Trickster Coyote

            Wednesday morning was my first day of eating bread in a month. I had cinnamon toast.

It was an awkward day for getting anything done. I had to work at midday and so I didn't have the whole morning free because to avoid being sleepy at work I had to force myself to take a nap in the morning. It was a great sleep though and it allowed me to stay awake while I was posing.

            During my bike ride to work I tried to think of as many clichés as I could and around each one I wrote a country and western song.

            I passed the blackboard sandwich sign outside of a café that had a picture of the handsome and sensitive looking Ryan Gosling wearing glasses accompanied with the words, “Hey girl, I’ve made fresh croissants and coffee to make your morning as wonderful as you are.” Apparently memes with quotes like that attached to pictures of Gosling are all over the internet. He says he has never said, “Hey girl”.

            I worked for Diane Pugen up in the pencil box. I’d never seen her on the sixth floor before. She told me that she’d been there all term but confirmed that this was the first term that she’d taught there. She complained that she hates the studio on the sixth level because they are so small, there’s too much furniture and there is no room for students to do their presentations.

            I think that Diane’s plan had been for me to just do a few short poses and then to do one long one for the rest of the class. I ended up doing mostly ten minute poses for the first half because a student was supposed to do a presentation but he couldn’t do it until he’d downloaded an app, which took over half an hour, and so I posed while we were waiting so the other students would have something to do.

            His presentation was on an Austrian painter of the early 20^th Century named Egon Schiele who used to let street kids stay at his studio, but he got in trouble with the law because he also did nude portraits of them. When he was sixteen he had an incestuous relationship with his twelve-year-old sister and then later with at least one of the younger run away girls. He was considered one of the great painters of the 20^th Century though.

            I finished the last hour of class with a long sitting.

            When I got home I went to the liquor store and bought a can of beer for the first time in a month.

            I made a post on Twitter, then I goofed around online for a while, then in the evening I rode downtown again for 20^th Century US Literature class.

            When I got to the lecture theatre there were some students there already but they were sitting with the lights off. I tried to turn them on but nothing happened other than a whirring noise. I thought I’d flicked the wrong switches so I turned them off and the noise stopped. When Scott arrived he hit the same lights as I had but it took a few minutes for them to gradually brighten. I wonder if they are sensitive to the light coming in through the window and so they don’t turn on fully until it’s darker outside.

            Scott began by talking about Native American Sherman Alexei, whose novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” I read in my Children’s Literature course a couple of years ago. Scott didn’t go into details but I figured from the way he spoke about it that there had been recent sexual harassment or assault allegations against him. Alexei is often one of the only aboriginal writers on university syllabi and now because of the allegations some universities are removing aboriginal studies entirely.

            Some say that Canadian and Aboriginal studies are separate.

            American literature doesn’t begin in English. There was work in Native American languages and there was Spanish and French writing. So the call to “learn English or go home” doesn’t have much legitimacy.

            Rarely are translated works studied in English courses and certainly not War and Peace.

            Thomas King is a mixture of Cherokee, German and Greek. Scott mentioned that King directed a film called Borders but as far as I can tell only a little piece of the short story was filmed with very simple animation. The story is about a Blackfoot woman that is driving with her son from Alberta to visit her daughter in Salt Lake City. But when she gets to US customs to cross into Montana and the border guard asks her for her citizenship she says “Blackfoot”. The customs officer insists that it has to either Canadian or United Static but she insists it’s Blackfoot. She is told she has to turn around and go back but when she gets to the Canadian customs the same thing happens. After hearing her say her citizenship is Blackfoot a couple of times they try to get her to say which side of the border she lives on but she says “The Blackfoot side.” She is turned back and this repeats itself again as she tries to cross into the US. They end up spending the night in their car in the parking lot and the next day they try to cross again but over and over they get bounced back and forth between the borders and have to stay in the neutral zone and eat from the gift shop. They spend another night in the parking lot. The next day the media arrive from both sides of the border and they are allowed to cross into the States. What is a border?
            It’s an interesting story but unrealistic. The customs officer could have just looked at her driver’s license or her Indian status card.

            Standard time was created to correspond with train and ship schedules but also for weather reporting.

            The first story we looked at was Bharati Mukherjee’s “The Lady from Lucknow”. She was Canadian for a while but she claimed Canada was more racist than the United States. She wrote about being an invisible woman in Canada and she gave up her Canadian citizenship, even though Canada still claims her as a Canadian author. We also claim John Irving while Margaret Laurence and Mordecai Richler lived mostly in the UK.

