Fela Kuti

            It was raining on Monday morning and that always makes traffic louder during song practice but on top of that there were a lot of sirens of fire trucks and ambulances going in both directions. Plus, my guitar was going out of tune more than usual, I think because it was quite dry in the apartment but the damp air was coming in from outside to meet it.

            Fortunately there was a break in the rain when I rode to Romantic literature class. The young woman who’s often in the classroom when I arrive held the elevator for me, but she didn’t come into the room with me, and it was empty for at least fifteen minutes after I got there. I took advantage of being alone and read from Wordsworth’s Preludes out loud. When the young woman finally made it in I asked her name and found out that it’s Julia.

            Gabriel was next to come in and we chatted again about Fela Kuti and about how the government was opposed to his politics. I asked him to describe the type of political system that Fela Kuti promoted and he went into a long description of a system other than democracy that both he and Fela Kuti agree upon. Kuti thought that government should include all Nigerian traditions. He said democracy as imposed by the British doesn’t fit with the culture of Nigeria. He talked about every community having a king and then beneath those kings are chiefs that are heads of families. I don’t think they are called “chiefs” even though Gabriel used the term. They may be what are referred to as elders. He said kings are not selected by heredity but by merit but they do not become kings based on a vote by the population of the community. I guess maybe the chiefs vote for the kings but I found it hard to see how such a system would be practical for running a country with a population of 186 million. There are 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria and they don’t all have the same views on justice. There would have to be some common body like a parliament for the leaders of each community to come to a common agreement on common laws.

            When class began, Professor Weinstein talked first about our assignment, which is due on October 17. She encouraged us to showcase our skill in textual analysis. We need to ground our analysis in specific details and show how the text yields up the meaning. We need the how and not just the what.

            When in doubt, cite. There is no penalty for over-citing.

            Our paper is supposed to have a maximum of 900 words but I asked her about the minimum. She said no less than 750.

            If you don’t get ahead you will get behind. She said that it annoys the hell out her children when she tells them that.

            We looked at the poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”.

            Wordsworth gives specific information about the time and the location. It is a loco-descriptive poem, which is a form that flourished in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries that situates the landscape and the scene.

            It is also a prospect poem like Thomas Gray's “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College", which has the famous line, “Where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise.” A prospect is a view over a scene and into the distance. The poet standing before a scene uses the landscape to reflect on childhood. The Romantic period updates these conventional forms by having the mind confer importance on the external and not the other way around. The mind is functioning in a prominent place in Romantic literature. Even the description of the landscape is an impetus for reflection. It is the primacy of the mind's mediation of the external that is primary to the analytic yield of the poem. The mind in Romantic literature mediates of refracts the external through consciousness. Children mediate less self-consciously and so they are relatively unmediated. The child in “We Are Seven” does not have consciousness or schemata. Her self-experience is primary and unmediated by adults.

            Wordsworth wants the rustic and the simple so as not to be weighted down by the trivialities of everyday life but still mediated through the adult philosophical consciousness. Poetry articulates feeling by giving it form.

            The professor advised us to keep a reading journal.

            The poem begins with “five years have passed”. The introduction had detachment mediating and refracting the emotional experience through memory. He is already localizing himself in time and place.

            This is a desentimentalized pastoral poem providing a source of refuge and a release from burdens. It is not abstracted but rather impressed upon his mind in specific details.

            He is describing himself as older but recalling his experience of this locale when a young boy and also when he was an adolescent. A child’s early experience is course and not thoughtful, with no sophisticated filter. The child throws its body into nature. His experience of the same place when he was an adolescent is emotionally intense. The adolescent is satisfied with external markers and there is no need for mediation.

            There are three aspects and phases of his self, the physical, the passionate and the meditative established by memory. He has developed while Tintern Abbey remains the same.

            The poem constitutes a locus of objectivity.

            For the boy nature was a substitute for the womb. The child eventually needs to fragment his self. The world of the eye and the ear half creates the world and half perceives it.

            She asked us to think about this question: In what respect can nature be this anchor of his purest thoughts?

            I said that nature is an anchor because it persists without changing as he establishes in the opening lines of Tintern Abbey. He can see the aspects of himself when a young boy bounding over the hills like a roe in line 67 and at the same time when an adolescent overwhelmed with passion for the same landscape in line 77 as well as now as a meditative adult because the unchanged setting itself serves to anchor all of those aspects of himself together, giving him a sense of his own continuity. He has planted himself in nature and dropped anchor there.

