Mittie Lawrence

           On Thursday morning I wanted to get all my journal entries out of the way so I could focus on my essay later, so I didn’t do any translations or work out chords for songs I’ve translated or my own songs. I did a shortened song practice and finished all that. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            In preparation for the Global Modernisms lecture, because I’ve been having problems with my screen freezing and having to leave the meeting and coming back and missing lecture time, I shut down a few apps that could stand to be off for a while. I closed Bit Torrent, then I went into the Task Manager and shut down as many apps as I recognized that stay active even though I never seem to need them. 

            At 9:45 I logged onto Zoom for the lecture. The room as usual didn’t open until 10:00. 

            Apala was explaining to Arshnoor why she gave us a short essay to start. Because it’s challenging to write a short essay. Don’t try to say a lot of things. Reduce them to two or three. You can’t spare a single sentence that is not making your point. Don’t worry about being too blunt.

            There was some discussion about whether we will be live after reading week. Apala said she hopes so. I said I hate Zoom because there’s no flow of communication. It’s lifeless. She says there is more energy in live classes. 

            Arshnoor gave the first presentation. It was on Multicentric Modernism and Postcolonial Poetry by Robert Stilling. 

            The centres of modernism are multiple over various times as contact points. 

            The elements of modernism: She gives the standard list. 

            Postcolonial studies are rejecting a master narrative. There is more concern with the subaltern. Disestablishing hegemony of the Eurocentric. Decolonizing modernism. Refashioning, use of urdu ghazal poetry, creolization, the Harlem renaissance. 

            Addressing Jameson. He says imperialism can’t be portrayed by modernism because modernist artists are colonial subjects. New scholarship however says there is an exchange between Modernism and Postcolonialism although critical. 

            It is problematic to portray postcolonial works as imitations. Other Modernisms adapted to their own contexts. Affiliation, Patronage, Emulation. TS Eliot was broadcast by the BBC and heard in the Caribbean. This influenced and inspired new adaptations of Modernist writing. In India modernism took off by way of the paperback revolution. 

            There are problems because of Modernism’s links to fascism, and appropriation. 

            There is a bias against poetry in postcolonial spaces because activists believe that realism is more effective. We should use new language to discuss global modernism and not say it is an imitation of modernism. We must consider the temporal expansion. 

            Apala says we have to expand from the default. There are multiple centres in relation to ours. All postcolonialisms are not modernisms but we can understand modernism in conversation with them.

            Anna wrote her presentation on the same essay but focused more on the poetry. She shows a poem called “WWE” by Fatimah Asghar, a South Asian poet. Her family left during the partition.

            Modernism is like punk rock. 

            There is a bias against poetry towards realism in postcolonial spaces. Gandhi was against poetry. But in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, there is a statement in the end on poetry. Gandhi recites an Anglicized poem while the poet speaks in the end in prose. Anand intertextualizes. The poet is critiquing poetry while the critic of poetry is speaking poetry. This is a very modernist moment. Mixing genres. She shows another gazhal called “Among Twilight Embers.” 

            Postcolonialism gives tools but less poetry. 

            I asked Anna about the two ghazals and observed that the first one does not fit as much as a gazhal as I understand it because it maintains a narrative throughout the verses whereas the commonality of the verses in one ghazal is supposed to be the mood. She said it’s a good point. The first writer is trying to deviate from the tradition. 

            Ariana wrote her presentation on Heart of Darkness and read it without PowerPoint. Conrad didn’t learn English until his 20s. Africans are treated as objects in his novel. 

            We had ten minutes left to talk about Untouchable. Apala lectured on the Dalit experience. “Dalit” means downtrodden or oppressed from the word “Dalita” meaning "to pound." There are four strata of Hindus: Brahmans and Kshatrias share the highest nobility between them. Then there are the merchants and traders, below which are the servants, the barbers, and cleaners. Dalits are not even in the four. They live outside town and going into town is a big deal because there they don’t have to breathe the smoke of burning feces. The caste system traveled to North America. At Cisco Systems in Silicon Valley technicians from India resent Dalits being hired because they think that their abilities are of lower quality and that they only graduated because they filled a social quota designed to raise up the Dalits. How does one bring the Dalits back into Indian society if they never were in it? In India, one carries one’s father’s caste. Bhim Rao Ambedkar was a Dalit who rose to become a jurist, economist, and social reformer. He renounced Hinduism and inspired the Dalit Buddhist Movement. 

            I posted my Discussion board comment early: 

            Arshnoor‘s presentation talked about postcolonialism wanting to decolonize modernism. Jameson says imperialism can’t be portrayed by modernists because they are colonial subjects. Postcolonialism both draws from and criticizes Modernism. Modernism can be a jumping-off point for Postcolonial art to find new expressions. 

