The Tyranny of Happiness

            When I arrived at the food bank on Saturday, November 26^th, as soon as I pulled my bike into the driveway I asked an elderly man standing near the back of what looked like the line-up, who the last one in line was, and he said it was him. As I walked up the driveway to the tree where I lock my bike, a tall, early middle-aged Tibetan man was walking from the very end of the driveway where I’d assumed he’d just urinated behind a building. After I locked my bike and walked back to the line I saw that the Tibetan man was standing behind the man I’d spoken to at first. I asked the Tibetan guy whom he was behind and he pointed to the old man. So I guess he’d gotten there, saw his place in line behind the old man without saying anything, and then went to the back to relieve himself.

            A few more people arrived and I noticed that I was making a mental note of their positions. Some stood in line and some didn’t but I knew their place and reminded some people of their real positions once the line finally tried to form.

            There was a loud conversation going on among the women from the Caribbean and a regular who I think is from Nova Scotia, who sit near the door. The big woman from Jamaica said, “Some people walk around with guns, and that’s their choice! Some people like to take drugs and that’s their choice! Some people go to the food bank, and that’s their choice!” Later she said, “Some backward fucking countries like Granada say that kids don’t need to go to school!”

            Three women arrived that gave off the vibe that they live together in the same group home. They were also all smoking at the same time.

            Joe, the manager and one of the volunteers that work reception, came out to make an announcement that they would be giving out turkey or ham vouchers early this year to avoid the rush, and that they’d start giving out the turkeys on December 9^th. One of the group home women asked, “Can I get a turkey?” and the Caribbean women near the door burst out laughing. Joe told her, “Not today!”

            The people in line have to take turns to go inside the food bank to get a coffee and a pastry. The group home women took turns and the shorter one in the mackinaw came out holding a sheet of white wrapping paper by its bottom centre so that between her fingers and the paper was a pastry inside like the pistil of a flower into which she shoved her face like an overweight bee. “What did you get?” asked one of the other women. She pulled her face out from the cellulose bloom and said, while still chewing, “A donut!” “I didn’t see any donuts!” he friend complained.

            At around 9:50 when I took my place in line, I saw that the Tibetan guy had moved far ahead, butting in while riding inside the Trojan horse of his conversation with the middle aged Tibetan woman who seemed to have a place further up in line. I stepped in behind the older man, but his friend who’d been just ahead of him the whole time as they chatted, had fallen just behind him. Just so I knew for sure where I stood, I asked him to confirm his place. The older man explained that the man behind him was indeed ahead of him and then added, “Don’t worry, be happy!” I responded that I would not worry but didn’t need to be happy. He wanted to know why. I said I don’t think happiness is important. He couldn’t understand why happiness would not be important. I said that it’s more important to be interested. He held two fingers together and extended his hand, arguing, “Happiness and being interested are like this!” I countered that I was interested in what he had just said but it did not make me happy at all. He suggested that if one is not happy, they are lost. I said happiness is only a drug. He made the point that he didn’t smoke happiness.

            While we were talking, next to us at the foot of the fire escape was a disheveled young white man on roller blades, shuffling his skates and nodding his head to the beat of a rap song that he was blasting on his portable system and in which the singer was authoritatively declaring his command over “Bitches” and “Muthafukahs” and indicating that “Niggahs beddah move aside!”

I explained that what I’d said about happiness being a drug was an analogy for the fact that people feel the need to pursue happiness. In our society we are almost bullied from the start of our lives with the insistence that we be happy and so it has been so ingrained in our social conscience that we must be happy that even if we are not happy we will convince ourselves that we are because if we are not happy we are betraying our function as members of society and are in danger of becoming cast out if someone were to discover our secret. He protested that unhappiness results from mistakes. He said that if a person makes a mistake, they become unhappy with themselves and then he indicated, for example, that everybody that comes to the food bank has made a mistake. I pressed him to confirm that he was claiming that everyone that comes to the food bank has made a mistake and is therefore unhappy. He confirmed that that is the case. I challenged that he had already claimed that he was happy and so I wondered if he thought that he was the only happy person here. He suddenly laughed with surprise and then nodded. Then he affirmed that he indeed was the only happy person at the food bank, though I discerned from his laughter a sheepish embarrassment that he’d just been caught.

He wanted to know if I’d lost my job. I answered that I work part time and I go to school part time. He asked what kind of school. I told him that I go to university. He inquired as to what I was studying and I told him that I was an English major, but that I minor in French and Philosophy. He wondered if I was studying French because I planned to go to Quebec to get a job. I said that was not the case and that I study it because I’m Canadian and that Canada is bilingual and that I like the language. I added that my mother spoke French and then he nodded and settled on that being my reason for wanting to learn French.

