Trapped In Line-ups With Smokers All Around

           

            There is a shaved-headed middle aged woman that I see hobbling up Dunn Avenue every morning on her way to get a coffee at the Coffee Time, beneath me. She always waits for her “walk” signal before crossing, but even then she holds up her hand to the cars to make sure they understand she doesn’t want them to run her over. I also see her walking back across Queen with her coffee, and when she gets to the other side, she pushes the button again. I don’t know if she is doing it to give the next person crossing a quicker “walk” signal, or if she thinks she’s turning it off.

Wednesday was a cool day and so I wrapped a scarf around my neck when I went down to the foodbank to get a number. I also took with me the copy of “Thomas King’s “A Coyote Columbus Story” that I’d borrowed the day before from the Faculty of Information Library. It was a good thing I did, because I had to wait in line for more than half an hour because there was a food delivery after they’d admitted the first five people, so the rest of us had to wait. There were even several minutes during which the line didn’t move, even after the truck left. So I read the picture book a couple of times, trying to focus on any symbolism that might be in the artwork, though my concentration was hampered from feeling sick as a result of inhaling second-hand smoke from the cigarette of the guy behind me. The friendly volunteer from Jamaica who often serves me at the first three shelves, was interested in looking at the title of the book I was reading. He was glad to hear that it told the Columbus story from an indigenous perspective.

            Coyote is the one who made all the stuff that’s in the world, including people. What she liked to do more than anything though was to play ball, but she got tired of playing by herself, so she danced and sang and thought really hard and caused some beavers to come along. But the beavers wanted to make a pond and not to play ball. So she did it again and caused some moose to come along, but they just wanted to enjoy wading in the pond. The same thing happened with the turtles she brought. Finally she caused some human beings to come along and they agreed to play ball with her. But she kept changing the rules so she’d win every time and so they got tired of playing with her. Then she tried it again but really screwed up because she caused Columbus and his men to come and they stole a bunch of people they thought were Indians and took them back to Europe. The rest of the human beings were very pissed off at coyote but she promised she’d fix the problem. She did her dance and sang and thought real hard and then Jacques Cartier and his men showed up. All the human beings, the beavers, the moose and the turtles caught the next train to Penticton.

            I went home with number seventeen and came back two hours later. While dodging cigarette smoke, I made some notes on my essay comparing Peter Pan and Where the Wild Things Are, that’s due next week. When Theresa called my number, she and Sue were marvelling over a jar of fruit ketchup from Quebec that was available on the shelf, so I took that. It turns out that it’s really just a kind of sweet tomato relish similar to what someone might make Down East, where I come from. It’s good, but it’s not ketchup.

            There was hardly anything besides packages of sliced ham at Sue’s section. She said, “I’m empty!”

            The only fresh bread was a kind of non-sliced white bread that I didn’t want. I took some of the not so fresh blueberry bagels that stay edible a little longer than the white bread.

            There were only some gnarly carrots and a quarter of a cantaloupe in the section by the door.

            I spent most of the day working on my essay. The topic I’ve settled on is a comparison of how children play at being grown up in J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” and in Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”.

            I watched the Buster Keaton short silent film, “Daydreams”. Buster asks his girlfriend’s father for her hand and he challenges him on how he will be able to support her. He says he’ll go to the city to make his fortune and if he fails he’ll come back and shoot himself. He keeps sending back glowing accounts of the jobs he’s doing while his girlfriend daydreams romantic pictures of his success. The reality though is that he fails miserably at everything and of course gets chased by the cops a lot while making wild and acrobatic escapes. He returns to his girlfriend’s father in a pathetic state. He hands him his revolver, but he misses. He failed at killing himself too.

A Child Stole His Children's Book

           

           

            On Tuesday, professor Baker came up to me before class and asked my permission to share an observation that I’d sent to her by email that relates Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” to Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons” In Ransome’s book, a mother refers to her daughter’s as “My young wild things.”

As we were about to continue discussing “Where the Wild Things Are”, I moved back to the second row so I could look at the book on another student’s laptop. Brian was in the third row and said “hi”, and then he told me that his friend’s son had stolen his copy of “Where the Wild Things Are”. That seemed strangely appropriate, considering the unruly type of child that is the hero of the story. I commented, “Then a wild thing stole your copy of ‘Where the Wild Things Are’!”

