Faithful in My Fashion

            On Wednesday morning I heard the 5:00 alarm and got up. I went to the washroom as usual, peed and did my ablution. Off in the distance I could hear the mournful sound of sirens like a howling wind or brush wolves up in horse country. I had this sense that it was very early and that maybe I hadn't heard my alarm after all but rather the sirens as thy went by. I finished washing and checked the time. It was 2:30, so I went back to bed. When I got up again at 5:00 I didn’t have to wash and so I started yoga two minutes early.

During song practice I bit my tongue. It was the first time I’d bitten my tongue while singing. It seems to hurt more than beating one’s tongue while eating. Fortunately it only smarted for half a song.

I finished posting my translation of “Vu de l’extérieur” (From the Outside) by Serge Gainsbourg and began memorizing “Pan Pan Cul Cul" (Literally more like “Whap Whap Ass Ass" but meaning A Good Spanking) by the same writer. The idea seems to be that bouncing up and down in an old jalopy is like being spanked and so it serves as foreplay.

I did some research about the Woodstock First Nation for my Indigenous Studies essay.

I took a siesta from 9:30 till almost 10:48.

I left home at noon and rode to University College in the cold rain. I put my range rider gloves on when I was over halfway there.

There were only two students in the room when I got there and neither of them was chattering and so I was able to read most of a chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray before the talkers arrived. I finished reading the chapter before class started but it was an exercise in concentration.

We finished up with Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

Pater is interested in the spirit of the past rather than historical facts. History is cyclic. He’s a historicist taking all the details from a particular moment through the art of the inexact. The contradictions of historical fact and historical spirit require readers to be existential about what they believe. We must look into our interest rather than at what it gets us. It is a more instrumental and less exterior approach that is still valid today because it forces us to examine what we take for granted.

Oscar Wilde is less subtle as he takes on morality in full strength.

What is morality? Is the conventional the right way of doing things? The power of being moved lies not in the morally right or wrong path but in how we approach our experience. We never step in the same river twice. We cannot help but be moved and so we should soak it up. This is Pater’s higher ethics. The temperament of being rather than doing is the correct principle of living. It's artist's temperaments that appeal to Pater more so than the physical art that they produce.

He says that Michelangelo must be approached through his predecessors. It is a way of understanding the present. Pater is prescriptive when he says, “must".

The ethos of Victorian prose is that one must trust the author’s character.

We began looking at Decadent poetry.

The materiality of ornately decorative classically rigid form is everywhere in Decadent Poetry. But form was used for impact rather than meaning. One of the forms was the villanelle and another was the alexandrine. She quoted what I said in my essay about the alexandrine causing the reader to have to catch their breath.

Swinburne writes of loss, isolation and incompleteness.

Thinking had become conventional and desensitized and so the Decadent poets made use of what was considered unnatural imagery to wake up the reader. They used artificiality to penetrate the reader’s comfort zone. The idea that what is natural is good is a man-made assumption.

The Rhymers’ Club was founded by W.B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys. Among the large informal membership were Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson. 

They and especially Yeats served as a bridge to Modernism.

The French Symbolist poets were a major influence on the Decadents. They opposed the domination of realism and gave priority to the implicit over the explicit. They used suggestion to convey sentiment and symbols were ascribed to distil a private mood and evoke subtle affinities between the material and the spiritual.

Literature these days is about things. The Symbolists transcended things and explored musical properties of language through sound relationships.

Dowson is licentious and likes complication in form more than Swinburne. His favourite diction is pale, cold, passionate, wild, and dreamlike with silence and lilies. Lilies are haunting and emblematic for the Decadents.

The Modernists valued the work of the Decadents. Both Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were admirers of Dowson. Eliot considered Dowson to have been underestimated. He said his monosyllabic pattern was unpredictable and therefore disorienting.

We looked at Dowson’s “Villanelle of the Poet’s Road”.

“Wine women and song ... gather them while ye may” Someone said that it came from “gather rosebuds while ye may”. I said I thought it was also a Biblical reference, as in “gather ye lilies while ye may". Professor Li said that someone named Christian should know and everybody laughed. But it turns out that I was wrong. It comes from the poem “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time" by 17th Century poet Robert Harrick. But it also turns out that I was accidentally almost right, since a similar sentiment was expressed in an ancient Jewish text called “The Wisdom of Solomon” in the line, "Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither".

