Michael J Pollard

            On Monday morning I finished memorizing “Velours des vierges” (Velvet Virgins) by Serge Gainsbourg. I searched for the chords but no one had posted them. I worked out the first three chords of the chorus.

            In the late morning I finished re-reading On Beauty by Zadie Smith. The ending didn’t makeany more sense the second time around. It seemed almost like a dream with Howard giving what is supposed to be a career defining lecture, after having forgotten his notes in the car. There is no indication that he speaks, but rather just clicks the power point from image to image while Kiki, the wife he’s cheated on twice sits in the audience smiling and he smiles at her. 

            I re-read “Curse for a Nation" by Elizabeth Browning a couple of times. Apparently this was scandalous at the time because they thought she was cursing England. It seems obvious that it’s an anti-slavery poem addressed to the United States. 

            For lunch I had chips with some of the coconut, carrot, cauliflower puree that I got frozen from the food bank back in the summer. It was incredibly bland by itself and so I added hot salsa to save it.

            Even though there had been another snowfall this morning and the streets were very sloppy in the afternoon, I took a bike ride anyway. My ass was only a bit damp when I got home. 

            I re-read Elizabeth Browning’s “Cry of the Children” poem against child labour a couple of times. 

            I kept on checking to see if this week’s Brit Lit 2 lecture had been posted. It hadn’t by 17:15 and I felt sleepy again. I laid down for only fifteen minutes without sleeping but I had my energy back. I checked for the lecture and it was up. 

            The lecture was on the Victorian period. There were changes in the world and the arts adjusted. Especially in the Victorian period there was a sense of paradox like there is now. The major paradox was described by Thomas Carlyle in 1843: “England is full of wealth yet it is dying of inanition (hollowness). We have more riches than any nation has ever had but we have less good of them than any nation had before.” What characterizes the Victorian period was that it was the high point of British imperialism, of its global reach when the British Empire covered a fourth of globe, there was tons of wealth and profit from industry and from the colonies. But there is also a moral bankruptcy and emptiness. A sense that transformations in communication lead to something empty and missing.

            Britain was the first really industrial nation with North American nations right behind, but it was ahead. It had a grasp on sea trade and train travel, shrinking the nation and the globe. Voyage to North America became more regular and less dangerous. Urban life expanded while the old agricultural organizations shrank much like today. There was more industry and more urban life. There was access to goods and ideas of people from farther away. There were exhibits about the colonies bringing ideas from afar and changing thinking. Manufacturing was growing with faster access to goods made quicker but with less permanence like today's fast fashion. 

            There was an expanded sphere of influence for the average person in relation to distant places through newspapers. The sphere of influence made a difference that was not coincident with perception. One could perceive more people that one could not interact with. One could see up close like today all over the world. We know about the farmers in India, the power outage in Texas and the fires in Australia but our ability to affect these foreign problems is limited. 

            There was a rise of wage labour in a more urban setting. This impacts wealth as the wealthy are no longer holders of old land. This disrupts the traditional landowners of the aristocracy as they are no longer as powerful. Wealth comes from commerce and comes quicker and not by inheritance. People make money by risk such as sea voyages to other lands. This disrupts the aristocracy but labour becomes reduced to cash value. Working conditions are awful and dangerous with long hours. People are driven by quick money and there is a rise of risk but risk can go the other way. There is a more volatile economic system with people rising but more often falling. One or two strains of bad luck and one is poor. There is a backlash against the new wealthy without upbringing and manners. There is cultural tension between the old money culture and the new. The aristocracy now has less money but are still trying to maintain control. 

            How should literature represent this reality and the experience of the people? We will talk about realism next week. We see in Victorian literature an increase in critique. Shedding light on injustice and suffering and oppression. It did this in the past through satire but it takes on a new, more direct and explicit form in the Victorian era to critique industrial work camps and the creation of suffering, shedding light on social injustice with the rise of the social problem novel. Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Elizabeth Gaskill’s Mary Barton and North and South and George Eliot’s Adam Bede. These were about exposing and changing opinions about social problems. 