            Nature is a maternal figure for his adult consciousness. Wordsworth lost his mother when he was a young boy and his father when he was an adolescent. The landscape is perhaps a surrogate parent.

            Wordsworth and his sister are bonded by this shared experience. He feels a sense of loss though because she will soon be no longer an adolescent and will hear the still-sad music of humanity.

            The mind is a dwelling place for experience. The physical landscape enters the mental landscape to create memories.

            This poem is about mental processes and memory more so than the environment. It is about the mind’s engagement with nature. The mind is prepared as a source of refuge and comfort. It creates a buffer against the pains of adulthood. Memory will be a mansion. We create of nature a locus of objectivity.

            I told her I wasn’t clear on the meaning of “elegiac” but when she used the word “elegy” I suddenly understood. I hadn’t associated elegiac with elegy.

            I asked Professor Weinstein if she’s been doing exercises for her shoulder. She confirmed that she has and I reminded her that she’d have to keep doing them after she heals.

            She’s taking physio at the U of T sports clinic like I did four years ago for my bursitis. I told her that I considered working towards becoming a physiotherapist when I first started at U of T but then I realized that I should follow my talents and take English.

            On the way home I stopped at Freshco and bought some grapes. There were packs of fish on sale and I was checking them out when an elderly Chinese woman with a cane came up to ask what kind of fish it was. I told her it was fresh water perch from the Great Lakes. She scowled and declared that she doesn’t like fresh water fish because it smells. I’d never noticed that fresh water fish smells worse than ocean fish. I suggested that she must have been raised eating ocean fish and she said that was a good guess because during her childhood in China that was indeed what she ate. I told her that trout is my favourite fish. I said it’s the same thing with vegetables. I was raised on a potato farm and so rice doesn’t mean as much to me as someone from Asia.

            She asked me what I was going to have for Thanksgiving. I told her that I get tired of turkey. She nodded and agreed. “It’s always turkey! And ham, and I don’t like ham!”

            She told me that she likes the halal chicken because the other kind is soggy.

            She wished, “Happy Thanksgiving!” and I said, “Same to you!”

            I knew I anted to buy something else but I’d forgotten what it was though I knew it was something in the personal care aisle. I walked up the aisle to try to jog my memory and when I saw the shaving gel I remembered that was it. It was on sale so I grabbed two cans.

            That night I watched another episode of The Naked City. This story was about a wealthy investment banker on Wall Street named Weston who crosses the street from his bank to go to a restaurant, at the back of which is a room where illegal racetrack bets are placed. But when he walks in there is a man being shaken down for his debts by a thug named Hody and his men. Hody pulls a gun and the man makes a desperate grab for it. Hody fires two shots, one of which ricochets and hits Weston’s shoulder as he’s running away. Weston goes to his doctor but the doctor says he would be bound by law to call the police if he removed a bullet. Weston does not to cause his bank a scandal and so he says  “What bullet?” and leaves. He buys a new shirt because the old one is bloodied, he gets the bullet hole in his jacket repaired and then he goes home. He has an unusually close relationship with his teenage daughter, Heather. At first she seems like a young lover and she dotes on him like a maid. He confides in her about the bullet. His wife comes home and the daughter is lukewarm towards her but that storyline is not pursued. His son comes home and he’s an angry though clean cut young man in his 20s who spouts a lot of hip lingo. The police come to the house because the doctor has told them about the bullet. Weston denies he has a bullet and since the doctor never saw the bullet he can’t prove anything. The police detective warns him that if they were able to track him down, then so will Hody and so he’d better give evidence before it’s too late. Hody does find him and lets him know that he has his daughter. Weston takes the risk and lets the police try to rescue Heather. They do.

            Weston was played by Claude Rains.

            Hody was played by Telly Savalas from before he started shaving the side and back parts of his balding head.

            Heather was played by Deborah Walley, who starred in Gidget Goes Hawaiian, and several bikini movies but was not very interested in acting in films. She did theatre, wrote film scripts, produced her own films and opened a theatre school for Native Americans in Arizona. She was a friend of Elvis after they made Spinout together and she said that he introduced her to Eastern Philosophy. I didn’t see that coming.