Gomer

            On Monday morning I finished posting my translation of “Mélo Mélo” by Serge Gainsbourg. That completes the songs he wrote for Jane Birkin's "Ex Fan Des Sixties" album. I found an audio of Zizi Jeanmaire singing his song “Mesdames, mesdemoiselles, mes yeux" and sang along with it a couple of times. It shouldn't be hard to memorize. Of the remaining seven Gainsbourg songs from 1977 I have yet to find the texts of the lyrics or videos for them. I assume they were all written for Zizi’s album but maybe no one has posted them and so I might have to just leave them on hold until someone does and move on to 1978, which only has three songs. Then 1979 is the year he recorded his groundbreaking reggae album. 

            In the late morning I got notice that the votes are in and our Brit Lit 2 course will definitely be dropping the middle assignment. So all we have now is the final essay and the exam. But we have yet to receive the instructions for the paper. I have never had a course with so much space between assignments. I have so much time on my hands that I’ve read most of the material at least three times over and all of the poems between ten and twenty times. 

            I checked to find out the tax deadline and found out it’s April 30, so that’s good. I can do my taxes when I’m finished with school in April. Now that I’m a pensioner my income depends on me doing my taxes on time. 

            I took a siesta from 12:10 to 13:40 and when I got up I weighed 88.4 kilos. Yesterday it was 91.8 and the day before that it was 89.5. It sure does jump around. 

            I had tomatoes, avocadoes and a mango for lunch. 

            I took a bike ride to Ossington and Bloor. When I got back I worked on researching the references in Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic As Artist”. There are a lot of mentions of characters that appear in Dante’s Purgatorio and Paradiso. 

            I kept on checking the Brit Lit 2 website but even by 17:30 today’s lecture had yet to be posted.

            Wilde mentions two poems by Baudelaire: “Madrigal Triste" (Sad Madrigal), which begins “What do I care if you are sage? Be lovely! And be sad!" and “L’Héautontimorouménos” (The Self Torturer). But he praises the whole book of “Les fleurs du mal". 

            At 18:00 the lecture was posted. The professor was wearing a green tie with diagonal white stripes on top of a blue and white checkered shirt. His wife must be away and so he had to dress himself. 

            The lecture was on Browning, Rossetti, Tennyson and Narrative Poetry. 

            The dramatic monologue focus is to get a sense of their content. Dramatic monologues are difficult to get a sense of the point. Dramatic monologue is a version of the kind of greater romantic lyric that we saw from Charlotte Smith and other romantic poets. A long poem spoken by a single person. But dramatic monologue is set in a single situation. Spoken by a single voice in a specific narrative situation but not the voice of the poet, so it’s like a drama or performance. The voice may speak to other people though their responses are not directly narrated (one sided). There is tension between the speaker’s words and the poet's control. The speaker says more or less than they think. 

            In the two dramatic monologues in this case we have Ulysses and Fra Lippo Lippi. The voice may speak to others and this is why it is tricky. We need to know what the poet is saying through context clues. Dramatic monologue is a way for the speaker to say more or less. The speaker is unreliable and so the audience must listen critically. Not sceptically but not naïvely either. Think carefully about what is being said and this is true in life when someone says different things than they intended, saying more than they want or giving away what is hidden.

            An example is Browning’s “My Last Duchess”. Spoken by a duke to an emissary from a perspective wife’s family as he argues what a good match he would be. But even while on his best behaviour the duke can't help let slip his possessiveness and narcissism. He keeps his late wife's portrait behind a curtain so others can't see her beauty. The speaker says “She had a heart-how shall I say?- too soon made glad … I made commands; then all smiles stopped together.” It tells more than we think. Did he kill her? There is an insinuation of something that he isn’t confessing. The speaker undercuts the message. With dramatic monologue we ask what the narrative context is and what is going on in the background? What is the setting, who is the speaker talking to and in what environment? 

            In Tennyson’s poem Ulysses has finally returned to his kingdom after the Trojan war and his long eventful journey home. The dramatic persona are Ulysses, Penelope, Telemachus and the other sailors. The setting is not clear. He's at home. His family has been through a lot waiting for him. Maybe he’s sitting with friends and complaining. Of the structure of the three stanzas, look at each stanza as doing particular work. In one he is expressing discontent in his world. Think about the language articulated and what he is saying. What is his way of expressing discontent? He is wasting away and dealing with age. There is no value. It is not nice to dismiss his wife as aging when she awaited so long for him and had to fend off countless suitors. There is the idea of impossible satisfaction. Does he get the impossibility of satisfaction? One can never be satisfied. The image of the arch conveys that one can always experience something else. Will he be satisfied? What is valued is profit use and action. He is concerned with what is right as opposed to waste. I’m famous and trapped and I deserve better.

