Women with Tools

After the food bank on Saturday I decided that rather than taking my food home I would try to make it to No Frills and back by 11:30. I bought two packs of Mexican blackberries. I’ve noticed that blackberries and raspberries shipped from Mexico tend to be of a much higher quality than the same thing from the United States.

I grabbed a loaf of multigrain bread, some mouthwash and a pack of paper towels. I had enough meat and dairy already and so it was a fairly short shopping expedition. I got home at 11:34. Nick got here a little over an hour later.

Nick sat down and visited for a while before we went upstairs with Nick’s bag of tools to rouse my upstairs neighbour David so Nick could put up some shelves for him. I rapped fairly loudly several times but there was no answer. David had assured me that he would be home all day. Nick had already decided to give up and run a more productive errand when I gave it one more try and started banging on the door like a cop and shouting David’s name. Finally I heard David stirring inside and he came to open the door. He wouldn’t admit that he’d been sleeping.

Nick set about to put up David’s shelves. I think I would have been in the way and besides I had food to put away and general tidying up to do downstairs and so I left them there.

After about half an hour I was about to make myself some lunch and went up to offer Nick a sandwich. He already had one shelf up and was about to work on the other. He turned down the sandwich because he said he was going to go get a slice of pizza when he was done. David suddenly said he would go get pizza. He asked what kind I liked and I said it didn’t matter. I went back downstairs and skipped making lunch. About half an hour later Nick came down and said he was done. Shortly after that David came in with two chicken shawarmas for us and a carton of fruit punch. He also paid Nick for the work he’d done. I invited him to join us but he declined. Nick and I ate our shawarmas at my kitchen table and shared the punch.

David came back down on his way out and called to us from the door that he was very happy with the shelves. He came back in a little later and gave us two bottles of Lesajsk beer before going back upstairs. Neither of us wanted to drink any beer right then and so I put them in the fridge.

Nick told me how a few years ago the daughter of a friend of his moved out on her own and Nick had given her a set of second hand tools. To this day she says it’s the best gift that she ever got. I can see how it would be empowering for a woman to receive a set of tools and to learn how to use them on her own.

After Nick left I did some writing.

That night I watched an episode of Perry Mason that started off spookily interesting but ended up like any other Perry Mason story. I think that the Perry Mason series was a quality courtroom drama but so far I don’t find it engaging enough to download the second season.

The weird part was at the beginning when two women, Martha and Rita are waiting to have their hair done at a beauty salon. The manager calls for Mrs. Joe Bradford and both of women stand. They are amused by the coincidence until they discover that both of them have the same address with the same keys. Martha tries to reach her husband but he avoids her and goes to his boat for a business trip up the coast. While Martha is alone in bed that night she hears someone enter the house. She comes downstairs with a gun and sees a woman’s muddy prints on the floor. We can see Rita hiding around a corner. The next day Martha goes to hire Perry Mason to locate her husband. Mason and Della go to Joe’s boat where they find his dead body, having been stricken in the back of the head with a fire axe. Since Martha had gone to the boat that night she is charged with murder and Mason defends her. In court we get the explanation for Joe having two wives. Rita had disappeared for two years after suddenly getting amnesia. During that time Joe had divorced her in Mexico and married Martha. Joe did not treat Martha very well and two of his employees, Jack and Larry were both in love with her. Larry tries to help Martha by confessing to the murder but Burger, the DA rejects his attempt and calls him a liar because the details he gives don’t match the evidence. Later, Mason reveals that Larry’s attempt to confess had been a ruse to throw the police off the fact that he really did kill Joe.
            There is always a light and often mildly comical final scene in a Perry Mason story. In this case Paul Drake comes to Mason’s office in a tuxedo asking to borrow $70 from Mason so he can take Rita on a date.

Martha was played by Nancy Gates who was a performing arts prodigy as a child and had her own local radio show for two years while she was still in high school. Her first movie was Hitler’s Children in 1943. In the next 26 years she acted in 34 films and 55 TV shows before retiring at the age of 43. She’s still around at the age of 92.

Rita was played by Doris Singleton, who started off as a ballerina. She played Lucy’s rival Carolyn Appleby on ten episodes of I Love Lucy.

Who Caused the Russian Revolution?

            On Saturday morning I finished working out the guitar chords for Serge Gainbourg’s 1969 song “La vie est une belle tartine”, which is a weird song because the title sarcastically declares that “life is a beautiful slice” while each verse describes a different failed suicide attempt on the part of the singer. My English adaptation has the title, “Life Is A Beautiful Turdburger”.

            The food bank line-up that morning was short as I expected it to be. The tall, slim man that looks like a gentle Charles Manson walked past me to the end of the line while I was locking my bike and so I was behind him.

Three places ahead was the Polish man with whom I’d had the conversation about milk the week before. Since we hadn’t had the time before for me to point out his misunderstand about what the percentage means on milk labels, I explained this time that 1% milk doesn’t mean 1% of milk but of butter fat.

            I told him that when I was young I used to drink milk straight from the cow. I offered the view that raw milk is much more nutritious. I think that I’m a healthier than average person but I would be only speculating if I were to claim that it has something to do with drinking raw milk while I was growing. I might simply be genetically healthier than average.

            I’d brought with me a beat up copy of George Orwell's 1984 with the intention of leaving it someplace near the line-up for someone that interested person to find. I put the book down on the edge of the base of one of the columns in front of 1501 Queen Street West. My Polish acquaintance was curious about the book and I was surprised that he’d never heard of 1984. I explained that even though the book is describing a possible future it’s really about what was happening in 1948 in Russia with a totalitarian regime run by a supposedly adored ruler and government propaganda actually rewriting the history of society and changing the meaning of words.

            Then my Polish friend started telling me what he thought caused the Russian Revolution (and I really wasn’t surprised all that much at all that this would be what this guy believed). First of all he declared that both Stalin and Lenin were Jews and then he expanded on that to claim that the entire Russian Revolution had been a struggle between Jews and god. Yeesh! That conspiracy theory is almost as old as the one about Jews kidnapping Christian children and using them for blood sacrifices. Very few countries treated Jews as badly in the early 20^th Century as the Russian Empire, so obviously when revolutionary movements began to form there would be some Jews that would support them, but only about 1.6% of the revolutionaries were actually Jewish. For the next ten years, before the Communist government began persecuting Jews all over again the number of Jewish members of the party had grown to about 6%. Hitler and the rest of the Nazis were the biggest believers in the canard of Jewish Bolshevism so it's very sad that there are dumb people still keeping the conspiracy alive. As for the claim that Lenin and Stalin were Jewish, the closest that comes to being true is that Lenin had a Jewish great grandfather. There's no evidence that Stalin had any Jewish ancestry at all.

            Then my companion moved the talk to South Africa and the claim that white farmers are being killed and their land is being taken away. He assured me that he knows this is true because he gets his news from Europe and European news is more accurate. That would depend on which news source one is getting one’s news from. Most of the people attacking the farms are looters and the violence is not politically or racially motivated. Black farmers and Black farm workers in South Africa are also victims of violent robberies.