He then asked why I was studying philosophy. I explained that I’ve always been interested in philosophy. This brought him back to the idea of mistakes. He said that when people make the same mistakes over and over again, they do so because they are stupid. I argued that chances are that if someone is repeating behaviour it’s because they are stuck because of a mental illness. I pointed out that “stupid” is an ugly word. He agreed that he probably shouldn’t use it and then asked me to confirm that I was saying that people that repeat the same mistakes over and over are mentally ill. I explained that there is a mental hospital a few blocks east of Parkdale that no longer houses mentally ill people. Parkdale is the nearest cheap rent neighbourhood to the hospital and that is why there are more mentally ill people here than in any part of Toronto. I was about to describe what I observe from my window looking out on Queen Street in Parkdale, when the door person separated us by letting him in. When I was allowed inside, he was on his way out. We each said, “Nice talking to you!” and I went to get my number and my turkey voucher. Desmond was working reception and confirmed when I asked that I don’t have to pick up my turkey on December 9^th, but could do so anytime up till December 23^rd. I got number 20.

I had time to go home for a few minutes, but stopped off at the Dollarama to buy a light bulb for my bathroom. I opted for a more expensive one in hopes that it wouldn’t burn out as fast as the cheap ones tend to do. The cashier was friendly.

I checked my messages and finished my now cold coffee, then went back to the food bank.

There weren’t that many people in the driveway when I arrived.

There were a few people even at that hour, waiting in line for a number. One of them was a slim, early middle-aged Saturday regular, who is always listening to music through headphones and singing along in a not very musical voice. All one hears is his voice but not the song he’s listening to. This time he was joining in on Steve Goodman’s “City of New Orleans”, as sung, I assume, by Arlo Guthrie. I noticed that he’d some of the lyrics a little wrong when he said, “The sounds of Pullman porters and the sounds of engineers” instead of, “The sons of Pullman porters and the sons of engineers ride their fathers’ magic carpet made of steel.”

The doorkeeper was the big, prematurely grey guy that sometimes volunteers there. He explained to someone that the only reason they put up with him is that he’s the only volunteer at the Parkdale Food Bank that has a drivers license.

For some strange reason, when he called out the numbers, “Fifteen to twenty”, I was the only one that went in. There was no one else being served. The tiny, elderly volunteer from the Philippines called for 15 but I was the only on in the room, so she just served me.

I took a package of lemon jelly powder and another of corn muffin mix. Corn muffins go great with baked beans. Canned beans are okay with corn bread, but they’re a poor substitute. I’m not a bad cook, but one thing I’ve never been able to recreate is my mother’s home baked beans. She used a crock-pot though, and I’ve never had one. I remember one of her brothers also made a great batch of beans that he called “bean-hole beans” at his cottage on Great East Lake in New Hampshire and that were baked in a buried pot underneath a campfire.

I also took a package of wheat free, gluten free, dairy and egg free quinoa chocolate chip cookies. I didn’t care if they were gluten free or vegan but the package was fancy so it made me curious if what was inside was as good as the packaging implied. If I’m that easily swayed, it makes me glad that I’m poor and wouldn’t give the stuff a second glance at the supermarket.

She gave me some more of those little bags of Air Canada pretzels and a handful of bars. There were three Fibre-1 chewy bars, which aren’t bad but I noticed later a couple of those horrible Lucky Charms bars.

I didn’t take any pasta, rice, sauce or canned beans, though there seemed to be plenty of all that stuff. I took a carton of chicken broth though.

I took three small containers of what I thought was applesauce, but it turned out to be some sort of nearly tasteless applesauce derived concoction.

Across the aisle by the cold section, a big woman wearing a helmet, who’s a regular food bank client, was chatting with Angie and telling her, “You’re gonna have to tighten your boots this month!” I approached Angie and asked, “Would you like to tighten your boots before you help me?” Angie laughed and asked what she could get me.

There was a choice of juice or milk, and the milk was a whole liter this time rather than the half-liter they’ve been handing out for the last couple of months. It was also 3.5% milk. I usually only use milk that rich just for coffee, but I took it anyway.

She gave me a tub of 14% sour cream and then asked if I liked sour cream and gave me another. She assured me that it keeps in the fridge. There was a bin of various frozen meat products. She said there was a choice of ground chicken, hot dogs or bologna. I noticed though that there was a package of beef and cheddar smoked Johnsonville sausage among the items, so I took that for a change. She also gave me a couple of bags of frozen egg patties. Those are actually pretty good for a quick meal along with some super fries when I come home late from Canadian Poetry class.

I perused the bread section, looking for raisin bread. The bread lady asked me if I wanted a bag of buns. When I said, “No thanks” she commented, “You’re the healthy guy!” I responded, “I am?” She said I always go for the whole grain bread. I told her that I had enough bread at home this time.

