Lillian Bronson

            On Tuesday morning I almost had the chords worked out for “Apocalypstick" by Serge Gainsbourg. I just need to figure out the transition from the refrain back to the verse. 

            I decided I would take my guitar to Remenyi today and have it shipped back to Washburn to hopefully make it so I get back a guitar in a couple of weeks that stays reasonably in tune. In the late morning I called Remenyi several times but just got their voice mail, so I didn’t bother packing up my guitar and taking it downtown with me when I went to buy books for school. 

            I stopped in front of BMV on Bloor between Bathurst and Spadina but there was a sign on the door saying, “No browsing.” Everything has to be ordered online now. I was worried as I rode to the U of T Bookstore that the same thing would be the case, and sure enough it was. All books have to be bought online now and picked when they’re ready in one to three business days. Supposedly I can use debit online but maybe not and it pisses me off that I would have to. 

            I decided not to bother. I already have the two novels and I have a lot of the material in the course package we were expected to buy. I found and copied or downloaded the rest from online sources. The only thing I need to learn is what selections from On The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and from Adam Bede by George Eliot we are supposed to read. I spent some time downloading and transferring files to the Brit Lit 2 folder. 

            On the campus there were posters for “Battleshits”. It’s a service by which you can anonymously send shit to someone. According to Blog TO it’s cow shit but it doesn’t say that in the posters. 

            I went online to watch the first formal lecture of Brit Lit 2.

            It was on the long 18th Century. Related to Aphra Behn. From the end of the 17th Century to the beginning of the 19th. Two pieces of overall context are consistent across these periods with problems and questions resulting from the rise of political modernity and how it settled into the kind of political society and economics we live in now. It was seeded in corporation, publishing, journalism, consumer capitalism, colonization, racism, waning religion and monarchical authority. Two important key features of literary history in transition from feudal monarchical settlement from that time. Key things of our lives rise from then. It wasn’t a direct progress but in literary history: The marketplace of literature came into being at this time. There were more readers and consumers which brought about changes in art and literature and what authors needed to do. Art has always been entertaining but much more in this area it became what is popular rather than what is elite or scholarly. Popular opinion by consumers changes culture and complicates things. We see how media changes things today as reading is falling behind online stuff. Is popularity good and does it define value? There are tensions. Should an artist try to please by being popular or is popularity a curse? The other context of the era is the growing middle class. Economic change created a rise in a class between land owners and workers on farms, cities and the very poor. Merchants and tradesmen in colonial and imperial trade created a new class. They had some leisure and some money to take in some theatre. They were not like our modern middle class but literally in the middle. The rise of that class and its access to education changes British society and culture. 

            The Neoclassical was the dominant aesthetic form of this period and came about through the 18th Century. Neo meant a new version of classical. In his 1711 “Essay in Criticism” by Alexander Pope he describes what will become of the dominant mode of verse in the 18th Century. He makes three important points about this style: That writing is a skill that comes from art rather than chance, as those move easiest who’ve learned to dance. Art can be learned and it is not a gift of god. One can imitate good art and art should imitate nature. First follow nature but not wilderness. Pope thinks the laws of writing good art follows the rules of old like Homer, Virgil and other Greeks and Latin masters. Modern writers must learn these rules. If one writes like Homer one becomes like him. 

            The heroic couplet. The form that this order takes is the heroic couplet consisting of a pair of rhyming lines usually in iambic pentameter that are closed to express one thought. “What dire offence from amrous causes springs/ What mighty contests rise from trivial things?” from “Rape of the Lock” illustrates the point. It expresses what offences and jealousies rises from the trivial. It is orderly and follows a verse form from classic tradition. It is mock serious. The last point is that Pope says let Homer’s work be your study by day and your meditation at night. Pope emphasizes form and hierarchical orderly expression is more important than content. The Rape of the Lock is heroic but trivial. As the form gets stricter what can be put inside opens up topics to expand the trivial into the sexual, the satirical, the mundane and the grotesque. These become common topics in the poetry of the Earl of Rochester, one of most explicitly graphic writers of all time and also de Sade.

            Opening up causes literature to be about ordinary people rather than kings and gods. People living a middle class life sees their own experience reflected back by literature. Partly because this class produced writers who sought out writing as a way of making a living. Middle class subject matter increased in demand. Experimentation starts especially in the novel. Poetry was more restricted but novels experimented with ways of communicating the every day.

            Lawrence Stern’s novel is as bizarre and experimental as one can want. It demonstrates the freedom that 18th novelists had with materials and the shape of the novel. In the 19th Century the novel becomes more standard. It was a new form and not knowing what to do invited play. Experimentation later becomes a side track. He illustrates in his novel telling everyday life without blow by blow. If there are no more gods but only everyday life, how does one tell it in a way that’s not boring. 