            I told him that he could have the George Orwell book if he wanted it and I think he took it. I wonder if he’ll read it and use it to fuel his racist theories. I have noticed over the last few years people from the far right quoting 1984 and claiming that the totalitarian society depicted in the story is the direction that the left rather than the right is going. That idea fits on the same shelf as the modern conservative notion that the Nazis were also left wing.

            I went back to reading William Wordsworth’s poem in the Preludes about crossing the Alps on foot during his summer vacation from college.

            Although it was a cool day I was comfortable in a hoody with my leather jacket on top but the guy who looked like a gentle Charles Manson was sitting on the steps of 1501 Queen hugging himself and shivering in a t-shirt with his jacket across his lap. I asked him if he was deliberately trying to make himself cold but he shook his head.

“So why don’t you put your jacket on?”

He explained that his skin gets itchy when he’s wearing anything over his arms. I asked if it’s a specific fabric that causes the problem but he said any clothing does it. I inquired as to whether he’d gone to a dermatologist and he nodded. "So it's not an allergy?" "No" "You don't have psoriasis?" "No, I just have irritable skin.” He sat there shivering and scratching his arms.

For a first time in a couple of weeks, the food bank opened on time. After the line started moving, a young man and a young woman came out of the door of 1499 Queen, each pushing a three-tiered cart full of stacks of the kind of stainless steel divided dinner plates that they use in hospitals. These I assumed were what they use to serve meals at PARC but I’d never seen them bring them out on the street. Suddenly the woman's cart spilled about fifty of its plates onto the sidewalk. As she stooped to pick them up I commented that it was a good thing they weren’t real plates. The Charles Manson looking guy said, “That’s why they use those”.

I got downstairs at around 11:00. My volunteer at the shelves was a friendly young woman of East Asian descent.

From the top shelf I grabbed a hand-filled bag of coffee beans. There were also bottles of red sesame oil, which I assumed were red because they were infused with hot pepper, but I didn’t take any.

Lower down was a variety of health bars. I took three white chocolate and macadamia nut Clif bars and three sweet and salty peanut butter coated granola bars. She gave me three more of the latter. I also picked a box of four Love Crunch gourmet chocolate and berry granola bars.

At the very bottom there was no cereal but there were some bags of sunflower seeds in the shell. I was feeling too lazy to de-shell sunflower seeds and so I didn’t take any.

The next set of shelves had mostly canned beans and some large jars of peanut butter. I took one can of chickpeas but my volunteer gave me two more.

I didn’t take anything from the rice and pasta shelves.

Angie’s dairy and meat station was unoccupied because just before I’d gotten there she went away to do something on the other side of the room. I waited about a minute before a young man temporarily took charge of her section. I didn’t take any milk, but there was a 750-gram container of organic Greek yogourt that I grabbed. He gave me two bags of three eggs instead on one but as usual I turned down the generic frozen ground chicken and hot dogs.

I had just moved on to get vegetables from Sylvia when Angie returned to ask, “Have you been taken care of young man?” I thanked her and said I had.

Sylvia gave me three potatoes, three carrots with interestingly branched roots, two red peppers, three large tomatoes, a cauliflower and a hand-filled bag of chopped green onions.

The bread that was on offer didn’t appeal to me and so I just left. It was nice to be done with the food bank early for a change. 

The Space Children

            On Friday I finished my review of Shab-e She’r.

            I managed to finally get in touch with my upstairs neighbour David about my friend Nick coming on Saturday to put up some shelves in his apartment.

            I watched another episode of Perry Mason. In this story a man named Ed has hired a private investigator named Beckmeyer to prove that his food has been poisoned. He accuses his wife Myrna of trying to kill him. He goes on a trip, checks into a motel and becomes sick. Myrna is called by a doctor who says Ed is dying. Myrna and her cousin Louise arrive to find Ed in an oxygen tent. Shortly after that Ed goes into convulsions, becomes still and the doctor declares him dead. Louise encourages Myrna to get a lawyer and so they go to Mason. The next day Ed’s body disappears and is found a day or so later in a grave in the woods. Because her wealthy uncle also died of arsenic poisoning, Myrna is charged with her husband’s murder. In court Mason uncovers that the doctor that declared Ed dead does not have a degree from a recognized medical school and that he conspired to fake Ed’s death with him to incriminate his wife. He'd already taken the $200,000 that she inherited from her uncle, whom Ed had actually killed. Mason gets the private detective Beckmeyer to admit that he killed Ed to take the money.           

            Beckmeyer was played by Adam Williams, who was typecast as a bad guy throughout most of his career. He played Valerian in North by Northwest, who fell off Mount Rushmore while trying to kill Cary Grant. One of the only good guys he played was in The Space Children about a brain from outer space that saves the Earth from atomic scientists by telepathically telling children how to stop them. He plays an atomic scientist whose children convince him that he's doing the wrong thing.

Barbara Pepper

            On Thursday I was at a party and in the foyer near the entrance to the house a guy had a woman in her underwear leaning with her hands against the wall. He was fully clothed but he was about to pull her panties down and fuck her with lots of people standing around ignoring them. For some reason I thought it wasn’t consensual because she didn’t look happy and so I grabbed a white dinner plate and smashed it over his head, which woke me up.

            I spent a lot of the day getting caught up on my writing.

            I watched an episode of Perry Mason. It begins with a man named Pete dropping a young woman named Veronica off on the highway, telling her to flag down a specific car. He undoes her top button and tells her to put on a good show. The convertible driven by movie producer Edgar Ferell does stop and almost immediately he suggests that he can get her into the movies. He takes her to the movie studio beach house where he sometimes lives but a car drives up and since he thinks it’s his wife he tells Veronica to go in the other room. She leaves the house just after a gunshot and runs to a nearby gas station. She tries to call Pete from the phone booth but he isn’t there. A man named John Addison, who is also a movie executive, pulls up who is about to use the phone but changes his mind. She asks him for a ride to town and he gives her one. She is later arrested for vagrancy and she calls John for help. He calls Perry Mason, who gets her out and gives her some money to go back to Albuquerque.  Instead of leaving, John gives her a job as a contract player at his studios. It turns out that Pete works for a scandal magazine and Veronica works for him to help him dig up dirt on entertainment bigwigs so he can sue them. He’s trying to extort $10,000 from John to keep quiet about him getting Veronica out of jail. Mason tells him to sign his name on a piece of paper and then to trace that signature onto a check for $2000. Mason arranges for Pete to come to his office and he gives him the cheque as a partial payment. Later Mason gets a call from John asking him to come to Edgar Ferrell’s house. Mason goes there but refuses to enter the house if a crime has been committed there. If John tells him about the crime outside of the house then Mason doesn’t have to call the police. John admits that Edgar is dead and has been for two days. John had found the body just before picking up Veronica. Mason tells him to find himself another companion and to call the police. He brings an assistant named Myrtle under the pretence of having her take inventory and lets her find the body. John calls the police and is arrested for murder. Mason arranges for Veronica’s mother Martha to fly in from Albuquerque. She is very over the top boisterous and down to earth working class personality. In court it is found that Veronica keeps a notebook of the license plates of all the cars that pick her up when she’s hitchhiking and that Pete uses those records to extort money from men that don’t want it known that they’ve picked up an 18 year old girl. Myrtle, who considers John to be a great talent who would leave the entertainment world impoverished if he had to go to prison, admits to having killed Edgar because he was possibly going to fire John.

