I finished memorizing “Ballade Comestible” (Edible Ballad) by Serge Gainsbourg and looked for the chords. There was only one set, and it was written in “do re mi” format, so I’ll have to figure out the first chord by myself and since that’s “Fa”, I need to work out which chords are “do” and so on.
I weighed 87 kilos before breakfast. I had time to eat about three grapes and drink a glass of orange juice before leaving for class.
I continue to see a surprising majority of people still wearing masks.
For the first time, Apala wasn’t in the lecture room before me.
When I was setting up my laptop I couldn’t find my flash drive, which contains all the copies of my course texts. I remembered distinctly putting it in the pocket of my laptop and I certainly never turned the bag upside down on the way. I assumed that somehow, I hadn’t put it in after all and that it was still at home. So all I could do was follow the text on the projector and make notes on my laptop.
Apala wrote something on the blackboard but it was washed out by the sunlight and I couldn’t see, so I told her. She came to look at it from my angle and when she saw it was true, she wrote it again on the side near me.
“World - Globe
Difference - unevenness/inequality
Coeval modernities/modernisms.”
We are moving in the course from conceptions of modernisms to world, globe, globality, and planetarity. How are they distinguished within the framework of global modernisms?
Global concepts of modernity are shaped by global capitalism. We've contested it but we are now looking at global modernisms that are more concrete.
Geomodernisms.
Season of Migration to the North as a global modernist novel as opposed to a postcolonial novel. This ties together the core aspects of modernism such as interiority, etc. with geopolitical awareness in the text. Place and self. Geomodernism as a concept. Place and self in transnational modernist texts in the framework of globalization in how different modernisms construct a response to modernity.
“The local conducts the charge of the imperial and racial.” This sounds poetic but I don’t know what it means.
The presence of a sense of wholeness both temporal and spatial. Globalization is not just spatial. Global capitalism shaping modernism. Moving to theorizing the field as a whole. The Jameson article refers to reflections while riding a train. “The strangely globalized privacy of the modern self.”
Apala mentions a book called 24-7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary, which claims that in the early 20th Century people slept ten hours a night. He says a generation ago they slept eight hours but now people tend to sleep six and a half hours because of 24-hour capitalism. We are isolated but aware of the world affecting our sense of self and time. Cubism as an expression of interiority. The fact that we know everything puts us in limbo and we can't sleep.
But I found that historian Roger Ekirch spent sixteen years studying historical references to sleep from Homer’s Odyssey to anthropological studies of Nigerian tribes. He wrote in At Day’s Close: Nights in Times Past, that what was common was a first sleep, two hours after dusk, followed by an active waking period of one or two hours followed by a second sleep. Sleep altogether took no more than eight hours throughout history and so there was never a ten-hour sleep. Also “a team of researchers from UCLA examined three traditional hunter-gather groups in Tanzania, Bolivia, and Namibia. In this sleep research, they found that the people went to sleep about 3.5 hours after sunset and the average sleep duration was 6.25 hours, with the subjects sleeping less during summer and more in winter.” So ancient people didn’t sleep any more than we do now and probably less. If we used to sleep eight hours and if capitalism is the culprit that caused us to sleep 6.5 hours, then it’s brought us back to normal.
I said people are interested in global information for the same reason that we dream. We don’t want direct contact with our immediate surroundings and so we use global information as a metaphor for our own lives. With no direct contact, the globe is out of our control and therefore we are free of responsibility for our own lives by pretending to care about the world.
There is a paradox in the term “ontosocial” (social being?) in terms of Bakha what is his ontology (the nature of his being? The reality of his existence?) Is this word being used right? It literally means “the study of being” and so when we speak of Bakha’s ontology we are obviously not talking about his study of being. He’s not that interior.
Apala is not saying the subaltern lacks ontology. The gap is seen clearly in Untouchable.
How we think of geocultural consciousness in Season of Migration to the North. The narrator sees both sides while Mustafa only sees one side. The novel tries to force us to justify Mustafa's actions.
We took a break.
Sandy's insightful presentation was on the spaces of travel in Season of Migration to the North.
Liminal space (between two places or states of being), exile, and modernism
The poem about Flanders that Mustafa recites is about a lost traveler unable to return home. Transitional space is a conflict of exile. Lost in liminal space. Salih uses images of travel. Consider the place of the modernism. Why is the narrator always moving? In the story of his trip across the desert, we never see him reach his destination. We only see him returning to the village in the next section. Storytelling represents the liminal space. He hears about Mustafa while traveling. The narrator is left in transition and stuck in the end.
She quotes Apala’s essay: “the narrator's recuperation of agency in the novel is a direct outcome of his experience of hybridity.”
Mustafa is becoming part of the narrator's identity.
