Tagore

            On Tuesday morning I finished posting my translation of “Laide jolie laide” (Ugly Pretty Ugly) by Serge Gainsbourg and memorized the first verse of his song “Baby Boum.” In this case “Baby Boum” seems to be someone’s nickname but given that this song came out in 1980 and the person being addressed seems to be young, I don’t think that “Baby Boum” is a Baby Boomer. 

            During song practice, my B string broke again. That was par for the course since the one I’d salvaged after the last one broke was old. The one I replaced it with today is old as well, so it might not last long either. 

            At 8:45 I started getting ready to leave for the Global Modernisms lecture. Not wanting to repeat almost being late for class last Thursday when the student covid cops asked me to show my ucheck greenscreen but I hadn’t filled it out, I made sure I did it on my phone before leaving. It looks like I’m not on Google Chrome on my phone and so my U of T password was not remembered. I had to look it up and then deal with the fact that I’m not used to typing numbers and upper case letters on my phone. It took fifteen minutes to do that and then I only had fifteen minutes to get dressed. I had no time for coffee and breakfast and so I only gulped down a glass of soymilk before heading out the door. 

            Since I’m used to traveling downtown by way of the Bloor bike lane, I absent-mindedly overshot College and went up to Bloor. Going back down to College would have taken even longer, so I just rode along Bloor to St George and then south to below Hoskins where I cut across a campus walkway to the playing field behind Hart House, then I rode to King’s College Circle and parked my bike as usual in front of University College. My detour didn’t seem to delay me at all since I was in class just as early as usual. 

            I asked Apala what the Dalit reaction to Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable was in India. She said it’s complicated because they haven’t really had much of a voice until recently. I said that from what I could find online the reactions are generally positive, but one writer said that Anand was patronizing. Apala agreed that he was, but important nonetheless. I said I’d been looking for comparisons between Untouchable and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She said that would be interesting. 

            We'll need a new zoom link for our online class on Thursday because Apala had deleted the link to the lecture room because she hadn’t anticipated going away and hadn’t thought we would need to meet online anymore. 

            We started talking about Mitter’s narrative on the formalist period in India and the Picasso manqué syndrome. Is Mitter fair in his assessment of the formalist prelude and how it led to primitivism and then naturalism in India? Archer says Tagore was influenced by Picasso. There were two Tagores. They were brothers, with one being a poet and the other a painter. There was a paradigm shift in the whole structure of thinking. 

            I suggested that in such a multicultural society as India maybe representational art would be a negative thing. I explained that representational art would tend to only represent one culture and thus leave others out. I suggested that non-representational art might be less exclusionary. 

            Primitivism and premodernism is purer. But primitivism can also be anticolonial. There was the creation of an intelligentsia that separated their selves from their own culture. The form of a hybrid intelligentsia taking a stand against their own culture. Reactionary primitivism. 

            Apala says she likes Tagore's art. What are Mitter's failures on Tagore? 

            We looked at Tagore’s A Cubist Scene. It features two Cubist boats on a much more traditional and perhaps Japanese-influenced painting of turbulent ocean waves. Two notions of autonomy juxtaposed. We also looked at his Cubist City but didn’t have time to discuss it. 

            Gleb was scheduled to begin his presentation, but he couldn't get it set up right away and so Mik went first. His presentation was “A Contemporary viewing of Chinua Achebe's "An Image of Africa.” Mik is a sociology major. His basic argument was that even if Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is not the worst racism, it’s still bad. He gives examples of microaggressions such as a white person clutching their purse when a black man walks by. I agree that is a microaggression but his quoting of Achebe’s relating of the conversation he had with the stranger in a parking lot about the existence of African literature and when the stranger says, “I guess I'll have to take your course to find out about it”, that is not necessarily micro-aggression. The man may not be saying that he can’t find out about the subject by other means. It may be more of a compliment and a way of saying, “You may be the one from whom I could learn best about this topic. This kind of thing is said all the time and it could just as easily have happened with a professor of architecture and the stranger saying, “I didn’t know they had Art Deco in the 1950s. I guess I should take your course to find out about it.” It’s more likely a moment of politesse with a stranger than an act of microaggression. 

            Mik argues against Cedric Watts’s “A Bloody Racist” in which Watts responds to Achebe’s declaration of Conrad being a racist. He then talked about Black Lives Matter and defunding the police. Both of which are legitimate and important things to talk about, but he seemed to be ranting far off-topic. I would have preferred to hear more detailed support of Achebe’s argument that Joseph Conrad is racist. As it was the presentation seemed to take it for granted that Achebe is right and move on from there. 

            We took a break. 

            Gleb’s presentation was on Friedman's “Spatial Politics of Periodizing Modernisms” and her analysis of Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. Her ideas run parallel with the theory of relativity. Space and time are not absolutes. She criticizes Jameson's definition of Modernism and says Modernism never began or ended. She breaks modernism into geomodernisms. Intermixing of cultures must happen. There has to be a hybrid. Britain and Africa are imitative of one another. Mustafa in Season of Migration to the North is a hybrid. Different locations have each their own unique time and space of modernism. Modernism invents tradition. Tradition suppresses modernity. Mustafa is a mimic.

            I asked Gleb about Mustafa's disconnection from family and the narrator's idealized connection with his. Is Mustafa the divided North and South Sudan? 

            Apala lectured for the last half hour on Friedman. Contact zones often involve violence. Friedman on Glissant talking about creolization. In circular nomadism, every periphery is a centre. Polycentric modernisms. Indigenizations. 

            I wasn’t clear on what indigenization is and asked for a definition but didn’t really get one. I wondered if it just means “making more indigenous” and she said it is. She said there is a necessary process of fabrication. I guess it involves the empowerment of indigenous communities by expressing indigenous character by using non-indigenous techniques and artforms. I would think the work of Cree artist Kent Monkman might fit that definition. 

            On the way home I stopped at PC Shop to tell Tom about my monitor’s incompatibility with the new computer. He said if the only adaptor he gave me that works is the VGA, my monitor must be very old. He advised me that if I buy another monitor, I should make sure that it either has an HDMI or a DVI plug. I also returned the keyboard he’d given me because it started missing letters yesterday. He gave me another new one. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos before lunch. 

            I weighed 87 kilos at 18:00. 

            I got caught up on my journal at about 19:00. 

            I wrote and posted my Discussion comment on today’s lecture. 

            I had a potato with steamed frozen peas and gravy while watching an episode of Astro Boy.

            In this story Astro Boy and some friends come across a strange flower in the forest. The boys want to pick it, but Astro Boy stops them and tells them a story about a boy named Lodar from the planet Zykobee. His planet was recently destroyed and now an army of giant robots in a fleet of flying saucers has come to steal the water from Earth. They begin to suck up the water in geysers from the lakes. Astro Boy can’t destroy the ships with brute force because the hulls of the ships heal themselves as they are penetrated. He learns from Lodar how to turn off the heaters in the ships which causes the geysers to freeze and destroy the ships. In the end, Lodar dies but it turns out he is a plant and asks Astro Boy to plant him. Lodar is the flower they have found in the woods. 

            Before bed I found a few bedbugs in a couple of old nests along the corners of the bedroom walls and one on the upper hinge of the old exit door.