            Martha Dale was played by Barbara Pepper who started off in the dance company owned by Samuel Goldwyn known as The Goldwyn Girls. Lucille Ball was also in the troupe and they became lifelong friends. Early on she played hard-boiled flashy dames in B movies but after having two children and gaining weight she played more comical character roles on television such as Doris Ziffel on Green Acres. She was considered for the role of Ethel Mertz on "I Love Lucy" but she had a reputation for being a drinker and the producers anticipated problems.

The Importance of Bad Behaviour

            It was too warm for the leather jacket on Wednesday but I didn’t wear shorts to class. There was an economics class in our room and so I sat in the hall and read Wordsworth. I read outside Talked with Gabriel and found out that the professor has his name wrong when she keeps calling him Gibran. I asked him where he’s from and he told me he’s Nigerian. I told him about a song I do with music by a Nigerian songwriter named Babatunde Olatunji. The original song is called “Kiyakiya”. I said that years ago I read a biography of the late Nigerian pop superstar Fela Kuti. Gabriel is a big fan of Fela Kuti and in the 80s he would save up money to buy every new album.  He said the things that Fela wrote about are happening now. The government was always trying to stop him but there would have been chaos if they’d killed him.

            It was past the time for our class to start and so Professor Weinstein had to go in and kick the other class out. The economics professor apologized and explained that since we weren’t in the classroom last Wednesday he’d thought that there would be no reason to clear out right away. It looks like the room will no longer be free ahead of us on Wednesdays and so I’ll leave my place a little later from now.

            The professor said she’s taking physiotherapy for her healing broken shoulder.

            Last time we’d talked about the subtle echoes of historical context in Romanticism, such as The French Revolution, gleaning and land enclosures. She warned us to be careful not to reduce the literature to an example of the historical context.

            Writing poetry is an affective experience. Democratizing the subject matter does not mean that the poetry is effusion. It is not simply spontaneous effusion but drawn from the experience of effusion. Release from triviality.

            Romanticism was also a period when art and politics began being theorized.

            We looked at the poem “Expostulation and Reply” which sets up a debate between consciousness and division. The professor called on me to read the poem out loud and asked for a volunteer to read its companion poem “The Tables Turned” and so Andola read it. Both poems are a debate between Matthew and William but “William” is not necessarily Wordsworth. These are not real people. The argument is on the topic of books and nature but there is not necessarily a winner. Both views oversimplify the terms of the debate.

            She asked us to think about the nature of the debate in these two poems.

            I offered that in lines 7 and 8 Matthew is essentially saying that we learn about human nature from human nature. She said that many critics have argued that lines 7 and 8 are pejorative.

            William – “One impulse from a vernal wood”.

            Tone and diction belong to the ballad form. There is a regularized metrical pattern that is almost childlike, as in a nursery rhyme.

            Professor Weinstein told us that her father was one of the first users of the electron microscope. But the electron microscope kills the cells it is used to observe.

            Without developed consciousness to mediate the world we are blind to it. We teach reading and writing but it is so much more fun to play outside. By teaching children to read and write we are giving them a forum for creativity. Matthew is saying that without books we are blind. Culture mediates through an educated consciousness. If we can’t articulate we can’t communicate.

            Wordsworth is departing from traditional form with his yoking of lyric and ballad.

            That’s how you engage with cultural form: by subverting.

            The leaves being mentioned are pages. Where do we get the information about closing up the pages of a book? The book is telling us not to read books.

            Forum of culture and cultural tradition. Wordsworth is saying that a poet has read and thought more deeply.

            We looked at the poem, “Simon Lee”.

            There are no poems about someone living in liveried poverty in the neoclassical tradition.

            The poem is very self-reflexive and demands that the reader think. It’s not a tale but rather about the psychology of reading and writing. He’s teaching us how to situate a reading in historical context. We need partly books and partly experience and then both must be mediated with thoughtful understanding.

            She urged us to read Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey thousands of times.

I told her that I agree with the idea that we engage with cultural form by subverting. I said that I think that all creativity requires misbehaviour. Something needs to be broken before something new can come about. She mentioned a book by Harold Bloom in which he says something like that about poetry.

She told me again that she loves my reading and will be calling on me throughout the year to read to the class if I didn’t mind. I said I’d be glad to help.

             I stopped at Freshco for grapes.

            When I got home there was mail from Social Services telling me that I have an appointment on October 30. I figured it must be a mistake because I actually had an appointment for the next day and I knew my worker didn’t need to see me more than once. I called her, left a message and then went out to buy a can of beer. Later she called me back and confirmed that it had been a mistake. She said that since she already had me on the phone she could just update my file without us meeting and she would send me the forms to sign. That was all right with me.

            That night I watched an episode of Perry Mason. In the story Fay and Anita are roommates and Fay is about to get married to Fay’s ex-boyfriend, Dane. Anita is trying to conceal the fact that she’s upset about it. She leaves for a date and says she’ll be home late and then she takes the stairs one floor up to Phillip’s apartment. He wants to make love but she gives him the cold shoulder and says that if he doesn’t take her out they are through. He tells her he’ll get ready and she says she’ll wait in the car, but after 45 minutes of waiting she gives up and goes home. She suggests that Fay make them some hot chocolate and then they can relax and chat. While Fay is in the kitchen Anita takes some sleeping pills from the medicine cabinet. Later that night Fay’s Aunt Louise arrives to stay before the wedding. Fay had sent her a key. She finds both Fay and Anita in bed and unresponsive. Instead of calling an ambulance she calls Perry Mason at a diner. He sends his doctor. The doctor determines that both women have had an overdose of barbiturates but Anita has had a milder and non-life-threatening dose. Mason and Della find two apartment keys in Fay’s purse. One of them is for Phillip’s apartment. They go up there and find him dead, with the lipstick mark of a kiss on his forehead. Mason arranges for a private ambulance to take Fay and Anita to a sanitarium and then he calls the police. Lieutenant Tragg finds clothing belonging to Fay in Phillip’s closet and it also turns out that Philip’s real name was Carver. They find Fay’s fingerprints on a glass in Phillip’s room. In court while interviewing a police lab technician Mason hears that lip marks are as distinctive as fingerprints. He shows him the picture of Carver’s dead body with the kiss on his forehead and then he gets Fay to leave a lipstick print on a piece of paper. Comparing the two the technician says they are not the same. Shirley, the woman that lived across the hall from Carver is also a witness because she'd seen people coming and going from Carver’s apartment. Mason goes to her in the courtroom and without consent suddenly presses a piece of paper to her mouth to get a lip print. I’m pretty sure that would be assault, even in 1957. Anyway before it can be revealed that her lip print matches the one that had been found on Carver’s forehead, she admits to killing him. She was in love with him though he’d gotten tired of her but she was obsessed and moved across the hall to watch him. When she saw him with Anita she decided to kill him.

            Anita was played by Jean Willes, who was the nurse in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

            

The Devil and the Supernova Pussy

            On Tuesday I did a touch of editing on the poem that I planned to read at Shab-e She’r that night.