The vegetable lady had potatoes, carrots, a couple of questionable onions and a head of leaf lettuce. She also had Chinese cabbage, but I guess that was instead of the lettuce because she didn’t offer me any.

Meaning is Found Outside Recognition

            When Professor Russell arrived at the lecture hall on Friday, November 25^th, I told him that I had sent him an email the night before, but that it had been somewhat of a false alarm, because I’d managed to hand the essay an hour later. He said he’d gotten it and told me not to worry, assuring me that I would not be penalized for being one hour late. That was a relief.

            When he selected the music from his phone that he always plays before class, which is almost always some kind of techno easy-listening songs, I asked if that was what he listened to at home. He said that he does sometimes, but what he tends to do is that if her hears a piece of music that he likes, he selects it and gets Apple to create a channel based on the style and then they stream similar songs. He said it’s almost always something I like. I told him that I hate it when Google shows me things that it thinks I might be interested in based on the spying they’ve already done into my online choices. They pop up stuff on the corners of my screen and then when I look at the news I always see news items they’ve selected based on my interests. He agreed that in that case it’s usually something horrible.

            Our lecture was a continuation of the subject of photography.

            For Bazin, a photograph is a window to the past.

            The thing that is artistically important about photography is its downfall because the artist is removed from the equation. The photograph’s power to be fictional does not come from the photograph itself.

            In his essay, “What’s Special About Photography?” Ted Cohen addresses the representational problem. There are two ways to interpret the correspondence between a photograph and reality. He says that photography is more natural than painting and compares it’s relation to the subject to be like that of a biological child to its parent and a painting is more like an adopted child.

            Someone behind me had opened a take-out container and the smell of overcooked lasagna was permeating the room in a non-appetizing way.

            Cohen’s response to the problem is strange. He doesn’t solve it and concedes that photography is just representationally deficient. Devlin thinks Cohen is missing the point. To temper the problem, photography makes up for it by being cool in other ways.

            He projects some samples of artistically created photographs. There is the view down the centre of a river, including the front of a canoe; a tree with a red sun behind it; a deliberately slightly out of focus shot looking up from the bottom of an autumn tree; and the long exposure from above of the lights from cars snaking along a mountain highway.

            Bazin says that the transparent quality of film makes it special because in order to make it interesting we have to be artistic. Bazin and Cohen are in conflict, while Walton is only talking about photographs being imprints.

            As a response to the argument that photography is mechanical, Cohen quotes a joke by Johan Sebastian Bach, in which he declares that there is nothing remarkable about his keyboard playing. He just hits the right keys at the right time and then the instrument plays itself.  Cohen thinks there is still a problem. It is too easy to be a photographer because everyone has a camera in their phone. It is always ready to pull it out, point, shoot and post. Remember that high art is produced by a skillful, creative mind in a non-formulaic way.

            He showed a selection of photos that he’d lifted from Instagram, that all looked like they were taken with phones. He seemed to be suggesting that they were accidentally good pictures but I couldn’t see how most of them had any merit at all.

            He took a poll and asked if we agree that photography can’t be high art. 42% disagreed.

            Photography is saturated and so we need a discerning palate. Photographic art lies in its non-representational aspects. The fact that photography is easy is when we appreciate a photo. The things we recognize are easy. When we appreciate a photo we move away from recognition and that opens up a space to appreciate all of the extra stuff. Imagine a picture of someone destitute during the Great Depression. Since you recognize the aspects that are easy to achieve, your mind moves to the deeper meanings such as symbolism, metaphor and expression.

            On the way home I stopped at the Australian Boot Company and someone finally had time to treat my boots. It usually takes quite a bit longer, but this time the manager did it and she was done in five minutes. She commented that I had the Blundies with the laces. I noticed that they did have them on the shelves anymore and she confirmed that they’d discontinued them. I asked about where to buy shoelaces and she said I could get them at Shoppers Drug Mart and I found one of their stores on the way home. I walked around, but couldn’t find any laces. Just as I was about to approach a floor person, three of them went into the warehouse section and didn’t come back. I asked the cashier and she didn’t know, but her customer knew the aisle number, then a security guard showed me where the laces were displayed.  I only found one pair long enough for sixteen eyelets. 

Turnitin is Terrible

            I started the final stretch of my essay at 6:30 on Thursday November 24^th with only about a page already written that didn’t work all that well as a beginning anyway. I had seventeen and a half hours before the paper needed to be turned in online. I spent the first two hours just reworking the first page and then my brain was exhausted so I went back to bed. I slept for an hour and got up feeling fully recharged and after that, other than pee breaks, breaks to make tea and coffee and the quickest bites, I worked for the rest of the day without getting tired till the end.

