Tuition Confusion

           

            On Saturday I discovered that the grant money for this fall’s course had already been paid and what was left over was deposited in my account. The problem is though that only one course has been paid for and that which was deposited is only half the refund I normally get. A letter I received on Friday said that my “application will be reviewed again in January” to determine my eligibility for a 2016 grant. I suspect that they did it this way because, unlike all the previous years, I’ve only enrolled in one half course in the fall. Since the grant is meant to pay for a full course equivalent, I guess they just automatically split the award. That makes it very inconvenient for me because I’m used to paying for all my fall and winter courses right away. The refund I receive is enough to pay for an extra half course, but since I’ve only received half, I’ll have to keep it in my account until January. I’m assuming here that all I have to do to qualify for the other half of the grant is to pass Children’s Literature but it is going to be uncomfortable to have the fees hanging over my head this time around. I’m going to go to the admissions office on Tuesday to try to get an explanation and to find out how sure I can be that I’ll be getting the other half.

            I’ll also need to get an explanation for why my student account has a balance owing of almost $7,000. As far as I can tell that amount is a flat fee that is automatically charged to every student’s account at the beginning of the term and then it, hopefully, disappears when the system gets the information that the student isn’t taking a full course load.

            Since it rained in the late afternoon I didn’t take a bike ride that evening, even though it had stopped by then. I figured there might be lots of puddles to ride through and it also might start raining again, so I stayed in.

            That night I watched an episode of Bonanza that started with the lynching of someone suspected to be a cattle thief by a group of masked ranchers. The wife of the victim was shot in the back as she tried to run for help. Hoss, on the way home from courting a girl named Cameo, discovered the bodies after seeing several unmasked men riding away from the property. Among the men, he recognized his friend, Jim, who was also sweet on Cameo. Jim was later arrested on suspicion of murder, but Hoss was reluctant to give the evidence that he’d seen Jim near the scene of the crime because he didn’t want to incriminate his friend if he was innocent. This was all further complicated by the fact that cameo was certain Jim was innocent and Hoss didn’t want to make it appear that he was just trying to get Jim out of the way so he could be with Cameo.

            The brother of the lynched man organized a lynch mob of his own made up of farmers who were fed up with being bullied by ranchers. Jim escaped from jail and ran off with Cameo but the lynch mob caught up with him and took him to the same tree from which their leader’s brother had been hung. They allowed Cameo to go for help because they knew she wouldn’t be able to get the sheriff in time. She ran to Hoss and begged him to save Jim. He agreed to go there and found Jim on a horse with a rope around his neck. The men were about to make the horse run out from under Jim when Hoss arrived. He forced the lynch mob away from the horse at gunpoint and was standing beside it, about to cut Jim free when the lynch mob’s leader gave the horse a verbal signal that caused it to run. Hoss jumped in to catch Jim’s fall, but he was trapped. All he could do was hold onto him and keep his weight from causing the rope to tighten around his neck.

            The lynch mob rushed in to try to get Hoss away from Jim, so he had to fight them off and hold Jim up at the same time. Hoss was shot in the arm, but still refused to let Jim go. He was told to let him go or die. Finally, Jim kicks Hoss away from him to keep his friend from being killed.

            It seems that the most interesting episodes of Bonanza were directed by Robert Altman.

Fat Bike

           

            On Friday I was prepared once again to leave PARC early because I didn’t think that anyone would come to my yoga class. I was almost disappointed when Lee walked into the room. Lee is the very first student I had when I began teaching at PARC three years ago. I asked him if he’d seen Shelly and he said that he had. It was good news to hear that she’s fine, but she’s just doing something else on Fridays these days.

            That evening I started my bike ride, half expecting or at least fourty percent expecting rain. As I headed north I started to feel little insect kiss raindrops once every few seconds. While climbing Dufferin I felt it increase to a steady tickling of rain, but not enough to make me turn back. At Oakwood and St Clair, a couple in their late middle age were crossing in front of me when the woman looked up and said to her husband, “It stopped raining!”

            I continued along St Clair to Mount Pleasant and then went north one block to head east on Rose Park Drive until it ended a few blocks later.

            On my way home, at Queen and John, a young man was riding a bike with tires three times wider than those of a mountain bike. Apparently this is called a “fat bike” and it’s a trend these days. The advantage is more for off road riding and because of the tires there is less reason to have shocks.

