On Thursday morning, in addition to the other cold symptoms I've had for the last couple of days, I also had a sore throat. My singing voice sounded like someone exaggeratedly parodying a hundred-year-old Bob Dylan. I was only able to firmly hit a couple of the lowest notes.
I revised my translation of the chorus of “Amour année zéro” (Love In The Year Zero) by Serge Gainsbourg so that it fits the rhyme scheme. I ran through the song in English but didn't have time to upload it to Christian's Translations. I'll do that tomorrow and start preparing it for blog publication.
I weighed 85.6 kilos before breakfast.
At 9:45 I started logging onto Zoom for my Global Modernisms lecture.
Zoom told me that I was the host. Apala couldn't undo it and she was having problems with her video and audio so she moved to another location and logged back in. I had to let some people in who were in the virtual waiting room.
There are common questions on the discussion board. We can use them to build a common base of knowledge.
Next week we begin presentations. They are flexible with no fundamental requirement. Just show you are engaging with the ideas. They should be on parts of the entire readings that are assigned that week.
Read Heart of Darkness slowly. She'll start generally discussing it maybe next Thursday.
She'll upload versions of the essays with her annotations.
The essays by Williams and Blair are related.
When was modernism? Historical questioning is methodological. There is a difference between a concept and a field. Understand modernism as a concept without defining it. Raymond Williams sees Modernism as a complex of historical multi-faceted phenomena. It is easier to define that way. Looking into the historical context of existing modes of expression, Modernism was a new mode. But not defining modernism comes with the risk of it becoming anything. Be wary of that. She will provide concrete understanding but we must question the limits.
“Problem” is a potent word. “Problematic” is used in critical theory in postmodernism. Modernism is problematic because it has both complex multifaceted individual aspects but it is not reduceable to concrete terms. But we have to do that and that's the problem.
The word “Ideology” is one used by Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci. He spoke of ideological state apparatuses. Our definition of “ideology” is not just worldview or opinions but more theoretical ideology as a construct. There might be multiple ideologies in societies. Ideology is not just an idea because an idea can be understood easily. Ideology is a thought construct on the basis of which communities work. Hegemony comes into being when ideology is naturalized. For example, it is an ideology that capitalism is the best system. It is a constructed ideology and believers will give reasons. Governments take it as a national policy. Capitalism is the idea and we buy the constructed idea that best identifies the ideology. Entire communities can believe it or not. Or another example could be that capitalism is the worst system. A nation contains a multitude of ideologies. Governments may work with ideologies. Local and federal governments may have different ideologies. If one ideological construction becomes naturalized that becomes a hegemony. She can make texts available on these points. Hegemony is when an ideology becomes a common belief in a community. As natural as weather.
I said the more hegemony the less precise and the more belief-based it would be.
Corporations have hegemonies. Ideology can function as a set of beliefs depending on constructs and status in society. Hegemony stops being an ideology when it forms. The idea for instance that men are superior to women is something people would stop questioning when the ideology becomes a hegemony. But Williams is not talking about hegemony. She's just saying ideology is distinct from hegemony. Ideology is tenuous. Modernism can't become a hegemony.
Modernism is a misleading ideology. Understanding of modernism develops in the 18th and 19th Centuries. In the 50s Marxist critics of modernism say the way to understand modernism is retrospectively looking back and canonizing it. The canon of modernism includes Stein, Pound, etc. Methodological intervention. Retrospective definitions are not peculiar to modernism. It is problematic and ideological. The machinery of selective tradition or canonization is a decision process. For example, the decision made to make ten Russian writers of the 19th century critically important.
How to understand modernism? Williams sees the Romantics as modernists because they were doing the same thing. Because he is a Marxist he thinks realism is a more valuable mode of expression. Narrative forms of reality Marxists believe to understand the world we must present it as it is. Williams highlights the importance of social realism. We think of realism as non-experimental. Gogol was a social realist. He is critiquing modernism's solipsism. Inner life and experiences. If modernism is new so is romanticism and socialist writing. What is new about Kafka or Proust? Modernism is constructed on the ideology that the expression of inner experience is the best content to function as art. It is that but also Williams does not see it that way. The ideology of modernism is that it highlights and celebrates inner life. We like it but it's problematic for Williams.
I said I think Marxism seems to restrict and overthink things to limit art. Someone else argued that capitalism also limits art. I agree that it does but it's not the same degree of limitation. There is no type of expression that capitalism would reject as long as people want to buy it. Capitalists publish Marxist thinkers. Capitalists publish anti-capitalist art. Capitalists published a book called “Steal This Book.” As long as it sells capitalists will market it. That is less limiting than ideological critiques of art.
The Marxist view is that nothing can be taken at face value. There is always an ideology underneath.
When I left the class I was asked to assign someone else as host and so I picked the real host.
I weighed 85 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride. Unlike yesterday the temperature was back in the double digits below zero. The snow patches and banks that had presented themselves as soft obstacles yesterday were now hard obstacles. Where it had been fairly easy to traverse the Bloor bike lane yesterday, the snow that had melted was now frozen and making it impossible in places to ride. About half the time I had to ride out onto Bloor Street just to avoid my tires spinning. I rode to Bloor and Ossington and went south to Queen.