            I had been offered work at OCADU that day but I had to turn it down for the sake of the essay. If I had already booked when the date of the essay was announced I wouldn’t have dropped the job, but I was glad there was no work for that day.

            The thesis of my essay was to use the Cluster Theory to prove that Leonard Cohen’s novel, Beautiful Losers, is a work of high art. The categories that are associated with fine art as applied to literature are verity, coherence, contemplation, and the requirement of the writer that they have utilized a skillful mastery over their discipline to produce a distinctive contribution to literature. I went through every category and found examples in Cohen’s book to prove my point. I tried including quotes but realized early on that that would be impossible for this essay that was not supposed to exceed 1,200 words. So I just had to put the page numbers in brackets to indicate where the examples were to be found.

            Arguing that Beautiful Losers is coherent seems a bit crazy at first glance because on the surface the narrative is totally incoherent because the narrator is communicating a state of confusion. But the category requires that the work be coherent in the sense of it comprising an organic whole and since the narrator’s confusion is not the author’s, I think I was able to successfully argue on its behalf.

            There was no problem showing that the novel is masterfully written, but the final category of contemplativeness was more difficult. Not that the book is not contemplative, on the contrary, it is extremely so, but the application of cluster theory requires that consideration of the opposite qualities must also be given. In the other categories, the opposite counterpart of verity is shallowness; the opposite of coherence is predictability and the opposite of masterfulness is ineptness. These opposites do not show themselves in the creation of the book at all. But the opposite of contemplativeness is sensationalism and I couldn’t honestly argue that the book does not try to stimulate the reader on a basic level. But the big revelation that occurred to me while writing on this category is that no novel could possibly be fully contemplative. Any novel requires that there be sensational elements to move the narrative along. That however didn’t detract from the work being proven as one of fine art, because the cluster theory allows for some leaning towards pop art while still being considered high art.

            I still had to fiddle with the wording of my argument for a while, and then I had to present an opposing argument and disprove that. 1,200 words is such a short space to complete an argument that it’s like the essay version of a haiku.

            At around 22:30 I had to start indicating all the relevant pages and make sure the citations were in place. I also cited the textbook article that wrote about the cluster theory and I indicated which pages the article was on, but I realized after handing the paper in that I’d forgotten to put a bracket in my text in reference to the article’s author. I hope I didn’t lose too many marks for that.

            So after working 16 hours that day on the essay I was ready to upload it to turnitin.com. That’s when the real frustrations began. I realized when I arrived at the site that I’d forgotten my password from last time. I still had half an hour before the deadline at that point though, so I thought I’d just get another password. Getting a new password on Google or Twitter takes about thirty seconds if one’s email address is still the same. But turnitin is not a very user-friendly site. One window I called up for changing my password told me that my email address was not on their records. Another one told me that someone else was currently using that email address and so I should use another one. It could be that I was just exhausted, but I could not figure out how to proceed in submitting my paper. I went on the student run Facebook page for the course at around quarter to the deadline and cried for help. Someone tried to help but it wasn’t a solution. Some idiot responded by posting a link to Super Mario Brothers on YouTube. At the moment of the deadline I copied my essay and pasted it into an email to Professor Russell just for a record to prove that I was on time. I then went back to trying to figure out the problem. I repeated the same things over and over. I checked over and over to see if there was some link that I had overlooked or some instruction that I had not followed properly. It had been so much easier with the first essay because I didn’t have to remember a password, but rather just had to make one up. Finally though, at around 1:00, I fiddled with the log-in form and tried what I thought might have been my original password. After a couple of tries the green checkmarks appeared to the right, allowing me to log in and finally upload my essay. Before that I had never been even a minute late handing in a paper.
            Of course, forgetting a password is my error, but turnitin should have made it easier to change it. As it was, they stubbornly made it so I had to remember the old one after an hour and a half of panic. If I hadn’t remembered it I would have been screwed. What a horrible academic “service” turnitin.com is!

Fictionally Deficient

            On the morning of Wednesday, November 23^rd I worked at OCADU. I brought along my laptop with me so I could work on my essay, but I didn’t get a lot done. I worked for Milan Pavlovic, who was very businesslike during class but quite personable during the break. With both his students and me. He’s from Russia but has lived in Montreal, and like me he never learned French. A further parallel with my life is that his mother spoke French like mine did.

            After work I took advantage of the fact that I was already downtown and went to professor Russell’s office to show him what I had so far for an essay. There was only one other student ahead of me when I got there and so I stood out in the hall for at least five minutes.

            I only had about three and a half paragraphs to show Devlin. For the most part, the advice that he gave me jibed with criticisms that I’d already realized about what I’d written and voiced while he was reading it. I talked about getting an A on my previous essay and he said that he’d thought that I’d been on my way to an A when I’d first brought it to him. That made me ask then what he thought I was on my way to this time. He said this one was a little choppy, so I’d have to pull it together.

