Nickster Fix-it

            On Friday morning I hadn’t woken up early to pee and so unlike the last few mornings I didn’t go out in the hall to turn the heat on before I got up at 5:00. The apartment was cold at first but once I started my yoga I was quite comfortable and during song practice. The heat came on by itself after that, though it was a relatively warm but rainy morning.

            I got a call at around 12:15 from OCADU telling me that they’d had a model no-show and asking if I’d like to come in and pose. The class had started at 11:50. I told him that I could be there by 13:00, though it probably would have been more like 12:50 but I always give the worst-case scenario. He said okay but then almost immediately called me back to tell me that the scheduled model had arrived after all. I was almost relieved.

            I took a siesta in the early afternoon and just as I was about to get up I got a call from Nick Cushing, who said he’d be at my place in about five minutes. He brought me the replacement for the Picardie tumbler he’d broken. It was not as tall or thick as the original but it’s fine for my purposes. I’ll look out for one that’s closer to the original but that’s on me. I consider Nick to have fulfilled whatever obligation he’d had to replace the glass.

            Nick also reattached the leg of my kitchen table, using pipe strapping. I had fixed it years ago using glue and wood chips to fill up the screw holes so that the screws would catch, but his solution was a lot quicker. He was done in less than half an hour.

            Just after I saw Nick off at the front door, my upstairs neighbour, David came down the stairs. He told me he’d knocked on my door a few times but I hadn’t answered. A few minutes later he knocked again and when I opened the door he handed me a big bottle of Argento white wine. I drank a glass with dinner.

            I finished reading A Streetcar Named Desire. I guess Stanley and Blanche are two sides of disturbing, with Stella as the passive element between them. Williams creates a palpable atmosphere of poor New Orleans. It’s kind of a sad ending and it’s also disturbing that Stanley gets away with raping his sister in law while his wife is having his baby.

            I watched the third episode of Star Trek Discovery. There was some interesting tension created by the fact that the lead character is considered to be a traitor. She doesn’t try to prove herself but she always rises to the occasion. The captain of the Starship Discovery and his security officer seem to have a dark agenda that is unknown to the rest of the crew.

Old Klingons vs New Klingons

            I spent most of Thursday writing about my English class on Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and on my being blocked for 24 hours by Facebook. I did a little more work at setting up an alternative to my Facebook page on Google+ at  https://plus.google.com/u/0/110439497284625370217. I’ll also continue to be on Twitter at https://twitter.com/christiaitsirhc, though I like to use Twitter for short written pieces rather than posting links or photos.

            I woke up to the sound of my alarm, but it was from an afternoon siesta and the alarm had rung in my head. It was time to get up anyway though.

            I’ve almost finished reading A Streetcar Named Desire. I can’t say I like or identify with the characters much, but I like the writing.

            I looked through a document that I’d pasted with old emails that I’ve sent and received, some of which go back to the beginning of me being on the internet in 1996, before the days of Facebook. I tried to organize them chronologically but it’s a lot of work.

            I watched the second episode of Star Trek Discovery. It was better than the first. It looks like the first two were written to be one film because the first doesn’t hold up well on its own and the second kind of pulls everything together. The Klingon’s faces though don’t look as real as they have on previous Star Trek shows. In the first series they looked to human, but in Star Trek the Next Generation they got them right. They didn’t look like plastic toys. They look like they are made of shiny plastic and there is way too much long dialogue in Klingon with subtitles. 

Howl

            Before leaving for my first 20^th Century US Literature class of the New Year, I went across to the LCBO to buy a beer to have with dinner when I got back. The liquor store was almost empty and there was only one bored looking cashier waiting for a customer.

            On the way downtown there were an abnormal amount of car doors open and sticking out onto the College bike lane. Two of them were back doors open with the drivers’ butts sticking out even further in my way.

            Just before Bathurst a car on my left slowed down and as I moved into its blind spot it began to swerve towards me because the driver wanted to park on the right side of the bike lane. Before he was able to hit me I shouted, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” until he stopped turning and let me pass.

            The second half of my full year English course would no longer be held in the Fitzgerald Building but rather in the very familiar University College, which is the one building where I’ve spent the most time at U of T, for either courses, tutorials or exams. Last year I was there for my full year of Canadian Poetry, in the same room where we would be taking this course.

