Dirt Slurpee

            I was disappointed during song practice on Wednesday morning to see it start to snow again. I’d been hoping that the freezing rain would come after I got home from class and not before I left for it.

            I had planned on leaving ten minutes earlier than usual but I was all bundled up and ready to head out fifteen minutes early and so it was more comfortable to just go than to sit around.

            The streets had been generously salted and so though there was a bit of slipping and my tires spun once when a light turned green, I managed to stay balanced most of the way downtown. The worst part of the ride was the thousands of tiny ice pellets hitting my face.

            The Bloor bike lane had been cleared and salted and once I was on it I was able to go a lot faster most of the way to OISE.

            In the biology class ahead of mine the instructor was talking about how men store fat in the liver and women store fat in the muscles and women win.

            I was able to make three rows of tables before the other students came in.

            I told Professor Weisman that I’d found out that John Milton had written an ode to melancholy called “Il Penseroso” and an ode to mirth called “L’allegro” and she nodded, saying that a lot of poets did. She confirmed that Milton was a major influence on Keats and really on all the Romantic poets.

            Her lecture was on Keats’s “Ode On A Grecian Urn”.

            Keats was highly speculative and explored all facets of an idea, including its negation.

            He died at twenty-five without realizing the great plans he’d had for an epic. He didn’t have a chance to write out his own theory of poetry. The closest he came was in his letters. In those days people took letters seriously, unlike emails.

            Ekphrasis is when one art form comments on another, but “Ode On A Grecian Urn” is an example of notional ekphrasis. The artwork described is created in the act of description.

            The debate between poetry and painting, or the sister arts is that some say the visual arts are better at communicating the transcendental because poetry gets too caught up in naming things.

            Keats is trying to figure out the narrative on the urn.

            Canst means “can”.

            There is debate over whether the first line is punctuated as “Thou still unravished …” or “Thou still, unravished …”

            The urn is sometimes seen as vaginal because the male speaker is trying to penetrate the urn. He has gendered the urn by calling it a “bride”.

            The maker of the urn is dead and so it is “fostered”.

            The scene on the urn is pastoral, with figures.

            Arcady is the ancient site of the pastoral in Greece.

            Keats creates with language an urn that is resistant to language.

            Timbrels are tambourines.

            In the aesthetic history of that time there was debate about the images on ancient urns.

            In what ways are unheard melodies sweeter than heard melodies?

            I wrote that the husband is quietness and the father is silence. The creator is both of these and he is quieted by death and historical distance. The urn is visual and is telling a story silently more sweetly than the capabilities of poetry. The narrative is mysterious to the modern observer and so much is left to the imagination. The imaginative ear hears sweeter music than the actual ear.

            To actualize an ideal is to lose it. Some say it was an advantage for Beethoven to have been deaf when he wrote his Ninth Symphony.

            Keats is working through the paradox of negotiating an ideal in art.

            In the third stanza the urn is described negatively, in terms of lack.

            The fifth stanza defeats our attempts to reason.

            In what respect is the urn a cold pastoral?

            It’s on marble. The lovers are unconsummated.

            This is one of the most famous poems in human history.

            There are differing opinions about the placement of quotation marks at the end. Our text only uses them for, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Other versions put the whole of the last two lines in quotes.

            Truth and beauty spring into being at the same time.

            We looked briefly at Keats’s letter to his brothers of December 21, 27, 1817. This is the letter in which he introduces the phrase “negative capability”.

            Coleridge could only deal with a topic if he had a full grasp of it.

            I rode over to the Admissions office. At first I was told that they don’t help students with their grant applications but when I explained that the application was complete but that I couldn’t submit it they were okay with trying to help me. At first I couldn’t log in with my laptop but the counter person suggested that the wifi was going on and off because of some work they are doing. When I finally got logged on I showed her my problem. Every time I tried to click “save and continue” the application site would highlight the “letters” section and say that it was an unfilled field. The only things in the letters section were two notifications from the fall, which had nothing to do with this application. She spoke with a counsellor on the phone and he agreed to come and look. He couldn’t figure out what the problem was and so he went away for a while to consult with someone else. I was there for at least half an hour and I started to worry that my battery was going to run out and so I plugged in the laptop. Finally the counsellor returned and asked me to put “0” in two fields relating to money spent on dependent children. This time the application went through.

            I asked how I go about taking the “grant only” option and I was informed that since the OSAP that I’d applied for was for part time students, I will automatically be taking the “grant only” option. That was a relief. I hope it’s true. This new set-up is new for the people at Admissions, so it’s always possible that what they tell me will be wrong until they get the hang of it, though there is no one else to get advice from.

            I rode down St George to Queen and then home. It was like driving through a salty dirt-flavoured Slurpee.

            I went out and bought a can of Creemore at the liquor store and found that it’s twenty-five cents cheaper now. I looked it up and saw that it's on sale right now.

            I received general emails from both U of T and OCADU announcing that the campuses would be closed at 15:00 because of the weather. That means that if I’d taken the six hours of work I’d been offered at the art college for Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday evening I could have stayed home and made $130 for nothing. Who knew they were going to wimp out over the freezing rain? I also felt kind of ripped off to hear that the St George campus had cancelled classes. Four years ago there was a wicked snowstorm that I’d thought for sure would have put the kibosh on classes for that day but since there was no notice of cancellation I risked my life riding my bike through a snowpocalypse to get to a philosophy class. This time they cancelled classes because a little bit of slush.

            I had a late lunch of two slices of marble cheese on toast and took a late siesta. I ended up sleeping for an extra hour and fifteen minutes.

            I typed up my lecture notes.

            That night I had an egg and toast with a beer for dinner and watched the last episode from the second season of Peter Gunn.

            This story was unique because it was the first time that a Peter Gunn story began with Peter Gunn on camera. Usually they begin with a crime being committed and then Gunn comes in after the opening credits. In this story Gunn is in his apartment when he hears a baby crying in the hallway. He goes to look and there is a baby in a basket with an anonymous note asking him to take care of it. Gunn is helpless and so he has to call his girlfriend Edie and have her skip work to assist him. Gunn learns from Lieutenant Jacoby that a couple with a baby were attacked and the mother was shot and killed. The father ran with the baby. He is told further that a mobster named Beldon is about to go on trial and the witnesses are being bumped off. On the street a man calls Gunn’s name and it’s an old war buddy named Ernie, who turns out to be the baby’s father. He explains that after the war he go into some trouble and went to prison but he was offered parole if he agreed to testify against Beldon. Just then a car drives by with shooters inside. Ernie is shot and ends up in the hospital. Beldon later tries to kill Gunn but fails and so since Gunn knows Beldon will be even more enthusiastic about his death now, he uses himself as bait to draw Beldon out. Jacoby helps and Beldon is killed, so no trial.

            I watched the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory.

            Spoiler alert!

Howard and Bernadette have a new neighbour with extremely bright motion censor lights that go on and shine on them when they are in their hot tub. Sheldon offers to help them see if their neighbour is following city building codes but he discovers Howard and Bernadette sinned by building their deck without a permit. He’s about to turn them in but decides to be a better friend than a citizen and finds a regulation that impedes the neighbour instead.

Meanwhile Bert has found a meteor in which he’s detected organic matter and so he wants Raj’s help to cut it open with his diamond saw which he calls “Terry Bradsaw”. Stuart and Denise think that opening the meteor will unleash an alien plague on mankind because they’ve learned from the instruction manuals that are comic books. Leonard offers to cut it open with his new laser but Bert turns him down. Leonard feels jealous and dreams that he cut the meteor open and was infected with a virus that caused him to try to eat Bert, Raj and Penny.