            Other novels are Robinson Crusoe and Oroonoko. They have the same problems of realism. Crusoe is deeply connected to the middle class. He’s explaining to his dad that he wants to sail around the world. His dad is middle class wealthy and says the merits of his class. There are no hardships and no labour. There are none of the embarrassing trappings of the upper class. The mid station is virtuous. In this class men are in and out and not stuck. Crusoe doesn’t follow his father’s advice and it would be a boring book if he did. He raises tension in the novel between the boring and the fact that it needs to entertain. 

            Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones turns the novel to every day life. A foundling baby is abandoned and found and brought up by a middle class family. It is an amazing and hilarious novel with so much sex that at one point he falls down a hill and into a woman. It is about how to tell a ridiculous story of coincidence of every day people. Oroonoko’s author Aphra Behn is badass. The professor’s wife told him to make sure to tell the class she is more awesome than Daniel Defoe. He valorizes the middle class and says he should have stayed. Behn represents non conformity, she was a libertine, a spy, and a popular playwright. She represents an interesting moment in British history and she makes a living as a writer. Oroonoko is a fitting beginning. It illustrates many concerns such as central concerns of class. The hero is a prince. It’s about middle class British colonists encountering a foreign prince. It foregrounds British identity and what art and stories can do. It carries on heroic values. There is anxiety about realism. How fact and art are used to tell stories. We don’t expect old stories to be real. But stories about what could happen are plausible. She addresses this in the first lines. I do not pretend to tell the adventures of a famous hero not adorned with accidents. There is enough reality. Defoe copies this. The narrator is not making up a true history. There is anxiety about realism dealt with by insisting it is real. She just conveys the story. The next paragraph says she saw it happen and she heard the rest from the hero. She will omit the boring parts. There is tension between entertainment and the boring ordinary. This is the key problem of literature of this course. If there is too much entertainment it is not serious enough but if it is too dull it won’t sell. Realism is established by details. The technique of realism calls for limits of description. She demonstrates realism by saying it can’t be described. 

            Another technique is detail overload. There is lots of detail in classical descriptions but it is ornamental or for mood. But here detail serves as brute force realism to make the reader believe. Defoe does this in Crusoe with tedious detail. Unexpected or unnecessary detail suggests reality. He finds one boot and this confirms reality. 

            Oroonoko tells two tales of injustice: Imoinda and Oroonoko’s unfair treatment by the king and the story of their enslavement. Both are about injustice. What is different in these two accounts. He actually pauses and stands there looking at the camera like a dork while he waits for the viewer to write some notes on his question. 

            I say the difference is that one situation is within his culture while the other involves Europeans. But I think it should be noted that there is less injustice in him being sold into slavery since he was a slave trader himself and Imoinda was the owner of hundreds of slaves. The fact is that enslaving Oroonoko is an act of justice on behalf of humanity because it put a very proficient slave trader out of commission.

            He says it is about how the injustices are perpetrated and how characters react. The difference is that there is deceit and dishonour on the part of the British. The old king does not deceive other than when he lies that he killed Imoinda. He doesn’t manipulate with dishonour. He is respectful and straightforward. In enslavement Oroonoko represents virtue in an inversion of convention. The British lie and manipulate while he acts noble and takes people at their word and he doesn’t lie. He is supposed to be barbaric. The story shows complexity in British colonial encounters with other cultures. The British are conventionally presumed superior but British characters are despicable don’t believe Oroonoko to be worthy of hearing truth. The projection of British values shows the superiority of those values. He is a symbol of British decency and represents the ideal. She turns him into a Brit to make him sympathetic. She celebrates what is more British about him such as his stiff upper lip. She can’t praise him in his native values. 

            I think he’s stretching here. I think she really is trying use him to show British values and not just for entertainment or to get the attention of the reader. 

            I edited my lecture notes up until dinner time.

            I had a potato, two chicken drumsticks and gravy while watching The Andy Griffith Show. 

            In this story the annual Founders Day celebration is approaching and there is the desire among the town council to change things up a bit. Floyd suggests a beauty contest and Ellie suggests that Andy be the judge. But when Andy thinks that she nominated him because she wants to win the contest and he says she will win, she gets angry. Over the next few days Andy does not have a moments peace as people bring their daughters to his home and his workplace to try to persuade him before the pageant. Some of the girls put on ridiculous displays to demonstrate how poised and graceful they are. Erma Bishop steps in to help Andy organize the pageant and works very hard, good naturedly and unselfishly. Aunt Bee secretly enters Ellie in the contest but Ellie tells him when she steps onto the stage that if he picks her she will never speak to him again. Finally Andy decides to crown Erma as Miss Mayberry because she has been the true beauty throughout. Ellie is very happy with Andy’s choice although everyone else is crying. 

            Erma is played by Lillian Bronson, who played supporting roles in over 80 films and 100 TV series. She was immortalized in a building sized mural painted by Kent Twitchell near the entrance to Hollywood from the freeway. She was the first woman to play a judge on Perry Mason. She played the grandmother on the short lived King’s Row TV series.