            Muckarjee’s writing is always about race.

            Of “The Lady from Lucknow”, what images does “Lady” evoke? Gentility, courtliness and a sense of the Medieval. But the lady is an adulteress and we would not associate the word with someone that cheats. Muckarjee is good with irony. What does it mean to be “from” somewhere? People of colour are constantly asked the question, “Where are you from?”

            Migration follows capital. Muckarjee was an upper caste Indian.

            Her character in this story is Pakistani and from Lucknow. The Lucknow Pact in 1916 was between India’s Muslim League, Germany and Turkey. I guess that was the beginnings of the partition that created Pakistan. But I remember there being an East Pakistan and a West Pakistan when I was a kid. I guess East Pakistan became Bangladesh and West Pakistan just Pakistan. Scott says that the British ruled by pitting Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus against each other. Between 200,000 and 2, 000,000 were killed.

            The honour killing incident at the beginning of Muckarjee’s story about the girl that was beaten to death by her father for falling in love with a Hindu is part history and part myth. It sets up that love is dangerous. The entire story is in the past tense but beginning with an earlier past makes the later past feel like the present. The girl’s love was ideal because it was preserved in death. The narrator cannot escape the history.

            To be a visible minority is to be invisible.

            When she is exposed as an adulterous the worst part is the calm and condescending response of her lover’s wife. Violence would have been cathartic.

            The Centre for Disease Control studies foreign bodies. Brownness is equated with filth.

            Kate Beamish thinks she is not racist and yet says, “Go and find our Palestinian.” The narrator is more similar to Kate than she thinks. How much self-awareness does she have? The other woman from Lucknow internalizes her racism and is terrified by herself.

            Aphasia is loss of the ability to find the right words and sometimes the afflicted person speaks gibberish even though their intelligence is not affected.

            The Palestinian cut her losses.

            No empathy.

            Having an affair with an American was the thing to do.

            That moment when Kate sits on the woman’s side of the bed and lifts the blanket to expose her breasts is powerfully cold.

            We had our halftime break and I asked Scott what exactly had happened with Sherman Alexie. He said that several women had recently come forward about him having taken sexual advantage of his role as a literary mentor. I said that I’ve never understood why people judge someone’s art by their behaviour. What a person creates comes from a different place than what they do and I don’t think the two should be associated. Scott talked about the fact that so many authors in the past have done things without consequences such as Norman Mailer and William Burroughs shooting their wives. He had more to say but there was an extremely loud and high-pitched conversation going on between several young women at the back of the room and they were drowning him out.

            Scott took attendance and told us that those of us that handed in our essays on time will get them back next class.

            Our exam will be on April 18^th in the morning. Scott doesn’t like the fact that it’s in the morning and suggested that we should protest, not go and instead go to the 7-11 to buy Slim Jims. Next week he will give us five essay questions, three of which we will see on our exams. Each question involves writing about two texts. We can talk about the films we saw but not separately. The films are important because they have seared the plays in our minds.

            When are you not talking about sex when you are talking about literature? In Thomas King’s “A Coyote Columbus Story” there is no sex.

            The pope refuses to apologize for residential schools. 30,000children died.

            Students are asking for more Black and Aboriginal literature but not Black or Aboriginal faculty.

            The totem pole on display in the hall at University College is a knock off. Totem poles are from the west coast.

            Egerton Ryerson was the architect of the residential schools.

            The picture version of “A Coyote Columbus Story” was illustrated by Ken Monkman.

            The humour of the story is slow, uncomfortable and it burns.

            The idea of the trickster in Native literature was lost until the 60s. The coyote trickster can shape shift and change gender.

            Thomas King does not speak any indigenous languages. The feel of oral literature is not the same as oral literature. Oral stories change.

            Feeling like an outsider is as old as the hills but that doesn’t mean it’s the same as being an outsider.

            “Y’know”, “like” and “um” are examples of phatic language.

            “In medias res” means dumped into the middle of a conversation. In literature it is when a story begins in the middle of the action.

            Indigenous stories are circular, ongoing and not about good and evil.

            Scott told us that at Old Mill Station there are indigenous creation stories installed with the art on the walls. Sometimes though people defile them with graffiti by drawing swastikas and other things.

