Vera

            I didn’t get that much done on Tuesday. It would have been a good day to do laundry but I didn’t feel like going out. I got an email from Scott Rayter informing us that he has a bad cough and is cancelling Wednesday’s 20^th Century US Literature class. He seems to have a very bad immune system; since that’s the second time he’s done that.

            I dug out of a drawer full of cords a set of Koss headphones that I’d forgotten I’d had, to check if the crackling noise I’ve been hearing is in my amp or my speakers, but when I played bits of Arcade Fire or Star Trek I didn’t even get the crackling noise through the speakers this time. It’s as if just jacking in the headphones and then taking them out again fixed the problem.

            I looked for a torrent of the second disc of the Alfred Hitchcock, because I’d started watching the first one after a year of waiting for it to download past 68%. What I found was a complete torrent of the show’s three seasons. I downloaded season one and it only took a few minutes. I just deleted the other incomplete download.

            I wrote a few more ideas toward my essay on The Wasteland and Howl. The women in Howl have no identity. Only men are named. Women are faceless. Only Neal Cassady connects with them. Ginsberg says that Cassady sweetened the snatches of a million women. He would have had to sweeten a snatch about every thirty seconds from the age of thirteen to the time that Ginsberg wrote it in order to get through a million of them, unless he did it all at once like Krsna. The locations are rarely bedrooms. Only one group of Cassady’s conquests has a job, that of a waitress, a professional servant to the general public. They are unhappy and unhealthy. Saved by sex with Cassady. If he has sweetened a million snatches could he have had time to leave an additional group of women unsatisfied? So one must assume that the waitress’s snatches were sweetened as well.

            I watched the second episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. It starred Vera Miles, who two years before that had played the sister of Norman Bates’s shower victim in Psycho. In this story she is Daphne, a med student on a campus where there is a serial killer both strangling and stabbing women. It turns out that she is the target though. Her psychologist boyfriend, Harold deduces that the killer must be someone she knows and so he arranges for her to walk in the woods in order to flush the monster out. The man that attacks turns out to be a talented, sensitive and lonely pianist that she knows. Harold shoots the killer but he lives and is sent to a psychiatric hospital. Harold tells Daphne that it isn’t over because he sees that this desire to kill is part of a psychotic disease that others may have caught. I figured out a third of the way through that Harold was talking about himself. So then Harold tried to kill Daphne but another that had the hots for her saved her.

            The Alfred Hitchcock Hour has basically the same format as the previous show, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, except that it’s twice as long. It has the same comedic opening and closing featuring Hitchcock himself, plus a segment in the middle. This one opens up with Hitchcock on a stage, dressed as a magician, with to his right an attractive woman in a short sleeveless dress. He says, “I trust you’ll excuse my startled expression, but this (he points at the young lady) is what I’ve just pulled out of my hat. It’s rather a shock when one is expecting a rabbit. However, I suppose it’s not as traumatic as it would be if I’d been expecting her and got the rabbit … This evening I shall attempt several feats of legerdemain. One is to make an hour disappear without you realizing it …”