d been given, because I can live without any more food poisoning.

            After the food bank I’d wanted to go down to No Frills to pick up some fruit, but I was so cold that I decided to go home to warm up a bit first. After putting my food bank groceries away I headed back out. At the supermarket I didn’t get a lot of stuff, just some black sable grapes, strawberries, bananas, soymilk, naan, and a loaf each of cinnamon-raisin and multigrain bread.

            That night I turned off my lights and lit candles during Earth Hour. It was very difficult to cook dinner by candlelight because I couldn’t see very well. I made a kind of chilli with two cans of beans, a can of tomato sauce and a can of chipotle peppers. Canned chipotle peppers are spicy but they don’t taste very good.

            I watched an interesting Alfred Hitchcock Hour that took place mostly on a university campus. Hitchcock’s lead in to the story was funny as well. It shows him standing in front of an ivy-covered wall as a branch of ivy begins creeping onto his shoulder and gradually starts to wrap itself around him. He says, “Due to the population explosion and the need for more and more institutions of higher learning, universities seem to be springing up overnight. Since everyone prefers to go to old established institutions we have developed such products as fast growing ivy. We can also, in a matter of months provide a campus with hundred-year-old traditions picked up at very reasonable prices from colleges that are sick of them. Aging the faculty has not yet presented any problem.”

A straight “A” student named Doc has a reputation for performing practical jokes while his roommate, Skip has a drinking problem and tends to go extremely overboard with wild behaviour that he forgets about the next day. The story begins in a lecture hall where the professor is about to introduce the class to the dissection of human cadavers. A corpse is wheeled out, but then suddenly it sits up and a female student screams. Emerging from under the sheet, Doc begins to laugh. The angry professor punishes Doc by giving him a stack of papers to spend all night marking. Later, at the residence, Doc is marking the papers at around midnight when he hears someone shouting “Woman in the hall!” The door bursts open and one of the guys tells Doc that Skip is drunk again and is going to throw Barbara in the shower. Skip comes charging down the hall with a young woman over his shoulder. He takes her into the men’s shower and puts her and himself under the spray. Doc tries to pull Skip away but Skip begins to beat Doc up until the other boys pull him off. A few hours later an alarm clock goes off. Doc is just finishing grading the essay and Skip wakes up to find he tied to his bed.

Later there is a Halloween party at which, besides dancing, one of the activities involves, for 25 cents being able to push a cream pie in the face of an honour student, of which Doc is one.

Skip is trying to break a beer drinking record of 63 cans in one sitting, but he passes out after 42. The guys talk about how Skip almost got kicked out of school earlier that day. Doc says that it’s a good thing Skip passed out because he could have killed someone driving back to the dorm. The Doc gets an idea. Wouldn’t it sober Skip up if he thought that he had killed somebody? The unconscious Skip is taken back to the residence. Doc goes to the lab and steals a cadaver. He puts a blonde wig and some earrings on it that were left over from the Halloween party and when Skip wakes up in the morning he tells him that he strangled and killed Ruby, the new waitress at the tavern. Doc says he has to go help the professor set up the class but he’ll be back in half an hour. He leaves Skip alone with the corpse. But the professor needs Doc for the entire lecture and Skip is going crazy. Finally he wraps the cadaver up in the carpet, puts it in his car and goes looking for a way to get rid of it. As he is driving an elderly woman is rolling her garbage can out to the curb. It gets away from her and goes in front of Skip’s car. He gets out to help her pick up her garbage. She says, “I told my husband before he died he ought to buy me a garbage disposal. But the dog was alive then and he’d eat anything. Then the dog died. I can’t get out of the habit of cooking for the three of us. Nothing that you cook for just one person tastes nearly so good. I don’t know why that is. Are you all right? Would you like a drink?” “A drink?” “Would you like to come into my house and have a drink? I’m 67 years old, my intentions are honourable.” “Can I park my car in your driveway? I have a rug and I’d feel safer if it was off the street.” “Yes, of course! You can put it right in the garage. I don’t keep a car in there anymore. I told my husband before he died he ought to teach me how to drive. But then they came and repossessed it. I wouldn’t make payments on anything I didn’t know how to use.” Once the car is in the garage he looks at the electric saw and the blades that are on a bench. She explains, “This used to be my husband’s workshop.” Inside the house she calls her newest neighbour to remind her that it’s garbage night. She explains that when they come around with the truck they throw things in the back and they are all ground to a pulp before the truck’s halfway down the street. Skip and the old lady are drinking gin and they both get drunk. She tells him that every Tuesday night she has to put on a dress, fix her hair, put on a little lipstick and take the garbage out. Then suddenly the lady pitches forward, unconscious on the dining room table. Skip goes out to the garage and begins to cut up the body with the old lady’s late husband’s saw, then he wraps the parts up in paper and places them out on the curb. He’s relieved the next morning when the garbage truck comes and grinds it all up. For breakfast she makes Skip a chicken liver omelette. He tells her he has to go to class. When Skip gets back to campus he finds out that he’s been cut from the football team. He goes to the tavern and while he’s having his first beer, Ruby comes in to work. She comes up to say hi there to Skip and he is in shock. Suddenly Doc comes in. “You said I killed Ruby, didn’t you?” “Where’s the body?” “If it wasn’t Ruby, who was it?” “It wasn’t anyone! Now where is it?” “How could it not be anyone?” “It was a cadaver from the medical lab. It was just a joke to sober you up. Where is it?” “Come on, I’ll show you.” The next scene shows dissecting class in the medical lab. One of the students pulls out a cadaver and thinks it’s Doc playing another prank, but Doc is dead.