Dowson’s villanelle is a carpe diem poem, much like Harrick’s but with more irony.

Professor Li said when we show sympathy we put ourselves above the other.

Decoration is just as important and the content.

Does the line “Yet is day over long” mean “long over” or “too long"?

I said that every other verse is a reversal of the other except at the beginning and end. “Wine and women and song” appears at the end of every other verse as a positive endeavour while "Yet is day over long" always closes the opposite stanza to convey the reverse sentiment. But within each verse the closing line opposes what is said in the rest of the verse.

“Three things garnish our way". Most of us agreed that to garnish is to decorate but someone said there is also to garnish someone's wages. The rest of us thought that it was “garnishee" but I see she was correct. "Garnishee" used to be a verb but now it's a noun, as in the person whose wages are garnished. 

The poem challenges the conception of pleasure with paradox.

Trochees dominate. The poem is mostly in trochaic trimetre with the first syllables stressed. It’s artfully metered.

I said that a villanelle is traditionally about lost love but I’d forgotten that it’s actually about obsession.

We looked at Dowson’s “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae”. I volunteered to read it and after I read the title Professor Li said I should teach her Latin. I told her I had no idea what I'd said and everybody laughed.

The speaker is haunted by guilt.

Guilt and immorality are different. The Decadents tried to recognize the effect of these feelings.

Dowson converted to Catholicism a year after this poem was published.

I mentioned that Cole Porter wrote a song called "I'm Always True to You Darling in My Fashion" based on the poem. It’s from the musical “Kiss Me Kate”. There's also a movie from 1946 called "Always Faithful in My Fashion" starring Donna Reed but it wasn't a hit.

We looked at “Mystic and Cavalier” by Lionel Johnson.

Both Edward and Ayesha did their seminar starters on this poem.

Edward said the rhyming couplets quicken the pace and reflect the poet’s desire to reach death quickly.

Ayesha thought the poem is about salvation through Christian mysticism.

Professor Li said that the poem is criticized for using conventional language.

We finished the class looking at the essay "The Decadent Movement in Literature" by Arthur Symons.

I was the last one in the room with Professor Li and she asked how I was enjoying the course. She was glad when I told her I was.

It was still raining a bit on the way home. I stopped at Freshco to buy fruit and got three bags of grapes. I had to squeeze the contents of several bags before I found three that were somewhat firm. I bought ten Ontario Empire apples and three containers of Greek yogourt.

My cashier was talking with the woman that manages the other cashiers. The manager told her that the store wouldn't be giving out candy to kids on Halloween this year. The cashier offered to put in $15 of her own money towards some treats. The manager seemed to think it would be a good idea for them to all put money in for that.

I had a late lunch of cheese on toast and took a siesta.

For dinner I made oven fries with the last of my cheese whiz melted on top. I ate them with a beer while watching an episode of Wanted Dead or Alive.

This story begins with a religious ceremony in which the men all look Amish but the women just look like regular farmwomen. A woman named Sarah steps forward and Abraham the leader tells her she’s been chosen by lot. He gives her a rifle and tells her that she must kill Josh Randall. Dressed as a man she goes to a town that Josh has stopped at. He’s in a barbershop about to get a shave. She aims from an alley across the street but fires just as the barber tilts the chair back. Josh goes after his assailant and catches her trying to ride away. He is surprised she is a woman. She gets away but he catches her outside of town. She explains that she is from a religious group called The Angels and that Josh killed one of theirs who happened to be the son of their leader. Josh remembers the man and explains that the man drew on him and Josh killed him in self-defence. Josh says he wants to go to the Valley of the Angels with her to explain this to their leader. They camp for one night and she tries to kill Josh again with his own gun while he is sleeping. He wakes up just in time to divert her shot. After that she seems to be on his side. She takes him to Isaac, the old man that helped found the Angels. He explains that Abraham is the son of his co-founder and he has taken all the power. Abraham finds out Josh is there and bursts in to arrest Josh. Abraham gives Sarah a chance to redeem herself by killing Josh. Isaac says everyone knows Abraham’s son brought his death on himself. No one is willing to kill Josh and so Abraham is about to do it when Isaac shoots Abraham.