            Anna wrote her presentation on the same topic but focused more on poetry. She shows a poem called “WWE” by Fatimah Asghar and another gazhal called “Among Twilight Embers” by Faiz. 

            There is a bias against poetry towards realism in postcolonial spaces, it seems because realism is more effective at reaching large groups of people. They don’t need to stop and think and take time to interpret metaphors. Gandhi was against poetry. But Anna had an interesting observation about the end of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. Gandhi recites a Hindu hymn as a poem while later a poet speaks in prose. The poet is criticizing poetry while the critic of poetry is speaking poetry. 

            My takeaways:

            I hadn’t realized that the Dalits were considered so low that they weren’t even part of the caste system. That fits with what Anand says in Untouchable about the untouchables not even being allowed to be Hindus and to worship in the temples. No wonder Bhim Rao Ambedkar became a Buddhist.                      “Among Twilight Embers” by Faiz is very much a ghazal in both structure and spirit while “WWE” by Fatimah Asghar seems to be a ghazal in structure only rather than content. It reminds me of all the people who write three-line poems in 5-7-5 and refer to them as “haiku” even when they have none of the essential characteristics of haiku. 

            I found it interesting that Postcolonialism has less poetry. I think this is characteristic of the tendency of political artists to tend to sacrifice art for the sake of a message. It’s one of the problems with slam poetry. 

            I weighed 86.8 kilos before lunch. 

            It had been raining all day and when I got up from my siesta at 15:30 it was still coming down, so I didn’t take a bike ride. 

            I was caught up on my journal before 16:30 and got back to working on my essay. 

            I weighed 86 kilos at 19:00. 

            The long day of rain had almost wiped out the snowbank that I could see from my window on the other side of Queen Street. But in the evening when I looked out again it was snowing once more, and the streets were white all over. Nature is a cruel joker. 

            I worked on my essay for almost four hours leading up to dinnertime. I formed a thesis and started to organize my argument. I was trying to incorporate the various definitions of “monstrous” into my argument when it was time to eat. 

            I decided to relax my brain and watch a TV show, so I had a potato with gravy and a chicken drumstick while watching an episode of Adam-12. 

            This was a Christmas story. It’s Christmas Eve and the cops are delivering charity presents as part of their annual Christmas drive. They bring some toys to Mrs. Ward, but she tells them her kids are home and since she doesn’t want them to see the presents being brought in, she asks if Malloy and Reed will meet her at the market in an hour so she can transfer the gifts to her trunk. Meanwhile, her son Harvey tells them that what he wants is a yellow dump truck. As they are driving away Reed checks but there is no dump truck among the presents. Malloy knows what Reed is thinking and he says they can’t buy Harvey a dump truck. If they get involved, they’ll have their hearts broken twice a day and it could compromise their job performance. But before meeting Mrs. Ward, Malloy gives in and gets Harvey the dump truck. After delivering the gifts to her they catch a drunk driver full of Christmas cheer and take him in for a breathalyzer test. There is a line-up of Christmas drunks waiting to be tested. Then they meet Mrs. Ward at the station who is there to report her car being stolen. It still had all the presents in the trunk. Malloy and Reed then go to a family dispute where Reba Beuhler is throwing out Charles Beuhler’s clothes. They disagreed over how to celebrate Christmas. She wanted him to take her out, but he said it was too expensive. She bought a chicken so she could stuff it and they could have dinner together, but he bought a big ham and wanted her to use that. They keep fighting and he agrees to leave but tells her about her Christmas present and she tells him about his. Malloy encourages them to open them, and she loves the dress he bought her as he loves what she got him. But then she finds out how expensive the dress is and starts arguing again about why he couldn’t take her out to dinner. Malloy and Reed leave. Meanwhile, the young man that stole Mrs. Ward’s car is caught. They know that the presents in the trunk might be kept as evidence and so they go back to the station to intervene. When the thief says he didn’t know anything about the presents and wouldn’t have stolen kids’ toys at Christmas, the sergeant makes an exception and lets Malloy and Reed deliver the presents. 

            Mrs. Ward was played by Mittie Lawrence, who played Fanny Bryce’s dresser and confidant in Funny Girl. She was the winner of the 1959 Miss Bronze California beauty pageant. She played a billboard girl on Steve Allen. She co-starred in the movie Night Call Nurses. 

            She was married to character actor Robert Doqui who had a very memorable line in Robert Altman’s “Nashville” directed at a Charlie Pride modelled character named Tommy Brown. 

            Reba Beuhler was played by Eunice Christopher. 

            I worked for about another half an hour on my essay before going to bed.