On the way home I stopped at Freshco where I bought eight bags of cherries, a pint of strawberries, a bunch of bananas, a bag of naan, a pack of pork chops, three bags of milk, a can of peaches, Greek yogourt, two small jugs of orange juice because they were on sale and cheaper than the big jugs that made up the same amount, a jug of raspberry lemonade, a pack of toilet paper, and two bags of kettle chips.
My scale said that I weighed 84.4 kilos at 18:00.
I finished editing my lecture notes just before dinner.
I had a small potato with gravy and a slice of roast pork while watching an episode of The Addams Family.
In this story, Fester has fallen in love with and wants to marry Diana, a bearded lady whom he's been corresponding with but has never met. Morticia and Gomez are concerned and so Morticia disguises herself as Diana's bearded mother and comes to visit Fester. She gets Fester to admit that he has no job, no financial prospects and does nothing, and so can't support her daughter. But this suddenly inspires Fester to try to become a success by taking a business correspondence course. On the day of his graduation, he is standing in a cap and gown listening to a record telling him that he now has what it takes to be a business tycoon. Fester storms into the executive Thaddeus Logan's office, hears him talking about a deal, then Fester grabs the phone from him and tells the person at the other end, “$50,000 or nothing!” and then hangs up. He tells the executive he'll call back and he does, willing to pay $50,000. Logan thinks Fester is a financial genius. Meanwhile, Morticia and Gomez find a psychiatrist under the “C”s in the phone book and ask him to come and examine Fester. Dr. Brown tells them not to call him “doctor” while he's there so that Fester won't be alarmed. But then Logan comes to visit and Morticia and Gomez think he's Brown. They convince him that Fester has flipped his lid but mostly he's scared away by Thing the disembodied hand. Brown comes later and is dismissed as the assistant of the one they thought was the doctor. Fester has forgotten about Diana. He says, “She's a woman and I'm a man. What could we possibly have in common?”
Carolyn Jones gave a great performance as Morticia pretending to be Diana's mother.
Thaddeus Logan was played by Roy Roberts, who put in over 900 performances in his 40-year career. In the 1930s and early 1940s, he appeared on Broadway before switching to movies. He co-starred in the film noir “He Walked By Night.” In the 1950s and 60s, he began appearing on television sitcoms as gruff executive types.
Dr. Brown was played by Harold Peary, who was cast as Throckmorton Gildersleeve on the Fibber McGee and Molly radio show. His character became so popular that he became the star of The Great Gildersleeve. His show ran for seventeen years, becoming one of the longest-running shows in radio history. He made four movies based on Gildersleeve and there was also a television sitcom for a short time.
As I was washing my dinner dishes, I had just put the kettle on to make coffee when a mouse ran out of the stove and onto the counter. When it saw me it ran behind the granite cutting board. Remembering how I'd injured the last mouse by pushing the board against the wall I avoided that this time and just pressed the stove-side edge against the wall, thus blocking it from escaping in that direction. I tried to reach in and grab it while still holding the dishcloth but I fumbled and the mouse fell into the sink. I had been washing the saucepan and it was full of water. I dumped out the water so I could easily move the pot to the counter. The mouse struggled in the quick flood. I grabbed it again with the dishcloth and got a good hold on it this time. I could feel the little thing struggling as I carried it out of my place, down the hall, opened the door, and gently tossed it out into the minus thirteen weather. I guess it could have died out there but they survived millions of winters before humans built buildings for them to live in. It could possibly find a tolerable place under the deck like my cats used to do when I had to put them outside sometimes in the winter. Maybe it would survive, freeze or be eaten, but it was in nature's hands and not mine.
I posted my Discussion Board comment:
The past tense question that Williams asks, “When was Modernism?” already implies that Modernism is not current. And yet he gives the impression that he thinks Modernism is continuous because it responds to the new.
We had the keywords of “Problem” and “Ideology.” Modernism is problematic because it has too many aspects to pin down but it has to be somewhat pinned down to keep it from becoming a garbage dump of ideas.
We learned that “Ideology” when it becomes part of culture transforms into a hegemony.
Modernism is presented as not being the Marxist cup of tea because Marxists like art that shows reality rather than trying to express the inner self.
It seems to me that when ideology becomes hegemony it becomes less precise and more of a faith.
But after all that lecture time spent talking about hegemony, we learn that the essay we are studying isn't talking about hegemony and that Modernism can't become a hegemony. So it appears like we were led down an intellectual cul de sac.
Marxism seems to restrict and overthink things to limit art. Someone else argued that capitalism also limits art. I agree that it does but it's not the same degree of limitation. There is no type of expression that capitalism would reject as long as people want to buy it. Capitalists publish Marxist thinkers because people want to buy their books. Capitalists promote anti-capitalist art. Capitalists published a book called “Steal This Book.” As long as it sells capitalists will market it. That is less limiting than ideological critiques of art.