            Since the night before I hadn’t been able to get into my gmail account. This was a problem that I’d had last month as well but I had tried so many things that when the problem was resolved I didn’t know which one, if any, did the trick. This time I didn’t bother trying to find a solution the night before because I’d been hoping it would just be a matter of time before it resolved itself or maybe simply a matter of starting my computer the next day. The problem was still there when I logged in on Tuesday and so I did a search of “gmail won’t load”. The first solution I tried was deleting my browser history and cookies, but that didn’t help. I tried going incognito and that worked for accessing my gmail but only incognito and it didn’t fix the problem. If I’d stayed in incognito I would have had to receive a code from google on my phone every time I logged on. Finally I followed a link for logging into gmail that actually fixed the issue: https://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0. I don’t understand why it worked but it did.

            I picked up a hint of distant wood smoke as I rode up Brock Avenue and got caught in a traffic jam at each major intersection on my way up to Bloor. Riding west on Bloor I had to pull over twice for sirens. The delays though were inconsequential because when I arrived at the Main Hall of the Tranzac only Bänoo Zan and the reception volunteer, Marta Ziemele were there.      

            I inquired of Bänoo why we were suddenly at the Tranzac rather than St Stephen in the Fields Anglican church  and asked if she’d been excommunicated or been bumped by bingo. She explained that it had more to do with the trouble caused by the troubled people that would sometimes slip into the church during and after the readings. I asked her if she didn’t expect to experience troublemakers in a bar. She said that was a good question but it was a choice for her between bad and worse. I reassured her that I’d seen very few troublemakers in my years of coming to the Tranzac.

            The Main Hall is the only room at the Tranzac that I hadn’t been in. Shab-e She’r has gone from having no stage in the gallery to the half-meter stage in the church, but the stage in the Main Hall is a full meter high.

            Since I planned on reading my first ghazal I asked Bänoo for help pronouncing the word. Rula had told me I have to make a gargling sound when I sound the “gh”. Bänoo said that’s true but I have to roll it more the way francophones roll their “r”s.

            Giovanna Riccio came to sit and chat with me for a while. I told her about the Romantic Literature course I’m taking. Rula arrived with a friend or relative from Lebanon and sat behind us. Giovanna said she and George Eliot Clarke went to Italy in June and that the Canadian embassy in Italy has commissioned George to write a poem about the Canadian soldiers that liberated Italy. Giovanna said that the Italians have bittersweet memories of the liberation but that the Canadian soldiers behaved much better than those from the United States. Giovanna says that she is almost ready to publish her manuscript of poetry about dolls. I told her that I’d first learned about Lilli from her when I’d heard her read from that manuscript at Shab-e She’r. Lilli is a German comic strip character of which they’d made a doll that became the model for Barbie. I said that I’d looked Lili up and found that those strips were really quite funny. I described one in which Lili is wearing a bikini on the beach and a policeman tells her that two piece bathing suits are not allowed on that beach. Lilli responds, “Which piece would you like me to remove?” Giovanna said that Lilli was a post-world War II gold-digger and that the Barbie Doll in the beginning was an exact copy including an averted gaze, which she said is symbolic of sexual shame. In 1971 they stopped having Barbie look away and to the side.

            Giovanna went back to help at the reception table and we started the event at 19:04 with Bänoo announcing that this was the 66^th Shab-e She’r. Bänoo’s new volunteer and co-host, Terese Pierre did the land acknowledgment, and I noticed that it had slightly different wording than the one that had been previously read and recited.

            Bänoo reminded the audience of her non-censorship policy. She said that performers are responsible for the content of their work and if one disagrees one shouldn’t shout them down. The answer to a poem is another poem.

            We began the open stage with Paul Edward Costa –

            “I’ve never felt the touch of god … By now I’ve long since abandoned the ritual of checking closets before bed … A voice once called me to a childhood place … I’ve seen Dr Jekyll transform into Hyde before my very eyes … but no one loses their mind …”

            From Paul’s second poem – “The second of my two daily pills fell to the floor … setting fire to the apartment … Narcissism simply becomes art appreciation.”

            Merle Nudelman read three poems. From “Tea Party Twist” –

            “Afternoon tea beneath our ruffled parasol … French braids and bows … A line of primped Barbies lounge … study that drink deeply behind that tiara … Distilled in a far away enchanted kingdom … words hiss down the neck to collarbone’s pale shelf … Tea anyone?”

            From “Life Dream” –

            “When soft film wafts over everything … you blink twice … All the world’s a stage … shivering in thought’s cellar … Textures of observing this reckless rendition … You stutter through your lines … You’re now strangely atingle … That parallel play … One man in his time plays many parts.”

            From “Verisimilitude” –

            “ … incense and myrrh … sheltered by a pious congregation … blunt the clarity of leaves … a disappointed fairy tale … mine no more … At once fragile breath … the rain dances and cardinals chant our story.”

            Sargon read four poems.

            From “Identity Laws” –

            “The residence on my Italian passport is a Canadian city … where I will be able to live … I can’t vote in Canada yet … I’m Italian … half Iranian.”

            From “XXY” –

            “Am I enough sexually active for my age?”

            “No, you don’t get to complain about the expensive rent with your “1500 handbag!”

            “I have always tried to be divided between Iranian and Canadian … My answer will always be Anarchy!”

            Bänoo announced that she wrote the libretto for an opera called “The Journey” about exile.

            Yavar Khan Qadri read two poems.

            “This morning is sunny, crisp and cold winds blow … lovers … I’ll finally see what the night is wearing.”

            From “Of Solitary Isles” –

            “Once upon a moonlit night … the solitary owl … a predator in the moonlight beside a glimmering sea.”

            Sydney White announced that she recently quit her Studies in Propaganda lectures that she’s been doing at U of T for several years but that many of the videos are available online. She read two poems.

            From “Truth Decay” –

            “The eleventh commandment is ‘Thou shalt not know’ … There is no ‘my truth’ or ‘your truth’ … Only opinions can be owned … Facts are feared by dictators and hunted by the young.”

            From “The Slick and the Dead” –

            “Kissinger said that soldiers are stupid animals for foreign policy … Kissinger proclaimed the fate of young men and lived past their deaths …”

            I wonder if Sydney really quit her lecture series or if she was asked by U of T to quietly end them. Last year Bnai Brith complained about her being interviewed by a University of Winnipeg radio station because they consider many of her conspiracy theories to be anti-Semitic, including her claim that Zionists caused the Russian Revolution.

            It was time for the first feature, John Nyman. When he stepped up to the mic someone at the back called out, “Love you John!” John told us that he would be reading poems of two subjects: poems about his houseplants and the devil. He informed us that because of this he was wearing two pins, one representing plants and the other the devil.

            From “The Devil’s Song” –

            “The devil says his song is his business … The devil shits on life … The devil isn’t fake … he’s naked … Otherwise I’m only clothes.”

            From “ID: Becoming Plant” –

            “I might write the dynamic turbulent form between chaos and order … My poetry might articulate itself through a body … My ideas might enter into composition with something else … but I might still be an idiot if at first I idiom with you.”

            From “My Houseplants” –

            “Leaves look like banana peels … There is no question that I also wither … making mind a martyr.”

            “The devil’s always smoking on the regular … When he speaks he spits … money poor but rich in scalps … My head is somewhere else.”

