Non Functional Elegance

            On Wednesday November 30^th, as I was walking to the bike racks south of the Sidney Smith building, a young woman walked in front of me that had her hair molded out on each side of her head to look like the horns of a steer.

Professor Russell had trouble setting up for Aesthetics class because his laptop was out of juice. He asked some of the students if they had a power cord for a Mac but no one did. He ended up figuring out a solution involving both his phone and laptop at the same time.

            We continued with our talk on the subject of Design, but couldn’t have an iclicker review question because of his technical difficulties.

            Functional elegance is functionality with the least complex form. It has less formal or structural functionality. It has the same functionality with less visual complexity. But it is boring. Functional elegance is just one kind of functional beauty.

            Formal features are constrained by function. Simplification is one kind of constraint. Function constrains possibilities.

            Other types of functional beauty:

            Adherent beauty.

            Add formal complexity, but it must be functional.

            He showed us the image of a fancy futuristic purple chair with curves that function as armrests.

            Apparent Fitness

            An object that looks like it is suited for its function.

            He showed a papasan chair on a rattan bowl frame with an oversize cushion.

            Apparent Unfitness

            Adds formal complexity to make product look unsuited for its function.

            He showed a cantilever chair with tubular single base.

            In art there is no objective principal.

            This was the end of our talk on Design. At this point he gave us ten minutes to go online and complete our course evaluations. I guess I could have used my phone to do my evaluations but I prefer doing it at home and I have until December 8 anyway.

            He began talking about Music. What is special about music? The distinctive feature of music is Syntax without semantics.

            He said he couldn’t find one music video that demonstrated what he was talking about, so he brought two.

            The first was called, “Five Minute Music Theory Part 1: Intervals and the Music Scale”.

            Intervals are the building blocks of harmony. The distance between two notes is an interval. An interval is either a whole or a half step long.

            Two frets – two keys – two half steps.

            Major scale. The first note is the root.

            The steps are whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half.

            The other video was “Twelve major Scales on the Piano: a Free Piano Lesson in Piano Theory”.

CDEFGABC

1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5

WWHWWWH

It doesn’t show what happens if one does not follow the pattern. The idea of the scale is that it follows this formula. When one composes music, staying in the scale is staying in key. All notes in a song in the key of C will be in the C scale. Syntax is the structure of the piece.

He gave an example of semantics:

Donald Trump Has The Worst Hair

Worst The Donald Trump Hair Has

I said the second one sounds like Yoda, but no one laughed.

The difference between the two is a disanalogy with language because the words mean something. Unlike music, language has both syntax and semantics. Music has grammatical rules, special grammatical structures, but the notes don’t stand for anything or refer to any kind of meaning.

After class I rode up to Admissions and Awards at Bloor and St George to ask if my receiving the other half of my grant in January would be dependant on the marks for my Canadian Poetry essays being posted by George. He is not a technically minded person and has no inclination of informing the university of our marks until April. There was no one in line at all when I arrived. The woman asked for my student number, but for the first time in years I’d forgotten it, so I had to show her my card. She told me there was no problem if my professor is lazy, because I’m registered into next year. I don’t think George is lazy, but I’m almost surprised that he even uses email. It doesn’t look like he had an email address before he was poet laureate of Toronto, which is what it says on his email.

When I got home, I decided that since I was still dressed, I’d go over to the liquor store to buy a can of beer for dinner. I went back in the cold room and picked a can of Creemore then I was just leaving the big refrigerator when a native guy with a cane came in and asked me to do him a favour. He handed me a six-pack and asked me to carry it to the front for him, because he was getting another, but couldn’t carry both six packs. As we approached the cash counters he shouted the name of the cashier over by the door to ask if she was open. Without turning she raised her arm and motioned him over. He offered to pay for my beer, and I accepted, but he wanted to buy me another and I said one was enough. He almost insisted, and repeated his offer a few times, but I told him I just needed the one. I guess I could have gotten another but I didn’t want to go all the way back to the cold room. Maybe if he’d offered while we were still back there I would have, but it was nice of him to buy me even one.