Michael Parks put in a strong performance as Skip and I thought the old lady and the lines they wrote for her were hilarious.

            

Blanche Dubois

            I was feeling heavy in the stomach and burping cumin on Friday morning after having eaten fried falafel the night before.

            I spent a lot of the day re-reading A Streetcar Named Desire. What a sad ending. Blanche Dubois is such a tragic character, but despite her flaws is the only likeable character in the play.

            The feeling that I’d had the day before that I might be coming down with a cold was mostly gone.

            I read the Sylvia Plath poems that were required reading for my course. I don’t think that I had read them all before. She really was a poetic genius with powerful imagery and with tragic force that contemplated mortality and with a pain-tempered ecstasy that overwhelmed her own fragile interior. She harvested agony and drew honey from a broken heart while writing with distance about her journey to suicide.

            I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay about a former movie story named Miles Crawford who, when his career failed, studied to become a lawyer. Years later his son gets into a knife fight with a friend and kills him. He is charged with first-degree murder. Ed Rutherford, the best criminal lawyer around is hired but he is not convinced of Todd’s innocence. Miles proposes that Ed handle the backbone of the case but that Miles will be the front man in court. His final statement to the jury is a powerfully moving “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” type speech, which causes the trial audience to applaud. Because of the prejudicial reaction the prosecutor asks to make his summation the following day. The next day the lawyers are called into the judge’s chamber and a movie is played in which, 30 years before, the actor Miles Crawford had given word for word the exact same speech as he had given that day. Crawford asks that they watch the conclusion of the film, which shows the young defendant being found guilty and given the death sentence. Todd is found guilty but the judge, having been moved by the film, chooses a life sentence with an early chance for parole over the death penalty.

            I re-read the Frank O’Hara poems for our course. There were far fewer poems from O’Hara than from the other poets, which I think was because Scott Rayter accidentally posted his PowerPoint presentation on Blackboard rather than a full collection of poems. O’Hara was interesting because of the little jabs of surrealism he would throw into his poems among the more free flowing lines that simply observed ordinary reality.

At Last I Have Control!

            Because of drinking coffee before bed for the first time in a month, I barely slept at all on Thursday from midnight until I got up at 5:00. My brain was firing a lot slower during rehearsal but I didn’t feel too sleepy before I having another coffee at breakfast timer.

I had to do laundry again. Every two weeks seems too soon to me. If I had 300 pairs of underwear I might only have to do it five times a year. The older Korean gentleman that manages the Laundromat was eating lunch with chopsticks out of a Styrofoam take out container. I was coveting his spicy noodles as I asked him to change a ten. While my stuff was in the wash I rode down to the Queenglad pawnshop to ask if they’d gotten the remote for my Yamaha receiver yet. Lou said he’d tried to call me but my phone wasn’t working because I didn’t answer it. I think he’d called on Tuesday when I was posing for an art class and had my ringer turned off. He went to the back and brought out a thin white box that was the same width as the one my Arm and Hammer toothpaste comes in and about a centimetre longer and handed it to me with a smile. I went to Freshco where I bought some fruit and soymilk, then I went back to the Laundromat to put my clothes in the dryer and then I went home.