            We went through the book page by page as Professor Baker fielded comments from us as to how we interpreted the artwork and the story.

            In the story, the protagonist, Max is wearing a white wolf suit and the hood part of it has very long whiskers coming out from the side that are more like those of a cat than a wolf. Also, the only kind of white wolf would be an Arctic Wolf, which is only found in Northern Canada and Greenland.

            Max is standing on two books, nailing one end of several tied together strips of cloth to the wall in order to hold up a tent he has made. He could have stood on the chair that is already in the tent but for some reason he’s chosen the books. He also looks really pissed off, for some reason.

            There is a teddy bear hanging pathetically by its arm near the other end of the cloth. It looks like a victim and perhaps is symbolic of Max’s innocence being the victim of his playing as an adult.

            In the next frame Max is seen bounding down the stairs with a fork in his hand and chasing the family dog, which is a terrier and which apparently was Maurice Sendak’s dog and which he injected into every story he illustrated, including the ones he didn’t write. I commented that the fork foreshadows Max’s threat to his mother that he would eat her up. It seems here that he is also playing at the idea of eating the dog.

            We only had a third of the class to discuss M.T. Anderson’s “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing”.

            The book pushes the envelope of what can be presented in a young adult novel, as there are some horrific scenes. These scenes are made even more horrifying because they are based on historical fact. The language is also very complex, as many people speak the way a classicist of the 18^th Century would speak. The author apparently read nothing but 18^th Century literature for seven years in order to absorb the language. The language is meant to create a distance between the reader and the story. Anderson has said of his novel that it teaches you how to read it.

            After class, I went to Robarts library to check the online catalogue in order to find out if any of the libraries have Thomas King’s “A Coyote Columbus Story”. There was a copy at the Faculty of Information Library, which is in the same building as the Robarts Library. I didn’t even know a separate U of T institution existed at Robarts. Apparently it’s the library of something called the “iSchool”. After entering, I went to the directory on the wall, to try and get my bearings. Almost immediately, a young woman came up and asked if she could help me. She took my up to the fourth floor to the library, but even she had to look up where the juvenile section is. So I was able to borrow the book and now I also know of another part of U of T.

            I went up to OISE to renew some books and then I rode up to Manor Road and Mount Pleasant, and then across to Bayview. It seemed to take forever to get there, as I turned south on each side street. Mount Pleasant and Bayview must tilt apart from one another as they go north. On the way back, I turned on Merton Street and saw the sign for a used clothing store for children, called “Once Upon a Child”. It seems poorly named, to my thinking.

            I watched a Buster Keaton silent short film called “Cops”. A rich man “loses” his billfold in Buster’s hands. Buster gets out of a taxi at a place where a large amount of furniture is sitting out on the street because the family is moving and is waiting for the wagon. A con man on the corner sees the wad of money buster has and tricks him into thinking that the pile of furniture is his and that he and his family have been thrown on the street. Buster buys the furniture from him and then buys a horse and wagon to carry it all with. It also happens to be the day of the policemen’s parade and so almost every cop in town is in one place. Buster ends up losing his way and riding in the parade, just as a guy throws a bomb over a fence to target the cops. It lands in Buster’s lap. He lights his cigarette on the fuse and tosses it aside. The explosion topples several cops and sends every cop in town after Buster.

"... is there anyone on this planet who approaches the dullness of the Canadian Prime Minister?" - Leonard Cohen

           

 

            On Monday I finished typing all my handwritten notes on the essay topics into a Word file. I then began reading them aloud and organizing them into a more academic format, adding things as they came to mind. I still however haven’t figured out which one will be my essay topic. Hopefully it will come to me soon, as I have an appointment with my TA on Thursday to discuss it.

I listened to two episodes of the Amos and Andy radio show from 1944. It was actually a very well written show. The story entitled “Mistaken Identity” was especially good. A criminal who looks like Andy intercepts a letter to him from an old girlfriend who has come into some money and is coming to New York to invest it. Impersonating Andy, he convinces the woman that he is going to invest her $1500 but he runs off with it. Andy is arrested and when he is placed on trial, the courtroom scene is hilarious, especially when Kingfish tries to serve as a character witness.