            Our Aesthetics lecture that day was on the subject of photography.

            He reminded us of what Bazin said about both film and photography being imprint and that they put us into causal contact and literally connect us to the subject.

            He showed us two images side by side. On the left was Van Gogh’s painting of the church at Auvers and on the right was a photograph of the same building.

            Then he showed us a painting that looks like a photograph of a glass, with another glass container beside it containing two pencils. So even though the painting is identical to a photograph it is not is causal contact with the subject.

            Walton calls photographs transparent because they are windows to the object. How can he claim this? If the object were to change before the picture were taken then it would be a different photo without the intervention of the agent. But everything that is the same between reality and picture in a painting is the result an agent making it that way.

            I asked about black and white but he said it would still be accurate. The image of the church would still be the same. Indirect seeing is no less literally seeing because there is no agent.

            But photography as photography cannot be representational because an artist did not produce the image. A painting that looks like a photo is representational. How can a photograph be representational? If it can represent things in more detail it can be representational.

            We looked at two images of Batman, side by side. The one on the left was a rendering of batman by an artist and the one on the right was a photograph of Ben Affleck as Batman. Photographs are unable to create fictions. The drawing represents Batman while the photograph represents Ben Affleck in a Batman costume. In the photograph the fiction of Batman is represented but not by the photograph. The fiction of Batman is represented by the costume that Affleck is wearing. Photography is fictionally deficient.

            I finally watched an episode of Johnny Staccato that actually had some good writing. Johnny is hired by a gangster to carry a suitcase full of rock samples from New York to California. But what we knew that Johnny didn’t know was that the suitcase was switched with another containing a bomb. Johnny was instructed to open the case when he was over Arizona. There is a lot of suspense because the case is almost opened several times along the way. Once by someone else who thinks the case is his and a few times by Johnny, with interruptions each time. On the plane he meets a beautiful woman (played by Gena Rowlands, who was John Casavetes real life spouse). When he finds out that she is the gangster’s wife and that he hates her guts, he finally puts two and two together and figures out that there must be a bomb in the case. 

"Susan Musgrave's Poems Are Like Diane Arbus Photos

            On the Tuesday evening of November 22^nd, George Elliot Clarke arrived, put his bag down and told us that he’d be right back. On the way out he commented positively about the edition of Beautiful Losers that I had sitting beside me. He returned a couple of minutes later with a large package, opened it and handed out our complimentary copies of Geist magazine.

            He announced that he was withdrawing permission for us to write our essays on poems from outside of the anthology.

            Our first poet of the night was Daphne Marlatt, who was born in Australia, so George said we can connect her to other commonwealth poets such as Michael Ondaatje and Dionne Brand. We can also connect her to the Black Mountain Poets and TISH because of her use of projective verse.

            She’s into proprioception, which George says means she’s kind of mystical and thinks the body sends her messages. Looking this up, I see that she’s into Charles Olson’s poetics of proprioception, which means that poetry must be centred in the unique bodily experience of the individual poet. I guess this ties in also with his idea that poetic meter should match the breath.

            The first of her poems we looked at was “Imagine a Town”. The name of the town is the title of her book, “Steveston”. She writes about it with a documentary sensibility. As in Bowering, the subject matter dictates. The poem is playful and down to earth.

            George asked what other poets this poem reminds us off. I was thinking of Fred Wah. George suggested P. K. Page’s photographic quality as well.

            Each stanza begins in the left-right position where the other one left off. There are unfinished thoughts and a bracket begins early in the poem that is not closed. She use stream of consciousness to write about water.

            George passed around a book of poetry by Derek Belew. I notice that rarely when these books are making the rounds do they ever come to me.

            Her next poem was “This City Shrouded”. George says it reminds him of Walt Whitman.

            Of the reference to waves, George riffs on “Waves of immigrants, waves of axes …”

            George told the story of how during one visit to Victoria he joined a guided tour of the B.C. legislature. He sat at the cabinet table where the premier decides which forest to destroy. Finally he asked, “What tour is this?” Someone answered, “This is the B.C. Forestry Association. We built this province!”

            I commented that the first stanza had a great Beat rhythm with lots of percussive onomatopoeic words. He asked me to read it. I started and stopped and so he asked me to read again, “Wind strum wires Jerry’s cove music standing hulls rock in their lines vivid wave on wave oncoming stands of cedar shreds through fog mimetic wind-rustle thrash or throb endless once to hand at Jerry’s camp”. George said, “That deserves a round of applause!” so people clapped. He said the piece sounded like a folk song, so I started doing it again while imitating Bob Dylan.

            This compelled George to give us a little impromptu lesson on meter, which he referred to as boot camp metrics.