            At Shaw and Queen I waited what seemed like a very long time for the light to change because a guy was leaning on the lamppost on the corner puffing very quickly on a cigarette. It seems to me that quickly smoked fags produce much more second hand smoke.

Who gives a fuck? It's Parkdale!

           

            On Thursday I left for class at 10:00 just in case I might find that there’s no lecture before mine on that day.  There was, so I sat on the floor out in the entryway, plugged in my laptop and plugged the flash drive in on which I’d loaded “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”. I had hoped to finish chapter two before class, but there was no time. It didn’t seem to matter for this lecture anyway, plus, I had already correctly deduced which of the siblings was the narrator of the story.

            Deirdre said that “The Story of the Treasure Seekers” is a book about books and makes reference to some previous piece of literature in every chapter.

            Since the narrator is a child there is no all-knowing storyteller and Nesbit deliberately has him make mistakes as he passes judgment on events.

            The children often play at being shipwrecked mariners but this is also a metaphor for the financial state of the family and the children’s sense of abandonment from having a dead mother and an emotionally distant father.

            The only adult the children feel affinity with is their next-door neighbour’s uncle, who is a writer. The implication is that only adult artists are able to align themselves with the minds of children.

            The children are voracious readers but they can’t see through form and formula. There is no difference for them between a newspaper advertisement and a fairy tale. They take everything at face value. When they see and ad placed in the paper by a moneylender, promising, “worry free loans”, they perceive the shark as a benefactor. I haven’t gotten to this point in the story yet, but apparently the normally ruthless businessman is so moved by the children’s belief in him that he becomes a benefactor after all.

            The book criticizes the false expectations set up by previously written children’s literature. Boys adventure stories of the 19^th Century were exciting but improbable. Alice’s world was sealed off as a dream. But the Treasure Seekers is realistic.

            The story doesn’t really build towards a conclusion, but rather they go from one adventure to another and so it’s more like beads on a string.

            Thursday’s lecture only lasts an hour. and so we  were done at noon. As I turned to head out, a student who had been a row or two behind me called out, “Christian!” I was just starting to recognize the guy with the reddish brown beard when he explained that we knew each other from the Tranzac open stage on Monday nights. It was Brian, the guy who sings Irish songs, sometimes in Irish and who lately has been playing reels he learned on the penny whistle during his recent trip to Ireland. We were both surprised to see each other, as I thought he was majoring in Irish studies and he thought I was majoring in French. It turns out that Irish is just a minor for him and English is a major for him as well.  We walked out together while he told me about a relative of his whom the RAF killed in an illegal air raid during the war between Ireland and Britain. This is the first time I’ve ever had anyone I’m remotely acquainted with in the same class as me, though I don’t know if we’ll hang out at all.

            I rode up to Eglinton and Yonge and then east through the ironic construction chaos between Yonge and Mount Pleasant.

            I was about to walk my bike across the street when a young woman accosted me. She said, “I see you’re on your bike! What are you going to do in the winter?” I answered that I’d be riding my bike. “What a trooper!” she said and then started telling me that I could go inside and get a free pass. Since I’d thought we’d been discussing transportation, I assumed at first that she was talking about a Metropass, but she was hawking for Good Life Fitness. I said, “I don’t live around here.” Because I thought that would end her sales pitch, but she asked, “Where do you live?” I said “Parkdale” and she said, “Oh, we have centres near there!” Finally I told her, “I get plenty of exercise.” And she got the message. She wasn’t even in such great shape herself to be trying to attract customers to a fitness centre.

            That night I heard an argument outside my window, though I don’t know exactly how it began. Someone had disapproved of something a woman had done and she shouted out, “Who gives a fuck? It’s Parkdale!” The woman who complained said she cares, because she lives here. I looked out my window and below me saw a tough looking woman, who I’d seen around for years, holding a two litre plastic pop bottle half full of something that didn’t look like pop. The woman who’d complained about whatever it was the drunk woman was doing was a casually dressed middle class white woman in her thirties accompanied by a man and woman of similar background and age. The drunk woman threatened them and the man scoffed, saying, “Oh, like you’re gonna beat us up!” I think I’ve seen that woman fight and I’m pretty sure she could take two guys like that. From what I’ve observed, there are no tougher women on the street than Africadian women. She came towards him saying, “You wanna try me?” Just then, her friend, who seemed sober, came running up, got between the drunken woman and the trio and calmed her down. As the trio walked west though, she followed after them, calling them out and mocking the woman’s declaration, “I live in Parkdale!”

