Sexually Aggressive Art

            On Thursday morning my computer was back to being fast. I don’t know if removing Adaware is what did the trick. 

            I finished posting my translation of “L’ethylique” (Ethanolaholic) by Serge Gainsbourg and memorized the first verse of his song, “J'ai déjà donné” (I Already Gave). I also adjusted my translation. It’s another list song, listing all the charities and salespeople to which the speaker has donated. 

            I had time to drink a glass of orange juice before leaving for class. 

            Before class, a woman sitting at the table behind me called my name and asked how I was. She said we’d gotten our essay proposals back and told me she was glad we had to do proposals for this course. 

            I said I wasn’t used to them and that the first proposal I’d had to do was for Indigenous Studies.

            She asked how that course was and I told her that I liked the subject matter but hated the course. It’s supposed to be a social science but doesn’t behave like one. I said I got in trouble for disagreeing with the instructors and correcting their information, such as the claim that all indigenous children were required by law to go to residential schools. It’s just not true and I proved that in an essay. I also told her that the professor for that course had declared that any Indigenous people that support pipelines are traitors. But when I did a media presentation for the course, I saw that APTN recognized that the support of pipelines is just another Indigenous perspective. 

            She said they should be allowed to work out those decisions for themselves and I agreed. I asked her to remind me of her name and she said, Freya. I didn’t realize until a few minutes later that she is the Freya who I chatted with the night of the US Literature exam last fall, and I apologized for forgetting that. 

            The class was taken up by three presentations.

            Madaleine gave us a critical feminist comparison of the three novels we studied this term. She said all three novels have male narrators, but I say we really do not know the gender of the narrator of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. All three texts have male authors and multiple layers of distortion. But even there we don’t really know that all of the authors didn’t secretly consider themselves to have a gender other than male. 

            In Heart of Darkness, there are three main female characters with no names: Marlow’s aunt, Kurtz’s Congolese mistress, and his European fiancé. The aunt is represented as naïve; the mistress is dehumanized, and the fiancé is considered weak and undeserving of the truth. In Untouchable some women have names, but they are objectified and featured for their usefulness. Season of Migration to the North is more complex. Most female characters are interchangeable. They fall into three categories: femme fatale, passive, and naive. Jean is shown to be inhuman, evil, and psychotic. 

            I pointed out that in Heart of Darkness most of the male characters are also nameless and that only the two points of tension, Marlow and Kurtz are named. She said that Marlow and Kurtz are male. I asked how they could have been anything other than male at the time. She said that’s also a feminist issue. 

            Someone mentioned that the character of Bint Majzoub in Season of Migration to the North falls outside her three categories. She said she hadn’t had time to discuss her and how she was considered to behave like a man. 

            Eliza and Campbell did “rock, paper, scissors” to determine who would present next and they tied three times in a row, so they just decided she could go first. 

            Eliza presented on David Richards’s article about Primitivism. The term “primitive art” was created by modernists. Gauguin fetishized other cultures From a European viewpoint the captured African art began and ended in museums. 

            I asked about Richards’s criticism that in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon the female subjects are presented as being sexually aggressive. I said I think that Richards is being sexist in seeing women that happen to be nude in a painting as sexually aggressive, or even if he thought so after learning that they were sex workers. Eliza said she thinks the African masks and the fact that they are prostitutes makes their depiction sexually aggressive. 

            I don’t think that the fact that the women were sex workers is an obvious part of the work of art. That is a detail that was learned as the painting became famous, so I don’t see how that fact contributes to a sense of female sexual aggression. As I said in my presentation on the same topic, the masks and the women complement one another. The women wearing the masks elevate the, at first sight, inhuman faces of the masks to penetrate into the viewer something more purely human. Also, the magical qualities of the masks elevate the European women wearing them to a shamanistic apotheosis. It is a marriage between the essences of African and European culture. 

            Apala says anthropology is a 20th-century phenomenon.

            Campbell presented on Planetarity and the Uncanny in the article by Spivak. Planetarity is an attempt to reclaim the planet from globalization and capitalism. The planet is on loan to us. 

            The uncanny is Freud’s unheimlich, meaning unhomely, defamiliarized. Freud says the vagina used to be home so the vagina as a sexual organ is uncanny. 

            Spivak says Conrad subverts the sublime in Heart of Darkness. Marlow sees tension and not beauty in the African river. The river symbolizes the vagina of Kurtz’s mistress just as she embodies Africa. In Season of Migration to the North the narrator swimming in the river is returning to the womb. Spivak is worried about making the planet Other.

            After class, I went to Lost and Found to ask about my USB drive. The guy in the office seemed annoyed that anyone was there to recover lost items. He said there have been no USB drives handed in.