            Spondee is  // for words like “heartbreak”, “childhood” and “love-song”

            Iamb is u / for words like “amuse”, “arise” and “awake”

            Anapest is u u / for words like “understand”, “comprehend” and “contradict”

            Trochee is / u for words like “happy”, “hammer” and “incest”

            Dactyl is / u u for words like “carefully”, “changeable” and “mannequin”.

            He told us that what usually gets stressed in English is the unusual part of a word. For instance, in “Battle”, “Bat” is stressed because “tle” is a common ending for many words. In “Running”, “Run” is stressed because “ing” is common. In “Chairman”, “chair” has the stress. George asked for a word, so I said, “architecture”. Zack said, “Good choice!” In “architect” the stress is on “ar”, but in “architectural” the stress is on “tec”. In “Go to hell” the “go” and the “to” are common.

            In English if you guess iambic pentameter” you will probably be right.

            Our next poet was Susan Musgrave. George says she used to be a witch. Then he punned, that if you’re going to cast spells it’s best to be literate so you can spell the spells properly. 

            Musgrave is a refined poet. She speaks of a good poem “that has made the hair on the back of our necks stand up”. View this like Emily Dickinson and her quote, “If I feel as if the top of my head were taken off, I know it’s poetry”. The anthologist says that Musgrave’s work “depicts the rough and tumble of lives lived on the razor’s edge”. George asked us what poet that phrase reminds us of. I guessed “Layton”. George said “No!” I guessed “Acorn”. George said incredulously, “Acorn? No!” I guessed, “Purdy” but he answered “No!” Finally Zack said, “Who then?” George said that poet that most depicts lives lived on the razors edge is Ondaatje.

            We looked at Musgrave’s poem, “Arctic Poppies”. He said it was a decadent poem and quizzed us for the stress on “decadence”. It’s on the “de” because “cadence” is common.

            George said when we read this poem we can think of Al Purdy’s narrative descriptions and tours of places. It reads like a Thomas Hardy novel. The hunchback teetering into view is Cohenesque. Musgrave depicts grotesquerie like in a Diane Arbus photo in which the grotesque is made beautiful. The weather is described as a pervert. Her mythmaking of her memory of a man’s kisses is like Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “Icarus”. The line, “Crouched beside an abandoned grave”. Abandoning a grave is a trick to pull off. The line, “Seeing your perfect body in his” is reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”.

            Musgrave is gothic. Her descriptive qualities add a twist.

            I said that I really like the way she makes a line appear complete but then continues it on the next line, like in “waiting for the fog” which could end right there but the next line begins with “to lift”. George said it was enjambment, which delays the full meaning of the sentence. But I said that’s not all she’s doing there. George didn’t really have an answer as to what type of enjambment this would be.

            We looked at her poem, “The Moment”. A said that the ending is funny because Musgrave is setting us up for the tragic outcome that usually results when a stranger kidnaps a daughter, but the result is that the daughter has not been abducted. She is merely being willingly gangbanged by the boys next door. It’s funny because that last part would have been a horrible thing for a parent to discover if not for the other fears and so it’s funny that a much lesser bad thing is the moment of relief.

            I said that the beginning of the poem, in which the narrator is hearing something through thin motel room walls that sets her memory off to tell the story of her daughter going missing, reminds me of Paul Simon’s “Duncan”, that begins, “Couple in the next room bound to win a prize. They been goin at it all night long” and the narrator feels compelled to tell his life story.

            Our next poet would be John Thompson, but we took our break first. I made an appointment with George for the next Tuesday to discuss my essay. I told him I didn’t really understand the ghazale from the point of view of how to write one. He explained that the lines don’t need to have a relationship to each other except through the mood they share.

John Thompson was another commonwealth poet. He is minimalist and sometimes surrealist like René Char. He was a master of the ghazale (pronounced “guzzle”), which is a Persian form that is sustained by a single emotion, mood or feeling. Remember that Phyllis Webb used the form. In the ghazale a combination of image and statement work together to produce a mood.

John Thompson is one of the most influential English Canadian poets. Like Berryman, he was minimal, surreal and terse. Thompson had a miserable adulthood in which he was constantly harvesting the bottle.

We looked at his poem, “Wife”, which is not a ghazale. It’s like he’s describing a cave painting. René Char did something similar.

George takes a moment to make fun of the province of New Brunswick as being primitive.

Thompson’s ghazales are of earth shattering importance. We looked at one of them, called “VIII”. There is a colon after “I forget: …” The reference to “broken birds” could be literal or they could be unfinished poems. The two lines, “Porcupine are slow, fast in their quills: they’ll come to your iron bar, believing themselves and apples.” George said there’s an old myth about porcupines and apples being pierced by their quills. Later I could find no reference to this at all, other than the fact that porcupines like apples. We know that the quill is an old word for pen and so we can think of the poet as the slow porcupine.

