Kip King

            Although it’s true that we’ve broken up with winter, there is a timeless tradition at the ends of romantic relationships for the dumpee to return like it did this week for at least one more pity fuck.
            It was cold while riding to class on Monday and so I was glad to be wearing two scarves and my winter gloves.
            At Dufferin and Bloor a truck slammed on its brakes and a sheet of ice slid from its hood to smash into briefly dancing pieces on the street.
            Before class I brought up Byron’s daughter and she said that Ada is still mentioned in the computer world and a computer language is named after her. The professor added that Ada’s mother, Lady Annabella Byron was also a mathematician. I said that through her, Byron is the only Romantic to have current descendants. She confirmed that that’s true, but added that Wordsworth’s brother’s descendant edited the Norton Prelude.
            At the beginning Professor Weisman announced that she wouldn’t be available for office hours next week but will be adding extra hours on Friday of this week.
            Our final author of the course is Felicia Dorothea Hemans. In some ways she is similar to Charlotte Smith in that they both had unhappy marriages that ended in separation and left them struggling to support a lot of children. They both turned to writing to make money and became widely read, but really there is a world of difference between the two. Wordsworth was indebted to Charlotte Smith for his success.
            Hemans’s poems are a complicated problem. She acquired a reputation as the poetess of English imperialist ideology and domestic culture. She is represented in terms of the conventional norms of separate spheres ideology. “Separate spheres” is not simply that man is removed from the house to serve the country, but that the woman becomes the angel of the house. England was at war. To have an English hearth and home becomes the image of what Englishmen are fighting for. It’s an ideology harnessed to substantiate the value of imperialist ideology.
            What does England represent? Throughout the 19th Century attempts were made to define English nationalism. These are motifs appropriated in discussions about “What is England?” and “What is an Englishman?” How is the English hearth different from the Canadian hearth? There is a long history of stable rootedness within the landscape of England and that’s why the anxiety for the foreign.
            Hemans was the poetess at the centre of nationalism. Much of her work is later than the other Romantic poets and so she was Victorian. Just after that period she was dropped from the canon because she was considered too sentimental. Later a new understanding arose of her mobilizing irony to question, subvert and undermine aspects of the domestic affections.
            We looked at her poem “England’s Dead”. It’s in ballad stanzas, which are quatrains that allow for sympathy, accessibility and ease of understanding.
            There was not a strong anti-war sentiment among poets at this time.
            The supposed glorious dead of England do not all rest on English soil.
            The title “England’s” could be the possessive but it could also be a contraction as in, “England is dead”.
            The professor asked me to read the poem.
            It’s addressed a son of the ocean isle and so in other words, an Englishman. This reminds us of patriarchy and lineage, a motif that calls to the idea of inheritance.
            To ask, “Where are your dead” is not uncommon in culture. The idea of culture for many people of the world revolves around caring for the dead in terms of continuity of inheritance through graves and markers. Culture begins with regard for the dead. The sanctity of burial ground is deep in English culture and imperialist culture in general.
            Lines 7-8: “Wave may not foam, nor wild wind sweep/ where rest not England's dead" means "The place where there are no dead Englishmen does not exist”. The world is a grave for Englishmen.
            How could anyone have not seen the irony in this poem?
           England’s navy was central to English nationalism. Owners of navy vessels or really any ocean going vessels had to be members of the Church of England.
            White” sail spread.
            By having dead everywhere England is claiming an affinity with the whole world.
            This is one of her most famous poems.
            We looked at “Homes of England”, which has been seen as a second national anthem for many people of England. It also has accessible verse and perhaps more irony. It represents a tone of primitive sincerity and openness.
            England’s homes defined the nation. Of prestigious stately homes think of Pembrook, Jane Austen and Downton Abbey with a vast landscape peopled by landed aristocracy with a pastoral setting contained within. Ancestry is one of the first points of reference for such homes. The owners have inherited the ideals of English virtue. These homes represent the transformation of England because they are no longer viable.