            When I was heading out in the evening for my bike ride, my next-door neighbour, who’d just come from the advance-voting poll, started talking to me. He said he’d gone there because he thought he’d beat the rush but the place was crowded. I was surprised that they had voting it on a holiday. I’ll just vote on Election Day. He told me he thinks that Stephen Harper’s reasons for coming down so hard on terrorism are personal because two assassination attempts have been made on his life. I don’t know if it’s been proven that any specific plot to kill Harper has ever been put into action. We talked about Pierre Eliot Trudeau and the War Measures Act. My neighbour said that there is a difference between refugees and immigrants and that whichever one is, stays on one’s citizenship records for the rest of one’s life. By the time we were done I was more than twenty minutes later for my ride than usual, so I just rode up to Bloor, across to Yonge, back down to College, west to Beverley, south to Queen and then home.

            I watched two short silent films by and starring Buster Keaton. The first was called “The High Sign”. In it he reads a wanted ad for a crack shot in a shooting gallery but he doesn’t know how to shoot, so he steals a pistol from a cop’s holster and replaces it with a banana. He turns out to be a lousy shot but manages to trick the employer into thinking he has a dead aim. He is so impressive that a wealthy man’s daughter hires him to be her father’s body guard because his life has been threatened with a note that reads, “Dear August, Three times we have demanded $10,000 or your life. Now August, unless you come across today, the first of September will be the last of August.” But it also turns out that the shooting gallery owner is the leader of the group of assassins that has sent the note and they have forced Buster to join their brotherhood. Mr August’s house has been equipped with a lot of trap doors and secret passages to allow for comic chase scenes as Buster turns the tables on the bad guys.

            The other movie was "The Playhouse", and the first ten minutes of it are genius. All of the dancers, the musicians, the conductor and the actors in the theatre, as well as every man, woman and child in the audience, are played by Buster Keaton. But then he wakes up and it just becomes another one of his cleverly comical movies.

No Matter How You Vote, At $163,700 a Year, You're Voting for the Rich

           

            On Sunday at 5:30, when my alarm went off, I did not reach it in time to turn it off and so it went into snooze mode for five minutes. I would normally have gotten up at that point but somehow my brain thought that I needed to turn off the alarm before getting up and so I went back to sleep. Even when it went off again, after shutting it off, I only got up because I had to pee. Then I walked back into the bedroom with the intention of lying down again until I realized that it was actually time to get up.

I spent most of Sunday working towards finding a topic on which to write my essay. I started by sitting down and hand writing a page on each of the eleven topics and whatever popped into my head when I thought about them. Then I began to type out each page and added more thoughts as I wrote to see which topic inspired the most ideas. I only got up to topic seven before I took my evening bike ride, but so far I’ve had more to say on the subject of sea voyages as they are used in the stories of Swallows and Amazons” and “Where the Wild Things Are”. I might though have quite a lot of thoughts when I start comparing Max from “Where the Wild Things Are” to “Peter Pan”.

            I rode up O’Hara, past a building blasting Soca music and as I was turning on Maple Grove there were a couple on the corner embracing tightly and the girl, who might have been drunk, was biting the boy’s shoulder. The neighbourhood is swamped with political posters, most of them NDP because that’s the party this part of town voted for last time. South of the railroad bridge it’s “Re-elect Peggy Nash”, who looks like a hillbilly in her photo and north of the bridge it’s “Re-elect Andrew Cash”, who betrayed Punk Rock to become a politician and who looks like a smiling dork in his picture.  With $163,700 a year you’d think he could afford to get his teeth fixed. On Brock Avenue the sound of a recording of a Portuguese crooner was coming out of a house. I was overdressed in a long sleeved shirt with my leather jacket on top, so once I got to St Clair and Dufferin I stopped a few doors east of the first panhandler I’ve ever seen on that corner and removed the shirt so I just had my undershirt on beneath my jacket. I rode to Yonge Street, singing my translation of “L’accordéon” and then down Yonge, singing my translation of “Le Moribond”.

