Nino Tempo

            My yoga routine has become so automatic that I might get lost in thought during a pose and then while I’m doing the next pose forget that I did the previous pose and wonder if I actually forgot to do it. I have to trust myself that I did it and move on.

            On Monday morning before leaving for class I started writing the outline of my essay and it pushed it up to exactly four pages.

            When I arrived in the classroom the lights were out, half the shades were down. I set up the room the way Professor Weisman likes it but I had to go to another classroom to steal a lectern. Hager helped me from her seat to lower it to the right height for the professor by telling me when to stop.

            Professor Weisman is usually there quite early but several students arrived before she did. Before class started she reminded us that next class we would begin our study of William Blake, who is a different kind of Romanticist than Wordsworth and Coleridge in that his poetry is not about landscapes. His poetry is more about the apocalyptic side of Romanticism. He also looks at class and social structure in ways that we haven't seen.

            I mentioned that the French Romantics seem to be a lot less about nature than the English and she confirmed that to be true.

            She reminded us that there are only four weeks left in the term and so we'd better put our feet on the gas pedal.

            In this class we looked at Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, which she said is unlike any poem in the history of the English language.
            She stressed the importance of the gloss text in the margin of the poem. I asked if it wasn't just important for a first reading because it intrudes with the rhythm of the poem. She told me that it is important as part of the composition.

            In Kublah Khan the speaker is trying to find the poetic equivalent to the architecture that he is describing but he is also documenting his failure to find a poetic vision of transcendence. He says in his introduction to the poem that he had written 300 lines but there was a knock on the door and when he returned the lines were no longer there. It's sort of a “the dog ate my poetry” scenario. But his story about being interrupted may be a staged representation of the failure of vision. Maybe there was not really a knock on the door. The poem “Kublah Khan" is not just about the pleasure dome. He’s turned his imagination on his own mind and in conferring images of horror he’s created a living nightmare.

            The mariner is a poet on the sea doing battle with an existential crisis. He is trying to construct being alone without redemption. The dominant image is of a ship on an unexplored sea.

            The gloss was added 19 years later. The gloss is annoying. We don’t need the gloss at first to make sense of the poem.

            The Latin epigraph sets you up as if it explains something but it does not. We get played with in this poem. We are being tantalized about some spiritual world that we learn nothing about.

            It is written in ballad-like stanzas in quatrains with generally short lines. Ballads are an oral tradition associated with openness.

            A wedding is about unity and celebration. It is a public, communal forum but the mariner interrupts it for one guest as if to say, “Don’t be so quick to celebrate!” He forces upon the guest the intense experience of the poem.

            The poem has a glittering eye that holds the reader spellbound.

            Of the gloss, think back to Wordsworth’s statement in "Expostulation and Reply": “We murder to dissect". The poem is being murdered by the gloss. The gloss writer is prosaic and reductive, reducing the experience of the poem.

            I asked if the gloss could be seen as the equivalent to a Greek chorus. She thought it was an interesting idea but said that a Greek chorus is supposed to agree with what is going on in a play, while the gloss in this poem sometimes contradicts the verses. If the gloss is a chorus then it’s a failed chorus because the gloss writer does not always understand what is going on.

            She said that maybe the gloss is a parody of the pointing finger that appears in the margins of Pilgrim’s Progress with the message to “mark this”. There is a dialectical tension between the gloss and the poem.

            I suggested that the gloss would be more effective if the poem was performed and the gloss was read by a different voice than the poem.

            The gloss destabilizes the reality of the poem but the poem is not reality. The gloss is a rival reality within the context of the poem but the poem is an aesthetic illusion. The tension between the gloss and the poem mirrors the consistently competing realities of the wedding music calling the guest to his destination while at the same time being compelled to stay and listen to the mariner’s tale.

            The poem does not just present the mariner’s tale but also a tale about him telling it.

            Is the wedding guest or gloss the reader? The gloss could be a parody of a poor reader.

            She wondered how many of us read Frankenstein in high school since the novel is on the Ontario Grade 11 curriculum. She mentioned this because in Frankenstein there is also a ship on a polar expedition.

            The albatross is considered by the sailors in the poem to be a good omen, but why?

            The guest stops the mariner just before he reveals that he killed the albatross for no reason. The gloss writer’s response is that shooting the albatross was an inhospitable thing to do.

            The tale becomes a tale about telling and repeating a tale and there is a lot of repetition. “At an uncertain hour, that agony returns: ad till my ghastly tale is told, this heart within me burns”. It’s the talking cure of Romanticism. 

            The wide wide sea is an existential image.