            From "How to Hustle" –

            He began with a quote from JZ: “I’ll sell water to a well”.

            “Stones … Remain stony … unrelenting until the point you’re spent.

            Signals … Externalize … Always flee … but never fail to enter the slipstream of erasure.

            … clear those currents routed against traffic.

            Investments … Hold on … Persist as liquid until pressed … with nothing extra except interest.

            Plants … require sun … wither at bad fortune … May your roots never shorten.

            Hustlers … keep hustling … Come through with the utilities called for ... add only a little more."

            From “Friendly Devil” –

            “The devil doesn't want what you want ... He's already been your friend ... leaves his baggage on your doorstep ... He's not made of stone ... so throw me a bone."

            John seemed to feel the need, because of all the talk about Shab-e She'r being about diversity, to try to fit in with the diversity that he is mostly diverse from, and to inform us, “Despite being white, I’m also part Jewish.”

            From “New Middles” –

            “Confessional poetry ... They say the only lessons learned are learned alone ... while I wait in the darkness at the threshold of the temple … mid-lifers riding the timelines … A half-woven love for a friend who’s 19 tomorrow … catches the light like a ribbon in the middle of a book …”

            From “Sunlight” –

            “ ... drove the steel hot carriage … blindside brightness … cobble a different labour … You command a demigod’s annoyance … No longer are the blind found in darkness.”

            From “The Devil" –

            “The devil doesn't care about reality ... seems innocent ... He isn't.”

            From “White Mood” –

            “Sometimes I show up white as sunlight ... sticky as bird shit ... Sometimes my white mood flies like a white flag ... slips straight through my doubleness … splitting the fruit from the flower … admits it’s ridiculous.”

            From “I” –

            “When he spoke of action he must have had a tree growing in his brain ... Vegetable ethics tend to draw a line ...”

            From “The Devil Writing” –

            “The devil is not exactly an author ... doesn't hesitate to falsify ... fluent but obtusely ... His evil is just banality ... His ethics is doing it my way.”

            From “A Plant is not a Nation” –

            “Unlike a nation a plant ... knows that dirt lands first on the deaths of the undeserving ... I can cut open its leaves and it doesn’t even mind … Unlike a plant a nation is strong and free … A plant is here in my apartment.”

            From “The Devil in Person” –

“The devil's clothed in nothing coloured skin ... not a monster all the time ... finds that I'm completely justified."

From “Praise God” –

“What I almost do is irony ... I praise god without irony … What else would I have learned from Kanye? I praise the right to live life falsely … I praise god for letting me disbelieve.”

John’s final poem was “An Angel” –

“An angel is stone … He is himself … His speech is faultless … There are no promises … He isn’t a friend … He listens.”

John Nyman is obviously the devil in his poems. His little fun-poking vignettes that hit the air dry are not always poetry on the whole but often carry poetic turns of phrase and are undeniably creative.

We took a break and I chatted with Cy Strom and he told me he was quitting running the Thursday night costume drawing session at Artists 25. He’s been coordinating it since the mid-80s, which is almost as long as I’ve been modeling. The good news he had was that the studio is finally going to get a substantial sum of money from the will of Tom Philips, which might help it survive for a few more years.

I went to the washroom. In the hallway, Chai Kalevar was handing out flyers advertising his candidacy for mayor on an environmental platform. I mentioned it to Cy and he suggested that Chai probably runs in every election. Most of the things Chai is calling for are not under municipal jurisdiction other than having more women’s washrooms and banning plastic straws. He could maybe successfully push for the latter but he can’t do anything without council support. I was hoping that the dominatrix, Carlie Ritch would be running for mayor again but I might go with Keesmaat in lieu of her.

While I was in a washroom I was surprised when Marta came out of a stall. I didn’t notice until I was leaving that what used to be the men’s washroom at the Tranzac now has a sign saying “All Gender”.

As usual, before the second feature Bänoo invited one open mic performer to warm things up. This time the slot fell to Dahveed Odelly Delisca -
            “No country owes me a status … I can never be alone … As an immigrant I’m always home … I never wanna feel lost … I know my heart is not a house but I call it home.”

“The first home I ever knew was my mama’s womb … Show me a different world instead of feelin blue … We used to share the same breath … and we were wha wha wha wha one.”

            The second feature was Jennifer Alicia, who is mixed (Mi’kmaq/Settler) from Newfoundland but her bio says she is living in Tkaronto.

Actually, though the name Toronto is probably derived from the Mohawk word “Tkaronto", that wasn't what the area that is now Toronto was called. That was the name for a narrows 150 km north of what is now called Toronto. The names of various bodies of water were changed to “Toronto” long before the name made its way south to become Fort Toronto. So even if we changed the name of the city to “Tkaronto” although it’s an indigenous name, it's a title relocated and misnamed by white people. If we wanted to honour the original inhabitants of what is now called Toronto we would rename the city “Teiaiagon”.

Jennifer warned us that her set would be awkward and very indigenous. She said she has two emotions in her poetry: sad and angry, but this time she only brought the ragey ones.

“I often find myself trapped … my white skin and white skin privilege … I’m tired of having these conversations … one of those cards … imposed by the federal government … If it was up to me everyone’s education would be free … I don’t want to see your dreamcatcher tattoo … I’m unapologetic with my mixednest.”

Jennifer encouraged the audience to make noise in response to her poems because, “I like when people give me some kind of energy.”

“I work in post-secondary indigenous studies ... We are allowed to smudge with sage but not in other parts of the institution ...”

“We are barbarians ... savages ... We have been punished ... generations of residential schools ... Scientific research says sage smoke is antiseptic … Turn back on millennial white guilt … If you are going to steal our culture you should at least get your supplies from a real Indian … 'the smudge is overbearing' ... Colonialism is hundreds of years old ... Give us our land back ... Try to cleanse the air ... It's like when farmers burn their fields … All that’s left is very us.”

            From “Another Indigenous Poem” –

            “I will not stay silent ... I promise to always honour my ancestors ... Colten Boushie ... The not guilty verdict was determined by all white jurors … You should probably talk less and listen more … There are no excuses … You can start by acknowledging this is indigenous land … We laugh still and it makes them angry … I will pray my great great grandchildren into existence …"

            Jennifer asked who in the audience knows Joseph Boyden. She explained that he's an author who writes about indigenous people but isn't indigenous. She said that some of his stories are stolen.

            From “Joe Boy” –

            “How convenient that for some my culture … savages with bows and arrows … Khloe Kardashian in a headdress … Johnny Depp as Tonto … What’s the difference between milk and Joseph Boyden? When left alone milk will develop its own culture … I wonder if Joseph Boyden could survive the stories he tells … Joe and Justin Trudeau treating Canada Day like Halloween … Stop playing dress-up.”

            Jennifer informed us that moose meat is a staple in Newfoundland. She said some say that there are more moose than people in Newfoundland (actually there are about seven people for every moose).

            From “Moose Meat” –

            “Simmered in the frying pan with onions ... Our diet consists of our environment … Moose hunting with my father … Skin used for drums … I come from generations of trappers … Hunting and trapping for us is life … Do our lives not have value to you? Do you not believe fruits and vegetables have spirits? Food has always been a tool of colonialism …"

            Jennifer ended with a new poem, which she said is different from what she usually writes.