            The next stanza refers to the “merry homes of England”. These are not the stately home. Hemans is moving down the classes with each stanza and with an increase in the number of homes.
            The values represented by these homes are not a vision of reality but a function of the ideal.
            Don’t be too smug and assume that it is obviously irony. It could be interpreted though that there is no irony here and that she is actually a conservative.
            Can the two poems be interpreted ironically?
            It’s a louder hint of irony with “England’s Dead”. I pointed out lines 35 and 36 of the last stanza: “May hearts of native proof be reared / to guard each hallowed wall". If something needs to be proved it means there is doubt about its veracity. The first line suggests raising children to believe and to prove that these values are the values of England. They are being raised to fight.
            Professor Weisman mentioned Rainier Maria Rilke’s poem “Requiem for a Friend” in which the first line is “I have my dead”. One understands oneself through a relationship with the dead.
            We looked at the Hemans famous poem "Casabianca". A French boy aged ten dies at the hands of British forces. The story is taken as an example of great family honour and loyalty in the enemy. The child has faith in family and his father’s ideals. All national identity rests on the production of stories of culture. 19th Century identity might have been keyed to the threat of immigration. The child's commitments are the same as those of England. Some say the boy was effectively murdered by his father.
            What is the tone of this poem?
            I said it’s a tone of sympathy with the enemy and a unification of the enemy’s and England’s values. Along that plane of sameness an English boy could be put into the position of the French boy.
            England is attacking its own values.
            When class ended I gave Professor Weisman a copy of my poem “Dumb Bike Ride”. It seemed appropriate to give it to her because it was written in the structure of William Wordsworth’s "I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud" and that's the poem we started the course with. She said she would read it with interest.
            I asked if she would be getting a break soon but she said that the time when she isn’t teaching is taken up by research which is actually more work. She told me she will be getting a bit of a break next week because her husband has been invited to speak at Berkeley and they pay for the spouse to come along. She said it's a holdover from the days when wives came along to press their husbands' pants.
            A few days before I had received a late notice from the OISE library. I was surprised because I hadn't gotten the usual two-days-before-it’s-due warning. I'd tried to go there on Friday after work but it turned out they close at 17:00 on Fridays. So after class on Monday, before leaving the building I went to the library to renew my books. I was informed that I owe $21 and that if it had been at $25 I would not have been allowed to take the books out. I don’t know what went wrong. Maybe the last time I renewed them online I’d misread “Your books have failed to renew” for "Your books have been renewed", though I never have before. The librarian renewed my books.
            As I was unlocking my bike there was a bent over old lady walking by very slowly on Bloor Street. She was looking very weak and stopped a few times as I was watching to lean on various things like buildings and bike post rings in order to rest. I was worried that she wasn’t going to make it to wherever she was going.
            My next stop was to the Admissions office to hand in my entries for the E. J. Pratt Poetry Competition. Although I’d told her what the envelope was for and it was written clearly on the front, she thought that it was an application for something else, because she asked for my “applicant number”. She had to open up my envelope and pull out my poetry before she realized that she was mistaken. She took it and I can only hope they don’t make another mistake, like send my poetry to OSAP or something dumb like that.
            I then rode down to Robarts Library to pay my ridiculously high library fine. The woman at the desk where I'd paid my fine in December said she doesn’t accept payments for fines there and that I have to do it at the main desk. I insisted that I’d paid it there just three months before and finally she gave in and took my money. She told me that soon they won’t be taking cash at all and I’d have to pay by debit.
            At that point I thought that I was free to go home but suddenly remembered that I’d planned on getting a haircut that day and so I rode up to St. Clair and Yonge to Topcuts.
