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.
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