Deep Image

            On Tuesday November 29^th I went to University College an hour and a half early for my meeting with George Elliot Clarke, to talk about my essay. We were supposed to meet in the Senior Common Room, but when I got there the room was full of people because some kind of event was going on. I heard George calling my name and I saw him next door, all by himself at a table in the Croft Chapter House. I walked in and saw that he was at an enormous oval table beneath a domed ceiling. George was eating his dinner and as I approached he said he had to go get a fork from the senior common room. I offered to do that for him, so I went there and at first glance, saw a plastic fork in the dish rack. I grabbed that and brought it back to George, asking if that was okay. He laughed and said it was fine. I wondered though if there was real cutlery available and if that was what he’d been expecting me to bring.

            Since he was busy eating I didn’t hand him my beginning of a first draft to read. I just described it to him while he ate. He had quite a feast in front of him. I don’t know what was in the takeout container that contained his main course, but he also had blackberries, a tub of what looked like ricotta cheese and he was putting them together on thin circles of flatbread.

            My essay is supposed to be on Confessionalism, but that form of poetry is a lot harder to pin down than I thought. One has to be pretty much aware of the life story of a poet in order to be sure whether or not what they’ve written is fiction or confession. If they are speaking through a character then they are not fully confessing.

            Once George got his after dinner cleanup done, he read my paper. He told me again that I was a good writer. We both agreed that none of the three poets that he listed for this essay topic are very confessional, and so he thinks that I should go with writing about the avoidance of confession, which was basically what I’d started to do anyway.

            I told him my opinion that poets that write from personal experience have a better grip on imagery than those that try to write about issues and events that are not a tactile part of their lives. He seemed to agree. I gave him the example of Soraya Peerbaye, one of the poets that we would be studying in the new year. I told her that I’d heard her read from “Tell”, the book partially about the Reena Virk murder, and also from the manuscript about her trip to Antarctica. I had found that her poems about Antarctica were much better because she was writing from experience and had a handle on the imagery.

            George asked me if I was going to Shab-e She’r that night. I was surprised by the question, since I was going to his class. I suggested though that some night in the second term, he could maybe take the class to Banoo Zan’s event. He thought that was a good idea, but wondered about the logistics. He couldn’t actually require everyone to go. I suggested that perhaps when our fourth paper is approaching, if a lot of us are choosing to submit a manuscript of poems in lieu of an essay, we could all go and read on the Shab-e She’r open stage. Again, he thought it was a good idea.

            We discussed the recent scandal over Justin Trudeau’s short tribute to Fidel Castro upon his death. I told George that I really didn’t get why people were up in arms about it. This was a man who came all the way to Montreal from Cuba to be an honourary pallbearer at Justin’s father’s funeral. Why would people be upset about him saying something nice about the man? George said, “Well why doesn’t he say that? Why doesn’t he show some of his father’s backbone?”

            George wanted to read an article in the New Yorker before class but he said I was welcome to stick around. I took him up on that and sat there making notes on my essay for a while. At about half an hour to class time I took my leave and headed for the lecture hall.

            When Zack arrived I sang, “In my mind I’m goin to Carolina …” I couldn’t tell if he was amused or not.

            George arrived on time. He gave up his last copy of Geist to a student that hadn’t gotten one the week before.

            After roll call, George showed us his new book again, “Because I still like it very much!”

            He had told me about this earlier, but he announced at this point to the class that a poet and songwriter named Joseph Maviglia would be coming to entertain us for fifteen minutes just before we’d be taking our halftime break.

            This was our last class of reading from the anthology, since the next Tuesday would be the night that our essay was due and so he’d just be showing films.

The first poet we looked at was Robert Kroetsch, who George said was a prairie poet and therefore a poet of the dust, gophers and guys with guns. He said he’d worked as a, “specialist for the United States Army, for cryin out loud!” He pushed notions of experimental writing and was upset by the puritanical streak in Canadian culture, as was Cohen.