            By a strange coincidence, on almost every Tuesday night last year, from January on, either rain or snow made my ride to class wet. On this Wednesday night the coincidence continued.

            While I was locking my bike I set my gloves down in the basket of a nearby bicycle. On my way to class I used the washroom but on the way out I realized that I’d forgotten my gloves. I went back, dreading that someone walking by had scored a free pair of new winter gloves, but they were still there.

            Unlike the previous location at that hour, there was no prior class taking place when I arrived. There were quite a few students already there, none of whom I recognized. I sat in the same seat I’d claimed the previous year.

            Scott was nearly ten minutes late. He started playing the Howl DVD, which started with the volume down as he went through the roll call. The trailer of an East Asian movie was playing and Scott wondered if he had the right one. He recounted that a colleague of his in the States once began playing a movie from his laptop for a class of 300 students, but he’d accidentally clicked the wrong file and it turned out to be porn.

            This version of Howl is the one starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg. Scott joked, “Boy, did I pick a good day to show James Franco!” referring to the recent sexual misconduct allegations against the actor and director.

            Apparently five women have come forward so far about Franco, but only one of the allegations seems to me that it fits as sexual misconduct. That would be if he really did try to force a woman’s head down onto his penis. The other ones seem a bit iffy to me. One involved him asking an actress to do nude scenes in two movies that he’d directed. I suppose it might have been inappropriate of him not to put it in the contract, if that’s what happened. The other one is an accusation of him unsuccessfully trying to pick up a 17 year old. Is that really sexual misconduct? It might not even be illegal for him to have had sex with her, let alone proposition her, depending on what state they were in at the time.

            I had already watched the movie before Christmas and the parts I liked then I still liked. I think that James Franco is a good actor and she shows it in this role but he still doesn’t look or sound like Allen Ginsberg. When Scott asked for our impressions I said that I think that the animated parts would have worked as a film all by themselves, but without Franco, because he really didn’t do the poem justice. They could have just used one or many of the recordings of the author doing the reading and that would have worked out great.

            Scott said that the animations were created out of the images that had been in a graphic novel based on Howl.

            To achieve honesty in poetry, the first thought is the best thought. Howl shows that form should follow and never precede content. It has to be felt in the body first.

            The trial made Howl famous but it wasn’t Allen Ginsberg that was on trial, but rather Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the City Lights Bookstore.

            Scott said that Columbia University, Ginsberg’s alma mater, gave him $1 million for his papers. But it was actually Stanford University and they didn’t only buy his papers, but 300,000 items that he’d collected over the years, including his dirty old sneakers.

            The footnote to Howl was actually written much later because Ginsberg’s father had complained that the main poem was too negative.

            There’s lots of Shakespeare in Howl and a ton of William Blake. It’s a reflection of the 50s but it’s not Happy Days.

            The kind of repetition that Ginsberg uses in Howl comes straight from Whitman and the name for it is anaphora.

            The first few lines of Howl introduce the subject that is the rest of the poem.

            It occurred to me that Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” must have been directly inspired by the apocalyptic aspects of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. I read later that when Ginsberg first heard the song he wept with joy because he knew that a torch had been passed.

            William Carlos Williams wrote of the young Ginsberg that he’d known in Paterson, New Jersey, “He was always on the point of going away where it didn’t really matter; he disturbed me. I never thought he’d live to grow up and write a book of poems. Howl is an arresting poem … Ginsberg has been through hell. It is a howl of defeat. He has gone through defeat as if it were a trivial experience.  He proves to us that the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the art to persist. Poets are damned but not blind. The poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own and laughs at it. Hold back the edges of your gowns ladies. We are going through hell.”

            Howl moves west. “I” disappears into the poem.        

            What is Beat besides jazz? Tiredness. Being fed up. Beatification but also beating your meat.

            The line that really got the poem busted was, “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.”

            Some of the powerful images in the poem are “hydrogen jukebox”. At first I made the same association of hydrogen with the hydrogen bomb, but hydrogen is also the most primary, the simplest and lightest element in the universe. Hydrogen is the fuel of stars. I pointed out the phrase, “Bop apocalypse”.

            Howl is full of alliteration. It is also a howl of laughter.

            “Publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull”.

            In the first line, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked”, the original word had been “mystical” but after changing it to “hysterical” it made all the difference.