Thompson was refused tenure at Mount Alison University in New Brunswick because he was a poet. His students rebelled and staged a protest to keep him. He got to keep his job but that didn’t mean he was happy.

George began to describe big fire pits where the heathens of New Brunswick burn academic literature.

The poem begins with “I forget” but halfway through he says, “Everything reminds me”. Of the last line, “I bury my face; set it in water.” I suggested that water might be drink. George agreed that was probably what he meant.

The poem is purgatorial.

Our next poet was Don McKay, who is part of the intellectual tradition of English Canadian poetry along with Eli Mandel. There is an emphasis on grammar and syntax. Think of Garcia Lorca’s essay on the “Theory and Play of the Duende”, which is an extreme physical and emotional reaction to art. George added that the backward, primeval New Brunswickers would burn such a theoretical work in their fire pits. He admitted that as poet laureate of Canada he probably shouldn’t be making fun of New Brunswick.

In talking about McKay, the anthologist mentions, “post-structuralist claims that non-linguistic experience may be impossible”. George says, “Every time someone says the word ‘post-structuralist’, like Goebbels said, ‘I want to go for my gun!’” Then he said he wants to see a film depicting a “post-structuralist dance” in which the dancers have razors attached to their sneakers.

We looked at the poem, “Adagio for a Fallen Sparrow”.

George says the line “sparrows burning” is Blakean. Maybe it reminded him of “Tyger, tyger, burning bright”.

The line, “an effortless repudiation of the whole shebang” is reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the way it uses two types of language in one line.

Of the poem, “Loss Creek”, in the lines, “He went there to hear the rapids curl around / the big basaltic boulders saying / husserl husserl …” George said that Husserl was a syntactical philosopher. He talked about the difference between meaning and object.

Think of this poem as having a post-structuralist engagement with Earle Birney’s “David”.

As I was packing up, Zack was the only one left. George had said to him, “Happy Thanksgiving!” so I asked what part of the States he was from. He said he was from “the good Carolina”, that is North Carolina”, meaning the less redneck of the two. I remember he had also mentioned earlier that night that he was a veteran. I didn’t ask him about that.

As I left University College, in the Soldiers Tower next door, the 51 bell carillon keyboard was playing a piece of music. I don’t know what the occasion was, but it sounded nice coming from the old building after dark.

Comics

            I had finally decided on the morning of Monday, November 21^st which theory of Aesthetics to use for my essay. I’d known for the last week or so that I wanted to apply a theory to Leonard Cohen’s “Beautiful Losers” but I just hadn’t been able to settle on which theory would be best. I chose the Cluster Theory and so that morning I flash-wrote a bunch of ideas down to take to my TA after class to see if my choices fit the requirements.

            Climbing Brock Avenue felt even more uphill than usual because of the strong wind pushing back at me from the north. When I got to Huron and College it was whipping at me like crazy as I sat waiting for the light to change. It challenged my balance even though I was standing on the tripod of two wheels and one foot on the curb. I was worried that once I started rolling I’d be knocked off my bike, but strangely, the wind didn’t seem as strong as I moved along.

            As I was riding up St George, a young woman unfairly sped past me.

            When Devlin arrived I asked him if it was okay to write on the cluster theory and he said it was fine, but it turned out that I’d misunderstood the purpose of the cluster theory. I thought it was more about determining the quality of a work but it turned out that it’s more of a social context that separates fine art from pop art and the cluster theory helps explain it.

            I told him I had problems with the category of “masterfulness” including creativity when creativity should be a separate category. He said I could treat masterfulness as only creativity if I wanted.

The guy that sits next to me had never heard of Beautiful Losers. I was telling him and Nancy that it contains a ménage-a-trois with Adolph Hitler when the class started.

We had a review of the last lecture on Video Games. Roger Ebert said video games cannot be high art because they are not masterfully created nor are they contemplative, the player has too much control and winning is too much of an issue.

What is special about video games as an art form is interactivity. Interactivity is more than just determining properties, because all art has that kind of participation. In the case of video games, the consumer is invited to make changes to the work. Interactivity affords unique artistic properties. If someone comes to a video game with a prior understanding and a readiness to appreciate, in virtue of interactivity new forms of meaning and expression can result. It can break expectations, but first one needs a familiarity with what designers are trying to do. It’s like a special kind of “choose your own adventure” book but the category of interactivity is broader.

Our lecture was on the topic of comics. He said we won’t even bother to ask if it’s art. I think though that by bothering to indicate what we won’t bother with we are automatically bothering with it.

What is special about comics?

He projected a page from Hellboy.

Is it a complex of other artforms: a mix of literature, drawing and printmaking?