            I was about twenty minutes early for Amy’s shift but it turned out that she’d arrived and that she’d start early as soon as she cleaned up her station. While I was waiting another customer, a little elderly woman came in, also specifically asking for Amy. The other stylists thought it was funny because they had no customers at all at that time. The old lady didn’t seem to mind waiting and sat there dozing while I was getting mowed.
            I asked Amy how Thailand had been because I remembered that she had been about to go back in December after my last haircut. She said her family was happy to be reunited but that her kids hated the 30-degree temperature every day and wanted to take a shower every twenty minutes.
            When half my hair was on the floor I noticed that it seemed blonder down there than it did on my head.
            The cut looked and felt good but it was much colder on my head when I left than when I’d arrived.
            I rode down Yonge to Queen and then west because I wanted to ride past the first legal marijuana store in Toronto, which had opened its doors for the first time that morning. It was already about 15:00 but the line-up for the Hunny Pot still went around the block. The owner is going to make lots of money.
            I stopped at Freshco to buy tomatoes on the vine, avocadoes and garden cocktail. They had a Canadian brand of greenhouse grown strawberries called “Smuccies” that the package said were “sweet” and so I bought a pack even though it was expensive at $5 for 340 grams. I didn’t try them that day so I didn’t find out right away whether they were really sweet or not.
            I immediately rode to Freedom Mobile to pay for my April phone service and then walked my bike home.
            This was the eleventh day of my fourteen-day fast and so I had tomatoes and avocadoes for both lunch and dinner.
            That night I watched the Rifleman. In this story a young man named Donnel O’Mahoney in a bowler hat and a black suit is out on the trail on foot when a stagecoach goes by. He runs and jumps on the back to get a free ride but the driver’s shotgun rider sees him and sneaks back over the top of the stage to loosen the ropes on the luggage and send Mahoney tumbling back onto the trail. Angrily Mahoney gets up and pulls out a gun. He aims at the frightened man but doesn’t fire. Later Lucas and Mark McCain find Mahoney collapsed on the trail. They take him home to feed him and once he recovers we hear him talking in a thick Bowery accent, which is amusing because Kip King, the actor that plays Mahoney was from Chicago while Chuck Conners, who plays Lucas McCain had a noticeable Brooklyn accent even though the character is supposed to be from Oklahoma. Mahoney is supposed to be only 16 in this story and he becomes friends with Mark right away. He regales him with stories of New York where the buildings are like mountains, some of them ten stories tall! But Lucas doesn’t appreciate some of the things that Mahoney pulls out of his bag to show Mark, such as a switchblade, loaded dice and a goil’s garter. Rather than letting Mahoney hang around and be a bad influence on his son, he arranges for him to catch the next fright stage into North Fork that will be coming by soon. Jackson, the driver is not very friendly. When they get to North Fork and Mahoney steps into the stage office he witnesses a confrontation between Jackson and his partner Cramer. Cramer reveals that his discovered that Jackson has stolen a lot of money from the company and he’s going to tell the sheriff. Jackson takes out a gun and kills Cramer, then he looks at Mahoney and says, “You shot my partner!” Mahoney runs and a few hours later Mark finds him on the trail. Learning that Jackson is after him Mark uses indigenous trail covering tricks that his father taught him to take Mahoney to a cave in which to hide. Meanwhile Lucas has learned that Mahoney has murdered Cramer and that Jackson is offering $200 for his partner’s killer, dead or alive. Lucas joins the posse just to make sure Mahoney is brought back live. Lucas realizes after a while that the faint trail he is able to pick up has two sets of footprints walking backwards on their heels. He finds Mark and convinces him to take him to Mahoney, but Jackson is watching and gets to the cave first. He is trying to kill Mahoney by shooting into the cave when Lucas arrives. Jackson turns on Lucas and is killed.
            I was surprised to read that Kip King is the father of Chris Kattan of Saturday Night Live and A Night at the Roxborough, but they look very much alike. Kip was one of the founding members of the Groundlings comedy troupe and his son also was in the Groundlings before Saturday Night Live.