No Kissing!

            

            
            I had thought last Wednesday that it was going to be my last chance to get help from the food bank because I was under the impression that my Children’s Literature course would be running on Wednesdays. I guess I was still in summer mode because I hadn’t looked in my calendar to see that my classes would be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So I went down to the food bank on Wednesday after all, but this time without intending to take notes. I brought the first few pages of  “The Story of the Treasure Seekers” to read while I was in line, but the line moved fairly fast and so I didn’t get very much read before getting number thirty-one.

            When I came back, I sat in my usual spot behind the bins, but the ground there is now all littered with empty cans and food packages. It looks like maybe homeless people are living behind the food bank.

            Once I was inside and was called, I lingered at the tea because there was a selection in a baggie and I couldn’t tell what kind it was. My volunteer opened it up and I could see that it was decaffeinated black tea, so I took some red tea instead.

            I got cereal (sort of like Shreddies, but organic) , pasta sauce, some yogourt bars, sardines and chicken broth. They actually had some canned pop for the first time. I’ve decided to not buy it anymore but I took a couple of cans of Coke. In Sue’s section there was a choice between milk and yogourt but she slipped some yogourt into my bag anyway. The high point of the haul was a frozen pork roast. As I was walking away from Sue, the guy behind me tried to kiss her, though probably not in an overtly sexual way, but more of a European style greeting. She good naturedly but firmly told him, “No kissing! You can look at this body, but don’t touch it!” There wasn’t much for bread this time around, except for a few buns. For vegetables there were a couple of corncobs, some gnarly carrots and a few Granny Smith apples. After I’d walked out onto King Street, Sue came running out with four eggs in a plastic bag, saying she’d forgotten to give them to me. One of the eggs broke on the way home, so I poured the white from the bag where it had spilled and dropped the broken yoke from the cracked shell into a pan to cook it right away.

            It was a bright, hot, cloudless evening as I rode east on St Clair, in fairly heavy traffic. At Russell Hill Road all the eastbound traffic turned left for some reason, as if there were a detour up ahead. I guess it was just a coincidence, because, as I continued on the traffic got busy again. I went up to Soudan and Yonge, just south of Eglinton and then across to Mt Pleasant. Mt Pleasant, in that part of town seems to be a hub of a trendy little middle class community. There are a couple of live theatres within blocks of each other; each showing three plays a night. It was almost dark by the time I got home. I roasted the pork, but only ate some of it before putting it away, as I’d also made some spaghetti and sauce and that was plenty. 

Introduction to Children's Literature

            

           

            Around ten o’clock on Tuesday I left for my first Children’s Literature lecture. It took me some time though to find the correct location of the classes. I had “RW 117” written in my calendar and I knew that was in one of the laboratory buildings. I checked on the U of T map and saw that the building marked “RW” was across from the Robarts library. My mistake though was that I associated the RW building with another lab building nearby on Wilcocks, where I’ve also had lectures. That one is called the Lash Miller building, or “LM”. I went inside and started looking around for RW 117, thinking that RW must take up a section of LM. After walking around for a while I finally asked someone. As soon as I said, “Excuse me!” I could tell the guy, who looked like a professor, felt tiredly burdened by the prospect of having to talk to me. I asked if he knew where I could find RW 117. He looked puzzled. “This is chemistry!” he said, hoping that would clear things up and relieve him of me. I tried to explain my problem and that I thought RW was part of the LM building but he didn’t know what the hell I was on about. Finally I left and went outside to see if there was a sign with RW on it in front of another building. Once I was on the street it dawned on me that I wasn’t on Harbord, where Robarts is.

I went back to my bike and rode it to Harbord where I found the Ramsey Wright zoological labs. Lecture hall 117 was just inside, but there was another class in session. Some of my fellow Children’s Literature students were waiting outside in the hallway. I would say that 80% of those students were women of about twenty and the rest were men of the same age.

The other lecture ran late. When we piled in a lot of the students from whatever class it was were still there. The professor from that class was at the front with her three TAs and one of them was wearing a bow tie. I’ll bet he thinks bow ties are cool.

