SEVENTEEN
GRAD SCHOOL
The Great Auk Pub
The Great Auk Pub is in what would be an alley in any other city, but in St. John’s the entrance was just off a set of stairs that went from Water Street below to Duckworth Street up above.
Milton couldn’t find it for the longest time and walked in long circles in the thick fog down Duckworth and up Water for over an hour before he found a group of young-ish people in cargo shorts, socks and dad sandals, who led him down the two flights of stairs and into the pub.
The pub was dark and smelled like stale beer, deep-fried fish, and piss. It was deceptively large for a stairwell alley joint. The entrance is near the pool table at the back of the bar, which was decorated for the occasion with two ratty-looking stuffed seagulls.
Ross was sitting on the pool table.
He responded to Milton’s friendly smile with a straightforward, “It’s five bucks.”
Milton paid and headed to the bar to get a drink, weaving his way through a mess of small tables full of people yelling over the blaring Great Big Sea.
Greg was at the bar getting drinks for him and Susan. He bought Milton a local beer and invited him to sit with them at a large corner booth right next to the stage with a few other students and professors.
They all raised their glasses to Morgan when Greg introduced him as they sat down and gave him a gentle ribbing when told Morgan was interested in studying seagulls.
“So, you must have seen this film, then? No? Never? My God, it’s seminal!”
Milton nodded like he could hear over the “It’s the end of the world as I know it and I feel fiiiiiiine” and smiled politely.
At about 8:30 p.m., with the bar filled to the brim, Ross walked on stage and began tapping a feedbacky mic.
“Welcome to the Seabird Student’s Association monthly mixer. Tonight we are thrilled to have gotten the rights to screen Dirty Birds, an award-winning film by Toronto filmmaker, Uh… Robin Davis. As you probably know already, there is a controversy brewing in ornithological circles about the classification of certain species of gulls. One of the key people in this debate is Dr. Greg Butts, and I’d like to invite him up to say a few words about the controversy and introduce the film. Thanks.”
“Thanks, Ross. Thanks everyone for coming. It’s nice to see this many people out to chat about seabirds. Ross is right, there is a bit of a controversy brewing. I’ll give you the Cole’s Notes version. Basically, a number of scientists, including myself, are recommending that several common species of gulls in the Larus genus, particularly Larus heermanni, Larus canus, and Larus delawarensis be reclassified into the Cathartes genus, as the behaviour of these particular gull species has changed so dramatically over the past century due to human interaction that they now more closely resemble the behaviour of vultures and buzzards and other scavenger birds than their seabird ancestors.”
Someone in the back loudly boo’d.
“Hah. Thank you. So, that’s all well and good. Right. If you are an ornithologist it’s a kind of turf war over the fates of these gulls, but I know not everyone here is a bird scientist, so in laymen’s terms, why this matters is that we’re basically saying these bird species have had their evolutionary trajectory altered by their behaviour and by human interactions. Which matters a lot, and to more than just seabird nerds, because we’re saying that behaviour can have evolutionary consequences, which would be the biggest amendment to Darwin’s theories of evolution since he first posed them almost 150 years ago; and also, we’re saying that human behaviour can directly alter the evolutionary trajectory of animals. That’s big. These are both really big deals. I won’t say much more now, but afterwards a few of us are going to have a discussion about this and what it all means for the discipline as well as life on earth more broadly. But before this, we’ve got this film: Dirty Birds by… Uhm… Robin Davis. This is a beautiful film that won the Palme d’Or du court métrage—best short film—at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and it is a great honour for us to get to show it here tonight. Take it away, Ross.”
Ross powered up the projector and a loud fan whirred to life. The screen at the front of the bar was filled with blue and blinked: “Source Not Detected.”
Ross began fiddling with cables and mashing buttons. The projector began counting down on the screen to power off. Ross mashed a few more buttons and the screen went blank. His face turned bright red as he mashed more feverishly and began violently yanking on cables.
Another student sitting at Milton’s table, Lori, the Seabird Student Association Vice-President, who was tucked back in the corner, began climbing over people’s laps to get out and race to Ross’s aid. She kneeled all of her weight on Milton’s crotch as she passed by, and he let out a sharp grunt that fluttered across the bar. Everyone felt it except for Lori who joined Ross in furiously mashing and pulling on things trying to get the projector to work.