            Elizabeth Browning’s “Cry of the Children” shed light on a socio economic problem. She was the main poet of the Victorian period. She uses her popularity and authority to take issues on in the way the poem makes its argumentative critique. He quotes the first stanza of the poem. There is a call and a reference to brothers. What is powerful about her is she implicates herself. She says we are doing wrong and are we going to help. She invokes natural images to emphasize what is unnatural. “In the country of the free” is used sardonically because people are being enslaved and oppressed. Many are not just labourers and slaves but kids. She emphasizes the unnature of this problem. In the last two stanzas there is a change of pronouns from “they” to “you”. Another tactic to make her argument is “Let them weep”. The suffering of the children makes them old without the benefit of growing and learning wisdom and calm but for kids early aging has no benefit. The change in the last line to “Let them weep”. They deserve tears because they have suffered but hearers of the poem deserve shame. The last stanza has rhetorical power where the poem becomes most direct. Children look up and curse the nation and their masters. The sense of moving the world on a child’s heart. There is a critique of the idea that wealth and progress are a measure of all things. The march to progress and wealth is tainted by blood on the hands and purple on the path and by atrocities in pursuit of wealth and progress. This is a curse. In the end the child’s sob is deeper than a strong man’s wrath. The legacy of suffering in England is tainted by the blood of children. The poem shows her direct, explicit effort to critique a social problem, a specific ill in her world. It is powerful because it makes its case on natural, personal and political grounds. There is a sense of implication. She’s not escaping herself. The curse affects all of us and we are implicated if we don't cry out. 

            "A Curse for a Nation" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and "To India" by Sarojini Naidu both take on the voice of the ancients or of religion for social critique. An angel tells Browning to write and Naidu invokes ancient India. She wants India to awaken and become powerful again. Women’s education was an ancient precedent. India as mother and empress of a sovereign past. Why sovereign past? There is a history of powerful women who trained the nation. 

            In “A Curse for a Nation" there is a reference to religion. We look at the prologue. There is an implicated speaker. She does not extract herself. But her implication is all the more reason why she must speak. The prologue structures around three objections to the angel. She can’t send a curse because she has family in the US and has family roots in the plantations. Her country also has sins like child labour. Her final argument is that woman is only good at sympathy. But for every excuse the angel says the excuse is why she should write the curse. You are implicated but can write because you see. Your ability as a woman makes you the right person to write this curse. Not man’s authority but emotion is the reason why. 

            A call and a curse are speech acts. A curse is a moral awakening and the curse is the poem itself. A speech act is when an utterance that performs an action as well as transmitting meaning. Curses, calls, promises, nominations, confirmations comprise a special set of speech acts called “performatives” in which the action of the speech act is enacted or performed by the utterance itself. When you make a promise the utterance of the promise does the promising for you. They can be, according to philosophers like J L Austin, happy or unhappy but not really true or false in a rigorous sense. A promise if one does not intend to keep it is an unhappy utterance. The promise is still enacted. They can't be true or false, they do what they need to do. The promise and utterance is the same thing for a curse or call. The two poems use the power of performative acts to make something happen. There is a growing sense in the Victorian era that literature has performative power and does something. 

            Charles Darwin helped bring about the other big Victorian change. There was a radical change of world view with Darwin at the centre though not necessarily the cause. It was not new but his way of articulating evolution becomes the centre. He ends the view of the world as ordered, intentional, total and teleological. We live in a world of change where mutability is the rule. Things are not defined by some permanent essence but by a dynamic process. The world is in flux and we are inside of the process. To imagine species as mutable is radical because most think it static. If we are searching for an unchanging idea of species like the raccoon that is false science. What we need to see is the world like a mechanical construct that is the sum of labour and mistakes. 