            “An indigenous futurist journey beginning with my pussy … ceremony is commencing and you are about to be healed … fucked so good that it transcends time and space … We are the ancestors now … My pussy be the portal … returning to ourselves in the future … Here there is no settler … We are in the transformative stages … using love and rage to transform communities … Our medicines grow free from capitalism … Our dreams are the manifestation of reality … tangible through the supernova star that exists within my pussy … Welcome to the indigenous future.”

            Jennifer Alicia’s best poem and really the only piece she read that could be considered poetic was the last one. This is interesting because she said that it’s not the kind of writing she usually does. But creativity comes from breaking one’s own rules. She is too comfortable with her rants that simply communicate information without attempting to be creative. The subject matter of her writing is important and that ‘s why she should develop a more creative approach to delivering that message. Janet Rogers, who featured at Shab-e She’r last year, is a great example of a poet who can be creative with the topics of indigenous politics and culture, thereby conveying that message with power. Jennifer Alicia's last poem shows her potential and so she should step outside of her comfort zone more often.

            Bänoo informed us that because the Tranzac had already booked the last Tuesday of October to another event beforehand, the next Shab-e She’r will this one time be on October 23.

            We returned to the open stage with Khashayar Mohammadi.

            Khashayar began with a quote from John Naiman –

            "The best poem is if I could write me singing ‘All Stars’ by Smashmouth as a poem”.

            Khashayar told us that four years ago he was a friend with a journalist in Malaysia. He told us the story of an indigenous Malaysian woman who refused to wear a headscarf and so she moved to a remote beach and lived with a lot of dogs for protection.

            From “Fractal” -
            “Stranded in a borrowed tent ... My lips imitate the silence primeval … If only I could remember how morning felt … Shoulder the burden … Our ride leaves … eight hours till electronics fade … Apocalyptic thunderstorms … embrace of a temple … Tonight I am the darkness behind the jungle.”

            Bänoo, in order to reassure us that she is not leading a cultural invasion, told us that in 67 installments of Shab-e She’r, Khashayar next month would only be the third Iranian feature she’s ever booked.

Marta Ziemele read her translation of a Latvian poet who writes about challenging

experiences. She first read the original Latvian and then her translation –

            “Going down Martin Street ... the sausage is sizzling and smelling good ... I remember the rotten smell of the wooden shack … why you chose his wicked hands.”

            It was my turn and I used the mic because I was afraid I wouldn’t be heard otherwise. I began by saying, "It’s just as well that Shab-e She’r moved from the church. I could never use the washroom there because there was a sign on the door saying ‘Washrooms For Everyone’ but I could never get everybody together”. It got a fair number of laughs.

            I said that I was going to read my first attempt at a ghazal and I called on Rula to correct my pronunciation. I was wrong again and both her and Bänoo called out the right way. I tried it a couple of times and just said I’d keep working on it.

            A ghazal has a specific structure and rhyme scheme from which I deviated somewhat, but the main thing is that the stanzas are not connected in a conceptual way but rather by the same mood.

            From “Her Star That Fell From Me” –

            “Drawn by distance. Our history / Her star that fell from me. I turn away. //

Laughter in the street outside / ring bells of a religion not mine // I’m afraid of your happiness / that doesn’t make you a terrorist // A tenemental low-rise in this / unsentimental suburb of Christmas // Exiled to an ache in the chest / is encrusted adolescent loneliness // Not unpleasantly up the river / I take a selfie in an angst-warm prison // The melancholy-satisfied blues / through a tune-less moment blows a bruise // I turn around."

            I don’t really like how it came across the mic and so I think I’ll try to go without it next time.

            Carol Ribner read three poems.

            From “One Bird” –

            “One bird swung down from a tree ... Every arch of singing nerve ... binding the nerve bridge against despair ..."

            From “Wild” –

            “I seldom think about it while always depending on it ... Trains contained by tunnels … But yesterday the wilderness reclaimed its territory … The power inside flicked off as the power outside grew … Monsters without lights staring … Anywhere could be wild.”

            From “Acupuncture at the Chiropractor" –

            “I flinch as the needles go in ... remind myself to relax ... let my muscles soften ... I imagine a whisper of information among the needles … Things move.”

            Samuel Guest announced that it was his birthday, got some applause and then read two poems.

            From “Coherence" –

            “Foot tapping ... I hate these thoughts ... breathe ... someone else is breathing for me ... head shaking ... I miss my family ... kill these thoughts … god isn’t ashamed of me … thoughts can kill me … get off the bus … on the subway not stopping … I have to pee … one more bus … miss the bus … walking … home … Charlie’s home … Charlie loves me …coffee … choking on spit … mother’s not at home … it got worse … snot on my hands … wash your hands … Charlie is gone … call mom first … calling mom … I live I die … mom is picking up … live.”

            From “Fly Butterfly Fly” –

            “ ... Do it like the others ... don't need to know why ... She really knows how to twirl up a breeze."

            David Sharma went to the stage and declared that the mic was too tall. People called for him to use the other one that was a meter from the other one but he said it was too far away. Instead he sat on the edge of the stage without a microphone.

            From "Like Honeycombs" –

            “A large cosmos orbiting a smaller cosmos ... marvelous grinning misery ... pitch black aurora ... My new eyes … silence … Everything’s snapping into place … behind the constellation … I love it all to hell … Everything deranged … a seizure between the waves … I’m happy now … Why does verse have to be tight? I can open the world's wheel again."

            Mehri Yalfani read two poems.

From “People" –

            “People are simple ... People are complicated ... People are fragile ... People are hard ... I feel sympathy with the fragile people … I have respect for hard people … I can’t trust complicated people … I like simple people who teach me to be simple like a tree … I’m just me … not knowing me.”

            From "I Am Safe and Sound" –

            “ ... The bombs falling from a cruel sky aren’t going to kill me in a far away land.”

            Norman Allan read two poems.

            From “Betsy’s Goddess” –

            “Betsy can see order … Matthew can see angels … Three-dimensional words … Matthew speaks the critical mass … All the goddesses have left ... Just need a whisper ... There are avatars everywhere."

            From “My Problem” –

            “Learning to cope with appetite … I don’t know where I’m going.”

            Rubab read “To a Colonizer I Speak English” –

            “You ripped apart nations … We have learned to live with that … If we pick your pocket today it’s because we’ve come to get our money back … In my bloodstream runs Urdu … Farsi … Big parts of western Europe travel on my tongue … I choke … Salaam … Good day … I choke.”

            William Hunt read –

            “I try to work and think with parameters … There’s a fundamental contingency … virtually the retroactive force … trade their own with the nearest box … Oh how nervous I am to become an indeterminate association with my surroundings … I want to simply imagine … Faulkner and Lady Marmalade … A fracking process … a secret nexus of nights … diamond studded … The illusory box … a malleable mechanism … push into adjacent murmurs … the earth and the foot … reproduction of themselves.”

            Jack Dempster read two poems –

            “Gazing at fireflies glittering over country fields … The spirit of love is a nightingale as the sky grows pale … Over shiraz the sun passes over desert oases … a peacock … Through the night the Persian lily sleeps … She will awaken and from each lone petal collect the dew water.”

