Fay Spain

            On Tuesday after midnight I checked again for bedbugs and found none. That makes two days since I saw the first one I'd seen in a month. Maybe it wandered in from another apartment, fed on me, tried to find a place to lay eggs but reacted to the powder and went up the wall where I killed it. 

            I translated the sixth verse of "Arthur, où t'as mis le corps" (Arthur, Where'd You Put The Corpse?) by Boris Vian: "We got ten years for our crime / That's more than enough time / to learn how to play belote / plus we felt a compulsion / to continuously question / our unfortunate goat // As he was getting skinny / we punched him more softly / just so he wouldn't crumble / but Arthur had to be taught / to pay for all of the trouble / putting us in the box." 

            I finished posting my translation of “On n'est pas des grenouilles” by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the audio of his song “Cuti – réaction” and found a recording by a band called Toubib but when I listened to the words they didn't match what I had. It turned out what I had was some kind of lyrical promo for the band. I found the lyrics to the song and started transcribing them. 

            I weighed 90.1 kilos before breakfast but that was an apple and one sip of coffee before leaving for my US Lit lecture. 

            The lecture was on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. 

            Professor Morgenstern commented that Thanksgiving does not really work as a break. 

            Our essay assignment will be posted two weeks from today. 

            In the module are two extra but optional readings. Adrienne Rich's "I Am In Danger Sir" about Dickinson and Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California" which is written in a Whitman style.

            Whitman's "Song of My Self" from the 1855 version of "Leaves of Grass". The book kept changing so having the right edition is important. It looks like I have the 1891 edition in hard copy and that's Whitman's own preferred edition. But I'll find a digital 1855 edition later when I need it for reference. 

            He was unlike university educated authors such as Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne. He left school at 11 and by 12 was writing for newspapers. His father was a farmer and carpenter and his mother was illiterate. Some say his style is tied to his mother's illiteracy and that he imagined his poetry as if addressed to her or at least accessible to other illiterates. 

            He is both author and maker of "Leaves of Grass" in the sense that the subject invents a new style and he also designed the book as an object. He paid to print it, set some of the type and acted as his own press agent and reviewer. He sent copies to Emerson and others. Emerson wrote him back to say, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career. " 

           Frederick Douglas is presented as an alternative to Emerson but Whitman responds to Emerson's call for a United States poet and artist figure: "If the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also. For it is not meters, but meter-making argument that makes a poem--a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own and adorns nature with a new thing." - Emerson, “The Poet”

 (1844) 

            "Song of My Self" shows itself to be a direct response to this call for optimism, affection, environmental awareness, specificity in relation to US politics and landscape. Whitman takes Emerson's letter and has it printed without permission and sends it out. Emerson will later be ambivilent to Whitman. 

            In social class he had a doubled identity. He identified with artists of all classes. He went to operas and Emerson's lectures but he also identified with what he called "the roughs." During the Civil War he volunteered in a hospital and did wound dressings. 

            He was different from his peers with his emphasis on the body and sex. This was problematic for some readers including Emerson and Thoreau. He was rich and passionate in "Song of Myself" in saying that the body is divine. But for Emerson, Thoreau and Douglas they want transcendental embodiment. Whitman doesn't want to transcend the body. He related to Emerson and Thoreau in that the head is more important than churches or creeds but his body focus was not shared by is US renaissance peers. 

            Emerson and Whitman on contradicting oneself. Be individual not bound by convention. "Do I contradict myself? . . . I am large. . . I contain multitudes." - Whitman "Why drag about this monstrous corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself: what then?" - Emerson 

            Bill Clinton used to distribute "Leaves of Grass" to his interns, including Monica Lewinsky.

            Thoreau on Whitman: "As for the sensuality in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, I do not so much wish it was not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read it without harm."

            Emerson was conventional on a social level but Thoreau was not. 

            Whitman wrote some more explicit poetry than presented in "Song of Myself" but it was not published in his life. But in general his eroticism is bound with democracy and contains covert homoeroticism. 