            I stopped at Freshco on my way home where I bought six bags of green grapes, a pint of straw berries, a half-pint of blueberries, ten avocados, scallions, a broccoli crown, asparagus, cilantro, mushrooms, baby Bok choy, three packs of grape tomatoes, a pack of Campari tomatoes, a bag of radishes, a piece of ginger root, some garlic cloves, a jug of orange juice, and a pack of toilet paper. 

            As soon as I got home, I tried to call the landlord about the bedbugs, but I got the message from Freedom Mobile that my account has been suspended. So, I rode over to Freedom and paid for my plan. The clerk was in a bad mood because he was annoyed by the elderly woman before me not paying in cash. 

            On my way home I ran into Graham, who I used to chat with in the food bank lineup. He said he’s moving to Grimsby where he got an apartment for the same rent as the room in the crack house where he’s been living for the last several years. He’s also started his own business teaching people how to use computers and the programs that are required for a lot of office jobs. I was glad to hear things are picking up for him. 

            I went back home and called the landlord, and we had our usual argument. This time he says he doesn’t want to call pest control for only my place because it’s the same price for the whole building. I told him he had a month and a half to do this, but he said it doesn’t matter how long. How could he be so dumb as to not know that bugs multiply extremely quickly? He also said something about wanting to have my place inspected so I prepare it properly. He still thinks that I’m the cause of the bedbugs even though Orkin confirmed that there were no bedbugs living in my place all last year and that the ones I saw were coming from other apartments. I warned him that I’ll call Public Health if he doesn’t do something soon. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos before lunch. I went online to check my essay proposal mark and I got an A-. Apala wrote: 

            ” Your last sentence brings together the ideas quite beautifully! I understand and agree with your observations here and what you're getting at. I just want to add a cautionary note, which actually you've yourself noted, that the argument should at no point be that the "class of outcasts" like Bakha weren't there or did not exist before Anand's novel. The difference here you're getting at obviously is between lived reality and its representation in art. Also, I think it's okay for us to at least assume that Mulk Raj Anand knew what he was doing; that his imposition of the kind of interiority to Bakha, the kind we see in the novel, is a conscious one. And still, Anand does it. That's one of the reasons it makes it a modernist novel. The modernists did not question the fact that they aren't able to represent reality as it is; they were more preoccupied with "how" such reality is to be represented, with "how" such reality is ultimately known or grasped. If this were a postmodernist or even a postcolonial novel of another kind, the representation of reality may not have been as coherent and narrativized or as lyrical (personal voice based). Your focus on form and representation is very fascinating!” 

            I weighed 85.8 kilos at 17:30. 

            I finished editing my lecture notes and posted my Discussion Board comments just before dinner. 

            I had my last avocado, tomato, cucumber, and green onion salad with lemon juice. Tomorrow I can add salad dressing. I ate while watching an episode of Astro Boy. 

            This story begins with the narrator explaining that in the year 2000 there are people from Earth living a billion miles into space on distant planets. Since their loved ones on Earth will never see them in person again, there is an annual Memory Day in which robots are custom-made to be identical to the far-away relatives and they come to stay with each family. 

            On this particular Memory Day, the Science Institute has been especially swamped with robot orders. Dr. Elefun says they need one more robot to look like a boy named Piper that Astro Boy resembles. Astro Boy says he will go and stay with the family. But they complain that Astro Boy only eats two dozen cookies while Piper ate four dozen. 

            While he is there, the couple’s older son Zootie comes home. He has been a gangster but now he has quit and wants to go straight. Astro Boy and Zootie go to Piper’s room where suddenly and very briefly a boy in a transparent sphere appears. Zootie thinks it’s a ghost. Pulling away a drapery, Astro Boy discovers another sphere and goes inside, inviting Zootie to come in as well. Meanwhile, Zootie’s former gang leader Mr. Gorilla and his gang come to take revenge on Zootie for leaving the gang. They plant bombs all around the house. 

            In Piper’s room Zootie explains that Piper built the two spheres and took off in one of them. Zootie accidentally steps on a button on the floor and the sphere disappears with them in it. Inside, Astro Boy realizes that they are in a time-space machine. It goes into the third millennia before reversing and hurtling into the past. Astro Boy doesn’t know how to stop it. Suddenly Piper appears on the video screen. He is flying in the other sphere but it has been moving back and forth in time since he left home. But he’s finally figured out how to work the controls. He says they will have to couple the two spheres when they meet while one is going back and the other forward. He gives Astro Boy precise instructions on how to make the link. After the joining, they go back to the place and time where and when Astro Boy and Zootie disappeared. Zootie discovers that Gorilla has come for him but Astro Boy quickly gathers all the bombs to toss them in the sky where they explode like fireworks. Astro Boy apprehends Gorilla and his gang and then takes them to the police. Piper is very glad to be home again.