Our professor’s name is Deirdre Baker. The first thing she told us was that she is comfortable with books but not with computers, so she might have problems changing the slides with her laptop.

Deirdre spent the first half of the lecture going over the syllabus with us. The first work will be E. Nesbit’s “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”, which she says uses an old kind of writing for children, but at the same time looks forward to the realism that will later become the trend.

The second piece we will be studying is J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which she told us began as a play in which the story would change from performance to performance.

The third book, Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons” is one that was totally unfamiliar to me. This is considered to be the first summer holiday story in children’s lit and the author was actually suspected of being a double agent for the Russians.

Next will be Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”, which she said played with the Victorian adventure style and changed what was possible for children’s literature. It was one of the type of books that Ursula Nordstrom, an influential children’s book editor called, “Good books for bad children.”

Rounding out the first month of the course will be Elizabeth Wein’s “Code Name Verity, which Professor Baker told us harks back to an older style but the imagery is absorbed in the text.

The first four weeks fall under the heading of “Islands, Survival and Empire”. For the second four week set, she gave it the category of “historical fiction”.

The first of these will be a “A Coyote Columbus Story” by Thomas King, whose work I encountered in my Canadian Short Stories course, and who I found to be very a very good and creative writer. “A Coyote Columbus Story” was later adapted as a children’s picture book.

The second will be “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing” by M.T. Anderson.

Deirdre said that both of the above novels boldly confront taken for granted patterns.

Of all the texts, she encouraged us to read them before researching them.

The next story will be Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”.

At this point our instructor demonstrated her opening statement by getting a student to help her move to the next slide. I think the only English professors I’ve had so far that didn’t fumble at least a bit with the technology needed to give lectures was the one who taught Digital Text and the one who taught Science Fiction.

The heading for week seven was “Fragile World, confronting mortality and time” and the works under that title were “Charlotte’s Web” and “Tom’s Midnight Garden”.

Week eight’s heading is “Friends” and she said it serves as a compliment to “Where the Wild Things Are”.

“Harriet the Spy” broke ground because the protagonist is a child without a traditional sense of propriety and her story does not have a comfortable moral ending.

She told us that all the texts work in conversation with one another.

George Macdonald, who wrote “The Princess and the Goblin”, was a friend of Lewis Carroll and a big influence on C.S. Lewis.

She told us that this course requires two essays, two prose analyses, some in-class writing and a couple of non-graded writing projects that we need to do to get our ten percent mark for participation. Of the prose analyses we will need to do close reading of a segment of text and talk about how it carries its weight and meaning. We should also talk about how what is not said affects the meaning of the story.

One of the non-graded projects will be to write about a picture book that affected us. I asked if we could use a comic book and she said “Absolutely!” She said she should have a graphic novel as part of the course material but there’s only so much space.

Also for our participation mark we are expected to send her by email our thoughts about the stories, but preferably before the lecture that covers it.

She said that children’s literature is very new as a field of academic study. It’s also unique in that it’s the only literature defined by age. We should be asking ourselves though, questions like, “Does it work for children?” and “Is it appropriate for children?” We should also keep in mind that these authors are adults writing for children and adults have power over children.

She told us that children’s literature tends to maintain an explicit liaison between instruction and delight. It has its roots in books meant entirely to instruct children in proper manners and religion. But it began to move away from this when children began to make choices according to what they liked from among what was available in adult literature, such as stories of King Arthur, John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” and Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”.

She says that there is a lot of bad writing these days as hack writers try to churn out imitations of popular trends.

She gave us a list of reasons why authors write books for children. One is out of didacticism. A sense that children need to be instructed.  Another is nostalgia for one’s own childhood, as was the case for A. A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame and J.M. Barrie.

Another reason that writers find their muse in children’s lit is simply because a child needs a story, as was the case for Astrid Lindgren, whose daughter was sick and so she just began making up the story of Pippi Longstocking to entertain her.

Sometimes authors are just driven by the need for money. Lucy Maud Montgomery got tired of writing about Anne, but she couldn’t afford to quit.

Another reason children’s stories get written is because that’s just the way the stories come out.

She told us that the most powerful children’s stories don’t talk down to children, and so when we are reading them we shouldn’t look down on them either. She urged us to avoid the word “cute” when responding to these works. 