            She shows the original title page of "Leaves of Grass" beside Douglas's book. Whitman has no author's name but just a portrait. His hat is at an angle, his right hand on his hip, his other in his pocket, his shirt is open at the neck, it's a three quarter portrait while a formal portrait would be cut off at the waist. He presents himself as markedly working class. He describes his portrait in section 4 of "Song of Myself": "Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looks with its side curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it." 

            Whitman is credited for the innovation of free verse. The term was not used until the 1880s. "Free verse" is a contradiction. One could say free verse stretches back to poetry's oral roots which he channels. The evolution of poetic form, strains of meter against form, but his use couldn't be ignored. 

           It is easy to identify Whitman style. There are many formal features: long Lines, anaphora, parallelism, enumerative catalogues, rhetorical questions in the second person (interpellation of the reader), neologisms, perspectival fracture, ellipses, repetition of syntactic patterns, building and adding. He folds the reader into the poem. Whitman invents words or neologisms that are not in the Oxford English Dictionary like "Foofoos." 

           He does not write in first person with or without a speaker from beginning to end. Sometimes the speaker is objective, subjective, ordering. 

            "Song of Myself" section 6 - The meanings of "grass". It is a publisher's word for substandard literature. Grass and writing is common writing. Isaiah: "All flesh is grass." Grass as the embodiment of mortality. The child figure innocence and wisdom. He is not authoritative in this section. "I guess ... I don't know." Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?" This is Dickinsonesque. 

            I said grass is a unifying flag for everyone. Everything he lists in the poem could be happening simultaneously. 

            He is creating unity with a performative gesture. Grass is a natural object. Hieroglyphic. Grass as witness. Mortality democratizing shared vulnerability. The words "uniform" and "hieroglyphic" are not opposites but stand apart. Sacred. 

            In the beginning he says "I celebrate myself" but logic requires the whole poem and he continuously adds to it. "Celebrate" can be pushed at. Look up "celebration". To consecrate by religious rites, to speak praises. Public and sacramental. Speech act. "We declare" compared with "I celebrate". In the end he says "I bequeath myself." 

            "Loafe" is a Whitman coinage. US slang. Not the kind of word one would use if a gentleman because lazy. 

            Ask who is "I" and what is "self"? Is "I" collective? Is it the US, is it everyone, anyone? Does it include non human? He gestures to that. He includes beetles. His sense of self is singular and outside and apart in line with Emerson and Thoreau but all encompassing and not distinguished. He is writing about unspoken aspects of embodiment and forms of social marginalization. 

            Sympathy is important. Queer sympathy but different meanings of queer including the sexual. She shows Thomas Eakins's painting of section 11. The relation between the poet and the lady is identical but distinct. She becomes a mediating figure. Shy, tense, erotic. 

            Was he all good? In section 40 he says "On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes, (This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.)" Quasi Freudian. The professor doesn't like that section. 

            We took a break. 

            Emily Dickinson. 

            "You speak of Mr. Whitman—I never read his Book—but was told that he was disgraceful." 

            She is traditionally situated as a madwoman. In her class femininity was always considered pathological. 

           There have been several revisionist portraits and two films, plus a strange TV show. 

           Oddly in her peculiarity she was like others of the US renaissance. Kin between Dickinson and Thoreau. 

           We looked at the Adrienne Rich poem "I Am in Danger Sir": 

“Half-cracked” to Higginson, 

living, afterward famous in garbled versions, 

your hoard of dazzling scraps a battlefield, 

now your old snood mothballed at Harvard 

and you in your variorum monument 

equivocal to the end— 

who are you? 

you, woman, masculine in single-mindedness, 

for whom the word was more than a symptom— 

a condition of being. 

Till the air buzzing with spoiled language 

sang in your ears 

of Perjury and in your half-cracked way 

you chose silence for entertainment, 

chose to have it out at last 

on your own premises." 

