On Wednesday morning I uploaded “A la pêche des coeurs" (To the Fishing Hole for Hearts) by Boris Vian to Christian’s Translations and started adjusting the text as it appears there to fit the way it looks in my Word document.
I memorized the first two verses of “Le Vide au Coeur” (The Empty Heart) by Serge Gainsbourg. This one is more interesting than the other lyrics Gainsbourg wrote for Alain Chamfort’s Rock n Rose album. It’s more introspective and more poetic.
Song practice was worse for my guitar staying in tune than the day before. I’ll give it one more day to see if it’s just a matter of the new B string stretching and then after that I'll take it back in to Remenyi. If another new machine for the B string doesn’t help they'll have to send it back to Washburn and I’ll be out of a guitar for two weeks.
I finally got an email from Albert Moritz about my manuscript but it was only after sending him an email accusing him of forgetting about me since it had been a year since I’d sent him my last revisions. He said he has been negligent but hasn’t forgotten. In fact he has spoken to Exile Editions about my book of poetry and he says they are interested. He confused me a bit by saying that my manuscript still needs editing before presentation but seemed to also say that he doesn’t have time. He sent me my poem “Junk Shop Bizarre” with small suggestions. The major one was that maybe I shouldn’t use the word “habitude” as in “my habitude is watching” , so I changed it to “My habit has been watching”.
I scrubbed another seven kitchen floorboards a metre in length and worked my way halfway between the credenza and the stove.
I had a toasted Montreal bagel with onion cheddar for lunch.
In the afternoon I did some hip exercises while listening to an episode of the Goon Show from October 12, 1954 called “The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler of Bexhill On Sea”. The story is set in 1941 and Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister are walking on the coast when Minnie is hit by a batter pudding. They call for the police and Constable Neddie Seagoon arrives. Minnie asks what is the difference between a policeman and a constable and he says they are spelled differently. They can’t see at first what has hit Minnie and so they light a match but that attracts German cannon fire from across the channel. They try lighting a German match but that attracts English cannon fire. Seagoon says he must inform the inspector about the batter pudding and so he jumps in the ocean and dries himself as he swims to save time. In the next few months 38 batter puddings are hurled at Minnie but the last one has an army boot inside of it. Seagoon goes looking for a soldier with only one boot and so he goes looking at the nearest camp. He tells Major Bloodnok to parade his men because he is looking for a criminal. Bloodnok tells him to find his own because it took him years to find these criminals. The men are paraded but they are all barefoot except for one Lance Private Eccles who wears one boot on his head because it fits. The next morning Minnie is hit for the first time by a cold batter pudding and so Seagoon investigates people that have had their gas turned off. One of them is Winston Churchill. Seagoon encounters Count Jim Moriarty hauling a portable oven with the smell of batter pudding coming from inside but doesn’t think that has anything to do with his case. Seagoon learns the hurler is in Africa and so he travels with Bluebottle (Peter Sellers) on a ship disguised as a train done up like a boat but painted to look like a tram. Their ship is destroyed by a mine but on the lifeboat the suspected hurler is hiding in an oven with a batter pudding. They are starving but Seagoon refuses to eat the evidence. Seagoon and Bloodnok get married.
This was from the fifth season and I watched it because it was at the top. I have a better sense of the order now. The first season is lost and there are only three surviving fragments from the second season, which I have, so I’ll listen to those next.
I worked on researching some more of the key terms for my Canadian Literature exam.
CanLit is a collective cross section of the most dominant literatures of Canadian history since Canadians started reading Canadians on a regular basis. It’s essentially what Canadians the majority of Canadians read or perhaps what the majority of Canadian critics read. The authors that have made the most money are the most influential. Trying to make Canadian literature correspond to academic ideas of CanLit is probably artificial. What is popular, especially internationally defines Canadian Literature. However one wants to characterize it critically it comes down to the Canadian literature that the world reads. People think of Canada in terms of wilderness and nature and so that defines it no matter what Canadians write about. If something else like life in certain cities such as Montreal as depicted by Mordecai Richler catches on then that defines CanLit as well. Popular Canadian literature that doesn’t depict any aspect of Canada may not be really Canadian literature unless there is something that stands out about the style. Morley Callahan for instance may not be Canadian Literature since he never mentions Canada. Gabrielle Roy wrote about French Manitoba and she was internationally known and so her work helps define Canadian literature. Best selling authors who are also critics have the power to define Canadian Literature somewhat beyond sales if their criticism sells.
Colonialism is spoken of as if it were a movement. So as a movement it is the collective urge by certain groups to form colonies, often with the sponsorship of either their parent government or the government of the place where the colonies are formed. The first colony in what became the US was in Jamestown Virginia in 1607. But the colony of New France formed in 1534. Colonies started out as trading posts and then people started settling. Probably the main purpose of colonalization was money and so it was about expansionism and the colonies were not as important. That’s why during the fur trade era the Northwest Mounted Police were brought in to protect Indigenous fur traders from pesky colonists who mucked up the commerce. It was only later when the fur trade died that colonists became valuable and Indigenous people became the criminals. Many colonists came to improve their shitty European lives that were shitty because they were peasants who owned no land, or because they were seeking religious freedom.
Cultural appropriation is taking on aspects of another culture. Singing a rock and roll song or rapping, saying “rap”, “groovy”, “hip”, “hep”, doing the shimmy, playing syncopated music, wearing dreadlocks, an afro, cooking soul food, could be seen as cultural appropriation if done by people of European descent, But mostly it’s appropriating in a non blended way or non organic manner. Like having “haiku standoffs” in poetry slams, like pretending to be a ninja, like dressing up as another culture in a mockery of their traditional garb, telling stories from the perspective of another culture as if it was one’s own, a bunch of white guys doing drumming and dancing like First Nations people would be cultural appropriation. A white guy I heard sing a Blackfoot welcome song said he’d lived with the Blackfoot. If they taught him the song was it appropriation? Maybe not. It would be impossible to not pick up on aspects of other cultures in an integrated environment and the internet is the most integrated environment of all and also radio and television. But when people become friends with and grow up with people of other cultures they are going to rub off on one another. It’s more about artificial cultural appropriation. Taking it on for profit. Elvis is borderline.
Decolonization is a strange concept. The only actual decolonization would be giving up living in a colony. Other than that it is merely a metaphor. The idea of “decolonizing the mind” is more poetic than real since there are no colonies in the mind. It also becomes a loaded term because it can create bias. If an Indigenous person like Knud Rasmussen can be seen to think like a European how does one know he is colonized or simply thinking independently? Is a First Nations person who supports pipelines colonized or expressing a modernized indigenous perspective?
I had a fried egg, a toasted bagel and a beer for dinner while watching an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour that suddenly downloaded after months of just sitting there in my torrents list.
In this story Hancock is betting in a football pool. He’s been doing it for years using numbers from astrology, birthdays, and so on but never won. This time he has bet for eight draws and seven draws turn up. The eighth game was delayed and hasn’t started yet. Sid has blackmailed him into promising a third to him if he wins because otherwise he will tell his family and they’ll take everything. They decide to go to the match. Since Hancock wants a draw, whenever one team scores he cheers for the other, which gets him into a fight with a middle aged man next to him. At half time it’s 3-1 and so Sid and Hancock go to the locker room of the team that’s winning and convince them that Hancock is a professor who can tell them how to win by a landslide. He switches everyone to positions they are bad at, including putting the shortest man in net, arguing that it will give them a psychological edge. The result is that the team that had been behind wins 13-3 and so Tony doesn’t get his eighth draw and so he only wins six shillings and four pence.
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