Carlos Rivas

            On Tuesday morning I was pretty sure I had a cold. I guess it could be omicron but I'm fully vaccinated so a cold seemed more likely. Plus it had been two and a half years since I had one so I was overdue. As usual, yoga and song practice helped me feel a bit better. 

            I worked out the chords for the first two verses and almost half the chorus of “Amour année zéro” (Love In The Year Zero) by Serge Gainsbourg. The second half of the chorus is the same as the first and so I'm pretty much done.

            I weighed 86.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            At 9:45 I logged on for the Global Modernisms lecture. 

            The discussion board is going well. 

            Modernism is huge. Every small thing could generate loads of text. 

            There is no right or wrong way to understand modernism. The Modern Fiction course has a different approach. Raymond Williams says modernism is a matter of selection of texts, methods, and approaches. That is true of any literary form but for Modernism in particular. 

            The slides from the last lecture are still not up. She's behind but will do it today. 

            Designing a course in Global Modernism is confusing.

            She says we can interrupt her if she doesn't see us raise our hands. 

            Mao and Walkowitz are professors of English in the US. Mao is an established modernist scholar. Walkowitz is one of the seminal people in modernism and transnationalism. Take note of the fact that transnational modernism begins in the US. 

            It is important to know what is important. 

            We could look at postcolonial literature as part of modernism. Many of the colonies started becoming independent. Colonization reached a peak and Britain reached a peak. South Asia was under the crown in 1858 and the colonies were franchized sources of income for the empire. Colonies were owned and became more decentralized by trade companies, but under the umbrella of empire. Of late colonial literature there are ways to study the history of empire alongside modernism. How the tools of modernist literature help with the study of postcolonialism. 

            Temporal expansion is interesting but few talk of temporal expansion because scholars are wary. We need to understand history grounded events. There are limits to temporal expansion. How is Modernism not like the renaissance. We will place more importance on the spacial. The spacial is more global. 

            The vertical is about class. The vertical is the most important and she seems to be quoting what I said on the discussion board. We must reckon with elitism like that of T.S. Eliot. 

            Modernism as a concept needs a single definition but as a field it is wider. Truth in modernism is important. Modernism as as a movement followed the realist movement but modernism experiments with anti-realism or more productively alternative representations of reality.

            Modernism, modernization and modernity. Don't overthink these. Modernity is a political and economic condition. Modernization is the action of modernizing. Rejection of religion. Modernism is the aesthetic movement.

            Modernists search for new truth and a different way of seeing reality. When we go into other readings we will see different views. Global Horizons is on the syllabus. Hayot and Edwards focus on global roots. Cuddy Keane is at U of T. Williams's international modernism is not trasnational. Doyle's temporal and Friedman's. They have different methodological approaches. Modernism was already foreign at the beginning. Ezra Pound on Chinese poetry. Joseph Conrad was radical and based in a colony. But how is it there? Modernism is already transnational. 

            How modernism is in the renaissance and not. 

           We focus on the reader to establish the field. 

            Michelle Foucault is post Nietzsche. He wrote the concept of the history of sexuality. Approaches to sex since Victorian times. How power acts on the body singularly and collectively. He was very influential. Nietzsche established the foundation of modernist philosophy along with Freud and Marx. Foucault is the successor to Nietzsche. Global modernists are educated on Foucault but not necessarily influenced. 

            We can't cover all so use the discussion board. 

            We took a break. 

            Discussion points. Expansions. It is okay to not understand. Vertical expansion is confusing. One could spend a year on it. Bad Modernisms was on that topic. The formal idea is not summarized comprehensively. Modernisms as self expressed elitisms. Every argument is a critical can of worms. Anti elitism. Some scholars contest that Modernism is elitist. Obscurity is not necessarily elitist but maybe it is. It's plural modernisms. Becket is difficult but not elitist. The fun part is that debates don't end. With modernism and transnationalism we take from the past and use the new. 

            There are no key definitions. One can't objectively define these topics. It should be an expression of ideas. Of transnationalism, who put the boundaries of nations in place? Global capitalism and colonialism, The national boundaries were emphasized during the war. One must look at each national context. Nation is an interesting idea. 

            Postmodernism. We might talk about it at the end. The temporal expansion aspect. Traditional modernist scholars don't like postmodernism. It is not productive or sustainable. They reject it. 

            There is a difference between what came from New York and other parts of the States. They could be different modernisms. Remember the category of nation and understand what is at stake. In Untouchable where is a national boundary. Anand is influenced by Joyce and the Bloomsbury scholats. But through these influences he struggles with his own background. 

            Modernism as an aesthetic movement and newness and novelty. Who can afford the luxury of change? Who can afford to read literature? This is a Marxist criticism. Who has the luxury to read? What is the foundation of privilege that allows study? Vertical expansion is relevant here. Use the articles and essays as points from which questions emerge. 