            Some of his metaphors get us in trouble. This difference from the divine world with no essence to define things. Science must work differently. Knowledge of the physical world is knowledge of interactions, processes and changes. Birth of ecological thinking on page 270, the world cannot be categorized on page 270, and the anti teleological on page 271. To understand humans this means to accept that you are not divinely special, you are more like everything else. Not only are you not perfect, you are not even finished. He says this is enabling on page 271-272. We understand things by how they interact with other things. He’s giving voice to ecological thinking. How we are connected must be understood through the connections. The world is not final but made of relations. Animals keep changing. Nature isn’t headed to an end. The process is accumulative not to an end. He sometimes talks as if there is an end and so it is confusing. It is hard to fathom how radical was this change. We are more like everything else than not. We are not perfect. Humans are still changing. We are in the middle of a non intentional process. People lost their minds dealing with this but he understands. He says it’s ennobling. He is saving us from animalism. We are the product of a long line. 

            The famous end. The most exotic object. He is saving wonder, glory and grandeur. Imagining humans arising out of all these blind possibilities is quite wonderful. He needs to do this. Natural selection caused mistakes and misunderstandings. He seems to undermine his own argument. He suggests that natural selection tends to perfection and so this suggests an end result. He doesn’t mean this. The metaphorical use of selection can imply an ultimate law or rule of usefulness. Use could imply profitability and that usefulness is better. We only see the end result. We are tricked to think there is a force to pick the best adaptations. In real time this is not true. His work shows it’s about mistakes as much as the best adaptation. The language of usefulness suggests that the changes are better or aiming at perfection. One trait over another not about better but about a set of indefinite complex relations. Darwin is sometimes misunderstood as saying there is an hierarchy of variations and that the best is picked. But his work shows that is not the case. There is random variation. New is not better but just different. A woodpecker’s beak is seen as the best adaptation for grabbing grubs but it could have been better. All change is random. The environment is causing change. Environmental change could wipe out more effective species while a less effective species survives. Victorian people responded to the new and he was showing changes as did Browning. Art reacts to these changes which are a key element in the Victorian period. 

            I finished listening to the lecture a little after 19:00 but it took me until after dinner to edit my typed notes. 

            I had three potatoes and gravy while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story Barney’s cousin Virgil comes from New Jersey and Barney wants Andy to let Virgil work for them. But everything Virgil touches seems to turn to a disaster. A roast ends up in Andy’s lap, Virgil backs the squad car through a wall, he breaks a glass cabinet while sweeping, he sands the cell keys trying to clean them but then the key no longer works. Otis can’t get out of his cell. Then Opie shows Andy a cowboy figure that Virgil carved expertly. Andy asks Virgil to explain how he can to such fine work when everything else he attempts falls apart. Virgil explains that he can’t do things while he's being watched. So Andy tells Virgil to get Otis out of his cell while he waits in the other room. He does it easily. This doesn’t really make sense since Virgil was alone during most of the disasters he’d caused.

            Virgil was played by Michael J. Pollard, who was in the same class as Marilyn Monroe at the Actors Studio. He made his theatrical debut on Broadway, He played Jerome Krebs, the cousin of Maynard G Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. He was meant to replace Bob Denver who got drafted but after Denver was disqualified for army service because of not being fit enough, Pollard's character was written out. He played Mister Mxyzptlk in Superboy in 1988. He was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role as C W Moss, the getaway driver in "Bonnie and Clyde". This led to his being nominated by a DJ for president and a song was written in which he asks "President of what?" The song stopped getting airplay because it mentions Robert Kennedy and then he was assassinated shortly after that. He played a psychopathic Billy the Kid in “Dirty Little Billy". The classic Traffic album "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys" came from a phrase spoken by Pollard. Michael J Fox put the “J” in his initial inspired by Pollard. He considered himself to be a Hippy. In an episode of Lost In Space he played a boy who lives in the dimension behind all mirrors.