            Stanza 2 introduces Telemachus. There is a difference in language. Compare his freedom with his praise of the value of his son’s job of doing common work. Backhanded compliments. Decent not to fail is the lowest bar you can set for someone. His work is domestics but mine is heroic. There is tension between the two stanzas. I’m too awesome for that shit. Old age comes back to his argument and the end is coming. We were badasses. Let us go out fighting. The message is about age and heroism. He contrasts the common duties of his son compared to the mariners. We may die. It is a greedy image to say we need more. Only the men. The heroic reading is overturned by his own speech. There is a vision of struggle against death but we get the sense that there is something off. 

            Tennyson wants us to see there are costs to this type of personal heroism. It reserves exceptionalism and heroism for manly men. It partakes of an ideology of never being satisfied. It treats life cheaply and its vision of courage is messed up, problematic and selective. Ulysses' son does not get to live this life, but only super heroes who know gods. Tennyson shows it’s messed up. 

            At the same time we are never satisfied. More more more. Dissatisfaction is misguided in a world of capitalist acquisition. It spoils us from recognizing a satisfying life. It treats life cheaply to say that courage is to die for nothing. That time is only valuable if sacrificed to adventure. Tennyson shows this is messed up. 

            The poem is misread. We are supposed to see ambivalence. He’s being unfair. We are supposed to see this. The Terra Nova expedition to the south pole led by Robert Scott was unlucky and poorly planned, leading to death. A monument was erected in their honour with the last two lines of this poem, “To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield." But it is a severe misreading of the poem. He doesn't think we are supposed to read the lines as heroic. It is supposed to be a symbol of inappropriate striving desire that can never be satisfied. That’s problematic and toxic throughout the poem. In context it is not heroic. In the poem we see tensions between the speaker’s words and what is happening. 

            I don’t buy the professor's argument that we aren't supposed to see Ulysses as heroic in this poem. Just because we can see the flaws in the hero’s logic doesn't mean that Tennyson deliberately placed those flaws there to convey the opposite message. I think the poet really does think that Ulysses’ plan is noble, even though he admits that it is not decent or good. It’s really Tennyson's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” I think Dancer is reading signals from Tennyson that he hopes are there to satisfy his own beliefs. He’s missing the point that this is probably not about Ulysses or travelling off and dying in adventure at all but about facing old age with grace. Tennyson himself has clarified that he intended Ulysses to be heroic in the poem. He wrote it after his friend died with home he used to travel. At the same time the poet was stuck in a domestic situation he found stifling.

            In Browning’s "Fra Lippo Lippi" the night watch is more moral than legal. The vice squad catch Lippi in an alley that leads to a bordello. It is a problem because he is a monk. To get out of trouble he evokes the name of Cosimo Medici, his powerful banker patron. There is a complicated interaction in which Lippi bullies the captain of the guards and threatens that he’ll be hung while reminding him he is better than he is. But then he feels bad and says they are both the same and offers to buy drinks. He wants their sympathy and wants to set the record straight, with no apologies for his lifestyle. 

            The rest of the poem is a recounting of his life, training and theory of art and beauty. Setting things straight by sitting hip to haunch is sitting at same level. The relationship between what we feel, see, and think is important. Lippi is trying to teach a lesson about art and beauty. “You think you see a monk”, the poem questions every word in this quote. He doesn’t want to be seen as a monk but as an artist, rebel and rake. The relationship between what we think and what we see. Your thought shapes your perception. 

            The central point is Lippi’s apologia for his hedonism and rebellious art and the lesson that he is teaching is in lines 300-304. If we think we see a monk we will see a monk. The poem is about the inability to know people by sight. The whole story is more than appears. 

            Most of the poem is apologia. It is about painting and the idea of relation between what we see and what we think. Attention to painting makes us aware of the world in a new way. He takes everyday things and puts them into a possible painting, even the guards. 