            “Swimming in an ocean of blood and fire don’t lose sight of your Cohen …”

            Before leaving the stage Jack declared that he stands against racism and for the liberation of Quebec.

            Reza Eslami read three poems -
            From “The Sound of Silence” –

            “In the darkness of the shadow I walk / searching for a reason ... I would dance to the rhythm of dropping water in the sink ... All the rhythms around me would get into sync.”

            “As night fell over the pasture of hope ... the scream ... A naive attempt to stop time ... The night is ebbing into the void of the shadow … The clock keeps ticking and the soul fades away.”

            “All the measured steps and calculated risks / when the lunatic heart of mine knew no boundaries / falling for you.”

            Mira Shoshana read one poem –

            “Head under water ... They burned our witches … so we bring candles ... I am ethereal Jew … Where is the woman with the rose in her fist … Who were you born into? Are you tik tik broken? Breath … break skin … What does it mean / being underwater? Water gives me nothing but the billowing emergency of my own breath … thump against the inside of my eardrum … In the silence of my room I can almost hold the walls … Head under water … I am not supposed to be here … I am breaking up again for air.”

            Rula Kahil shared that she'd just come back from the Middle East where she'd spent a lot of time on the beach. She read two poems about it –

            “Majestically roaring ... you come and you go ... After you climax close to me … preparing for your next climax … you Mediterranean at my feet.”

            “Sharp edged hollow figures ... Declaration of patriarchy ... women with a black tent ... swimming at his feet ... covered by the black tent … gazing at the half-naked bodies nearby.”

            Haamid Sharif told us that he was from Manchester where there are a lot of spoken work artists better than him, “but I’m not too bad!” He read one poem –

            “My name is often concealed as a reference number … telling me to be thankful for colonialism … Now they want to say terrorism is a symptom of my religion … The Daily Mail: the paper that celebrated the election of Adolph Hitler.”

            That’s an interesting piece of information and it turns out to be true. The Daily Mirror was apparently more fascist and even published Blackshirt membership forms.

            The final performer was Omar, who drew our attention to the fact that they’ve been singing Beatles songs all night next door in the Southern Cross room and confessed that it’s been making him feel nostalgic. He read two poems.

            From “The Ballad of Mr. S” –

            “You don’t need a passport to fall through a hole in this universe … You see, some of us are born with the good kind of pain …”

            From “Pillow Talks” –

            “Here lies the cradle of all my dreams … the tenderness I sought after a hard days night … Here lie the remains of tears … a softness pulling us to the centre … Here lies the sun from the depths of darkness rising into light.”

            Bänoo asked us to help put the folding chairs against the southern wall of the room. One thing I liked about the church was that we didn’t have to do any work when the night was over but now we were back to stacking chairs like we did at the gallery in the Annex. On top of that the Tranzac's folding chairs are more difficult to collapse because it’s not just a matter of pulling the back and the seat together. There’s an adjustment that has to be made on the bottom.

            Rula told me “Nice ghazal!” before she left and Cy said he liked it as well. I think Cy is deeply relieved that he no longer has to stand guard on the street at the end of the night like he did at the church to keep down and out and sometimes violent people from wandering in.

            Before I left home earlier I made sure I half cooked a potato and a cob of corn so all I had to do was heat some things up for a late dinner when I got home.

            I watched an episode of Perry Mason. In this story Perry is on vacation and roughing it in his cabin that only has three bathrooms. Things begin though with a man named Mark and his guest Carla in another cabin in the same neighbourhood. They've just finished watching a home movie and Mark gets fresh, tearing Carla's blouse. She slaps him and things fade to black. In the next scene a couple, Sam and Betsy are in bed and Sam sits up in bed, wakes Betsy up and says that he heard a shot. Then they both hear a woman scream. Betsy looks through her binoculars and sees Carla’s mother Belle in Mark’s cabin. Belle leaves and Sam calls the sheriff. The sheriff finds Mark’s dead body having been shot. Sam doesn’t tell him they saw Belle in the cabin. The next morning Belle knocks on Mason’s cabin. She tells him Carla had been at Mark’s cabin the night that he was shot and she wants to avoid a scandal for her daughter because Mark had disreputable reputation with girls and she doesn’t want the papers to know that she was there. She asks Mason to find the woman who screamed so that the focus would be on her. Mason calls Paul Drake and asks him to come there. When he gets there Mason wants the number of every license plate in the area. The reason is that whoever had screamed at Mark's cabin probably cares enough about him to go to his funeral in LA. and her identity could be found then. The sheriff comes to Mason's cabin to talk with Belle. He says there were footprints leading from her house to Mark’s house. He also found the murder weapon in some brush and it belongs to Carla's boyfriend and they've found blood on Belle's shoes. He arrests Belle for murder. Mason tracks down the woman whose license plate was in both Bear Valley and LA. Her name is Marion Keats. Belle is tried in the Bear Valley Court. Mason puts Marion on the stand and charges that she had been in communication with Mark’s housekeeper, Nora because Marion was in love with Mark and Nora was instructed to call her if ever a woman was at Mark’s place. She was the one that screamed on seeing Mark’s body. Mason discerns that it was actually Sam that killed Mark over a money dispute and then went to bed, only pretending later to have heard a shot.

            Carla was played by Barbara Eden, eight years before she became famous in I Dream of Jeannie. 

Gleaning

            On Monday at 10:00 I left for Romantic Literature class. It was cool enough to wear my motorcycle jacket but I didn’t need gloves. At OISE female students were looking at me, possibly mostly because I stand out in many ways. There are very few people my age there and the ones that are tend to work there. No one else wears a motorcycle jacket and so when you throw that on someone that already stands out, well …

            There was only one female student in the room when I arrived, and I think she's always there first. The desks were arranged in circles and so a previous class must have had some discussion groups. Gabriel walked in just after me, but I'll have to ask him to confirm his name because I’d thought for sure he'd said it was Gabriel but I hear the professor calling him Gibran.

            While waiting for class to start I made notes toward my short essay on how Wordsworth represents childhood in the poem “We Are Seven”.

            Professor Weisman always comes at least ten minutes early and wasn’t wearing her sling this time, though she was wincing a bit from her now healing broken shoulder.

            The professor told us that we need access to details in order to learn to appropriate textual material. We need to learn to bring to the fore an analytic yield of textual details and to learn to incorporate those details into an understanding of the historical and sociological context of the Romantic Period. Romanticism is especially responsive to the sociology and politics of its time because it echoes the circumstances the Romantic authors were responding to. The great event for Romantics was the French Revolution and its slogan, "Democracy, Egality, Fraternity!” The professor had us all repeat the slogan in unison a few times. The slogan provided an example for Europe of possibilities for change, democracy and human dignity. 

            But that hope turned to a bloodbath in the reign of terror. Revolutionaries turned on revolutionaries because some were suspected of sympathizing with the royals. There was deep paranoia and a sense that the achievements of the revolution needed to be brutally defended. Wordsworth saw it as the second fall of man.

            In the Prelude Wordsworth says of that period, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven!”

            The French Revolution was part of a general movement towards an understanding of the principles of democracy. There was a movement of the working classes for economic independence. At the same time there was the Industrial Revolution and the American Revolution.

