Rance Howard

            On Wednesday morning I finished posting my translation of “Merde à l’amour" (Shit to Love) by Serge Gainsbourg. I found the lyrics for his song “Tic tac toe” but I didn't have time to transcribe them today. I'll start that tomorrow and then translate it.

            At noon I logged on for my final Brit Lit 2 tutorial. Carson was two minutes late because of technical issues. 

            Our exam is from April 12 at 14:00 until April 13 at 17:00. It won’t be graded with gruelling intensity. 

            Carson reminded us of the TA survey. We aren’t required to fill it out but he would find it helpful. 

            He talked about their need to submit all our grades by April 22. If we wanted to resubmit an assignment after receiving our grade we would have to submit them to assistant professor Dancer.

            There was a lot of talk about the math of the grade for the paragraph assignment and how it would be added to our literary analysis assignment. Someone didn’t seem to have done the paragraph assignment yet and wondered if her essay mark would just override it. The paragraph assignment is worth 5% of our mark and so Carson advised her to do it since if she didn’t then even if she did perfect on everything else she couldn’t get a mark higher than 95% without it. Since the student average would probably be in the B range that 5% might make the difference between a C plus and a B minus.

            Carson asked if we agreed with Dancer’s assessment that the characters in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty all have varying degrees of attachment or detachment and that Carl is the least detached. I said I didn’t get how Carl could be seen as detached. He did go into hiding in the end. 

            I said what I really think the novel is about is death and my take on the dreamlike ending is that Howard is dead. If Howard represents postmodernism then it might symbolically be about the death of postmodernism. 

            Carson agreed that the ending does feel something like a weird afterlife like at the end of Lost. Another student thought my interpretation was cool. I said since this meeting was supposed to be to judge whether or not Howard could get tenure as a professor, I suggested that tenure itself is a kind of afterlife. 

            Scarry is wrong about aesthetics. I said that the idea of eternal beauty is not about the object of beauty but the poetic moment that captures it. I gave the example of the poem “Une charogne” by Charles Baudelaire in which he captures the beauty of a rotting corpse that is flowing with maggots and blossoming in its decay like a flower to the music of buzzing flies. It isn’t that the corpse is a thing of beauty but the poem about it is and Baudelaire’s poetic moment about an ugly thing will be beautiful long after even the most exquisite object of beauty has decayed. 

            Carson talked about the idea that the thematic content of a work of art rendering it ugly. I offered the example of the movie Triumph of the Will by Leni Riffenstahl. Even though it might be disturbing because it is a Nazi film that sets up Hitler as noble, most people recognize that it is nonetheless an aesthetically beautiful cinematic masterpiece. 

            At the end of the novel Howard keeps on zooming in on Rembrandt’s painting of Hendrickje and making it larger and larger. I suggested that it parallels how Kiki got larger and larger throughout their marriage and how perhaps at this moment Howard is appreciating it. 

            I said that Howard suddenly seems to be appreciating the beauty of Rembrandt’s paintings and that might also signal the death of postmodernism as it is presented in the novel. I said I don’t think that the critique of Howard’s view of art is necessarily fair, especially when directly linking it to his attitude to life. 

            Direct experience versus the critically mediated. 

            Wilde is detached but playful with a kind of life affirming nihilism. 

            I weighed 89 kilos before lunch. I had seven saltines with five year old cheddar and lemonade. 

            I went out and bought a six pack of Creemore before taking my bike ride. It was quite warm and I didn’t need to wear a hoody between my shirt and the leather jacket when I rode to Ossington and Bloor. 

            I continued re-reading my Brit Lit 2 lecture notes and got halfway through by dinnertime. I had a fried egg with toast and a beer while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story Andy is contacted by men from the treasury department who tell him that a shipment of gold is coming through Mayberry on its way to Fort Knox. Since they are expected to provide security Andy shares the info with Barney on the condition that he keeps it top secret. But Barney of course lets it leak out and soon the whole town is excited about the gold shipment and line the streets to welcome it like it was a parade. The truck stops for gas at the filling station and Barney is suddenly told that he is going to trade places with the guard inside the truck. Gomer is supposed to gas up the truck but starts pumping gas through the gun hole into where Barney is sitting until Andy stops him. Barney sneaks a peak at the gold and discovers that the gold bricks are just boxes full of sand. He starts yelling and the treasury guys take off with Barney locked in the back. Andy pursues them and cuts them off on a country road. They explain to him that the truck was all along intended as a decoy and that the real gold would be going through Raleigh. Barney lets that leak as well. Despite what a bumbler Barney is it is really Andy’s fault for trusting him. 

           One of the treasury agents was played by Ron Howard’s father Rance Howard. He appeared many times as minor characters throughout the series. He also appeared in The Music Man and several of the films that his son Ron directed. His and Ron’s first film appearance was in the 1956 film Frontier Woman. Ron was two at the time. He played Henry Boomhauer on Gentle Ben and he played the father of Captain John Sheridan on Babylon 5. He played Dr McIvor on The Waltons.