            Scott told us that despite his friendship with Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac was a raving anti-Semite.

             I left while Scott was giving back the tests because I’d picked mine up before Christmas. I got home at around 21:00 to discover that I’d once again been blocked from Facebook for 24 hours. This time it seemed to be over nude photos that I’d posted on my Josephine Baker fan page. That’s crazy, since nudity was one of the things that made Baker a historical figure. I was warned that if I continue to not comply with Facebook’s “community standards” my account would be permanently shut down. Fuck Facebook! I will never accept their censorship. It’s like your landlord trying to tell you that you can’t hang certain pictures on your walls. It’s like someone telling me that, in terms of content, I can’t read the poem of my choice at a reading. I will not give in to censorship. I will post whatever I consider to be appropriate and if it gets me shut down then so be it. I began to prepare for that possibility by beginning to set up Google+ as an alternative because I’ve read that Google does not have the same puritan ideas about the posting of non-pornographic nude photos.

            I still have an account under the name Myown Dick, and so I can still communicate with my friends on Facebook. My ideal though would be if all of my friends that like to follow me would still do so on Google+.

            I found out that Josephine Baker and Allen Ginsberg were both born on June 3^rd, so it was an interesting coincidence to come home from watching a movie about Ginsberg being censored to finding that I’ve been censored because of Baker.

            I watched the first episode of Star Trek Discovery and found it disappointing. It didn’t have the same magic of any of the pilot episodes of Star Trek spin-offs. The drama at the end when the first officer, insisting that they should fire upon the Klingons first because that’s their way of saying “hello” was more interesting. The captain refused to fire first and so Michael tried to unsuccessfully take over the ship in order to fire but she was overwhelmed just as they were surrounded by the Klingon fleet at the end.

The New Doctor

            I got up to pee at 4:00 on Tuesday and though I’d been warm enough under a sheet, the apartment was cold. I wrapped a towel around myself and went out into the hall to turn on the furnace and then I went back to bed. By the time I rose an hour later it was too hot.

The reading on my hygrometer has been at a very dry 10% humidity for a few weeks, but on Tuesday morning it had jumped to 30%. My guitar stayed in tune a little better but I’ve found it holds its tuning best at 40%.

            In the early afternoon I took my bike through the middy slush downtown to the OISE Library to renew my French grammar exercise books. I was supposed to return them on Monday but I took the day of grace because of the snow and also because I wanted to edge myself toward taking another day of grace next time so I can make my return day Wednesdays, to correspond with my English course, so I wouldn’t have to come downtown just to return the books. My new pants got splattered on the way.

            After the library I travelled down Queens Park to University and to Staples, south of Dundas. I figured since I was downtown already I should buy some new pens for making lecture notes. I also bought four rechargeable batteries because the ones I have don’t last long in my camera anymore. They’re fine for my stereo remote though.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home. I bought some decent bread because the spelt bread that I got from the food bank is good to serve as thin burger buns but they are lousy at sopping up egg yolk. I also bought some red prince apples, some blackberries and some yogourt.

            I watched the Doctor Who Christmas special. Since it’s recent I won’t reveal too much about the story, but the twelfth and first Doctor are together through the whole episode and everybody knows now that the twelfth regenerated into a woman at the end. There were some funny interactions between twelve and one. David Bradley gave an amazing portrayal of William Hartnell’s grumpy original Doctor. He didn’t like the fact that the Tardis was lit so dimly but Doctor 12 argued that it is supposed to be atmospheric. Doctor 1 barked, “This is the most powerful space-time machine in the universe! It’s not a restaurant for the French!”

            There is some inconsistency between various Doctor Who narratives. They played up in this story that the first Doctor on the TV show was the first Doctor of all but I recall it having been suggested that there were many previous regenerations. Otherwise William Hartnell’s Doctor would have lived in that incarnation for at least a couple of thousand years. If they others die after a couple of years then if Hartnell’s incarnation must have led a very sheltered several millennia with no adventures at all. They also show the 1^st Doctor being puzzled by phrases like “data base”. One assumes he has been to every era so the age of computers and the internet would not be a surprise to him. When he meets Bill and learns that she has been the Doctor’s companion he tells her that he needs her. It appears to her and us at first that he means as a friend, but then he adds that the Tardis hasn’t had a good cleaning in a long time. He also hears Bill use language that one would not have heard on the original show and he threatens to spank her bottom if he hears her speak that way again. Doctor 12 tells him, “Please stop saying things like that!”