He projects four pages of a comic with no text that has characters with birdcages for torsos. Then he showed a comic in which the images were photos instead of drawings. There is no printing involved in the production of web comics. Each of the three is missing one of the three listed elements and yet they hold together as comics.

Another definition: Discrete juxtaposed images in sequence for narrative effect to either tell a story or simply to create art. It shares similarities with film montage. But the difference between comics and film is the kind of control over the pacing of the sequence of images. In film the pacing is precisely controlled in a temporal sequence but in comics the consumer controls the pacing and images are juxtaposed in a spatial sequence. There can be multiple perspectives on the same action.

He projects a cartoon strip called Cyanide and Happiness in which someone says to another, “Fuck you jerkjob!” The other says, “I’ll make you eat those words! And then he literally does shove the words from the first panel down his throat.
            This illustrates that the spatial juxtaposition of panels in comics affords metafictional possibilities. The panel positions affect pacing and eye movement, thus generating new meanings like montage. This theory is consistent with the idea that certain artistic elements will inherit artistic qualities from other traditions. That which is special about drawing and literature individually is also true about comics. Comics get to have their cake and eat it to. They draw on several artforms and yet still have their own unique spatial orientation. If film were to try to juxtapose multiple images in the way that comics do, it would seem like overkill. Tenability in comics is not a question. Comics communicate a temporal meaning through spatial orientation. In order to do this a video would have to effectively become a comic and use pause.

What feature does not distinguish comics from film? Being made from a complex of other artforms. What does distinguish comics is the juxtaposition of images.

After class I headed right up to the Jackman Humanities Building at St George and Bloor to discuss my essay with my TA. There were already three people waiting to do the same and more arrived within minutes. The guy with the headphones around his neck was there again. He’s very outgoing and wanted to engage everyone to talk about what they were going to write about in their essays. He said that he was going to talk about Ethics, using George Carlin’s skit about the seven words you can’t say on television.

As they discussed their essays, I could see they these guys all have a much better philosophical vocabulary than I do, and yet a few of them mentioned having gotten low marks on their last essays.

When Melissa arrived, things didn’t go in order. A guy that had gotten there last or close to it bullied bullied his way forward and even said that what he had to ask her might be helpful for everyone. But all he did was complain about how he’d worked his ass off on his paper and gotten a disappointing mark. She explained to him that his thesis had been overly ambitious. They talked for about fifteen minutes.

The guy with the headphones saw her next, for about ten minutes. After that a young woman who’d come well after me said that she was next. I corrected her on that, and then pointed out another guy who’d been there when I arrived. He said that what he had to show Melissa was going to take quite a bit of time and so I could go ahead.

I didn’t have much to show Melissa. A lot of the ideas that I had thrown down that morning were based on my misunderstanding of the cluster theory that Devlin had corrected me on before class. I had written about my problem with the category of “masterfulness” and my idea that “creativity” should be a property on its own. She got the impression from this that instead of the cluster theory, I might want to apply a theory of creativity to Beautiful Losers. I said that considering how passionately I feel about creativity it might actually be a can of worms to write about one of the theories, since I don’t agree with any of them.

            I asked Melissa about my previous essay, saying that I was happy with the mark, but that because there were no negative comments I didn’t know how I could possibly improve in order to get an A- plus. She explained that she hadn’t actually given out any A – pluses, and so it wasn’t a matter of any mistakes that I made that kept me from getting more than an A. To get an A – plus I would have had to come up with something that was philosophically groundbreaking in my essay.

Don't Let Your Guitar Dry Out

            Even though I needed time at home to start a Philosophy essay on Sunday, November 20^th, there was no avoiding doing laundry. I rode through the first snow of the season to the Laundromat.

            At the end of the day I still hadn’t gotten around to starting the essay, though I had rolled around a few ideas in my head.

            For the last couple of years I’ve kept my guitar in the living room, which is the hottest part of my apartment, and so to counter the dryness, whenever my hydrometer droops below 45, I stick a homemade humidifier made of damp sponges in a perforated baggie, into the sound hole of my guitar, to keep the instrument from drying out. The reason I’d originally started putting my guitar in the living room was because I had bedbugs in the bedroom. But it’s been a year now since my place stopped being infested and it suddenly dawned on me that I could actually move my six-string back into the bedroom. Judging by the hydrometer, which I’ve also moved into the bedroom, the moisture level is pretty much perfect in there for my guitar and so I don’t need to humidify it very much, if at all.

            I watched the fourth episode of Johnny Staccato. The show is certainly nice to look at in terms of the photography and nice to listen to, as the musicians that perform as background are outstanding. A beatnik café was portrayed very authentically without a lot of the over the topic comic effect parody that usually happened in television show depictions of beatniks in the late 50s. The writing for the show after four episodes is still thin and the dialogue continues to be clichéd.