            I was worried that the remote control wouldn’t work or that it would take batteries that I didn’t have, but it takes AAs, which I can recharge. It also works, so now I can watch a video while eating and change the volume without putting my plate down and getting up. Also, since it’s a remote control that means that I can open or close the drawbridge over the mote that surrounds my building without going downstairs and turning the crank.

            Once my laundry was back home, I made lunch and then took a siesta.

            I was sneezing and sniffling a lot all day. I don’t know if it’s a cold coming on or something in the air. Maybe it’s the cockroach gel that was put down around the kitchen and bathroom on Monday.

            I got caught up on my journal.

            When I posted my blog I noticed in the comments section for my Monday blog about the exterminator coming that a police detective wants to get in touch with me relating to an ongoing investigation. I assume it doesn’t relate to that particular blog and I suspect it relates to my blog from a month and a half ago about my ex-landlady after I heard that her son was arrested recently on a murder charge. If that’s the case there’s not any point in talking to me, since I wrote everything I know in that blog. A blog comment section is an odd way for the police to try to reach me.

            I made falafel with tahini and hummus, but the bag of falafels was frozen when I put it in the frying pan. It was awkward trying to separate them while they were frying. I had them with tahini and hummus while watching a somewhat interesting Alfred Hitchcock Hour. A woman named Mrs. Logan has just moved to a small town where nothing ever happens. She calls up the local sheriff because she has observed something suspicious about her next-door neighbour, Mr Jarvis. She hasn’t seen his wife for three days, he just sits in the backyard drinking all day and at night she sees him digging a big hole in his garden. Mrs Logan thinks that Jarvis might have killed his wife. The sheriff dismisses her theory but he looks into it and finds that no one has seen Mrs Jarvis for three days and that Mr Jarvis tells some people she’s sick and others that she’s gone on a holiday. One evening Mrs Logan takes the sheriff to her bedroom window to look down at Mr Jarvis as he digs his grave shaped hole. At one point Jarvis looks up and sees her watching him. Minutes later he rings Mrs Logan’s doorbell. The sheriff hides while she answers the door. Mr Jarvis essentially tells her she is a busybody and that she should mind her own business rather than standing in her window to spy on her neighbours. The next night the sheriff goes to Jarvis’s house where Jarvis has already filled in the hole that he’d dug. He tells him he’s going to have to dig it up and he does so. What they find is a dead dog. Jarvis explained that it had been sick and so he’d had to put the animal down. He also confesses that his wife had left him and he’d been too embarrassed to tell anyone. The sheriff goes to tell Mrs Logan that the case is closed but that makes her angry because she doesn’t believe Jarvis’s story. The sheriff leaves and then Jarvis sneaks over the wall to Mrs Logan’s yard and sneaks into her house. She is sitting on the couch flipping through a magazine as he sneaks up behind her with a shovel. As he gets close, she turns, sees him, stands, they go into one another’s arms and begin to kiss. I didn’t see that coming. The whole nosy neighbour routine has just been a ruse to throw off suspicion from the fact that Jarvis really did kill his wife. She’s buried in Mrs Logan’s yard. They dig her up and drag her body over the wall and back to Jarvis’s yard and Jarvis puts his wife’s corpse into the grave, on top of the dog. Meanwhile, Mrs Logan is filling up the hole in her yard. The doorbell rings and it’s the sheriff, who had forgotten that it’s against the law to bury an animal in one’s yard, so he says he will take it downtown. Jarvis is stuck. As they go into the backyard they hear Mrs Logan’s voice calling out “Darling!” and then her head pops up with a smile from the other side, but on seeing the sheriff her expression drops. Her and Jarvis are done. I don’t understand though why they didn’t just keep Mrs Jarvis buried in Mrs Logan’s yard.

Martha

            Wednesday morning was the first time I’d drank coffee in a month and I was buzzing all day. It helped me to get caught up on my journal though.