She reminded us that many of us are only recently out of childhood ourselves. I assume she was referring to me, but I couldn’t tell how she knew.

During the halftime break I introduced myself to Deirdre Baker and brought up the idea that these stories are written by adults. I told her about the stories that I had my daughter make up and how they reminded me of the Native oral tradition stories in which things appear and disappear suddenly and that they were a lot more violent than the stories that adults write for children.

After the break, she talked about our first author, E. Nesbit. She said that her work is inspired by British adventure stories of the past in which authors convey that the whole world would be a better place if they all learned to be like the British in both religion and manner, but looks forward to the post Victorian era. She keeps the adventure but leaves out the British evangelism.

Nesbit was an unconventional Victorian lady, who bobbed her hair, didn’t wear corsets, she rolled her own cigarettes and smoked like a factory and was pregnant at the time of her marriage. She grew up playing with her brothers and turned out both adventurous and headstrong. “The Story of the Treasure Seekers” is based on her own experiences growing up. Her own children have said that she was often very childish even among them. She would throw tantrums at the dinner table and then would stomp away like an angry kid.

Nesbit’s husband, Hubert Bland, secretly had another wife that he would spend part of the week with. When Nesbit was recovering from a stillbirth, the woman who was hired to take care of her somehow got pregnant while she was staying there. Bland’s business partner absconded with their company’s funds, leaving the family dependent on Nesbit’s book sales.

Nesbit and her husband were Fabianists, who strived towards socialism through democratic means as opposed to revolution. Oddly though, Nesbit was opposed to women achieving the vote. Her and her husband were two of the nine founding members, which attracted prominent public figures such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. The meetings were at their house in the country where members would go to spend an exciting weekend of discussion. H. G. Wells said that there was always a rush to get the earliest train out of London, because those who arrived first would actually get a bed.

We read the first two paragraphs of “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”. I was surprised that so many students had a lot of astute observations about it. I thought it was interesting that the children set about to find treasure in order to save the family from its fallen fortunes.

After the lecture I rode up to Yonge and Hillsdale, across to Mt Pleasant and down to Davisville to get back to Yonge again. As I was descending the hill where Yonge Street dips beside the graveyard, a woman in black passed me. She was large and short but with most of her weight divided equally in her chest and her hips in such a way as to be considered voluptuous. Her movements though were not particularly sensual. They were jerky and desperate as she pumped her short legs frantically to try to stay ahead of me.  Passed her during my ascent from the cemetery and though she almost caught up with me a few times along the way, I stayed comfortably ahead until south of Bloor Street, when I became more interested in the buildings than our little race.

That evening, after I’d finished doing some exercises, I went out to the kitchen and saw that several cans of cat food had been left for me at my open door. Later on when I saw my upstairs neighbour, David, I thanked him. He was very upset at the guy who lives at the top of the stairs on my floor. David has been keeping a covered e-bike outside on the deck for several months. The guy at the top of the stairs is the only tenant with a door that opens out onto the deck and I guess he had been annoyed that David had been keeping the bike on the end of the deck where his apartment happens to exit to. It’s not as if he has some sort of right to that part of the deck but he decided to move David’s bike to the other end and inadvertently broke the mirror and the pedal. David tried to talk to him about it but he apparently refused.

That night, I heard shouting out on Queen Street and there was a verbal altercation going on between Bernice Sampson, a woman I’ve known in Parkdale since the late 80s when she was a crack addict and prostitute. I even mentioned her in a poem I wrote back then. About six years ago her daughter was killed by some people she trusted to care for her, but Bernice is still the loudest person on Queen Street. I know she volunteers at PARC and she knows everyone on the streets of Parkdale. The person she was arguing with is the West Indian guy who gets drunk almost every night and shouts at people, quite often challenging them to fights that never happen. On this night the guy called Bernice a “nigger”. Bernice’s response was, “I know what your mother is!”

Transfiguration

           

            As it had only been a week since I’d last prepared my place for the exterminator, I figured on Monday morning that there would be less work getting ready, so I took a little time after yoga for song practice. Once I started my preparations, the only really time consuming chore was vacuuming my couch. It’s amazing how much cat hair shows up on a black futon when one’s cats have white bellies.

            When the Orkin guy came just before 11:00, he asked me to move my bedroom futon out into the living room.

            On my way out, I talked to my new neighbour Greg. He was getting his place sprayed for cockroaches but told me he’d only seen a few “teenagers”.