I stopped at Freshco but before I shopped for anything I had to pee very badly. One has to get the key from the express counter and it’s the heaviest key I’ve ever carried. It’s attached to a piece of rectangular pipe about five centimetres long by a thick chain about a third of a meter long. I guess they’re very afraid of losing it.

I watched Buster Keaton’s “The Haunted House”. A ring of counterfeiters dress up as ghosts, skeletons and ghouls and rig their place of operations to make it appear haunted so that people will stay away. Keaton works as a teller in the bank but he clumsily spills glue on the money and so it becomes very difficult to handle neatly and it sticks to everything. People are sticking to the floor and to each other. Then robbers come in but the money they are given is sticky. They put down their guns to unstick themselves from the cash and Buster picks up the guns to chase the bandits away. But when the owner rushes in to see Keaton alone in the bank with guns he thinks that he is robbing it and so he runs away to avoid capture. He runs straight into the haunted house. It takes him a while to figure out that it’s all trickery. He ends up capturing the bad guys.

Good Conversation and Bad Coffee

           

 

            On Saturday I was in the middle of song practice when Nick Cushing called. He’d come into town from Hamilton the night before and meeting me had been one of the many birds he wanted to kill with the stone of his visit. He had invited me to go out for breakfast but I hadn’t expected him to call that early. He explained that he hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep so he wanted to head home earlier than planned. I can’t remember the last time I went out for breakfast that early. We got in his car and drove over to Pete’s at Sorauren and Queen. I noticed the sign says “Parkdales Pete’s Restaurant”, so either there’s more than one Parkdale or they could only afford one apostrophe.

            This was actually the first time that Nick and I have sat down just the two of us at a table.  I had three poached eggs with bacon, homefries and brown toast. The food was okay and the conversation was pleasant but the coffee tasted like the condensation from a rusty air conditioner.

            The main reason for out meeting was to discuss some voice over work and ad-libbing Nick wanted me to do for an animation project that Nick is working on, and to give me a microphone so I could make audio files of my voice.

            I got home at around 9:30 and made myself a real coffee right away to get the taste of the Pete’s dishrag squeezings out of my mouth.

            I spent most of the rest of the day reading M. T. Anderson’s “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Volume 1”. At almost 18:00 when I only had ten pages left, I decided I needed to take my bike ride. The sky was filled with the ribs, spines and other skeletal parts o the ghosts of whales. I rode through wood smoke and past a dead raccoon as well as over a squashed squirrel and I think a flattened pigeon. By the time I got to Yonge and St Clair it was almost dark, so it didn’t make sense to explore any unknown streets that I couldn’t see, so I just headed down to Queen by way of Yonge and hen went home.

            I finished the Octavian Nothing book upon my return. It’s an interesting and at many points, masterfully written story. Around 1760, a beautiful and pregnant African princess was captured and brought to New England where she was bought by an eccentric scientist. She and her son are in many ways treated like royalty, but they, especially the boy, are actually specimens being studied in an elaborate experiment to discern whether an African child has the same capacity for education, as would a child of European descent. Even the fine food he eats is weighed before he dines, as well as the waste he expels afterwards. The house in which he is raised is full of crazy scientists, one of whom is not sure if anything exists when he is not looking and so sometimes he will suddenly rush to his room and charge in to see if he can catch the matter of his chamber in a state of not being there.

            All of these goings on in the house are surrounded by the growing unrest leading up to the American Revolution. This society of strange scientists is financially supported from across the ocean by a lordly benefactor, who suddenly dies. His heir is a nephew who comes to visit in order to see if he should be investing his money in these experiments. He takes a liking to Octavian’s beautiful mother and she to him. He offers to take her and her son back to England where he would pay for Octavian’s education and set Cassiopeia up in an apartment to be his mistress. When she demands nothing short of marriage he tries to sexually assault her and she struggles with him. Octavian, who has been listening at the door, comes to his mother’s defence. It is at this point that they learn that they are not considered equals to the white occupants of the house. They are both severely whipped and then thrown naked into the icehouse.