            It was a few degrees above zero for my ride to English class, so I wore only one scarf and my spring gloves. But it was scheduled to drop to minus three by the time the lecture was over so I had my other scarf and my winter gloves in my backpack.

            I’ve been re-reading A Streetcar Named Desire in preparation for my exam. I’d like to see Lucille Ball. Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance and William Frawley as Stella, Stanley, Eunice and Mitch, with Tallulah Bankhead as Blanche.

            Scott was about five minutes late as usual. He started the class by showing us a video of an American Dad parody of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Roger and Francine are pretending to be a married couple in social settings. They meet a younger couple named Rick and Candy and invite them home for dinner. It becomes something like the Albee play when they start making up each other’s back stories in front of the couple. Francine says Roger is an economics professor when he wanted to be a political science professor, but Francine says, “It’s too late now because it’s been established.” Roger begins to flirt with Candy the way Martha flirts with Nick in the play. He says of Francine, “Mandy used to look good before she went to rehab.” “I never went to rehab!” “You have now. It’s been established.” “Make me a drink!” “Yes love, whatever love wants. Amanda wears a hairpiece.” Then Roger tells them that Amanda killed their baby and couldn’t have another because her uterus was polluted with syphilis. Then they start fist fighting and the young couple run out. It ends in a similar way to the ending of the Albee play, with the two of them calmly devastated in the aftermath of their battle.

            Scott told us that there is a long-term plan to revitalize King’s College Circle and Tower Road and turn them into cobblestone car free paths lined with oak trees. They might also put a pond in front of Hart House like there was a hundred years ago. The car parking would go underground. He said that it wouldn’t be finished in our lifetime though.

             We broke off into groups to discuss three passages of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that Scott quoted. Four of us middle aged students were in a group together: Christine, Steve and British student who also comments a lot during lectures. We talked about Martha’s monologue when she is alone, which seems to reveal that her relationship with her father is not as hunky dory as she lets on in company, and that perhaps there was even incest when she was young.

            Martha’s first husband was the boy that mowed the lawns at Miss Muff’s girl’s school. Scott thought that name “Miss Muff’s” suggested there was some muff diving going on. Martha is not vulnerable until this monologue. It was because of Martha’s sexuality that Albee’s play was turned down for the Pulitzer. Women were expected to have children, go to parties and support their husbands. Martha is more of an equal to her husband, but less so in the film version.

            The play is about madness and mind games of truth and illusion. Madness is prominent in all of Albee’s plays. Did the young gardener even exist? Martha committed the sin of making public what should be private.

            It’s absurdist theatre like “Six Characters in Search of an Author” by Luigi Pirandello.

            It’s also about fertility. Martha and George are barren and sterile in a sterile environment that produces sterility. Nick and Honey may also be unable to have children.

            It’s about war in New Carthage. Carthage was totally destroyed in the third Punic War.

            At the end George and Martha’s crutch is dead and so things must change.

            Walpurgisnacht is the night of evil spirits. George recites the requiem mass in Latin. The play ends with fear and relief. It is as if language has died and they are speaking like robots. Virginia Woolf committed suicide because she was afraid of herself.

            The next movie that Elizabeth Taylor did was The Taming of the Shrew, in which she just shrieks and throws furniture around.

            George is clearly depressed.

            The recognition scene in theatre or anagnorisis is a moment in a play when a character makes a critical discovery.

            Nothing is being said but they are talking constantly. David Mamet copied this style. Silences are also repetitions. There is presence and absence.

            Martha lacks a mother.

            Sandy Dennis miscarried during the shooting of the film.

            Martha and George are Nick and Honey’s future.

            There is a lot of baby talk and infantilization. There are also a lot of animal references, which also recur in Albee’s work. To call someone an animal is to assume superiority over them. But referring to people as animals is also a way of masking human behaviour. The big bad wolf in Little Red Riding Hood was a human rapist. George calls Nick an ant. Martha calls him a houseboy. He is a sexual pawn. No one until Martha has ever treated him that way.

            Do George and Martha require an audience? They want to hurt others. They are co-dependent. Feeding each other’s illusions has destroyed both of them.

            Martha is promiscuous all the time.

