New Backpack

           
            On Monday before my ride downtown to Romantic Literature class I had to remove the essential items that I always carry in my backpack and put them in one of my cloth shopping bags. During the last few months the main zipper of my Heys backpack has been hinting that it was on its last teeth. I was able to keep it functioning by closing it very carefully. In recent weeks I’d needed to avoid fully opening it and so I would just undo it far enough to get my bike cable out and in or to slip a few groceries inside or it. Over the weekend though the zipper finally died and the teeth would no longer connect.

            Transferring things from backpack to bag took a touch longer and so I arrived at OISE about five minutes later than usual. As usual I went first to pee in the washroom on the main floor. As I was walking out I met professor Weisman coming up from a lower floor. I asked her where she was coming from she said that she’d taken the subway from Jackman Hall, although she usually walks. I hadn’t even realized that there was an entrance to OISE from the subway.

            I see now from looking it up that she didn’t take the train but that she entered St George Station across from Jackman Hall and took a tunnel to OISE, I guess because the sidewalk is slippery.

            She told me that it was very controversial when OISE became part of the U of T campus. She said, “Don’t get me started on the OISE infrastructure. The school was started by the Ontario government in 1965 as a research institution in the area of education. It didn’t join the University of Toronto until 1996.

            Most of the class had already arrived when we walked in, so I just moved one table to make a desk for myself, with one free place beside me that no one took.

            I mentioned to the professor that Jane Austen seemed to be more conservative that the other Romantics in that she was pro land enclosure. She confirmed that Austen was definitely more conservative than the Romantic poets, especially the second-generation poets.

            There was loud hammering going on throughout the class. The professor wondered if we could hear it. I said, “It’s a lesson", meaning that someone was teaching a hammering class. She thought that I meant the hammering was a life lesson and commented that when chess players are in training they are sometimes deliberately inundated with loud noises in order to help them develop concentration.

            Professor Weisman took some time at the beginning of the class to talk about our research essay, which she said we should be starting now.

            She said there are fewer research essays these days because of the increase in the size of classes and the difficulty of marking research papers for so many students.

            She stressed that we should know the difference between a refereed and a non-refereed article.

            Research librarians are highly trained and very helpful and she urged us to make an appointment.

            Research search engines through your library account. Not blogs, Wikipedia, Schmoop or Spark-Notes.

            Find out what the scholarly conversation is on your topic.

            Quoting a published scholar is not proof or argument. One must still discuss the text.

            If one is researching Frankenstein one might look into the scientific research of Shelley’s era.

            Keats’s Cockney background determined his drive towards high lyricism.

            Challenging hierarchies is a topic. Give an argument and not only examples. What about challenging hierarchies?

            Citations must be in MLA style.

            We looked at “To Autumn”, which is one of Keats’s great odes. Within it he looks at some of his favourite theses, such as transience and the essential tension between flux and the longing for permanence.

            What is associated most with autumn is the harvest and plenitude, but it is also a prelude to barrenness.

            She asked me to read the poem.

            Odes usually have ten-line stanzas but these have eleven for a more prolonged effect of the prolonging of fulfillment. But the couplet is still in lines nine and ten.

            Autumn’s beauty depends on transience.

            The theme of the first stanza is a kind of pre-harvest perfection. There is pregnancy, heaviness and a sense of bowing down to the Earth.

            In the second stanza autumn is personified as completion. Several times Professor Weisman gendered this personification as a woman. I pointed out that Keats does not actually say that autumn is female or even imply it in any obvious way. She pointed out the line, “Thy hair soft lifted by the winnowing wind” but I argued that my hair could be lifted by the wind. I said that I understand that the poetic tradition would probably be to make autumn female but should we just take it for granted? This made her think and she admitted that maybe she has been taking it too much for granted that autumn is female in the poem.

            I pointed out that the eleventh lines of the first two stanzas each present the result of a harvest. In the first stanza the bees have harvested their honey and in the second the cider is being pressed. Cider can be seen as a type of human honey.

            Autumn is beautiful but it reminds one of transience and vulnerability.

            In the last stanza the songs of autumn is the music made by the insects, the birds and the animals.

            She said the second stanza is visual while the third stanza is auditory. I added that the first stanza is tactile.

            She declared that the poem is a type of ekphrasis by representing autumn and music and as sculpture. I pointed out that I couldn’t see how Keats is describing autumn as sculpture. The visual descriptions of autumn in the second stanza are not necessarily sculptural. In the third stanza he does name and describe the songs of autumn but I’m not sure if it’s ekphrasis unless the poem is about an actual created work of art created by a human being.

            Squeezing cider could be seen as squeezing out a baby.

            Temporality is recuperative. Remember Shelley’s line, “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”

            The professor mentioned that on our final exam, in addition to essay questions there would be some single paragraphs to write.

            We looked briefly at “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”.

            She said it’s a tragedy. I guess it is a tragedy in the classical sense but I'd always thought King Lear was funny.

            Cordelia refuses to falsely flatter her father.

            This is another poem about reading.

            Keats is not caught in romance but in the complexities of life.

            Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey was also a revisitation.

            Personifying the romance of idealized unification and transcendence.

            Enchanted lyricism.

            Romance is told to “Shut up …” He is bidding romance goodbye. Deflecting sentiment in favour of the tragic. Saying goodbye to his own earlier poetry.

            Damnation versus impassioned clay.