There’s nothing wrong with writing about nudity. If you see it as wrong you are envisioning it. George said it’s the same with Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita. You have to imagine the scenes. Nabakov uses medical terms to conceal meanings that you have to imagine. “White purse” is not just an innocent reference.

As Canada’s poet laureate, George said he couldn’t criticize any Canadian elected officials by name, but he said that a certain prime minister, whose initials might have been “S. H.” though George couldn’t say for sure, had been a promoter of puritanical values.

George said that Tim Horton’s Danishes are keys to twisted consciousness.

Kroetsch was a mythopoeic poet who used the narrative lyric sequence.

We looked at his poem, “Meditation On Tom Thomson”. Tom Thomson drowned while canoeing in Algonquin Park,

The poem has a decadent energy. The phrase, “The muskeg snatch of the old north” has a pop art aesthetic of treating highbrow in a lowbrow way that was popular in the 60s and 70s. Kroetsch was used to four letter body bawdy words because of his background.

The term “black bottom” can also refer to the Black slum of a southern US town, but also a type of jazz place. Neither of those references matched anything I found online. Black Bottom is the name of a neighbourhood in Detroit that only coincidentally also happens to currently be a Black section of the city. It was apparently named by the original settlers because of the darkness of the soil. There was also a very popular dance in the 1920s that was named after the Black Bottom part of Detroit.

The poem both damns and celebrates Thomson.

There is a reference to a line by Patrick Lane.

George claims that Kroetsch is using the poem to refuse Thomson a godlike status. I argued that he’s elevating him to the stature of a deity, especially in the stanza: “and holy shit mother the muskeg snatch / of the old north  the bait that caught / the fishing father …” The old north (the mother) is presented as a godlike entity with which Tom Thomson (the father) enters into a union. It seems to me that this is Thomson being deified. George argues that Kroetsch makes Thomson into a déclassé god. He’s the god of the Trailer Park Boys. He’s the fisher king.

George regrets that Gary Geddes, the anthologist, did not include dates on this poems, but he guessed that it was the 60s, when Andy Warhol rendered Mao harmless in a Day-Glo painting. It’s a Beat poem, with outbursts in capital letters like in Ginsberg’s Howl.

George said that a Group of Seven painting just sold for a very large amount. Patrick said it was 11.2 million. I found out later that the painting was Lawren Harris’s “Mountain Forms”.

George mentioned that a guy received the Governor General’s for performance art of throwing his own blood at walls. I guess this is Istvan Kantor, also known as Monty Cantsin (but that is the collective identity of several participants in the Neoism movement). I think that it was Istvan and Jubal Brown who were behind a book burning as performance art even that took place back in the mid-nineties.

Next we looked at one Kroetsch’s poems from his book, “Seed Catalogue”, which George told us is designed to look like a farmer’s ledger. The poem begins with what may be an excerpt from a real seed catalogue: “no. 176 – Copenhagen Market Cabbage”. George declares that, “Anything can be poetry. Anything!” The poem follows Ezra Pound’s “Cantos” as well as Charles Olson, bpnichol and TISH.

A seed catalogue is symbolic because it is a harbinger of spring.

The narrative of the poem is discontinuous, with disjunctions between descriptions of seeds, testimonials and biographical moments. The line, “A terrible symmetry” is a reference to William Blake’s “fearful symmetry” in “Tyger”.

The point is that anything can be poetry. Test this by looking at a list of ingredients. Then George dramatically spoke the name, “Monosodium Glutamate!” several times until I said, “MSG!” and he responded, “MSG? Monosodium Glutamate!” Think of George Bowering. Vernacular speech can be poetry. A mix of the tension between poetic and non-poetic speech is what creates poetry.

Our next poet was Albert Moritz. He worked as an advertising executive. George said, “He was a mad man! He is now the Goldring Professor of the Arts and Society, please and thank you!”

I volunteered to read Albert’s poem, “Stabbing”.