            I rode over concrete that was blazing in the midday sun, up to Yonge and Manor. I then headed east, dipping down the southern streets to Belize. This was the first neighbourhoody area that I’d explored north of the graveyard. Everything else had been mostly high-rise apartment buildings. This residential section was a bit of a rollercoaster maze of dipping, turning shorter streets.

            I rode into the parking lot of the Anglican Church of the Transfiguration and looked around in curiosity but it didn’t transfigure while I was there, so either the transfiguration already occurred or else the transfiguration is pending.

            When I got home I’d eaten up almost half the four hours I was supposed to stay away from my apartment. The kitchen isn’t sprayed during these bedbug treatments, so not many of the fumes had crept out from the living room. I had laundry that I’d washed, rinsed and drained by the time the technician had come and so I thought I’d better take advantage of the nice weather and get my wet things hung up on the railing out back.

            After that I took a chair out on the deck and sat out there for half an hour or so. I went back inside an hour before I was supposed to but the air didn’t feel that toxic.

"Alzheimer's Ate My Brain"

           

            Early Sunday afternoon I packed up my guitar, printed up some stories and some writing by Paul Valliere that he had asked me to bring along and headed north on my way to the open stage in the park that he’d planned for that afternoon. It was starting to sprinkle as I rode up Lansdowne and I was beginning to regret bringing my guitar. Just as I was about the make a left turn on Dundas, my phone rang, so I got off my bike, walked it to the corner and answered the call. As I expected, it was Paul, telling me that he was considering cancelling the event, because of the weather and because several people had already called to say they wouldn’t be able to make it, in consideration of the rain. He said for me to come anyway and that he could have a few people at his place.

            It probably took me a little less than half an hour to get to Humber Hill Road. Paul’s instructions had been to follow Humber Hill Road and to turn left on Lundy, but Humber Hill stops right away, so I deduced that he really meant that we have to turn right on Old Dundas. I followed that and turned left on Lundy, then found the entrance to the park and was about to go there when I heard Paul calling my name from across the parking lot of an apartment building. I rode over to a small gathering of people that consisted of Paul, his daughter Alison, Kathleen Zinck and Brigitta and John, an elderly couple with whom Paul used to be in a writers group. We all piled into Paul’s small place, where apparently Alison is also living right now, with her dad taking the couch.

            I met Paul’s twelve-year-old dog, Kira, on which Paul had harnessed a muzzle as a precaution, because her behaviour around strangers is not always predictable. Someone suggested that she would only bite bad people, but I think that’s a little much. I doubt if there is really any good and bad among human beings that a dog can pass judgment on. Maybe nervousness and fear in a person could make a dog feel nervous and fearful. But a nervous and fearful person could actually be less dangerous than someone who is so fearless that they don’t manifest nervousness at all. Fearless people tend to be very social and therefore have a lot of friends. Studies show that those with a lot of friends tend to be more indifferent to causing harm to their friends than those who have just a few. I doubt very much if dogs or any other animal can pick up on all that. It may be beating a dead horse to remind people how much Hitler loved animals but I doubt if even the most sensitive dog would pick up on the fact that a human who is kind to them would be willing to arrange for the extermination of six million dogs, let alone six million humans.

            Brigitta was very interesting in that she was so matter of fact and so aware of her situation when she explained to us that she no longer writes poetry because, as she put it,  “Alzheimer’s ate my brain.” John explained that his wife’s short-term memory is gone. She was though, the most engaged of anyone with everyone else in the room and very aware of everything that was happening in each moment. She was especially sympathetic about Kira having to wear a muzzle, and she asked me, “How would you like it if someone put a muzzle on you?” I answered that it would depend on who put the muzzle on me.

            Another fairly consistent part of our little get together was Paul’s neighbour, David, from down the hall. I picked up, from things that he’d dropped in conversation, that he is, but he’s one of the darkest skinned Italians that I’ve seen in North America. Perhaps his family is from Sicily and he has some Arabic DNA left over from the period when the Moors occupied Sicily a thousand years ago. David could have as much as 25% Arabic DNA from that time.