            In Albee’s plays the young, good-looking guy always gets it.

            The film producers didn’t want “bugger” but “hump the hostess” was okay.

            Philip Roth referred to Edward Albee’s “pansy rhetoric”. People thought the play was an attack on heterosexuality. Albee was seen as a threat. An angry and intelligent female was important to the voice of the time. Martha is the complex heir of Hedda Gabbler. Most people that go to plays are women, despite the fact that there are so few major female characters or playwrights.

            Watching a play we feel directly involved with the actors.

            “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” turned the theatrical tropes on their ass. 1962 was the time of the Cuban missile crisis. Nick was named for Nikita Khrushchev. A lot of theatre and literature of that era were meant to smash people out of their complacency.

            Professors were supposed to teach morality. Scott said when he was a student he had a professor that invited him to dinner and his Japanese wife sat at his feet the whole time.

            George is history and Nick is biology. Nick is going to clone himself and make the world bland. Everything is reduced to biology. History knows that we repeat our mistakes.

            When George made Martha think that he was going to kill her it turned her on.

            “Flores para los muertos” is an example of the conversation between “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

            Fertility is a recurring theme in many of the works we have studied.

             A houseboy is also a husband’s servant.

            Honey is positively excited by violence. The comedy keeps things from boiling over.

            George and Martha entertain one another and exercise their wits. They are not productive. This marked the death of linear theatre.

            A child murdering parents is a classical theme. Nick and Honey are children and George and Martha are predators on the hunt and out for bloodlust. There have to be witnesses.

            Scott said that universities used to put on this play a lot and it was weird to see students try to play middle-aged characters.

            The Bergin boy’s laughter is taken for madness. He is rendered silent by a needle.

            George killed his parents and his and Martha’s son.

            I mentioned the idea that the son may be symbolic of the American dream.

            Albee was adopted and he hated his foster parents. Parents make up what they want their child to be. The play is about how parents and children fail each other and the fantasy of being loved. George and Martha would not have had such a perfect child as the one they imagined.

            Divorce rates were lower and so couples that should not have been together remained bound to each other in hatred.

            The father tells Martha to “be nice to” Nick and Honey. He pimps her out.

            Albee was very well read but he hated universities.

            We finished about three quarters of an hour early.

            When I got home I made guacamole with garlic and limejuice and had it with plantain chips while watching the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. A hit man named Derry with a moral conscience is hired by a book-making gangster named Harney to kill an employee named Eddie that has started to steal his customers. Eddie’s wife Connie is permanently in a wheelchair due to an accident that resulted from Eddie accidentally knocking her down the stairs. Derry is attracted to and feels sympathy for Connie and is reluctant to kill him because then she will have no one to take care of her. He decides to fake Eddie’s death and have he and Connie move to Mexico. He buys a corpse from the morgue and plants some of Eddie’s personal items, such as his wedding ring on the body, and then he burns it in Eddie’s car. But before Eddie and Connie leave for Mexico, Connie shoots and kills Eddie with a gun that is registered to Derry. She claims that Derry killed her husband and he is arrested for murder.

            

The Great Toilet Flood

            The toilet was backed up on Tuesday morning but I didn’t have time to plunge it because I had to leave for work early. After arriving at OCADU, as I was climbing the stairs to the fourth floor of the Village by the Grange campus, my phone started ringing. I didn’t bother to answer it on the stairs, but once I was on the level I took the call. It was my landlord telling me that water was leaking from my apartment down into the donut shop. I told him the toilet was plugged but I hadn’t flushed it. I also let him know that I could not come home until the afternoon. He has a key but he said he was in London. Later it occurred to me that I did pee before leaving for work and out of habit I flushed the toilet without seeing if it was overflowing. I couldn’t imagine a toilet continuously overflowing like a tub though so I figured it would have probably stopped already. Throughout my time at work though, from time to time I was dreading what kind of a mess I would find in my bathroom when I got home.

            The morning class for which I worked was first year when all the classes tend to try to give an overall sampling of the various aspects of art that students can choose to branch into in subsequent years.

            The instructor was Francisco Granados, a flamboyant man in a bright red toque. He had me start with a full 20 minutes of 30 second poses, then a set of 1 and 2 minute gestures, followed by four 5 minute poses and a 15 minute pose. Then he had me reverse the order and do the fives, the twos and ones and the 30-second poses again. It was a workout.