Both victim and murderer become symbols of sacrifice. The imagery of ascent to the gods is Biblical. There is a bit of Cohen maybe in the phrasing and in the mixing of the secular and the sacred. The poem is both primitive and profound with the transcendent idea of murder being a ritual sacrifice to preserve our own loved ones. Throwing someone else in the well to save one’s own daughter. He’s digging beyond the headlines to see the metaphysical manifestation of this crime. Cohen, MacEwen and Musgrave do the same.

Then George said, “I have to take it to the bridge now and reference one of the most occult forms: Deep Image Poetry!” (George had mentioned Deep Image to me when I’d met with him earlier and he’d told me he was going to talk about it but he confessed to not quite understanding it.) See the deep image in Moritz’s poem in the move from murder to deeper thinking. Deep image has great connections to surrealism. Pier Giorgio di Cicco, the second poet laureate of Toronto was instrumental in moving forward the idea of Deep Image Poetry. George added, “He was also instrumental in the fact that he plays the trumpet!”

We looked at Albert’s poem, “Woman in Astrakhan”, which George declared to be another example of deep image poetry. I suggested that the woman in the poem is a metaphor for the night. George dismissed my suggestion completely, citing all the references to light and even the sun. I argued that she is entering because it is the beginning of night and so light would be present as she is making her entrance. George still wouldn’t budge. Patrick started to defend my argument but George fought him off too. Then Sylvia began to offer that the woman represented revolution and George liked that. Patrick said, “Oh! So she can be revolution but she can’t be night?” George said, “This is the challenge and peril of deep image poetry.” Suddenly there was a loud, thundering sound outside of the building, too short for actual thunder but I didn’t want to venture to believe that it was gunfire. It turned out to be the sound of a garbage truck and perhaps the echoing noise of an empty metal bin being dropped back into its place. Then George asked, “Are squirrels nocturnal?” A few people answered that they are not. George said, “I rest my case!” This was in reference to the black squirrel in the last stanza of Albert’s poem. I found out later that squirrels are crepuscular in the warmer parts of the year and so they are active at dusk, which still fits with my argument.

I think the next thing George said might have seemed incongruous to the class, though it fit with the conversation that I’d had with him a couple of hours before that. He declared that, “Fidel Castro was not wasting of resources and he was a self-sacrificing leader of the people! That’s all I’ve got to say about that!”

At this point George introduced Joseph Maviglia.

One of the first things Joseph wanted to do is to get a student to use his laptop to take a picture of him and George, then he took off his glasses and put them down just to the right of my notebook on the long desk. I could tell right away that I didn’t like the guy because he didn’t even consider someone else’s space.

He recited a poem called “Winter Jazz” – “I may as well just listen to the jazz … listen inside the sound for something kinder than wind knocking cats down dirty alleys … not pay attention to the man sifting his hands for quarters last spent on the juices of his head’s uneven jukebox … wondering how many fires it takes to warm the wind …”

Then he said, “I got to find my glasses!” I said, “Right here.” he took them and declared to George, “You’ve got great students!”

He asked if anyone knew what “dharma” is. I said it’s “duty”. He said it’s cosmic order. Looking it up later I saw that there are multiple meanings but that my answer was one of them and his was not. If one thinks of dharma in terms of cosmic order it’s not the cosmic order itself that dharma represents but rather one’s relationship to it.

He then read his CBC poem for Allen Ginsberg – “Warriors’ guns full of rampant atrocity … the TV reeling stunned dreams … Allen the leviathan has grown heads … Oh beautiful for spacious skies when the sweat of air conditioning fans the mad line-ups increase … Why Howl? Howl because Dylan almost told the people the truth … Cassady still driving … Mad Gregory, Molock can sure make a mess out of you … Where is the urban ruin here as the saxophone plays in the middle of a dream … There is a rumour of happiness …”

Someone took a picture of him and George each with one arm around the other and hands on each other’s far shoulder.

He commented that November is a month for memorials and that we’d just lost Leonard Cohen and then he said, “Two years ago in November we lost a MAJOR … Lou Reed!” I really resented the implication in a poetry class that Lou Reed had made a larger contribution than Leonard Cohen. That’s like comparing a drawing of Mickey Mouse by Walt Disney to Salvador Dali’s “Persistence of Memory”.