            The mariner gives a somewhat contrived and oversimplified moral.

            At the beginning the ship goes outward, forward and southward. It drops away from civilization. The sun “higher and higher every day until over the mast at noon” gives the effect of approaching the equator.

            The gloss does not have the mysterious power of the poem itself.

            Part five is an interpolation of guilt, blame, sin and retribution.

            She asked, “What is the significance of the conclusion of the poem? How do you process the moralizing coda given the rivalry between the gloss and the mariner’s tale?

            I said if “He prayeth best that loveth best” that means that love supersedes prayer in importance since one can’t pray properly without loving first. But perhaps the gloss writer is a better prayer than lover. There is an irony because the wedding guest turns away from the wedding, which is supposed to represent love. The gloss writer seems to come to the same conclusion as the mariner.

            Poetry depends upon repetition.

            “Water, water everywhere is a baptism.

            The mariner is repulsed by the slimy things but later blesses the water snakes. The mariner interprets a moral.

            That was the end of the class but I suggested that if the albatross represents Christianity, the albatross’s dropping away from the mariner’s neck after he blesses the snakes implies that a relationship with nature is a superior religion to one of worshipping martyrs.

            We discussed how the albatross is the largest flying bird and it can fly around the world without landing. At the time the poem was written it was new and exotic as was its habitat of the southern hemisphere.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home. Grapes were dirt-cheap and so I bought five bags, as well as some raspberries. I also bought cheese, bread and yogourt.

            When I got home I had a can of organic lentil soup with potato chips for lunch.

            That evening I had to work at OCADU and I took my laptop so I could transcribe my lecture notes from earlier that day. This time I didn’t accidentally delete any files. I partially boiled a potato before leaving and made sure I turned the stove off this time. I noticed that a further aftermath of the stove fiasco of the week before is that my stainless steel pot now rusts on the inside bottom.

            When I got to work I was setting up my laptop as the students were coming in, all in their late teens or not much more than twenty I would guess. One young man said to a young woman, “I’ll see you tonight!” She seemed doubtful and said, “I don’t know. Are you fertile?” He responded in a slightly annoyed voice, “Yes!” She said, “Okay then, I’ll see you tonight!”

            I worked for Terry Shoffner, my favourite teacher at OCADU of the ones that are left. He’s always interested in my university courses and impressed that I’m pursuing my degree.

            It was a portraiture class and so I didn’t have to take off any clothing other than what I wear for outdoors and I just did mostly twenty-minute poses for the whole night. 
            When I got home I heated up a chicken leg and some gravy with my potato and watched Peter Gunn. This story was unique in that there were no fisticuffs and not a shot fired. A young man namedSandy with a James Dean style pompadour and a leather jacket is hitchhiking late at night when two hodaddies in a dune buggy make several attempts to run him over. He escapes over a high wall but when he falls to the other side he hits his head and is knocked unconscious. We see two nuns standing over him. A day or so later Peter Gunn walks into a juke joint called “Rockabilly’s” where a real life rock and jazz singer and musician named Nino Tempo is singing his own uncharting first single “Loonie ‘bout Junie”. 

            Gunn meets with Laurie, who tells him her boyfriend Sandy has been arrested for murder and she wants Gunn to help to prove he couldn’t have done it. Gunn goes to see Sandy in jail. It seems he was just hitching home from a stint in prison when he got driven off the road. Since he was unconscious he can’t prove his alibi and all he can remember is waking up in a room with bars on the windows and hearing bells. Since the room reminded him so much of prison he just started running and didn’t stop until he was on the highway and the cops arrested him. Gunn discovers that the bells are from a convent of The Little Sisters of the Friendless. He goes to see the sisters and they can definitely confirm that Sandy was there at the time of the murder. The only problem is that their vows stipulate that they never leave the convent and so they can’t go to court to testify. The rest of the show is just negotiation until it’s finally decided to bring the court to the convent.

            Nino Tempo was a child prodigy. He became a member of the session band The Wrecking Crew. He had a moderate Disco hit with “Sister James” in 1973 but his biggest hit was a 1963 duet with his sister, April Stevens on a recording of Deep Purple. Their version was the second biggest hit for that song and it won a Grammy. He also played on John Lennon’s “Rock and Roll”.

            Sandy was played by Paul Carr, who played Lieutenant Kelso on the second episode of Star Trek. He was the first Star Trek crewmember to die on screen.

            Sister Thomas Aquinas was played by Anna Lee, who was a major character on General Hospital. She was the goddaughter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and a best friend of his daughter, Jean.