Survival

            On Tuesday morning I finished memorizing "Lucette et Lucie" by Serge Gainsbourg and worked out the first couple of chords. 

            Song practice went fairly well until 8:00 when I started having problems getting my guitar in tune again. I finished a little over half an hour late, which was a half an hour better than the day before.

            At around 11:00 I logged on for the penultimate Canadian Literature lecture. The professor was talking about her place being renovated and that her kitchen is temporarily in her laundry room with an electric oven. She has no couch in the living room, her place is filthy with dust and best case scenario it will continue that way for another two weeks. Because of the pandemic she is housebound in a state of chaos. 

            A student said she was terrified of the upcoming exam and may require therapy. The exam will be in two parts, with obvious themes based on lectures. The essay is 5-6 pages but if brilliant one could get away with 4. She’s uploaded a list of key terms. Next week we’ll review the course. The last tutorial is this Thursday. 

            The lecture was on the scandals of CanLit. Where CanLit is now but in a historical context. Five years ago a series of events turned the Canadian literary scene upside down. The professor said it was a difficult time for her. One scandal had to do with a conference that she’d organized. CanLit and CanCrit. How texts come together including those of ethnic groups to make the nation. Methodology of the critical imperative encompasses the way we read. It gives tools to analyze and determine meaning. Criticism shapes the canon and cultural industries. The influence can be mutual. 

            She asked if she was going too fast and then lost contact for a few seconds. She had tried to move a slide but had gotten cut off. 

            Which authors and publishers are included in the canon? Various contexts influence each other and CanLit. The politics of representation. CanLit’s representation of Canadian society through realism. Diversity of subjectivities ignored, represented or instrumentalized. How cultural industries such as publishers, media, festivals, awards, stores and institutions represent literature. Why one is published or not by a big or small press. What authors are being taught and written about? Who is invited to read? Who is in stores, being promoted or getting grants. Thematic criticism. Late 60s to early 80s. There was a double intention. To institutionalize Canadian literature. Governed by politics and thematics to establish a general grammar of Canadian literature. To identify patterns. To unify disparate parts of the literary tradition. 

            Atwood’s Survival in 1972 had a big influence but a bad one in Kamboureli’s opinion. 

            DG Jones’ Butterfly on Rock studied themes in Canadian literature. John Moss’ Patterns of Isolation and Sex and Violence. 

            Thematic criticism was preoccupied with the anxiety of the Canadian identity. An after effect of colonialism. How different are we from the US and the UK? Literature of settler culture. Different but with a kinship to the commonwealth. The binary of Centre and Periphery and the ideologies that reflect it. We can’t become the Centre because of colonialism. All themes emphasize and determine the Canadian identity. Thematic criticism is in cahoots with Canada. It came into its own before multiculturalism but multiculturalism changed it. 

            Regionalism. Place is a condition of the human self. Landscape has personality. The belief that region has a greater influence than anything else. 

            FP Grove’s Settlers of the March. Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese. Sinclair Ross’s As for Me. Sheila Watson’s Double Hook. Robert Kroetsch’s Badlands and Seed Catalogue. Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear. Jack Hodgen’s Invention of the World. Aritha Van Herk’s No Fixed Address. Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston.

            Regionalism territorializes but also transforms geography into a sign that hides ideology but can be a master narrative. It responds to and mimics the nations homogenizing impulse. It began as an answer to the dominant views of CanLit in the 60s and 70s by highlighting and trying to overcome the binaries of Centre/Periphery; Local/Cosmopolitan; Regional/ National. Region as an unproblematic category where all inhabitants are the same. Master narrative. Predominant discourses. The Canadian identity is a master narrative. CanLit’s non-progressivist development. 

            Until the 1960s and early 1970s Canadian literature was only taught in the context of the US and the UK. THB Symons’ To Know Ourselves. Only 8% of courses taught CanLit. In the 80s and early 90s only 5-10% of University English programs had Canadian content. In the early 80s most professors in Canada were white males from the US or the UK. A lot of professors were draft dodgers who didn’t take Canadian Literature seriously. Any Canadian literature courses were non-credit. She was shocked when she first came to Canada and saw this. In the 90s it was up to 12%. David Cameron’s Taking Stock. 

            In the 1990s and early 2000s there was a major shift and suddenly there was more CanLit and diversity. Professor Kamboureli was told at the University of Victoria in 1987 not to offer distinct CanLit courses. She said she used two words at the time that she couldn’t repeat. I assume they were “Fuck off." Her students had read UK and Us literature and knew nothing about Louis Riel and the Residential Schools. The two Margarets and the one Alice were okay but not Austin Clarke or lesbian writers. Beyond Them. 

            The preoccupation with the Canadian identity persists. But there are now feminist approaches, anti racist literatures and transnationalism. The new critical canon shifted to more diversity with Indigenous, LGBTQ, and BIPOC authors. The interest in situational and material conditions that influence CanLit. Examples are feminism, decolonization, biopolitics, gender, colonial history, peace, humanitarianism, TRC, book clubs, the publishing industry, poststructuralism, and new historicism. Turning points ruptures, emergent events. Identify moments of crisis that demand retooling. Engage with turning points that demand uncovering and coming to terms with the political unconsciousness. CanLit as a discipline cannot be accommodated with existing traditions that stand out as aberrant. Force to change. 

