Lisa Gaye

            I guess it was because I was nervous about my essay deadline but I didn’t get to sleep until after 3:30 on Wednesday morning and so I feel exhausted when I got up at 5:00. After I felt better although I was still a little wiped out. I didn’t have time to think about however because after yoga I needed to get back to work on my paper. I started at 6:00.

There was a distraction outside for a while as a young woman had doored a big guy with long white hair and a long white beard. I think she’d wrecked his bike just enough so he couldn’t ride it to work, and he was extremely angry about that to the point that he was shouting and swearing. She was immensely apologetic and not only offered to give him all the money in her wallet but also her transit pass. His response was only, “How am I gonna fuckin lock my bike?” After a few minutes a cop showed up and things got quieter. I went back to work on my essay.

After six hours the essay part was finished even though the paper was more than three hundred words short of the minimum requirement. I couldn’t think of anything more to say and besides it was too late. I needed to do the citations but that took me two hours and so I was a little over half an hour late for class.

            Someone had taken my usual seat and so I sat on the other side of the room and closer to Professor Li. They were discussing Oscar Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. They were going through it line by line as we’d started doing last week and thy were now at the lines, “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril”.

            I think it means that if you go too deep you are lost and if you don’t go deep enough you are lost.

            The next phrase we looked at was, “Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital”.

            I explained that if a work of art had depth then different people would reach into it at different levels, which would result in a wide variety of opinions.

            In the final line Wilde declares, “All art is quite useless.”

            I said that the artist has no intention for a work to educate the reader or to have any other effect. Obviously though artists do write in order to produce a reaction in themselves.

            Giulia did her seminar starter on The Picture of Dorian Gray and claimed that it argues that art is a reflection of morality. I would say it’s a reflection of self and morality just comes unintentionally along for the ride.

            We talked a bit about the novel. I said that Dorian Gray is already like a painting from the start. The professor agreed with me.

            The painter describes on page 129 of Chapter nine Dorian’s face having been everything that art should be, unconscious, ideal and remote. The professor commented that is not a description of a realistic painting. But the final picture was meant to be realistic.

            Dorian becomes devoid of life.

            “Science” and “fact” are Victorian buzzwords.

            Our second seminar started was by Kevin and he wrote about Oscar Wilde’s poem, “Symphony in Yellow”.

            He says that Wilde places the incidents of yellow objects in the scene like notes in music. Wilde says that a barge is loaded with yellow hay but in all my childhood on a farm I never saw yellow hay. He might have mistaken straw for hay. If hay turns yellow it’s dead and useless for feeding livestock. I doubt if someone would bother to load it on a barge because one would probably rather burn it.

            The professor says that Hellenism is everywhere in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, but less so Orientalism. She showed us some slides. One is of The Peacock Room designed by James Whistler using the Anglo-Japanese style. Another was of a peacock feather fabric design which is at the Victoria and Albert Museum but which can also still be bought at Liberty in London. She showed us a sample that she’d brought from home but this time didn’t pass it around.

            There are four stanzas in Wilde’s poem and he mentions yellow in every one but finishes with green. I discovered later that it was probably inspired by a much longer poem by Théophile Gautier called “Symphonie en blanc majeur” which Wilde referred to as “that flawless masterpiece of colour and music”. In that poem Gautier describes white and only refers to yellow early on when he says that the scene he is describing would make flowers yellow with jealousy and in the last stanza he asks, “Who would add pink?” Here is my translation of the first verse:

From their white necks curving and long

We envision tales of the north

On the old Rhine where human swans

Sing as they swim beside the shore

           

            Near the end of class we started looking at “De Profundis”, Oscar Wilde’s letter from prison to Lord Alfred Douglas. It was his love affair with Alfred that led, because of Alfred’s father, to Wilde being imprisoned for homosexuality. The letter has somewhat of an arrogant tone in that, while offering forgiveness to Alfred he tells him that he needs him to forgive him.

            I handed in my essay. This was our last assignment and so all I have left to work on from now to spring will be assignments for Indigenous Studies.

            I told the professor that a half-year course is too short for the subject of the Aesthetic and Decadent Movements.

            As I left University College the sun was giving the tops of the old buildings of the east side of King’s College Circle one last golden kiss just before descending behind the rooftops of the west side.

            I stopped at Loblaws to buy a couple of bags of black grapes. Ahead of me was a young Latina mother with her two very exuberant children, a boy and a younger curly headed girl. I remembered having seen the woman with her son in the same area on Queen Street a few days before. The boy had said something to her I guess about his gender and suddenly she stopped to speak to him in a very serious voice to stress, “You are a male! You are a male boy!” She was buying fruit and a few healthy baked treats. The boy wanted a bag of Doritos but she told him, “We don’t eat that! We have blueberries, we have blackberries and apples!” She was surprised to hear her son inform her, “Yes we do eat it because they gave it to us at school.” Both children were very outgoing and made eye contact with me and smiled while we were waiting.

            I had a late lunch of cheese on toast.

            It was too late to take a siesta and so I just forced myself to stay awake and tried to get caught up on my journal.

            I had oven fries with salsa and melted cheese with a beer for dinner while watching the thirteenth episode of Zorro. This was the end of the first third of the first season and marked a turning point because it was the end of Captain Monastario being the villain of each story.

            As the story begins Monastario has arrested Don Diego because he has finally deduced that he is really Zorro. Diego takes it all very calmly but plays dumb. Meanwhile the Viceroy Don Esteban makes a surprise visit with his daughter Dona Constancia. Monastario holds a dinner party in his honour and to show how successful he has been in running Los Angeles shows him that he has captured Zorro. As he has a copy of Zorro’s costume he has dressed Diego as Zorro. But when he unmasks him Esteban and Constancia recognize Diego because they are old friends. They do not believe that Don Diego is Zorro. Diego asks to speak with Esteban and Constancia in private. When Monastario comes back in the room Esteban asks him why he is so sure that the man in the costume is Zorro. He answers that to have the same build, height and moustache as Zorro is too much of a coincidence and so it is definitely Zorro. But suddenly it is revealed that while Monastario was out of the room they had dressed one of the soldiers in the costume. Angrily Monastario challenges Diego to a swordfight. It’s another very fake battle because while Diego does not use skilful swordsmanship he shows great reflexes in avoiding Monastario’s sword, hitting him with furniture and slapping him on the ass. Suddenly Diego’s servant Bernardo, dressed as Zorro, comes riding up to the inn and throws a knife at the door. The viceroy has planned on dismissing Monastario all along but now has him arrested and puts Sergeant Garcia in charge.

            Constancia was played by Lisa Gaye, who played Gwen Kirby on the TV series “How to Marry a Millionaire”. Most of her films were rock and roll B movies of the 50s. She said she got on the back of Steve McQueen’s motorcycle once but never did so again because he drove like a suicidal maniac.