            The society then comes under the control of another benefactor and though still considered specimens, Octavian and his mother begin to perform the functions of slaves.

            There is a smallpox epidemic in the colony and so the society organizes a pox party and to inject the guests with the disease in order to develop an immunity. Octavian’s mother however dies and so he escapes.

            He finds freedom as a member of a revolutionary militia until he is recaptured. He ultimately escapes again and his further adventures are in a second volume that we aren’t required to read.

            Though, as I said, it is in parts very well written, I’m reminded of Alice Munro’s observation that she’s never read a novel that couldn’t have been better as a short story. I don’t agree with her about all novels but I think her assessment is right on the money in the case of this book. It could have stood to lose at least a hundred pages.

            I watched the Buster Keaton short silent film, “The Goat”. “Goat”, in this case means, “scapegoat”. It begins with Keaton stepping to the back of a breadline, not realizing that the two people he is standing behind are actually mannequins in front of a men’s clothing store. By the time he realizes his mistake there is no bread left. He then looks through a window where a murderer named “Deadshot Dan” is getting his mug shot taken. Dan tricks the photographer into taking Buster’s picture and then escapes. Wanted posters are put up all over town with Keaton’s picture on them and so most of the movie is a series of comical chases.

I Want His Picture So I Won't Be Lonely

           

 

            I’ve noticed that the guy who rides the little elephantine vacuum trash sucking vehicle for the city, spends a lot of time cleaning around the Capital Espresso. The other morning I saw him even pull out the bench to clean behind it, then he took a coffee break. I assume he gets a little something for free for the extra attention that he pays to the place.

On Friday I finished the last fifty pages or so of Elizabeth Wein’s “Code Name Verity” and bawled my head off.

            I started reading M. T. Anderson’s “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing”, but I got sleepy and decided to doze on the couch before I had to get ready to go to PARC and see if anyone would come to my yoga class.

            At PARC, I had just finished sweeping the floor of the Healing Centre, which is what the room where I teach is called, when a woman walked into view in the hallway and tried the door opposite mine. She knocked on it and asked me if anybody was there. I told her I didn’t know. She left but came back about fifteen minutes later because she’d been looking for the Healing Centre all along. She wanted to take my yoga class but it was fairly clear that she had an intellectual disability, so I had to alter the way that I normally teach in order to accommodate her. She was also about my age but not in very good shape and so I couldn’t give her anything even remotely strenuous to do. So we did mostly exercises for the extremities, along with some light bending and twisting. I had to do every exercise with her otherwise she would lose track.

            Marilyn wore a lot of jewellery and told me she wanted to get fingerless gloves like Madonna so she could wear her rings. She also told me that she has a boyfriend named George and she wants to get his picture so she can carry it around and look at it so she wouldn’t be lonely and it would make her feel good whenever she sees him.

            My cat Amarillo smells like a corpse. It really stinks up the place when he’s here. I’m certain it’s not something that a bath would fix. I assume it’s an internal problem that has something to do with age.

            I switched the batteries of the back red flasher on my bike. It seems that the batteries that no longer serve my guitar tuner adequately are still okay for giving my bike light a brighter flash.

            I decided though to not take a bike ride that evening, even though the clouds looked dramatic and interesting to ride under. I have 300 pages of a book to read and then I have to figure out which essay topic on which to start form a thesis. I have an appointment with my TA for next Thursday, and need to have something of a draft to show her in order to get feedback, then the following Tuesday I need to hand in the essay, so I don’t think I can sacrifice the hour and a half for a bike ride.

            I did though watch another short silent film by and starring Buster Keaton. This was called “The Boat”. He had built a boat in his house so his family could sail in it for their vacation, but of course he hadn’t considered how to get it out. He had to cut the doorway bigger, but when he hauled the boat through it tore down the house. Then, in trying to tow the boat into the water to launch it, his car went in first and sank. When the boat was finally launched, it also sank. Somehow it was made to float. Once out at sea, they were caught in a storm and sent out an s.o.s, but the person receiving the Morse signal asked the name of the boat. The answer was “Damfino”. The radio operator signalled, “Well I don’t either!” and went back to reading his paper. They ended up abandoning ship and so Buster, his wife and their two sons were in a lifeboat the size of my bathtub. One of the boys pulled the plug and their boat began to sink, but it didn’t because they’d reached land. As they walked ashore one could read his wife’s lips as she asked, “Where are we?” and his as he said, “Damned if I know!”