            Thursdays will be more presentation based. 

           Raymond Williams's ideas are not easy to summarize. He was of the Marxist new left and not mainstream. He had a romantic side as a Marxist thinker. Trad Marxists do not talk of culture as a way of life and they do not take experience seriously. He talked of structures of feeling, fluidity of society and history. He's thinking with Foucault as are many. Literature is an aftereffect of material relations according to Marx but Williams revised this. He likes to look at culture. He said it is not enough to call culture an after effect. He saw culture as shifting with politics in dialogue. Every moment in history is a dominant and emergent set of cultural expressions. We'll take the rest of the essay up next time. Williams's is the most theoretically dense of the essays so far. Williams is the most important of these.

            Modernism is a problem of history. Historic questioning is a term for left based criticism. Historical criticism means taking a left based Marxist approach. We also need a historical approach to understand Pound's Cantos. It is not just a poem but also an expression of ideas but also historical background of the classics, China, class affiliation, and how they shape the understanding of literature. What if Pound was not middle class? What if he was working-class or of the aristocracy? Modernism is a problem and an ideology. It is a dominant and misleading ideology. We will look at the ideologies next time first. Why ideology? 

            I weighed 86.1 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I was going to take a bike ride. I didn't know how far I could get in the aftermath of the storm but I needed some exercise and fresh air. But when I took my bike down from the hook I discovered that my front tire was flat. I'd just pumped it the day before so there was obviously a puncture that I picked up between here and the laundrymat on Monday. Fortunately I had a spare tube so I spent the next half hour changing it. It was a struggle getting the tire off but even more so putting it back on. I was almost ready to take it over to Metro Cycle to get the guy to pry the last twenty centimeters of tire onto the rim but I finally managed it. 

            I went for a short ride. I made it to Dundas and Brock and considered going along Dundas to Dovercourt, But the thought of maneuvering in the narrow space between the parked cars and the buried streetcar track made me think I'd better not. I thought about continuing along Brock up tp College but that stretch looked more snowy and precarious than what I'd just traversed. I decided to just turn around and ride home on Brock. 

            I weighed 85.5 kilos at 17:15. 

            I finished editing my lecture notes at 19:30. 

            I wrote my Discussion Board comment: 

            

            To summarize the lecture, Modernism is big with too many ideas to pin down. We can look at Postcolonial and Transnational literature as part of Modernism because Modernism was transnational from the start. Modernists tried to find new approaches to understanding reality. Ironically Marxism influenced some of the art of Modernism while Marxism is less interested in art. Or at least more critical of art based on what class it comes from. It is safe to say that art for art's sake is not compatible with Marxism. Raymond Williams is not a typical Marxist and doesn't agree that art is an after effect of socioeconomic relations. He sees art and culture as constantly interacting with the political situation in the moment. 

            The statement that Modernism is an ideology is odd. Perhaps that's true of the scholars that study and try to make sense of it. But most of the artists that collectively and unconsciously created Modernism were not trying to express an ideology. They were trying to create and express themselves from inside to outside. Certainly one can study the context of the environment in which they lived and created and find patterns and common characteristics. But to be an artist is to avoid the limitations of ideology as much as possible. 

            Frankly I thought this lecture was disorganized. We went over things that we've already covered in previous lectures. I think our instructor had intended on getting deeper into Williams than she did and I wish she had. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a slice of roast pork while watching an episode of The Addams Family. 

            In this story an old friend of the Addams family from Spain, Don Javier Francisco de la Manch Molinas comes to visit Gomez with his daughter Consuella and a chaperone named Maria. Gomez does not realize that their grandparents arranged when Gomez and Consuelo were five that they would be married. They have come for the wedding. They misunderstand when Gomez introduces Morticia and think that she is his sister. To further complicate matters, Morticia overhears Gomez tell Don Javier that he has a girl in every country. He means a girl Friday or perhaps a secretary but Morticia thinks they are wives. Gomez hires a flamenco dancer named Cardona to entertain the Molinas and the dancer and Consuella fall instantly in love. That night at the party Gomez is surprised when Don Javier announces his marriage to Consuella. He says it's not going to happen. Don Javier challenges Gomez to a duel but somehow he gets to choose the weapons when it's supposed to be the challenged one. Thing knocks Don Javier's gun away and Gomez fires at the ceiling. It falls on Cardona and Consuella runs to him making it obvious they are in love. Gomez offers to pay the dowry. There is no explanation to how Don Javier would think Morticia was Gomez's sister since he is close to the family and knew Gomez since he was a child. 

            Consuella was played by Yardena. 

            Maria was played by Bella Bruck. 

            Cardona was played by Carlos Rivas, who appeared in many films in Mexico and the United States. He's a founding member of Nosotros which works to improve the image of Latinos in the entertainment industry. He co-starred in The Beast of Hollow Mountain, The Deerslayer, and The Black Scorpion.