He sat down to play his guitar (another strike against him) and he played the first verse from Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”. Then we heard that thundering sound from outside again. Another thing that Joseph did that annoyed me was to stop and make comments in the middle of the song. He segued from Suzanne directly to singing part of “Listening to You” by Pete Townsend – “Listening to you, I get the music, gazing at you, I get the heat, following you, I climb the mountain, I get excitement at your feet …”

Then he sang one of his own songs, called “One By One” – “Woman I know she wants to talk about the way she feels. At least that’s what she told me … Yesterday I heard a train ask the city how it feels … Your heart is your invention …”

George exclaimed, “Wow!”

Joseph said, “With everyone’s permission …” He asked if he would have time to read one of the essays from his book, “Critics Who Know Jack”. He said it was Beat stuff. George told him, “Probably not.” But he persisted and he got to read it anyway. The piece was called “Full Moon Lou” – “ … Feel that extra dimension … My filmmaker friend, Bill, he bought a yacht, but first he bought a Mercedes. He slipped a CD into his newfangled sound system. Where do you want to eat? Maybe Mars. Genius and high metaphor. The aftermath. The sensuousness of madness. Jim lit it up … off the Rimbaud  … There’s a killer on the road … This aint Sergeant Pepper …Given the present day context, Lou … kicked is own soul around New York … Walk on the wild side a whisper to the inside … Stretch rock and roll to its literary limits …”

I was not very impressed with Joseph Maviglia’s offering to our Canadian Poetry class. I thought that the first poem he did had some good poetic moments, but his song was not particularly interesting and his attempts at Beat derived prose were pretty close to horrible.

We had a short break, during which time a handful of students came down to the front to buy Joseph’s five-dollar book, including Patrick. Patrick almost seemed to be justifying his reasons for buying the book. He said it would be a memory of the course. He was standing in front of where I was sitting and he said, “For five dollars, it’s worth it! Right Christian?” I answered, “Not to me!”

George said that in his capacity as poet laureate of Canada he recently wrote a rhymed poem about senate reform. His parliamentary French translator liked it so much that he took the time to also rhyme it in French.

He mentioned that right now he is working on a poem on National Parks for the minister of the environment.

I expressed regret to George that we wouldn’t be covering Lorna Crozier, because I really liked her poem about carrots fucking underneath the ground. George said that he liked that poem a lot too. He explained that he’d had to make a decision on which poets to leave out and he left out Lorna because she’s a little more conventional than the ones he included. He added that he had been on the jury that gave Crozier the Governor general’s Award and he had included her husband, Patrick Lane in our readings. I hadn’t known that Crozier and Lane were married.

When the break was over, George mentioned his favourite soap opera. I don’t remember the context that brought it up, but the show was called “Santa Barbara”. When I looked it up, it didn’t seem to be critically acclaimed, but maybe George liked it because almost every character in the story over the years was accused of the same murder that happened before the show started.

Our next poet was Roo Borson. George told us that he really likes the book, “Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei” which she wrote as part of the collaborative writing group, “Pain Not Bread”, consisting of Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Andy Patton. He said that the book mixes literary criticism with wine and living deconstruction. They play those terms against every day events while satirizing literary theory. The name of their group comes from the story of the death of French literary critic Roland Barthes, who stepped off the curb, perhaps thinking about his theories on “The Death of the Author”, when he got hit by a bread truck. The name of the group comes from “pain” the French word for bread, also used in the English sense of the word “pain”. I looked this up though and found that Barthes was actually hit by a laundry truck and he died a month afterward.

George said, “I think about contemporary jazz when I think of rhythm. Incestuous cadences! Everybody’s got a cadence! You don’t need to take a political stance. Stand on your cadence!”