Mustafa is transitory after death too. Mustafa thinks his final destination was Jean Morris.
I wonder then if Mustafa's final destination was Jean Morris, then he should have died with her and the period between her death and his death is liminal space.
The agency of the river becomes a grand non-human agency.
Thomas gave his presentation on geomodernisms
Modernism changes in western society in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Geomodernism is the spatial application of modernisms. In geomodernisms, culture-clash creates new modernisms
How a culture views race can reflect in the text.
Thomas mentions how Season of Migration to the North was banned in Sudan.
I pointed out that it wasn’t only the novel that was banned. Many things were banned when Sudan became more conservative. At the time of this novel people in Sudan were listening to Ray Charles and Harry Belafonte and there were two big dance halls in Khartoum. Apala agreed with me.
Push back against the circuits that create transnationalism.
Eunice also gave her presentation on Geomodernism.
She says T.S. Eliot built an ideal centre. Geomodernism and paradigm change.
Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought she said that in China race is a cultural rather than a biological distinction. I don’t know if that’s true about China, but I remember reading Oscar Wilde refer to the English as a “race” and he was clearly speaking of culture. And so, in his day people might have thought also of the French as being a race. I would conclude then that any collective members of a given nation could be seen as a distinct race, no matter what their ethnic background happens to be. Therefore, Canadians are a race, the Quebecois are a race, and so on.
After class, I considered taking a bike ride, but since I needed to stop at the supermarket on the way home, I decided the extra twenty minutes might force the risk of having to pee badly when I got there.
I walked into Freshco unmasked for the first time in two years but I was surprised to see the majority of people still wearing them. I only saw two employees working maskless in the produce section and all the cashiers had masks on.
I bought two lemons, several tomatoes, a cucumber, two bottles of Garden Cocktail, and some shaving gel. I asked my cashier if it was store policy for cashiers to wear a mask. She said they can take them off if they want.
In the afternoon I looked for my flash drive but couldn’t find it anywhere. Maybe I dropped it before setting up my laptop back at University College. I’ll check the lost and found on Wednesday. Luckily, I have another one that Nick Cushing gave me although I haven’t used it for a few years. I was able to use it to copy my lecture notes from my laptop. Also, when I plug it into the USB port I don’t get a message saying “There is a problem with this drive. Do you want to scan it?”
I weighed 86.3 kilos at 18:15.
I was almost finished editing my lecture notes at dinner time. I had avocados, tomatoes, cucumber, a black jalapeno, and lemon juice with a glass of Garden Cocktail while watching an episode of Astro Boy.
This story begins in the 1960s when astronauts orbiting the Earth were seeing strange little lights outside their windows which came to be called “cosmic fireflies.” There’s a transcript online of astronaut John Glenn reporting them. But astronaut Scott Carpenter identified them as ice crystals. Much later they were identified as relativistic protons from cosmic rays hitting the retina. But in this story, a scientist named Dr. Bolt goes up into space independently to study the phenomenon. But after he collects a sample of the fireflies, they turn out to be intelligent beings made of gas. One of them gets out of the container and into his helmet. It enters his brain and tells him he is Toxor of the Mistmen and he’s taking over his brain so that he and his people can return to Earth and conquer it. Later, Astro Boy is entering a stadium to watch a robot baseball game when he sees his friend Specs running. When he catches up with him, he discovers that Specs has just stolen a gold watch. Astro Boy insists that he give it back but Specs escapes on his space bike. Astro Boy flies after him, catches him and forces him to come back to Dr. Elefun. Elefun runs some tests on Specs until the Mistman that was occupying his body emerges and tries to take control of Dr. Elefun. He sucks it into the canister of a vacuum cleaner. Elefun proposes that Astro Boy let the Mistman occupy him because it won’t have any control. So, the Mistman enters Astro Boy and Astro Boy crashes through the wall and follows a signal to where several people have been occupied and they are being given orders by Dr. Bolt. He says they are going to take over the world. He gives instructions to each of them but to Superintendent Walter Bushlet he gives a bottle of germs to dump in the reservoir. Several Mistmen attack Astro Boy and he defeats some of them with freezing. He is too late to stop Bushlet from pouring the poison into the city’s water supply. But he tears out the pipes before they reach the people. Astro Boy is arrested for destroying public property. The authorities don’t believe the story of the Mistmen. Astro Boy escapes to try to force Bolt to be a witness proving his innocence. Bolt attacks him with a giant robot, which he defeats. Elefun convinces the authorities that the Mistmen need to be frozen and that only Astro Boy can do it. Elefun prepares a highly explosive freezing unit which Astro Boy explodes in the ionosphere, freezing all the Mistmen and they fall down as hale on the Earth.
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