            The title is from her letter to Higgenson. Higgenson was a Unitarian minister and an abolitionist who wrote an essay calling for young poets to write. She answered at the age of 32. He became her editor but wasn't always sure what to do. "Half cracked" is what he said of her. 

            US feminist poet Adrienne Rich claimed literary mother figures in the early second wave of feminist criticism. Troubling how we remember, she plays with and revalues his dismissiveness of Dickinson. She revalues the mad woman idea. Rich is interested in what kind of middle class white woman would be an artist. 

            Most of Dickinson's work was published after death in a book making up thousands of poems.

            She was reclusive. Drastically non conforming. "own premises" can be both beliefs and home. Dickinson and gender in her oeuvre. Does she conform to 19th century norms of femininity? 

            From overperforming, expansive and shameless Whitman to secretive feminine, housebound recluse Dickinson. It is worth straining against that polarity. 

            In her first letter to Higgenson: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? The Mind is so near itself—it cannot see, distinctly—and I have none to ask— Should you think it breathed—and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude— If I make the mistake—that you dared to tell me—would give me sincerer honor—toward you— I enclose my name—asking you, if you please—Sir—to tell me what is true? That you will not betray me—it is needless to ask—since Honor is it’s own pawn." She performs submissiveness while wanting something and offering her view.

            Her letters are poem like. Another letter can be compared to Whitman's portrait. She associates portraits with death. Gives a portrait in writing. People say "what?". 

            She's canny. When she asks for help she corrects him. He wants her to regulate to traditional rhymes. She's ambivilent in letter 268. She 's telling him how to read poetry because he thinks the subject is the poet's self while she says it's not. The discipline of reading lyric poetry didn't exist. "I" is not always the writer. Avoid thinking so. 

            "It is not the relation of the “I” to the poet or to any other established “self” but the use of words in the context of speech that implies a perspective or subjectivity in some form. The lyric, in other words, always implies an “I,” but that subjective position does not refer to an identity outside the poem. One could say that the poem’s language is both the stage on which its “I” performs and the script constituting that subjectivity or “I.” - Suzette Juhasz and Cristianne Miller.

           Dickinson poems are untitled and referenced by first line or number. Her poems had a common ballad meter. She played a bit but was very regular in general, using the iambic tetrameter and trimeter of hymns. 

           Her rhymes were unconventional. She used slant or approximate rhymes and not typical punctuation. Lots of dashes and capitals There are only provisional answers to think of this. These were hand written poems. What would she have changed in print? Read caps and dashes but don't overly fixate on the dashes. Some regularized her punctuation and sometimes she consented. 

           From the big book on Dickinson. Poem 271: A solemn thing — it was — I said — A woman — white — to be — And wear — if God should count me fit — Her blameless mystery — A hallowed thing — to drop a life Into the purple well — Too plummetless — that it return — Eternity — until — I pondered how the bliss would look — And would it feel as big — When I could take it in my hand — As hovering — seen — through fog — And then — the size of this "small" life — The Sages — call it small — Swelled — like Horizons — in my vest — And I sneered — softly — "small"! 

            Solemnity is an account of a speech act. Think Hester and Dimmesdale in the forest. "White" could be bride to be but she always dressed in white. It could be virginity. She radically revalued the relation to religion. Hallowed sanctification. Purple could symbolize passion, divinity or royalty. Plummetless unfathomable she invented the word. Uneasy quality. 

            I said "plummetless" sounds like not far enough.

            Marrying as a bottomless well and an eternity to get back or pledge life to god. Stanza three the bliss of losing ones life. The off rhyme registers uneasiness while a closer rhyme gives allusion to contained meaning. But in the off rhyme there is no closure and meaning.

            I said "small" may refer to her gender as in girlfriend being "petite amis" and other references to women. 