The longer they mashed and tugged the more hands joined in. There were seven or eight of them frantically trying to get the thing to work. Finally, someone flipped open the lens cover, which had gotten closed in all the fondling, and the cluttered desktop of Ross’s laptop was visible, including a conspicuous file labeled “Anal-ize This.”
Ross inserted a DVD and his laptop whirred. A small window opened with the silhouettes of two seagulls circling. Ross couldn’t find where to click to make it Fullscreen, so he just enlarged the window; “Anal-ize This” was still visible in the background.
“Is that okay, can everyone see it?”
Someone in the back yelled, “Press Control and F5!”
“What?”
“Control and F5!”
“Why?”
“Make it Fullscreen!”
Ross began mashing every laptop button but Control and F5. The video stopped playing. Then the program playing it closed. Then several awkward moments of button mashing while everyone in the room read the contents of Ross’s desktop, which included among the mess of files and folders “Titty Dickers” and “Cocky and Ballwrinkle.”
The blue blinking “Source Not Detected” returned. Lori and others re-converged for yet more clicking, mashing, pulling, plugging and fondling. Eventually they got the projector turned back on and the movie playing in full screen.
“I can’t hear it!”
Ross began fiddling again. He asked if anyone had speakers. No one did. With Lori’s help he managed to turn the volume up to Max on the laptop and point the feedbackey mic towards it. Any sounds coming from the mostly silent film could only be heard clearly from within about five feet of the laptop. Everyone in the bar leaned forward and strained to hear the faint squawking of the gulls.
. . .
Dirty Birds
Dirty Birds opens with a bright white ball of sun in a faintly grey, cloudless sky.
One seagull circles into view—someone at the back of the bar boos loudly. Another seagull appears. The two seem to be part of some choreographed routine. They turn in identical circles going in opposite directions. When one circle grows bigger, the other does the same simultaneously.
Leaning his head towards the laptop, Milton could make out the faint cry of one of the gulls over the whirring of the DVD and projector fan.
Another gull joins the pair, then another, and another, until the sky is filled with them. The one faint cry becomes two, then ten, then a cacophony of hundreds. The camera pans down across the sky until the sun washes out the entire picture.
DIRTY BIRDS
A FILM BY ROBIN DAVIS
The camera continues panning down to reveal the horizon—the slums of Calcutta—then further, to reveal that we’re in a landfill. Truck after truck dumps large piles of garbage onto one giant mountain of garbage. Bulldozers push the truck-sized garbage piles deep into the face of garbage mountain. The roar of the engines can be heard beneath the roar of the gulls.
Thousands of gulls fill the sky above all the garbage. They dive into the pile and emerge with bits of trash. The camera slowly zooms in on the chaos. The slums blur and disappear into the background. The trucks and bulldozers blur and disappear into the background. The garbage mountain blurs and disappears into the background. The thousands of birds become hundreds, become tens, become one full bird, becomes just its head, as it stands on a pile of trash and begins digging at a plastic bag. It pulls something out. A large scrap of rotting bread. The gull throws its head back, unlatches its jaw, and swallows the large piece of bread whole. It re-engages its jaw, hops twice, and begins to fly.
The camera stays trained on the gull’s face as it begins to zoom back out. Slowly the single bird becomes ten, becomes hundreds, becomes thousands. Slowly the garbage re-emerges, then the trucks and dozers, then the slums of Calcutta.
The camera follows the bird as it flies up. The garbage and trucks and dozer and houses fall out of frame. It’s just birds and sky. Thousands then hundreds then tens then two. Circling around one another in some kind of dance. Then one, the gull with the belly full of rotten bread, circling as the camera continues panning upward towards the sun until the picture is washed out by white light.
THE END
Credits roll over “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen:
DIRECTOR – ROBIN DAVIS
WRITER – ROBIN DAVIS
PRODUCER – ROBIN DAVIS
PRODUCTION DESIGNER – ROBIN DAVIS
CINEMATOGRAPHER – ROBIN DAVIS
EDITOR – ROBIN DAVIS
FIRST ASSISTANT DIRECTOR – ANDREW SIMMONS
SECOND ASSISTANT DIRECTOR – LANCE POCHARD
TITLE ARTIST – ALTON SALAAM
SOUND DESIGNER – GASTON CHARLES
SOUND ENGINEER – RUDDY TURNSTON
ASSISTANT SOUND ENGINEER – AVA WEBBER
“ANTHEM” WRITTEN AND RECORDED BY LEONARD COHEN
COURTESY OF COLUMBIA RECORDS.