            During the break he asked his students to look up the word “palindrome”. I had actually forgotten that it’s a word or phrase that reads the same way forwards and backwards. Of course the point was that my poses for that class combined to make a palindrome.

            Immediately after Francisco’s class I had to pack up and head across the street to the main building and work upstairs at the top of the pencil box for Kevin Compuesto. He had the stage set up for a two-model pose, but the female model would come next week. He had two mannequin legs sitting in a chair with a drapery over them to indicate where the other model would be posing and I was supposed to sit on the stage and interact with her in some way. He’d put a few props at the front of the stage to suggest that the absent model would be some kind of worshipped being and so I sat facing her with one hand on the arm of her “throne”. It was a difficult pose because both of my knees were bent and they got pretty stiff by the end of the day.

            I was feeling a bit sleepy and so on a five-minute break I laid down on the stage to doze a bit. Kevin had to come over and poke me when I actually fell asleep for two minutes past my break. During the long break I got enough rest to continue to the end.

            I was glad to be on my bike afterwards and moving my knees. I stopped on my way home at the Bank of Montreal on Queen Street, east of Bathurst, because I was low on grocery money. The ATM in that bank sometimes rejects my card and I have to try again.

            The following day I would be entering the second transition out of my annual fast, as I would start eating vegetable protein, so I bought some soy milk, a couple of tubs of spicy hummus and a plastic jar of tahini. I got the last two items because I thought they might go well with some falafel that I had in the freezer. All of the tahini containers were greasy from sesame oil that was leaking out from under the cover. I picked the least slippery one.

            When I got home only the bathroom floor mat was soaked but the floor was dry. The biggest surprise was that the toilet was unplugged. I figured that the landlord must have let himself in and cleared the block. But that evening he knocked on my door and told me he’d just gotten into town. To explain how the toilet had cleared itself he suggested that the weight of the water had finally just pushed a hole through the blockage. He said there was still water dripping down in the donut shop but he couldn’t figure out why. He asked me to watch when I flush next time. He’s been a lot calmer since his stomach exploded a couple of years ago.

            The second season of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour started off with a bang in the story about the mental patients taking over the asylum, but the next three stories have been below par. The one that night was about a bus driver nicknamed “Driver” who stops for a beer at one of his old haunts and runs into his trashy-sexy ex-girlfriend, Betty Rose, who hasn’t gotten over him and continues to insist that they were made for each other. He had gone away to Korea though and brought back a bride named Mickie. He leaves the bar, but instead of going home, stops to sit at a spot by the lake where he used to meet Betty Rose. Betty Rose finds him there and once again pushed him to come back to her. She threatens to tell Mickie about his past with her and he strangles her to death. The next night, before Driver comes home, Mickie is visited by the sheriff, who tells her about the death of Betty Rose, including the fact that the killer tore a button from Betty’s coat. Mickey finds a woman’s coat button in Driver’s coat. As she is preparing dinner, her dog Rags gets under foot and causes her to spill a large can of milk. She ventures down to the McLeod General store and on the way runs into Mrs. McLeod’s mute daughter, Ruby, who loves Mickie’s dog. They walk together to the store with Rags on a chain leash. When Driver gets home Mickey asks him about the button and he tells her that he found it on the ground on the way home. Mickie says he should turn it in to the police and so he says that he will go right away. Mickie and Rags come with him. On the way though, Driver decides that it would be less incriminating for him if he just leaves the button for the police to find. Mickie is suspicious and based on the way he answers her questions, she figures out that Driver is the killer. She says she never wants him to touch her again and so he strangles her too. Driver tells the police at the store that Mickey didn’t come home after going out to get the milk. Since he is not a suspect he is told to go home. He pulls out Rags’s chain and tells him to come, but Ruby, who communicates with a blackboard, claps her hands to draw attention to her board and writes that Mickey had the chain with her when she came for milk, so Driver must be the killer.

            Mickie certainly didn’t look Korean and in fact she barely looked Asian at all, but it turns out that she was played by Pilar Seurat, who was a Filipina actress who got a fair amount of work in the 60s in both television and film.