            “A” Coyote Columbus Story suggests that there is more than one.
            One of Columbus’s crewmen, Miguel Cuneo wrote about their second arrival in Hispaniola. They capture 1,600 male and female natives. Cuneo took one beautiful teenage girl for his own sex slave. She fought him with all of her strength and so he beat her into submission and raped her.

            Scott says that one estimate puts the number of indigenous people killed from first contact until now at 100,000,000.

            Anthropomorphism and anachronism is used in the story to show that nothing has changed.

            The colour “Indian red” has been removed from the Crayola crayon box.

            Coyote kept on changing the rules. History is also always changing the rules.

            Columbus and all of European was the result of a moment of accidental and wrong thinking on the part of Coyote.

            Coyote characterizes Columbus’s behaviour in kidnapping the Indians as a show of bad manners, as if he had no relations.

            Columbus’s voyage was financed by money that Queen Isabella had stolen from the Jews and Muslims of Spain.

            Coyote thought it was funny that Columbus wanted to kidnap the Indians since they aren’t worth anything. Freud says that jokes release tension and anger.

            The moral is be careful what you think.

            Thomas King wrote an essay on history and fiction. He says that satire is sharp and it should make readers uncomfortable. In “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” George is history but he is a bad historian because he is interested in fiction.

            Peter Munk died today. He gave $175,000,000 to U of T.

            When I got home I warmed up some pita bread and had it with hummus (which I found out later I should boycott because the brand name, Sabra, is Israeli) while watching The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. A woman named Marion Brown gets off a plane from Baltimore in Newark, New Jersey, takes a taxi to a building and knocks on the apartment door of a woman named Bernice Brown. She explains that she is related to Bernice’s husband, but after a while she reveals that relationship is that she is married to him too. She shows her the marriage certificate and the wedding photo. Marion says she needs a drink and Bernice says she needs one too. Marion asks for ice and while Bernice is going to get it Marion pours a small amount of scotch into one glass and then some powder in the bottle, and then carefully wipes away her fingerprints from the bottle and the glasses. When Bernice comes back Bernice pours herself a drink from the bottle and upon drinking it immediately dies. Marion takes a plane back to Baltimore where the next morning she enjoys marital bliss with the very good natured and happy bigamist, Raymond Brown. Before the travelling salesman leaves for Newark he checks to see if the crewmen have put in the new fuel tank in the basement but he just finds a gaping hole. Marion tells him she hasn’t ordered it yet. Raymond arrives at his other home to find his place full of cops and his other wife dead. After the funeral he calls his third wife Lucille in Hartford Connecticut and tells her he’s coming home that night. As soon as she hangs up, the door buzzer rings and it’s Marion. This time Marion immediately reveals herself as Raymond’s wife. Lucille doesn’t not seem shocked. She invites her in so she doesn’t make a scene in the hall. As soon as she turns from closing the door though Marion is pointing a gun at her. Marion finds out that Lucille has been married to Raymond for five years while she is the most recent wife. Marion puts the gun away. Lucille says she admires any man that can get along with so many women. She declares that Raymond is a hero. Lucille suggests that Marion divorce him and Marion agrees. Then she asks for a drink. Lucille says she needs one two. Marion says for Lucille to sit right there and she’ll make the drinks. She goes in the other room and pours Lucille a drink mixed with cyanide. Then she takes a plane back to Baltimore. Raymond arrives at his home in Hartford just as they are wheeling away his wife Lucille. Raymond calls Marion and tells her he’s flying earlier to Boston than expected. She asks if she can meet him there and at first he says no but then agrees. They spend the day and evening together in Boston but he says he has one more appointment that night. She says she’s going back to Baltimore. After his appointment he goes to his fourth home and finds the police there and his fourth wife dead. He comes home to Baltimore worried that he’s going to find her dead too. She’s asleep on the couch but wakes up and offers him a drink. He knows she doesn’t drink but she explains that she’s taken it up lately. He is suddenly suspicious. She leaves to make the drinks. On the coffee table he sees a book called The Widow’s Guide. He goes to the basement and sees that the big hole is still there. He comes back up and she hands him a drink. She says she wants him to stop travelling and work entirely in Baltimore from now on. He exclaims, “It’s true! You did it! All of them!” She says, “Have a drink.” He says, “The police will find out!” She says, “What they’ll find out is that only you had a motive. You can either stay alive with me or be dead away from me. I will see you executed for murder if you leave me.” She promises that he’ll be happy with her and he can always change his mind. He asks, “What if I do?” She answers, “If not the police there’s always the hole in the cellar.”