            Another important element that spurred Romanticism was the movement towards land enclosure. Land enclosure was a hot topic because it rose against the English tradition of the open field system. There had always been common land for the grazing of sheep but land began to become consolidated into private and enclosed farms. With land enclosure large open meadows were divided by fences and walls. Before land enclosure the greater portion of the population of a village shared the use of the surrounding land and so land enclosure was a threat to a farmer’s connection to the landscape. Celebration of the landscape is the primary reference point in Romanticism. Wordsworth was playing also with the threat of enclosure and nostalgic longing for pastoral settings that had already been lost.

            In rustic life Wordsworth saw an example of unadulterated human nature and of uni9verdal aspects of human nature free of trauma and triviality. His Lyrical Ballads and his preface to them are a celebration and a forum for mental ease but they are a celebration tainted by sociological pressures on that idealization.

            Another key term in Romanticism is “pastoral”. The pastoral is an ancient genre depicting beautiful, rolling hills rather than cliffs and gentle flowing streams rather than waterfalls. These settings tend to be populated with shepherds and shepherdesses playing lutes. Pastoral simplicity in Wordsworth’s view is a release but for him there is also an internalized landscape.

            The pastoral is not always peaceful but there is very little work being depicted, whereas in the Georgic genre there is plenty of struggle and farm-work being done. The Virgilian pastoral carries an ethic of simplicity, cooperation and ease. Wordsworth’s pastoral poetry also holds an anxiety about the threat to the land. One can't miss the political context.

            I wonder if Wordsworth’s interest in rustic people and their lifestyle might also be a bit of a Roman holiday.

            The professor asked us to think of the place where or the situation in which we feel most at ease. What comes to mind form is when I’m thinking of rhymes for the translation of a song.

            Romanticism is not just about enjoying a landscape but escaping to it as in Yeats “The Lake Isle of Inisfree”. It is freighted with an urgent need to escape to pastoral refuge and belonging. This is a time of the encroachment of the urban on the pastoral but it is also a time of war. England was at war through pretty much the entire Romantic period and so celebrations of English engagement in the English landscape were patriotic. Keep the home fires burning.

            We looked at the poem “Goody Blake and Harry Gill: a True Story” which isn’t a true story. The piece is an evocation of real poverty and the idea that magic is possible. It shows the ideal of pastoral refuge under threat. The professor said it is written in ballad stanzas, but ballad stanzas are supposed to have non-rhymed first and third lines in iambic tetrameter and the second and fourth lines are supposed to rhyme and be in iambic trimeter. The poem is not in true ballad stanzas but it is a narrative ballad with simple diction.

            In the poem the old hedge that Goody Blake wants to use for firewood is also the fence that indicates Harry Gill’s property. This is a conflict between a healthy worker and an impoverished woman. It’s a conflict between warmth as an ethical imperative and the protection of private property.

            This is a poem about the end of gleaning laws. Gleaning is picking things up off the ground, which was a right in traditional England. The poor were allowed to wander in the fields and to gather the scraps left over after the harvest. Gleaning had been essential to the rustic life, but in 1788 there was a lawsuit called The Great Gleaning case, which disallowed gleaning. Some landlords used physical force to remove gleaners. There was a desentimentalization of the rustic ideal and the sense of refuge. The idea of private property was something new.

            She asked us to think about what way the historical and political context resonates in the background of “Goody Blake and Harry Gill”.

            For a poor person, when it is cold a hedge represents firewood. It does not symbolize a boundary. Not freezing to death is more important than ownership. The law goes against objective morality.

            Wordsworth appropriates folklore in this poem. Goody’s successful curse on Harry is a reversal of fortune like the storming of the Bastille.

            Wordsworth wanted to democratize diction and poetry.

            We looked at the poem “We Are Seven”. The professor asked for a volunteer to read it out loud and so I spun my chair 180 degrees and read it to the other students.

The professor said this was also written in ballad stanzas and in this case, except for the alternate rhyme, it fits.

The narrator represents the adult attitude towards death and our views are aligned with his. If we align with someone that acts like a bully, what does that make us? The poem is meant to be didactic and to teach us the unclouded, unmediated perspective of a rustic child, representing nature. Adults mediate and so we can’t fully be aligned with the child but in the narrative continuum we can recognize something of value in between.

The adult is “throwing words away”. It’s a self-reflexive poem in that it comments on its own status.                                                                                                               The complicated Lyrical Ballads are meant to represent authentic human nature.

There’s a change in the last verse in that it’s the only time the girl exclaims to the adult while he exclaims to her a few times in the poem.

In our last four minutes we looked at the poem “Lines Written in Early Spring”.

Escapism. There is recognition of central division between human engagement and the natural world. There is recognition that we have failed the natural order.

We live in the Anthropocene Age in a world that has been fundamentally altered by humanity.

She told us that we should read “Lines: written above Tintern Abbey” many times.

As we were packing up I approached the professor on the subject of gleaning. I told her that I was raised on a potato farm and that when the big mechanical harvesters started being used people used to walk behind them and gather what the machines had missed because McCain’s didn’t come back for them. I hadn’t known it was called gleaning.

We were the last two people in the room and she asked me, “What’s your story? You’re obviously not the same age as the other students.” I explained that I’d quit high school and had gone on the road. I got my education from second hand bookstores and hadn’t had any respect for formal education. But I’d taken academic bridging ten years ago and got into university and so I‘ve been chewing my way through ever since.

She told me that I have a great reading voice. I thanked her and explained that I’ve had a lot of experience with public reading from poetry readings.

On the way home I stopped at Freshco where I bought grapes and a field tomato.

I did some writing.

That night I watched an episode of Perry Mason. This story was unique in that it took place entirely outside of a courtroom. Mildred Kimber, the very ill owner of an orchid company has a husband named Bob who has used the controlling shares of her company to pay off a gambling debt to a nightclub owner named Sam Lynk who runs a crooked game upstairs at his club. Mildred calls Perry Mason but he can’t see her till the next morning and so meanwhile she tries to see Lynk at the club to get the shares back but he’s not there. Lola, the platinum blonde voluptuous hostess at the club, who is mad at Lynk over his philandering tells Mildred that she has proof that Lynk uses marked decks in his games and she agrees to meet her at Mason’s office. On her way out of the club Lola receives a box of chocolates that had been sent there for her by an anonymous admirer. That night Mason gets a call from a desperate Lola, saying she’s been poisoned. When he gets to her place with the police she is barely alive. Mason goes to see Lynk and finds him shot dead. A prescription bottle with Mildred’s name on it is near the body. He goes to see Mildred and discovers that she has the murder weapon. She swears she didn’t kill Lynk but took her husband’s gun from the crime scene to protect him. Lola recovers and goes home from the hospital but Mason convinces Lieutenant Tragg to come with him to Lola’s place because her life is being threatened. When they arrive her place is on fire. She claims that a crook named Harry Marlow, who also wants Mildred’s shares knocked her out and set fire to her place but she is informed that he’s been in custody since morning and so she admits to setting the fire and to killing Lynk. She had also poisoned herself to make everything look good.

Lola was played by Peggy Maley, who only acted for seven years. She’s the one who asked Marlon Brando’s character in “The Wild One”, “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”