            Emergent events. Women and Words 1983. The first national gathering of women scholars. No men were allowed except at some public readings. The Japanese Canadian Redress Movement 1981-1988. Cultural Appropriation from 1989 to the early 1990s. Into the Heart of Darkness at the ROM was considered insulting. Writing Through Race 1994. No whites. 

            Events that caused rupture. The Canadian Constitution of 1982. The Meech Lake Accord establishing Quebec as a distinct culture. Free Trade 1994. Caused independent booksellers to close. TRC 2015. Police treatment of Indigenous people and BIPOC. Cultural appropriation. Traditional dress, music, cuisine, knowledge and culture without approval. 

            We took a break. 

            Scandals. Stephen Galloway, a UBC professor was accused of sexual abuse and rape by UBC students and administration in 2015. UBC accountable published a letter in support of due process. UBC unaccountable published a letter against the other letter. 

            Hal Niedzviecki the editor of the Writer’s Union of Canada's magazine “Write" proposed a "Cultural Appropriation Prize". Mickinackominist. Trans Canada conference organized with Larissa Lai. Black scholar Rinaldo Walsh. How scandals circulate in the era of social media. Who or what instrumentalizes, reifies, appropriates. Dramatization of conflicts. Professor Kamboureli wrote Scandalous Bodies. Diasporic literatures in English Canada. 

            She showed the UBC accountable letter from November 14, 2016. Galloway was not allowed to speak about the issue. The counter letter acknowledges the victims and uses emotional language. It talks about how women are silenced and rendered invisible. It declares, “We believe the women.” It raises a lot of questions. 

            Cultural appropriation. Writing about another culture from the point of view of that culture is not the same as having members of that culture as characters in your story. The person that proposed the cultural appropriation prize urged people to write about what they do not know. 

            I suggested he’s just saying one should take an interest in other cultures. 

            Others need a chance to tell their own story rather than being objects in white writing. Drew Hayden Taylor wrote in the Globe and Mail that you can write about other cultures but not as an authority. 

            The Insurgent Architects House for Creative Writing responded to the article about the Appropriation Prize. They were angry and appalled. Demanded a retraction, an apology, anti-racist education, protocols for editing, affirmative action hiring. Canlits as resistance to CanLit. 

            The whole Galloway affair reminded me of the Gregg Frankson ban that took place in the spoken word community around the same time. I was going to bring it up but we ran out of time. I remember how protesting the idea of a ban got me cancelled as the host of a poetry event and I was accused of being a danger to women. 

            I had chips, salsa and yogourt for lunch. While I was eating I was reading the news online and my wifi went off. The last time this happened was October 30 and it lasted until the next morning and so it looked like I wouldn’t be able to post my blogs or do any research online until Wednesday. 

            I finished typing my lecture notes in the evening. By that time my brain was too tuckered out to put much thought into my essay other than to make a few small adjustments on the way to dinnertime.

            For supper I had a potato, a piece of chicken and gravy while watching the final part of Quatermass II. 

            In this story, although the alien incubation facility in England has been destroyed there are others elsewhere in the world. Captain John Dillon, in command of other infected soldiers has taken over the launch site for the rocket that Quatermass plans to use to blow up the asteroid. Just as Quatermass did in the first series with the transformed astronauts, he is able to appeal to the humanity that is buried inside of Dillon so that Dillon calls off the soldiers. Quatermass and Leo pilot the rocket into space but when they are almost there it is revealed that Leo was infected with the gas when the dome exploded at the facility. He has come along to commandeer the rocket so the aliens can use it to fly to Earth. Leo has brought a gun along and he and Quatermass confront one another in their space suits outside the ship. But when Leo fires, the recoil sends him hurtling backwards in space. Quatermass lands on the asteroid. The aliens coil around the ship but Quatermass is able to release the nuclear section of the rocket to blow up the aliens and still launch back towards Earth. I don’t get how it was possible. Maybe there was extra nuclear fuel and enough to take him back home. 

            In terms of pacing, Quatermass II was pretty lame compared to The Quatermass Experiment. The trip to the asteroid was pretty tedious but the worst waste of time was when Quatermass gets in to the facility and drives around. The place looks like it’s really just an oil refinery and he spends at least five minutes driving around. 

           This series also featured a different actor playing Quatermass. John Robinson got the part because Reginald Tate the original Quatermass died a month before shooting. Robinson was mostly a theatre actor and this was his only major screen role. Tate starred in Journey’s End one of the BBC’s first dramas in the early days of television. 

           The Quatermass series was extremely popular and influential. When I finished watching the show the internet was back on. 

           This completes all the British shows from the 1950s I could find. Next I’ll move back to shows from the US but of the 1960s. That will take a long time because it pretty much covers my entire childhood of TV watching from the age of five to fifteen. First stop: Andy Griffith.