            This idea that is best articulated by Hannah Arendt in Love and St Augustine. Caritas versus cupiditas. He is driven to break out of his isolation by means of love. Whether cupiditas turns him into a denizen of this world or caritas makes him live in the absolute future where he will be a denizen of the world to come. Since only love can constitute either world as a man’s home. “This world is for the faithful (who do not love the world) what the desert was for the people of Israel" they live not in houses but in tents. To become a monk is to be asked to live in caritas (to relinquish the world). But Lippi says he cannot see love of the world as bad. Caritas is love of divinity. Cupiditas is love of the world. Worldly love vs. divine love. Our love of the divine vs. our love of the world. If we live in caritas we don’t live here. Love of the world to come is incompatible with ethical life in this world. If you go by caritas there is no reason to love or care unless driven by the world to come. This is messed up and Lippi agrees. Artists must love this world. He renounced the world of greed. 

            He can't help but love the flesh and the beast and that is value. Love of the world is a primary value. The privileging of cupiditas has a role in art to love life as we see it. There is an overlap here with George Eliot. Lippi draws things as he sees them. This puts him in conflict with the church and caritas. Art should reveal divinity. 

            The goal for the church is not to show the flesh but to paint the soul. Art should make us praise. Beauty might be distracting and won’t instruct. Not the real but an abstract sense of divine love. Lippi challenges this and says it makes no sense. Does beauty really distract from divinity? If one paints beautifully it must be the soul. The key aesthetic is that simple beauty and the ability to perceive it reflects soul. The soul is receptive to beauty. Beauty shows soul. Turning back on beauty is wrong and denies god and life. Art is the way we lend our minds out and connect with others and connect our souls with love of god. He's putting cupiditas at the centre of a proper relation to the world and god. One should not deny the world and beauty. 

            It makes us better people, healthier, ethically more responsible, moral and virtuous to love the world. The irony of the poem is when he points out that efforts to turn one’s back on the world don’t work. Look at fat monks. They have not turned their backs on the world. It is impossible. 

            Lippi is not sure that his art is going to do it. The heart of the poem is that this world is no blot for us. It is not the desert Arendt described. The world’s meaning is good and to bring that into art is the proper responsibility of all people, especially artists. Art's job is not to remind us to fast. It is a higher calling to bring out the intense and good. The goal of art is to see the divine beauty in the ordinary and everyday. But Lippi has little hope for this kind of painting for him. His life has been one in which he has had to sneak these ideas into his art. He paints what is ordered but hopes for the future. He has no power, unlike a modern artist. 

            For Christina Rossetti's poem narrative poem a lot of the techniques used here can be applied. What are the dramatic persona and setting, etc? Also Wilde will take up these ideas of art. 

            He says he’ll post a video on instructions for our literary analysis essay this week. 

            

            I finished typing the lecture just before dinner but after dinner it took until almost 23:00 to edit my notes. 

            I had tomatoes and avocados for dinner while watching Andy Griffith. 

            This story starts out with Barney complaining to Andy about Mayberry being ripe for the picking because it has no security. Andy senses correctly that Barney saw a police movie the night before and so he’s going to be “Glen Fording all day." But Barney is like a dog with a bone. He goes to the bank and finds the elderly security guard asleep, the bank vault open and the teller’s drawer open. The security guard has an antique gun that is falling apart. Barney lectures to the manager and teller with a long speech about security and they look at each other and say, “Glenn Ford!" Barney decides to teach the bank a lesson by robbing it and so he comes in drag as an old cleaning lady. But as he is standing by the vault putting money in his bucket the teller recognizes him. The manager calls out to him and Barney is startled, locking himself in the vault, which won’t open until the next morning. But Barney kicks through the flimsy wall at the back of the vault into the beauty parlour. Meanwhile they think Barney is still inside and they are worried he will suffocate. They bring in a guy from the filling station with a blow torch and this is the first appearance of Gomer Pyle. Barney comes back into the bank from the front and tells them he’s just proved that the bank has no security. Watching all this however are two real bank robbers who see that Barney is right. The next morning one of them comes in with a stocking over his head just after the manager opens up. The manager thinks it’s Barney again and so does the teller, who goes to tell Andy. Andy comes in and disarms the robber, thinking he's just taking a gun away from Barney. The crook grabs the guard’s old gun, which falls apart. Outside Barney captures the other crook on lookout with the getaway car but he’s catches him for illegal parking, not knowing he's a robber until Andy tells him.