I finished working out the chords for “L’hymne à l’amour - Moi l’ nœud” (The Hymn to Love – I’m the Node) by Serge Gainsbourg and ran through the song in French and English. I’ll upload it to Christian’s Translations tomorrow.
For the last two mornings during song practice I’ve seen two sparrows mating on the power line outside my window. The female always purchases in the same place and when she flutters her wings it seems to signal the male to fly on top of her. But he’s always only there for a second, then flies to perch about a meter away until he gets the signal again.
I only had time to drink a glass of orange juice before leaving for Global Modernisms class.
When I got there, I told Apala that the narrator of Season of Migration to the North couldn’t have drowned at the end because he’s telling the story in the past tense. Also, it turns out that the same character is the narrator for subsequent novels of the cycle, and he is even named in one of the books.
We had three presentations.
Fiona’s presentation was on “Perception and Multilayering of Identity in Season of Migration to the North Through Narratology.”
Perceiving reality as an illusion.
Mustafa recites a poem written in October, 1914 by Ford Maddox Ford.
The narrator is written as nameless to make Mustafa sympathetic. The narrator embodies east-west values. Mustafa could be seducing the narrator like he did the British women. Mustafa thinks of his own name as an alias. Why use a frame narrative? It gives us a person to connect to. A frame narrative creates uncertainty. Is it truth? Is Mustafa monologuing? Implied narrator.
I ask about the unfinished poem by Mustafa that the narrator finds, critiques and corrects. I don’t remember what she said.
Noor gave her presentation on Season of Migration to the North, with a focus on the Canadian translator Denys Johnson-Davies, who also translated sayings of the prophets. He was considered the leading Arabic-English translator of our time. Noor is Egyptian and she read the novel both in Arabic and English.
She said that in Arabic it is not as emotional and that there is more authority. Mustafa means “the chosen one.” Tayeb Salih wrote the novel in a specific type of Arabic that everyone wouldn't have understood. She thinks he wrote it as a critical message to politicians.
I asked her to clarify about the English translation being more emotional. She said she didn’t mean it was more emotional but it is less precise because there are different spellings of words like “colour”. In Arabic there are no differences of spelling.
George gave his presentation on “Irrealism Indigenization and Sexuality: the Driving Force of Fetishism." He returned to the quote “the periphery is where the future reveals itself. Alternative modernities are of a conflicting nature if indigenization. “Irrealism” is a term coined by Michael Lowy. An aesthetic found on a logic of the imagination of dreams, sexuality and kink weaponized. Mustafa consumes colonization like a cannibal. Jean Morris is a dominatrix. Mustafa was a top but became a bottom. George suggests we read Freud's Death Drive.
After class I rode to Yonge and Bloor and then south to Queen. On the way home I stopped at Freshco for my last day of shopping there with a mask on. I bought nine bags of grapes, a pint of strawberries, a half-pint of raspberries, a cucumber, several avocados, three 1.5-liter jugs of orange juice, two bottles of Garden Cocktail, and a pack of Sponge Towels.
As I was unlocking my bike, I had to pee very badly, but I was determined to make it home and not pee my pants. It didn’t help that I had to struggle up the stairs with a heavy bag hanging on each handlebar. When I got in front of my apartment, I had trouble positioning my bike with the stuff still on it because I wanted to just rush into my place and pee. Then Benji came out of his place. I told him I couldn’t talk because I had to pee and while I was unlocking my door I could feel some urine start to come out as he said, “That’s the way it is when we get old. We can’t hold it in anymore.” I made it before too much damage was done. A little bit of pee had gotten to my briefs but hadn’t made it through to my trousers.
I weighed 86.5 kilos before lunch. I had mashed avocados and salsa with plantain chips.
I weighed 87.1 kilos at 18:10.
I got caught up on my journal before 18:30.
I wrote my Discussion board comment but when I went online Apala hadn’t created a board for today and so there was nowhere to post it.
After writing the above I tried again and a board had been created. The only thing I added to what I’ve written above is that George’s take on the novel was interesting but I think that all human interactions could be analogized with domination and submission relationships. If that’s the case then wouldn’t D & S relationships cease to be a fetish and just be another word for “relationship”?
All afternoon there’d been a guy sitting on the bench in front of Popeyes and shouting and cursing at people. He was a short, stocky man of South Asian background, in his thirties and not unattractive, with long, curly hair. He wore a long coat and a purple backpack. Later he started ripping open all the bags that have been put out for garbage night and kicking the plastic bins over into the street. When it got dark, he started chasing women and making violent gestures towards them. There was also a device he was carrying that was perhaps a game player that was repeating one annoying melody over and over very loudly. Finally, someone took it away from him and when he attacked the man to get it back, he put him down on the ground and pinned him there until the fire department arrived. He was still on the ground after the guy got off him with the firemen standing and talking to him. He was sitting up when the cops came. Obviously, the man is unwell, so I assume he’ll be taken to the psychiatric ward at St Joseph’s Health Centre.
I went to my old computer to copy some documents and photos and was surprised that Bit Torrent had disappeared. There’s no trace of it or of any residue files anywhere on the old system. I wondered if Windows Defender removed it as a bad app. It doesn’t really matter that much since I have it on the new computer and the torrents that were on it had been there for almost a year and I would have soon deleted them. I did a search and found an article that confirms that Windows Defender and several other anti-virus programs have been targeting torrent apps. It might be part of an overall plan to stop “illegal” downloads.
I found and copied an editable version of Untouchable and also copied Season of Migration to the North into a document.
I had my last two potatoes with steamed broccoli while watching an episode of Astro Boy.
In this story Astro Boy and Mr. Pompus are returning from a robot conference in the Caribbean. They board a cruise ship to New York, but also boarding is a criminal named Patch with some other gang leaders and forty-seven very large members of a robot wrestling team.
On the voyage, they hear people screaming about a monster being loose on the ship. That night a giant robot caterpillar with a horny head breaks into cabins and eats all the jewels. Patch has a meeting with some gang leaders and the 47 wrestlers and shows the gangsters that his robot Gangor made $1 million in one night. He offers to sell them Gangor for $10 million. They decide to shoot Patch and take the robot but as Patch collapses the 47 robots begin to link their bodies together to form Gangor, who covers the bad guys in goo and then tosses them overboard.
Astro confronts Gangor but is also covered in goo and then thrown to the sea. Astro Boy is trapped in a ball of goo until some sharks attack it and tear the goo apart, freeing Astro Boy. Astro takes on Gangor again, this time dodging the goo and then knocking the monster apart segment by segment. Patch recovers and says he won’t build any more robots.
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