We looked at Borson’s poem, “Talk”, the last line of which, “something to be tinkered with at their leisure”, George said is a zinger, like something by Atwood or Musgrave. He compared it to a talking blues song. The title says a lot. The poem covers different groups, different types of talk and the restrictions of talk in each group. There is an oppressive commentary given to different economies of language deficiency. George concluded that the narrator of the poem is a pontificating talking head, like Rex Murphy. A sexist, anonymous speaker employed by Talking Head Incorporated.

We looked at her poem, “A Sad Device”, which George said reminded him of posters from the 80s. There is a cubist collision of disparate images and jarring disjunctures, like the ROM. I commented that the extension on the ROM looks like an alien popping out of somebody’s stomach.

The poem has a kind of deep image, but not really. It presents a transmogrified reality containing a death wish, so maybe it’s deep image after all.

There was a question of to what is meant by “the frozen mammoths in the laundry room”. I said they are the old laundry machines. At first George rejected that, but then he read further and admitted that I was right. There was a good ten minutes of discussion about why they are mammoths and why they are frozen. I think it’s just that they are large and ancient and probably don’t function properly.

Our next poet was Dionne Brand, who was born in Trinidad in 1953and came to Canada by herself in 1970. George urged us to think about that. She traveled on her own to live in another country at the age of seventeen. She has been a member of the Communist Party of Canada and she received her MA from OISE, which George declared is “the red campus!” She is a filmmaker. She worked as a social worker in socialist Granada. The Cubans resisted the US invasion of Granada.

She is interested in nouns and influenced by Pablo Neruda. Nouns are political. He pointed to someone’s water bottle and said, “Your water is political. Your water bottle is political. This desk is political, though it’s also warm and stylish. Everything has the politics of production behind it. Someone is managing the water supply when you make coffee. This is a Marxist viewpoint.”

He told the story of being at the checkout counter at Loblaws and seeing that a bowl of chocolates had been strategically placed within a child’s frame of reference.

I wondered about her poem, “Ossuary I” in which she eliminates the verbs halfway through. I observed that what she ended up with is a list that goes nowhere. George explained that the list is a catalogue and a catalogue is your life. To work on creative writing make a list of nouns. Our identity is anchored in material things and that’s why fire is so devastating. Dionne Brand is political and politics creates abundance or scarcity. She’s always jamming the abstract and the concrete together.

We looked at Brand’s poem, “Ossuary XV”, which George said is about body parts holding descriptions of possibilities of explosions and butchery.

George mentioned related current events, such as native women being attacked by the police and sexual assault in the Canadian military.

Brand telescopes outward and inward, making the connections.

George said that Brand also wrote in the ghazale form, which he reminded us is properly pronounced “guzzle” but added, “Unless you are a Ryerson student.”

George suggested that in the future people might look back and conclude that those people of the early 21^st Century were ridiculous, except for the ones that graduated from the University of Toronto.

With not much time left before the end of class, we quickly moved on to our final poet of the term, Erin Moure. George said that she’s an autodidact that applies pure reason to attentiveness to the politics of language. She is difficult to get through. The poet should not short change the reader.

George told us the story of how he went down to the Royal York and said, “I want champagne and caviar!” The caviar came with little pieces of toast and various sauces. “Holy smokes! $500.00! I don’t recommend it! 15% tip too!”

We looked at her poem, “For Mitterand’s Life, for My Life, for Yours”. Maybe it’s a deep image poem. Mitterand was anti-Semitic, but later denied it. I couldn’t find any proof that that is bluntly true. His early political career was on the extreme right before he joined the French Resistance. He might have been anti-Semitic in the sense that every non-Jew in that era seems to have been anti-Semitic. Maybe he was, but people do change. Maybe he felt that admitting to having once held certain beliefs would ruin his political career. He certainly didn’t behave like an anti-Semite when he was the President of France.

George finished our final class by declaring, “Language is political. There is no escape! We are all convicts in the prison of language! Have a good week!”

Functional Elegance

            I didn’t leave home at all on Sunday, November 27^th. I read an article on Design twice for Aesthetics class and I worked on getting caught up on my journal entries.