SPECIAL THANKS TO THE CITY OF CALCUTTA SANITATION
DEPARTMENT.
MADE WITH THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF TELEFILM CANADA,
CANADA COUNCIL FOR THE ARTS, ONTARIO FILM FUND, ONTARIO
ARTS COUNCIL, MISSISSAUGA FILMIC ARTS INVESTMENT FUND,
AND THE HAMILTON PUBLIC LIBRARY.
Mutually Assured Collegiality
Milton was mesmerized.
His mouth fell open with the first frame of the film and stayed open the entire seven minutes. A string of drool fell out of the left corner of his mouth and made its way past his chin and towards his lap.
He’d never seen anything so beautiful in all his life.
As it played, he didn’t see dump seagulls fighting over scraps of rotten trash, he saw the first smile Robin ever smiled at him. He didn’t hear dump trucks and trash dozers and screaming birds faintly over the hum of a DVD player and a projector. Milton just heard Robin’s intoxicating laugh.
He didn’t feel pity for the birds, or embarrassment at the trash and waste of man, or any pangs of guilt or any morality at all, he just felt her arms around him, her lips on his, the softness of her stomach as he kissed his way down, down, down.
As a smattering of applause for the film turned into awkward waiting for what came next, underscored by low bar chatter, he could smell her. He could taste her. She was there with him. And it was only him and her there. Together, at last. Alone, at last.
Alone until Lori crawled back over Milton, kneeling hard on his growing erection, on her way to help Ross turn off the video, which had begun playing again from the start.
The sharp grunt from before was replaced by a sensual moan, just loud enough to be heard throughout the bar, just loud enough to turn a few curious heads in time to catch Milton trying to recoil his string of drool and erection and hide his reddening face.
No one knew who he was, so they just looked silently at one another with very concerned looks. That split-second of judgy agony was mercifully interrupted by Ross pounding on the top of the projector, trying to stop the movie from playing a second time through.
As the attention turned from Milton back to the academic death match that was shaping up on stage—a handful of bookish folks sitting around a pub table, holding microphones all wrong, blowing into them at the wrong times, making them hiss and squeal unnecessarily, asking “is this on,” and looking at the microphone like it had just told them it was their real dad when they heard their voice projected through the bar—Milton returned to his fantasy.
As Greg took up a passionate, table-thumping speech on behalf of the Behavioural Evolutionists, the “Evolutionaries” he called them, and how strongly he believed his facts were more factual and more irrefutable than the other side’s, and how at least seven gull species needed to be reclassified as terrestrial birds—“Comprehensive surveys and migratory tracking data from 18 sites around the world have found that more than 80 per cent of the populations of each of these species migrate between human waste sites as opposed to their more traditional marine-adjacent nesting and feeding sites. Likewise, most gull species have always been monogamous breeders; however, we’re seeing an increase in poly-amory related to these landfill birds. This is fascinating in its own right, but we’re also seeing increased breeding variability that is accelerating differentiation within the species, as traits better suited to survival in a landfill, traits like aggressiveness and mouth size, are becoming preferred and more prolific than marine traits, like diving and swimming. This means, without a doubt, that the changes in behaviour have begun to reshape both the psychology and physiology of these species. If these trends continue, the Common Gull will look more like a Turkey Vulture than a Tern within a century”—Milton relived his first meeting with Robin at the anarchist potluck in the abandoned furrier in St. Henri, over and over again in his head.
As bird psychologist Dr. Tom Robarts took up the case of the other side, the supremacy of his facts over Greg’s, and the urgent threat that radical reclassification of species posed to the integrity of the ornithological sciences, and even the fate of the University, one of the most ocean-focused schools in the country—“It is beyond reckless to begin taxonomical reclassification of species based on preliminary studies that, despite showing notable special differentiation, which I will admit is significant, would move their study between distinct and major subfields of ornithology—from marine genera to terrestrial genera, for instance. This stops being a scientific question, at this point, and becomes a vastly different question of the internal politics of these fields of study and the principles and practices and traditions which sustain them, of the institutions which support them, of a certain hierarchy and distribution of expertise and equipment and methodology, and, ultimately, funding. It opens a veritable hornet’s nest of complications for both theoretical and practical concerns of the study of these species, and this doesn’t even begin to broach the deeper implications of these purported ‘findings’, which are philosophical, social, and moral”—Milton relived the night they first kissed, after he read his poetry for the first time at La Baraque, over and over again, imagining they didn’t stop with just that kiss.
