Personified Abstractions

            On Wednesday morning during song practice the buttonhole at the bottom end of my guitar strap finally frayed open. I’ll have to cut some scrap leather from an old pair of pants and sew it up, but meanwhile I needed a quick fix so wound the two ends of a piece of wire around the two sides of the buckle and hooked the middle of the wire around the strap button on my guitar. It slipped off a couple of times but once I squeezed the wire narrower it stayed put for the rest of my practice.

            As I was leaving my building for class there was a guy riding by with his bike on the sidewalk and with his unleashed dog running ahead as he shouted instructions to it in another language. The man was wearing a camping backpack and the little bulldog was wearing a utility jacket. They turned north on O’Hara and the guy was riding the left side of the street as he kept on calling to the dog things like, “You stay on the fucking sidewalk!”

            There was a Biology class in our room and so I sat in a desk that happened to be sitting outside the door. I made some notes about my day so far and read a bit of Frankenstein.

            When Julia arrived I chatted with her and found out she’s an English major with a minor in criminology. She said she wants to go into a law and becoming a lawyer is one of the possibilities she’s considering. She said she would be more interested in contract law because criminal and family law are too emotional.

            When the other class got out there were not very many students so I wonder if it will be a regular class in that time slot or not.

            OISE had ignored Professor Wiseman’s request to put the tables in rows for her. I couldn’t rearrange things by myself and students were already taking seats in the established seminar style arrangement and so I just broke the front end of the rectangle and moved one table for myself into a position so I could face the professor without craning my neck. I put an extra chair beside me in case someone needed a seat.

            Professor Weisman was visibly frustrated by the fact that the institute hadn’t done what she’d asked regarding the floor plan.

            I hadn’t seen the professor wearing her sling for a while and so I asked her about it. She confirmed that she’s finished with the sling but she still has to keep going to physio.

            I asked her if our required reading Frankenstein only includes the novel and not all the extra text. She told me that it’s just the novel but if people do their research essay on Frankenstein they can use the other text if they want.

            We had our second lecture on Shelley.

            The second generation of Romantics inherited some of the first generation’s revolutionary ideals.

            Shelley mobilizes our expectations.

            Traditionally odes to personified abstractions came with a presupposition that audiences have generalized understanding of the subject. In Shelley’s “Ode to Intellectual Beauty” we no longer have a generalized understanding. The best we can manage is to assign imperfect names to that which we vaguely intimate. Shelley is warning that such names can harden into ideology. The sceptical mind of the poet is self-aware.

            We looked at Shelley’s sonnet “To Wordsworth”.

            Wordsworth had stood for the egalitarian basis of human nature. Shelley saw Wordsworth as having retreated from his ideals and taken a turn towards conservatism. Shelley saw Wordsworth as a sell-out and felt that he had betrayed those that saw him as heroic. He’d given in to quietism of the imagination.

            The poem begins by addressing Shelley’s admiration for Wordsworth and speaks of a sense of loss. He laments Wordsworth’s abandonment of his own ideals.

            Sonnets are sometimes about loss and the compressed form of a fourteen-line limit drives the writer towards amazing concision. The form inhabits a world of contradiction.

            There are a lot of slant rhymes such as “stood” and “multitude”.

            She said that assonance, which has repeated vowel sounds, is the same as slant rhymes, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. “Table” is a slant rhyme for “asshole” but there’s no real assonance. Assonance is “deep and dreamless sleep” or “eyes of the idol with the iron head”.

            Someone defined a slant rhyme as getting the rhyme wrong. The use of it reminds us of what is wrong.

            As this is a sonnet of loss it belongs to the tradition of the elegy. Wordsworth is alive and yet Shelley is talking about the loss of Wordsworth. He starts by addressing Wordsworth as the “Poet of nature”. In an elegy the dead person is addressed in the beginning. He compares his sense of the loss of Wordsworth to Wordsworth’s sense of the loss of youth. But Wordsworth sees consolation.

            This poem goes full circle. In the first twp lines he talks about how Wordsworth taught him to mourn for what will not return and in the end he mourns for the loss of Wordsworth.

            I wondered what the resolution and consolation was for Shelley. He resolves that Wordsworth is dead and his consolation seems to be the poem.

            Ronan asked if Wordsworth had read the poem. She said he had but there was no published response.

            I asked Gabriel what “kiya” means because Serge Gainsbourg’s “Joanna”, which I’ve adapted, comes from “Kiya Kiya” by Babatunde Olatunji. He didn’t understand what I meant at first by “kiya” but when I sang him the chorus: “Run away, run away, run away, why do you run kiya kiya?” he got what I the word was. “Kiya kiya” together means “so fast”.

            Since I knew that Freshco didn’t have any good grapes this week and I knew that No Frills did, I figured that because they are the same company then Loblaws would probably have what No Frills has. I stopped at the Loblaws on Queen near Bathurst to buy black sable grapes.

            When I got home there was an email from Albert Moritz sending an attachment of the Poetry Master course syllabus. It’s going to be a lot more regimented than I expected and there are actually books to buy and read. I have to bring in fifteen copies of a poem for the first class on Thursday night.

            I had a late lunch and a late siesta. I slept for almost an extra half an hour and felt very groggy when I got up. Imagine if there was a gun that made people feel the way they feel when they’ve just woken up. After shooting them you could just knock them over and take their money.

            I cut some leather and started sewing it around the torn part of the leather tip of my guitar strap. I just tacked it on all around with a few stitches at each corner. It'll function for now and I’ll fully sew it later.

            I finally finished picking the bones of my Christmas turkey. I had it with a beer and watched two episodes of The Big Bang Theory. I picked up from where I’d left off last winter with the 16^th episode.

            Bernadette is due to have her baby any time but wants to get it over with so she and Howard are having sex twice a night because she’d heard that it induces labour. I can confirm that’s true. My daughter Astrid was nine days late but a day after her mother and I had sex Nancy went into labour. All of their friends have ideas as to how to induce labour. They also are loaded with name suggestions for Bernadette and Howard’s son. Ay lets it slip to Howard that Bernadette has already chosen "Michael" after her father. Howard is upset that he's not being considered. Bernadette goes into labour and they name it “Neil” after Neil Armstrong, but his middle name is Michael because it was a difficult labour.

            The second story involves Amy and Sheldon planning the location of their wedding and they want to have it at an exclusive club of which Albert Einstein had been a member. It was very difficult to get an interview because they didn’t know anyone that had a membership. They were surprised and offended when they went and found Leonard and Penny lunching there. It turns out that Leonard is a member but didn’t tell Sheldon because he’d wanted to have a place to go that was Sheldon-free. Sheldon has worked out mathematically the perfect date for their wedding but the club is already booked on that date by Kripke for his birthday party. Leonard tries to talk Kripke into changing his venue and ends up getting him to do so in exchange for cleaning barrels that had previously contained radioactive material. When Sheldon finds out he tries to get Leonard free from the deal but winds up cleaning barrels beside him. In the end they get out of that deal by inviting Kripke to the wedding and telling him he can sing “Volare”. I guess the joke is supposed to be that he pronounces the letters “l” and “r” as “w”.