            Whitman's large self. She says sages say this small life. She expands it inside of her to horizons. The poem is structured from "I said" to "I plundered" to "I sneered." She chooses self. But the well is self loss. She has to negotiate with her triumphant self via gendered constraint. The poem is about triumph but she also wrote about mental anguish. Keep that in mind for Melville. 

            She reads poem 510 on the other side of triumph:

It was not Death, 

for I stood up, And all the Dead, lie down—

It was not Night, 

for all the Bells Put out their Tongues, for Noon. 

It was not Frost, 

for on my Flesh I felt Sirocos—crawl— 

Nor Fire—for just my Marble feet 

Could keep a Chancel, cool— 

And yet, it tasted, like them all, 

The Figures I have seen Set orderly, 

for Burial, Reminded me, of mine— 

As if my life were shaven, And fitted to a frame,

And could not breathe without a key,

And 'twas like Midnight, some— 

When everything that ticked—has stopped— 

And Space stares all around— 

Or Grisly frosts—first Autumn morns, 

Repeal the Beating Ground— 

But, most, like Chaos—Stopless—cool— 

Without a Chance, or Spar—

Or even a Report of Land— 

To justify—Despair. 

            I told the professor about Richard Maurice Bucke and his relationship with Whitman. How he thought Whitman was the greatest example of cosmic consciousness in history. Also about how Bucke thought that Aborigines were colour blind when they really have the highest developed colour sense of any people on Earth. 

            I rode to Yonge and Bloor and then home. 

            I weighed 88.7 kilos before lunch. 

            I weighed 90.3 at 18:00. 

            I finished editing my lecture notes just before dinner.

            I read some more of "Song of Myself." 

            I had a small potato with gravy and the other half of the cornish hen for dinner while watching an episode of Gomer Pyle. 

            In this story when Gomer gets off the bus in town with Sergeant Hacker and Corporal Jensen a panhandler approaches them saying he wants enough for a bowl of soup. Hacker and Jensen dismiss him but Gomer gives him the money. Hacker tells Gomer he's going to buy booze and not soup. Gomer says he tries to believe people because most people don't lie. Hacker and Jensen go into a burlesque house and Hacker gets the idea to teach Gomer a lesson about trust. He asks the lead dancer Lila St Clair to go on two dates with Gomer, telling him she's a school teacher and then invite him to the strip club so they can see Gomer's face when he finds out what she really does for a living. Lila agrees to do it for $50. Hacker introduces Lila to Gomer as his cousin from out of town and asks if he'll show her around. The first day Gomer takes her to a flower show. Lila is bored but then Gomer gives her a corsage. The next day he takes her to an old California mission and Lila actually has a pleasant time. The next night Gomer is given an address to meet Lila and it turns out to be the burlesque club. Gomer has brought a present for Lila but she meets him at his table and confesses she's not really a school teacher because she works there. He asks if she's a waitress. She asks Gomer to leave. He is on his way out and feeling confused when Hacker comes and gets Gomer to sit down Lila is introduced and she does a prime time TV friendly imitation of a burlesque dance. Gomer watches looking sad and then he gets up and goes to Lila's dressing room. He tells her she forgot her present. He says if not for Hacker's trick they wouldn't have become friends. She says you made friends with a school teacher, not a burlesque dancer. He says if that's your chosen profession there is nothing wrong with it. He asks her to open her present and it's a miniature mission bell. Hacker comes to give Lila her $50 and she gives it back to him. 

            Lila was played by Fay Spain, who was on her own at 14. At 17 she lied her age and became a dealer in Reno. As an actor she first made guest appearances on television before she got work in movies. She had to struggle very hard and persistently to get work in the movies because she failed screen tests and was not considered photogenic. In her first film she co-starred in Dragstrip Girl. Then she did Teenage Doll, The Crooked Circle and The Abductors. She played Darlin Jill in God's Little Acre, Maureen Flannery in Al Capone, Francie Culluron in The Beat Generation, Lil Lewis in The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, Queen Antinea in Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis, Destiny Cooper in The Flight to Fury and Marcia Roth in The Godfather II.