As Dr. Reginald Abergavenny III, the chair of the philosophy department, began blowing into the microphone and thumping it loudly, nearly deafening everyone in the room, as he launched into a lengthy “unpacking” of the “implications” of “problematizing the phenomenon of history as the deciding factor in speciation and differentiation”—“I am from a place where my people are the indigenous inhabitants, or as indigenous as 37 generations of Celtic Briton from Derbyshire can be, so I’ve got a bit of a different perspective, I suppose, than my colleagues here who are descendants from New World settlers. It’s truly a shame there couldn’t be a North American Aboriginal on this panel, because I’m sure we would share a similar perspective. That being: heritage is a foundational principle of the continuity of a species. And while I do appreciate the contention that behaviour is a determinant of destiny—if I may translate it from ornithological-ese to the Queen’s English—I survived the Blitz as a boy, and continue to carry the words and spirit of Sir Winston Churchill very near to my heart, so Lord knows I understand the consequence of behaviour on shaping not just the individual being but entire societies, or populations, or flocks, as it were. I’m afraid my dear friend, Dr. Butts, is perhaps a tad overzealous in his extrapolation of certain of the gulls preferring to lunch on rubbish as opposed to having to earn their dinner at sea. It’s a more useful allegory for the history of Newfoundland itself and the consequence of post-confederate non-industrialization, than a fundamental re-think of the principles of progeny and progeniture”—Milton relived the night that Robin ended up back at his apartment, in his bed, in nothing but her socks and underwear, in his arms, and how it might have gone different. How it might have ended in making love and happily ever after, instead of passing out, pent-up and broken-hearted in a pile of trash.
As the panel opened the floor to questions and the loud-mouth in the back, who identified himself as a Thayer Hartlaub, Ph.D. student in the biology department who hailed from New England, and stood up and shouted a long, rambling non-question question about how the defense of taxonomical progeniture was, fundamentally, a “case for National Socialism and racial purity at worst, or of white supremacist American nationalist exceptionalism at best”—Milton imagined he and Robin both completely naked and lying next to one another on his bed in an alternative version of that one wonderful night.
As Dr. Abergavenny cut off Thayer Hartlaub’s anti-Nazi rant to plead his own defence: “I survived the fucking Blitz you little American shit, so don’t you dare lecture me about the dangers of National Socialism”—Milton imagined the feeling of Robin’s nakedness against the tips of his fingers.
As Thayer Hartlaub began to yell louder and point angrily towards the stage and go on about “you’re just jealous the Germans reached the end point of colonialism before you Brits did, you dinosaur”—Milton felt the tips of Robin’s fingers on his naked skin.
As 78-year-old Dr. Abergavenny stood up and flipped the pub table off of the stage, sending several glasses of beer spiralling into the crowd, and took off towards Thayer Hartlaub, Milton felt the warmth of Robin’s mouth on his.
As Thayer Hartlaub, in an effort to get through the crowd that was trying to intervene between him and the septuagenarian head of the philosophy department, climbed onto a high-top table and launched himself, top-ropes style, onto Dr. Abergavenny and a throng of academics, Milton imagined his weight on top of Robin, her legs wrapping around his hips, her hands pulling him into her.
As Dr. Abergavenny shattered a beer bottle on the corner of a table and pressed it into Thayer Hartlaub’s cheek in an attempt to remove his eye, Milton imagined Robin reaching down between his legs to gather up his hard, throbbing…
Milton’s concentration was broken by Thayer Hartlaub’s blood curdling scream as Dr. Abergavenny’s beer-bottle shiv broke skin.
Milton tried to shake it off and return to his dream, but a beer bottle exploded against the wall next to his head and he snapped-to in the middle of chaos.
Beer glasses and bottles were flying. A chair was shattered over someone’s back.
Dr. Dolores Fienberg, the head of the Women’s Studies department, hit Dr. Robarts between the shoulder blades with a pool cue. A second swing splintered the cue across his back and sent him to the ground, where Dr. Fienberg began stomping him.
Greg wrestled the beer-bottle shiv away from Dr. Abergavenny before he could get Thayer Hartlaub’s eye. But Dr. Abergavenny remained in the middle of the mass of swinging fists and flying bottles with a bluing Thayer Hartlaub in a rear naked chokehold, shrieking at the top of his lungs.