            I watched an episode of Johnny Staccato in which he went to hear an old friend of his who used to be a great saxophone player, play badly. I sure couldn’t tell. It sounded like bepop to me. It didn’t seem very plausible that a good musician would have a nervous breakdown and afterwards would just think that he sounded good when he didn’t. There was also the even more implausible element of his piano player and drummer being part of a heroin ring and using the trio as a front. When Johnny got on their trail, they drugged him and then shot him up with heroin. That show was trying a little too hard to be hip.

            Before leaving for Aesthetics class on Monday November 28^th, I changed the laces on my Blundstones. In the package, the laces that I’d bought looked like they were a darker brown than when they were on my boots. They turned out to be golden brown and a lot brighter than I would have preferred.

            I raced with two women on my way to class. One of them had very long, light brown pigtails and the other was a young, big-boned Black woman in a short, black dress. They weren’t riding together but they both kept passing me at and then I kept catching up and passing them. I was ahead of them again when one end of the new lace on my right boot got wound up where my crank arm meets the axle, so I had to stop to unravel it and then double tie my laces.

            There are two young women that always come early together and sit four rows behind me, talking constantly and loudly in Chinese. Maybe it’s racist of me but I find it unpleasant to listen to. Then again, maybe it’s not racist of me to be annoyed by it. It would only be racist if I were to say they shouldn’t speak loudly in Chinese, and I wouldn’t do that. I’ve heard people speak Chinese a lot and it’s never bothered me, but I have to admit that if they were speaking French or Italian or even German loudly it might not bother me as much.

            At the beginning of class, Professor Russell gave us some information about the next Monday’s quiz. Like the last one there would be ten short answer questions. The questions would cover everything from our first class on art and ethics to the end. There had been a bit of an overlap after the last quiz, because we’d talked a bit more about Wollheim’s idea of criticism as retrieval, but Devlin said not to worry about Wollheim for the second quiz. The main difference would be that instead of a 24-hour window in which to write the quiz, we would have 12-hour window, from 9:00 to 21:00.

            Our lecture was on the topic of design, but more specifically on industrial design, which is an activity where one designs man-made objects for practical use. The designer focuses on external features that one can perceive and control, but not on the engineering. They do not make the objects.

            He showed images of a kitchen counter, a chair, a table and a bed. These were examples of Modernist furniture design. Modernism rejects ornamentation, so no details, including engravings and carvings. According to early 20^th Century architect, Adolph Loos, we live in a time when art is for artists and so there should be no art in design.

            The problem is that not everyone wants products without ornament and so as a response to Modernism came Postmodernism in design.

            He showed us images of colonial style kitchen; an ornate brass bed; a kidney shaped table; and a lamp, the base of which was shaped like a woman’s leg and foot in fishnet stocking and stiletto shoe that was reminiscent of the lamp from the movie “A Christmas Story”.

            He took an iclicker poll, asking us if there is an objective principal of good design. 34% somewhat agreed, while 24%, including me, somewhat disagreed.

            If the object performs its function, what is wrong with it being decorated? Decoration is perhaps wasteful. Ornamentation goes out of style easily and clutters the environment.

            What if design can be aesthetically pleasing without being frilly?

            He showed the image of an Anglepoise style balanced-arm lamp and another of the classic AB1 Braun alarm clock. There are certain designs that stand the test of time, with functional elegance. So Articulate Functionalism may be better than Post Modernism. Less is more.

            He showed the image of the Diamond Rio PMP300, which was the first commercially successful MP3 player, beside the image of the first ipod. The ipod had a wheel for controlling the menu compared to buttons on the Rio situated around a circle in the same position. The ipod was simpler, more elegant and it solved the design problem effectively.

            Geoff mentioned the Mac being so accessible that entry-level users can’t learn about computers.

            Functional elegance achieves function in a less complex way, but it’s boring. I look at the ipod and I think it looks sterile and almost like a medical instrument and so in that sense its design is disturbing.

            He showed us a chart featuring the heading of Functional Beauty (function must constrain form), with subheadings, Functional Elegance that has achieved function, Apparent Fitness, Apparent Unfitness. But we ran out of time.

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.