            By the end of the day I’d finished almost half of “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing”. What a bizarre but creative and well written story! But I won’t comment on the story itself until after I’m done, hopefully on Saturday.

Weaving Time and Space

            

           

            When I arrived in the lecture hall on Thursday, the young woman whose lunchbox I saved was just leaving my usual seat. She thanked me again so I took the opportunity to ask her the name of the course. She told me it was Medieval Society.

            Professor Baker was a few minutes late, but came down the aisle-way calling out, “Good morning! Good yawning!”

            She began by politely shaming us for not keeping up with the reading.

            The lecture was about Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”. I’d had no problem reading that book more than five times since the night before. She showed us several slides that featured the text of an interview with Sendak. Some of his statements were as follows: “fantasy is all pervasive in children … We are always fantasizing … Fantasies need a form and so we build a house around them and that is a story …” He said that there should be no distinction between children’s literature and adult literature. He said he would like to take writers who set about to write a children’s story and cut them into little pieces.

            The professor said that children’s literature can certainly teach lessons but that shouldn’t be the reason it is written.

            “Where the Wild Things Are” came out in 1963 when I was eight years old. It was revolutionary because it was the first children’s book that made a hero of an angry and disobedient child. The book features illustrations by Sendak so that the text and the artwork are interdependent. He designed every aspect of the book, right down to the size and the type of paper that was used.

            She said that Sendak said that as a child, when he got a new book, the first thing he would do is open it up and smell it. At this point she encouraged everyone who had a copy of the book (Mine is electronic) to smell theirs and give their impressions. One person said that it smelled “grassy” and another said “woody”. The professor commented that those are hospitable smells.

            The second thing that Sendak did with a new book was to bite it. She told everybody to bite their copy and asked why he would do this. I suggested that it would mark the book as belonging to the person who bit it. The student whose copy I was looking at said that it was a “consummation”. The professor politely corrected that he probably means “consumption” but added that Sendak would have loved the Freudian slip.

She said that the cover design uses the title and author’s name as a proscenium arch. Inside there is a splash page featuring a multi-coloured illustration of palm-like foliage but the next page simply shows the title in a white background. I suggested that the two pages serve to isolate the purely sensual from the intellectual before bringing them together in the story.

One thing that I noticed is that the creatures in the story have the physical proportions of children who are younger than the hero. They are more like toddlers.

What I find most interesting about the text of the book is the way Sendak wove time and space together as he described the boy’s imaginary journey, “Over a year, in and out of weeks and through a day.’ To go over, in, out and through periods of time, makes time into space and space into time, and it sounds almost like weaving or tying a knot.

After class I went to Robarts Library to log into the catalogue and find out of M. T. Anderson’s “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing” was in a library nearby and available. I discovered that there were two copies at the OISE library, so I went there, found it, and took it out. After unlocking my bike, I walked west on Bloor to get to a place to cross over to the south side and heard a woman call out my name. It was my friend Ivy. We stood in the middle of the sidewalk talking about our courses, but mostly mine, because she’s taken the Children’s Literature course and loved it. She said the M. T. Anderson book I just borrowed is one of the best books she’s ever read. We agreed to aim at getting together for a beer around the end of October and said goodbye.

I rode east on St Clair. I stopped at a light but as it changed, a female cyclist passed me. I passed her again before Mount Pleasant. She passed me while I was going north on Mount Pleasant and when I passed her again she started laughing, and commented that we keep taking turns. I stayed ahead of her till I turned right on Belsize, which I took to Bayview and then went home.

I watched the Buster Keaton silent short film, “Hard Luck”, in which he plays a homeless person looking for a meal. He goes fishing and catches a tiny fish, which he uses for bait and catches a fish that would be a good meal, but he gets greedy and uses that for bait, then catches a fish about a metre long, which he again uses for bait, but the bigger fish that bites the hook just takes the line away from him, so he’s left with nothing again.