“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!”
. . .
Thayer Hartlaub
Milton didn’t have a dog in the fight, just an erection, so he watched a bunch of middle-aged professors and late-twenty-something grad students, all with no upper body strength, trying to murder one another for a while.
When the manager of the bar pulled the fire alarm and the sprinklers came on, Milton snuck the Dirty Birds DVD out of Ross’s laptop and got out the door just before the paddy wagons showed up.
In the department offices and halls of the Science Building the next day, everyone laughed the fracas off, except for Thayer Hartlaub, who, sour over his three stitches, bad case of pink eye, and being a litigious American, filed assault with a deadly weapon and attempted-murder charges against Dr. Abergavenny.
Pressing charges as a result of an academic dispute, however, even when a 78-year old phenomenological ontologicalist with increasingly alarming Nazi leanings nearly takes your eye, is highly frowned upon in academic circles. As soon as charges were filed the academy started putting the screws to Thayer Hartlaub.
First, his preferred parking pass for Ph.D. candidates in Lot 17 was revoked without explanation and he was reissued a pass for Lot 47—an unlit dirt lot behind the hospital, about a 30-minute walk, on a nice day, to the Science Building.
Then his mailbox in the department office, where he collected intra-campus mail, special-order library books and journal articles, student assignments, and his power and telephone bills for the basement apartment he was renting in the once fashionable suburb of Cowan Heights, was given to the new master’s student, Morgan Murray. Thayer’s mailbox was moved to the basement of the Physical Education building, another 10 minutes out of the way on the trek from his car to his office.
His office was flagged for emergency asbestos abatement and he was forced to relocate to an empty residence room in the antique Hurley Hall undergraduate male-only residence, which throbbed with rap-metal 24/7 and reeked of weed and B.O.—and was another 10 minutes further away from where he had to park.
He wasn’t assigned any teaching for the coming term, and lost out on the $1,175 for the 42 hours of class time and 300 hours of marking that came with each course.
His automatic renewal of the 74 books he currently had checked out from the Queen Elizabeth II campus library was mysteriously disabled. This wasn’t discovered until a letter sent two weeks later was received an extra two weeks later, because of Thayer Hartlaub’s infrequent checking of his intra-campus mail. By then, the dollar-per-day-per-book late fees were over $1,500. He had to ask for an advance on his student loan to pay the fine.
The next time he checked his mailbox, which he made a point of doing more frequently after the library fines and his power having been temporarily shut off because of a missed bill, he had three letters of resignation from the three internal members of his Ph.D. committee.
Dr. Rhoreston Tittlewatts, a marine biologist, claimed his 97-year-old grandmother was in poor health and he would be completely too preoccupied with her assured imminent death to possibly review and adequately invigilate a dissertation about something as frivolous as adorable seabirds.
Dr. Maria Armiston, an animal behavioural psychologist, claimed her 97-year-old father was in poor health and she would likely be required to drop everything at a moment’s notice to fly back to Wisconsin to tend to him and, thus, could not possibly be relied upon to serve on any type of committee in the interim.
And Dr. Larissa Munk, a marine paleobotanist, claimed her 97-year-old aunt, on her mother’s side, who had raised her after both her parents were killed in a paragliding accident in the South of France in 1961, had recently contracted a rare case of dementia and required around-the-clock care, so she would be taking administrative leave to provide it.
Without a committee, Thayer Hartlaub wouldn’t be able to defend his nearly complete dissertation: “Gendered Responses to Inter-Colony Aggression and Violence in North Atlantic Puffin Populations.”
After a tour of the department and 17 variations on the word “no,” he had no choice but to transfer to the Geology Technologist program in the Polytechnic University of Saskatchewan in Moose Jaw and take up moderation of the Facebook group “MUNStinks!”
When both Thayer Hartlaub and his lawyer, Jerry Fitzgerald, who had quit private practice to enter provincial politics, failed to appear at Dr. Abergavenny’s pre-trial hearing, all charges were dropped.
Equilibrium returned to the university in time for the next edition of “The Bolshevik Society,” a quarterly quasi-fight club/Russian literature seminar in the rec room of Russian Department Chair—or Tsar, as he insisted on being called—Dr. Sergei Krinklinski’s suburban home, where Dr. Abergavenny was the three-time defending champion for his take on Vladimir Solovyov’s defence of Aristotle’s noumenonical essentialism, and his willingness to fight dirty.