            We only got to see Jodie Whitaker at the very end but I’m very interested in seeing where she’ll take the Doctor. Will she be funny or morose? I suspect there will be lots of humour with a serious sub-narrative. I’ve read that her companion will be a middle-aged man. That’s kind of disappointing to hear but maybe they’ll find a way to make him interesting.

           

           

            

The First Doctor

            My guitar stayed in tune a little longer (about every other song) on Monday.

            There was a knock on my door in the afternoon from my neighbour, Benji. He said that his friend was opening a coffee shop and was short staffed and so he was going to go and work there overnight. He wanted to show me how to turn the furnace on because now that the weather is a little warmer it won’t always kick in before our apartments feel cold. He said that it’s just a matter of turning the thermostat up to 75 (24) from 73 (23 - I don’t know why it’s not in centigrade), and then it will automatically drop back to 73 and click on.

            I watched the final episode of the 10^th season of Doctor Who. Bill is a Cyberman but her mind is resisting so strongly that it still feels to her like she is her old self, unless she looks in a mirror. The Doctor still thinks there is hope to change her back because she actually cried a human tear. Missy and the Master leave the Doctor to fight the Cyberman army without them but Missy has a change of heart and stabs the Master so that he will regenerate and become her, but then he kills her with a full blast from his sonic screwdriver. She laughs as she dies. If she’s not really dead, it probably won’t be the beautiful Michelle Gomez who’ll play the part again, because she says it’s over for her.

            Nardole leads the occupants of the 644 km long ship’s solar farm to a farm on another level and it seems settles down to farmer’s life with many surrogate children and what looks like might turn into marriage with a matronly frau.

            The Doctor and Bill defeat the Cybermen but the Doctor is mortally wounded. Bill begins to weep in despair when from across the cosmos arrives Heather, the young woman that Bill fell for just before Heather turned into a time travelling water creature. She’d tracked Bill through her tears. They kiss and Bill is suddenly no longer a Cyberman but a water creature like Heather. They take the Doctor back to the Tardis and Heather tells Bill she can make her human again or she can travel the universe with her. After shedding tears on top of the Doctor’s body, Bill and Heather jump out of the Tardis together. The Doctor wakes up and begins to regenerate but he resists because he doesn’t want to change. The Tardis takes him somewhere. He leaves the Tardis and continues his struggle as he talks to himself about being the Doctor. Suddenly though he hears someone else approach and the casting or makeup is amazing because, David Bradley really does look like William Hartnell, who played the first Doctor.

            William Hartnell was my first Doctor too and I remember watching the first episodes back in the 60s. The Daleks scared the crap out of me. The Doctor was also a bit of an asshole in those days.

            I immediately downloaded the 2017 Christmas Special to find out what happens next. All I know is that the Doctor will be a woman at the end.

Who Am I?

            On Sunday morning I got up feeling a little down. It happens from time to time. A sense of, “What’s the point?” but after yoga, once I started singing, it all melted away. That’s usually the way it works. My song practices seem to be a protective barrier that keeps depression away from the later part of the day, though that’s not why I do it.

            Later during practice though I had to deal with the frustration of my guitar going constantly out of tune in my intensely dry apartment. It got to a point near the end when it just wouldn’t go in tune at all. I was almost ready to go and buy a new guitar but sometimes that’s not the solution because often, better guitars are even worse at staying in tune. Tuning is especially difficult in a city like Toronto where it’s dry inside in the winter and extremely humid in the summer.

            My landlord came for the rent and the first thing he said was “Happy New Year!” I returned the greeting but feels odd being friendly with Raja after all the hassles I’ve had from him over the years. I asked him to unlock the red stepladder that he’d chained up out on the deck. For years it had been free and just sitting in the corner of the landing on the way to the third floor, available if ever we needed it. I have high ceilings and if ever a lightbulb goes out up there, if there weren’t a stepladder I would have to pile things on top of a chair to precariously stand upon. I thought I might get an argument from Raja but he said he’d unlock it and put it on the landing. He explained that he’d only locked it because someone in the building had put it outside and our next roof neighbours had stolen it.