            In the sextet Shakespeare becomes the muse.

            The old oak forest is an image of romance.

            She said for us to look at “The Eve of St Agnes”, its idolizations of and comments on the function of romance.

            At the end of class Zanab, a beautiful student who always wears a hijab, approached Professor Weisman to show her a passage from “To Autumn” that she thought supports my argument that autumn is not necessarily female. It was a reference to clouds touching the “stubble-plains”. I thanked Zanab for coming to the defence of my argument, but I didn’t really see how that gendered the poem either.

            Professor Weisman was interested when I mentioned that I’m minoring in Philosophy because her husband, Arthur Ripstein is a Philosophy professor at U of T. She said he teaches a Philosophy of war course, among others.

            I told her that my favourite Philosophy course was “The Philosophy of Sex” and she knows the professor, Ronny de Souza. We both agreed that he’s over the top. I recounted how in his class we basically got to watch artful porn every two classes.

            I rode straight to the Admissions office, which is also the Transcript office. OSAP had requested my academic transcript and so I’d ordered it. They had it there but seemed confused when instead of taking it I asked them to give it to OSAP. They said OSAP doesn’t usually ask for transcripts unless there is an academic exception. One of the counter people checked out my account and saw no academic exception but also saw the request for a transcript. He shrugged and said he’d send it to OSAP. He also pointed out that I still have some files to upload to OSAP. I had uploaded my income tax form but they’d wanted the form issued by the CRA. He added that there is a signature form that I also have download, sign and re-upload.

            The next thing on my agenda was to go looking for a new backpack. I rode east on Bloor and then down Yonge. Just north of Wellesley I saw a luggage store called Zam Zam International with backpacks on display, so I stopped and went in. They had a few Swiss Gear backpacks that looked pretty good, and a couple that had pockets for laptops. While I was checking them out a customer was chatting with the man behind the counter about the Bruce McArthur sentence. He declared that prisoners have too many rights in Canada and that all of the families of his victims should be allowed to beat the shit out of him. What purpose would that serve? If he is a serial killer he is so emotionally detached that he would not learn a thing from such a punishment. The customer also suggested that the prison authorities should be torturing McArthur and pulling out his fingernails in order to pull from him his reasons for committing these murders. What an idiot! If you torture someone they will give you the answer you want to hear in order to stop the torture. No truths could be extracted along with fingernails. All such a policy would do would be t provide employment for someone like Bruce McArthur, who enjoys torturing people.

            After the asshole left the proprietor stayed behind the counter and didn’t come to ask me if I needed help. I tried on the Swiss Gear backpack that felt like the best and then called to him. There was no box, as the one I’d selected was the only one left. There’s a two-year warranty. I paid $79.10, he took the stuffing out and I put my stuff inside. He then handed me a bottle of spring water and said that he was giving out complementary bottles of water with every purchase that day. I didn’t really want a bottle of water but it was free and I thought it was odd and funny that he was giving out bottles of water.

            I looked up Swiss Gear and saw that it’s a high quality brand and that it is listed in a few best backpack lists. Heys, the Toronto brand I’ve used for the last ten years is not listed at all. I think that Swiss Gear is owned by Wenger, which makes the Swiss Army Knife. They have the same white cross on a red field logo and Wenger is owned by Victorinox, which also makes the Swiss Army Knife and has a slightly different white cross on a red field logo. I feel pretty good about my purchase.

            I stopped at Loblaws on Queen on my way home and bought the last two bags of their black sable grapes, plus a couple more bags of red grapes from South Africa.

            I went online and registered for a CRA account so I could upload my tax info to OSAP. In order to get a security code I had to call the CRA and sit on hold for twenty minutes. I read some poems by Dorothy Hemans and dozed a bit. I finished my application and uploaded my tax form. On the OSAP site I couldn’t find any indication that they needed me to upload anything else and so I just decided to wait and see if they let me know if they need something more.

            I had a late lunch of a small piece of chicken and some yogourt with honey.

            I took a late siesta and wound up sleeping for almost three hours.

            I typed some of my lecture notes.

            I had a chicken breast for dinner with a potato and gravy and watched the first episode of Rawhide. Clint Eastwood hasn’t changed his acting style since he started out on this show. He’s always been the same character.

            In this story the trail drive encounters a prison wagon that camps nearby. The convicts include a beautiful young woman named Dallas and a murderous Englishman. An escape attempt results in the death of the deputy and the severe wounding of the sheriff. Gil and Rowdy have to leave the drive and escort the prisoners and the sheriff to Fort Craig. Meanwhile Dallas’s husband Luke and his gang are following about an hour behind.

            Rowdy separates the horses from the wagon to ford them across a river and then uses the horses to pull the wagon across from the other side. Halfway across Luke arrives. Dallas falls in the river and can’t swim. Gil saves her but Luke wants to kill him and Rowdy anyway. Dallas steps in front and Luke shoots his own wife to prove he doesn't care. Gil and Rowdy are able at that moment to get guns and kill the outlaws.

            Dallas was played by Terry Moore, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in Come Back Little Sheba. She claimed to have been married to Howard Hughes even though she went through two other marriages during the time she was supposed to be married to him. She received an undisclosed settlement after his death. One report says it was $350,000. She posed nude for Playboy at the age of 55.

            Really the best thing about this show is the killer song with lyrics by Ned Washington (who also wrote When You Wish Upon A Star) and music by Dimitri Tiomkin.