            David also seemed to be an alcoholic. He was there for several hours and I never saw him without a can of beer in his hand. He would periodically leave Paul’s place, sometimes to join the group of smokers that would go outside to relieve their habits, other times he would go home to smoke a joint and then return with another can of beer. At first he was drinking the extra large cans, which he referred to as “adult beers”, but after a while all he had left was the size of beer can that his lingo suggested the beer store only sells to children.

            Another person, that only Paul knew, named Jim Snow, arrived.

            Paul’s purpose for having this event was for it to be a “thank you to summer” picnic in the park slash open stage. He asked his guests, first of all to share something from memory. Brigitta, unfortunately was not able to share anything. John recited something that was not his own. He said that he has been involved in other things of late, such as digitizing slides, so he hasn’t been writing poetry. Jim Snow recited one of the only poems he had ever written. This was for a Spanish woman that he met once. I don’t remember his words, but thematically it was sort of a “The earth stops when I look at you” poem. Kathleen recited a poem from memory as well. Paul asked me to play something, but first I recited a poem of my own: “My penis is the hotline to the red phone in the White House of my heart, and my penis is always ringing, but whenever I pick it up there’s never anyone at the other end.” I sang my song, “The Next State of Grace” and I followed that with my translation of Jacques Prevert’s “Les Feuilles Mortes” – “ … Dead autumn leaves can be raked up and collected, and so as well can memories and regrets that the north wind takes to be lost then into the night’s cold oblivion, but one more thing that I have not forgotten is when you used to sing me your song …”

            Alison was just about to read a poem from her laptop when my phone rang. It was Cad telling me that he and Goldie were on the Warren Park bus and wanted further instructions. I passed the phone to Paul so he could guide them in. He went out to meet them, and so Alison’s poem was delayed for a while. As I expected, Cad was uncomfortable with Paul’s dog. Of course though, Goldie wasn’t.

Goldie sat just around the corner from the living room, in the dining room, and because of that no one but John Snow, who was sitting in a recliner in the corner that actually faced the dining room, could see her. I insisted that she move her chair closer to everyone else. She resisted, but eventually gave in and thanked me later. I also had to encourage Cad, who was sitting in the hallway, to come into the living room as well.

Once everyone was settled in, Alison read her poem. It was addressed to her brother, Alex, who died about ten years before. She started crying and wasn’t able to finish it.
            Jim Snow left, saying that he had a date with another Spanish woman. Goldie moved to the recliner.

John and Brigitta left. When she was saying goodbye though, Brigitta apologetically explained that she would not remember us.
            With the couch freed up, Paul’s neighbour, David, came in and participated more in the conversation. He and Cad immediately hit it off because they had much more in common in terms of racism, sexism and homophobia than anyone else in the room. After hearing a few of David’s statements, Cad declared excitedly, “Everything he says is the truth!” to which David responded gratefully, “Everybody thinks I’m crazy when I say these things!”
            David said that it’s a rite of passage for men in Columbia to have sex with donkeys. I looked this up and it seems to be true in a very small, remote, poor and uneducated section of the country that has been ignored by the government for generations. The rest of the country is deeply ashamed of what they consider to be a stain on their culture.
            Another thing David talked about was the age-old myth that Orthodox Jewish married couples have sex through a hole in a sheet. I knew this wasn’t true but Cad insisted that David was right. Everywhere I look on the internet there are Jewish sites that say this is an urban myth perpetuated by Reform Jews and Christians. The rules for married couples in Catholicism are actually more strict and sexually repressive than they are for Orthodox Jews.
            Alison read another poem that I think was also a rap lyric by her late brother, Alex. I remember meeting Alex at least once when I was running the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy out of the Drake Hotel. We argued politely about rap music because I said I didn’t think it was usually very good poetry.
            Alison has a Bengal cat that cost her $700. I really didn’t notice anything in its appearance or manner that distinguished it in such a way as to make it worth more than the cats that I got for free. It seems a little high-strung and doesn’t get along very well with Paul’s dog.
            A few more poems were read by Paul, Kathleen and Cad. I sang my translation of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Strip Tease” – “ … all of these are just chimeras, from my mouth to my lower areas, because no one, not even you, will get to touch the parts they view …”
            Paul hinted that he wanted us to leave while at the same time saying we were welcome to stay, because he wanted to have dinner. Kathleen and I left and Goldie was trying to edge Cad out but he was lingering in conversation when I walked away.
            The sky was black, except for in the west where it looked like a lifted shade, letting the sun into a dark room.