I put the new rent amount in a sealed envelope and gave it to him but a few minutes later he knocked on my door to tell me the amount was wrong because I’d given him about $15 too little. I was sceptical because what he’d handed me back had two fives and I remembered specifically counting out one five dollar bill to go with the hundreds the twenties, the toonie, the loonie and the three quarters. I didn’t think that he was deliberately trying to rip me off but I thought he might have gotten my rent mixed up with someone else’s. He said that he’d found an extra five between two twenties. I shrugged and went to get him the correct amount. Raja was down on one knee in front of me with a box filled with hundreds of dollars in rent money on the floor to his right while I was standing in my doorway looking down at him. Benji came out of his apartment on his way out and he looked at us with puzzlement. I explained to him that Raja was worshipping me and making an offering.

I watched the second to last episode of the tenth season of Doctor Who. They’d landed on a spaceship that was so large that it would stretch from Toronto to Montreal. The ship was halfway into a blackhole and so time was different in different parts of the ship. Bill had a big round hole shot clean through her and she was taken away from the Doctor to a hospital in the lower part of the ship. She woke up having had her heart replaced by a mechanical one. She was befriended by a quirky old guy with a beard and long hair who got her a job mopping floors in the hospital. In her spare time she would watch the Doctor on the closed circuit camera as he planned her rescue, but the video barely moved because of how differently time moved in the part of the ship where he was. Ten years passed for Bill while it had only been minutes for the Doctor. Her friend agreed to help her escape but it turned out that he’d led her into a trap. She was taken to the operating theatre to be “upgraded”. The Doctor and Missy arrive and meet the man who’d betrayed Bill. He pulls off a mask to reveal that he is The Master, which was Missy’s previous incarnation before she regenerated as a woman. The Doctor finds Bill too late, as she’s already been turned into a Cyberman.

The night before that I watched an episode in which Bill encounters some Roman soldiers, one of whom has taken a fancy to her. She thought she was going to have difficulty explaining to him that she was a lesbian but he understood right away. He said, “Oh, you’re like Vitas over there, who only likes men. I’m normal. I like both men and women, but I think it’s fine that you’re so limited.”

Also on Saturday night I got a message from Facebook telling me that someone had pointed out to them that my name might not be real and so I had till January 13^th to prove otherwise. What’s weird is that I went through this with them at least five years ago. I scanned my identification and sent them a digital copy, so they should have had it on record. I wondered if it was a coincidence that they were giving me a hard time so soon after censoring one of my picture posts. I immediately took a photo of my U of T student card and sent it to them, along with a message of protest and a reminder that they should have my information on record. They didn’t block me from accessing my page, so I figured that was the end.

But on Sunday I got a message that the ID I’d sent them wasn’t enough. I had to send something else from their list. I angrily took a photo of my birth certificate and sent it to them with another message of protest and another reminder that we had done this a few years ago. This time they blocked me from accessing Facebook, but only for a few minutes. After that I got a message saying everything was fine and they wouldn’t bother me about it again. They probably said that last time too.

           

           

            

Ordinary Invisibility

            As I was leaving the food bank on Saturday with my groceries, I felt that I hadn’t quite gotten the chill out of my bones during my few minutes indoors, so upon facing the cold again I seemed to feel a bit disoriented. I had planned on riding straight to the nearest No Frills to buy paper towels and detergent but I decided to go home and warm up for a few minutes. After a few minutes of putting the food away in my very warm apartment, I felt ready to go outside again. I re-bundled myself and was about to leave but when I checked for my bike-lock cable, I couldn’t find it. I checked and rechecked all my bags and my backpack and even looked in the fridge just in case I’d absent-mindedly unpacked it with my groceries, which I have never done. I had the lock in my pocket but the cable did not seem to be with me. It occurred to me that when I’d unlocked my bike in front of the food bank my keys had fallen in the snow. Perhaps that had distracted me and so after picking it up I’d possibly left the cable wrapped around the bike post ring. I rode back to the front of the food bank but my cable was nowhere to be found. I figured someone must have taken it after I’d left, so I went home and then walked down to the hardware store to buy a new cable. But they didn’t have the kind of thicker cable that I’d bought from them before and they only had ones that were locks and cables combined. I decided to look elsewhere. I went back home and almost immediately saw my cable sitting on top of my stove in plain sight where I’d pulled it out of my bag to put away my groceries. I’m glad my instincts told me not to buy another.