Sandra Dorne

            On Thursday morning I translated the first verse of “A la pêche des coeurs" (Fishing for Hearts) by Boris Vian. 

            I worked out the chords for the verses and the chorus of “Tennisman” by Serge Gainsbourg. All that’s left should be the bridge and maybe the ending. 

            My guitar is still giving me tuning trouble but I can’t take it to Remenyi until December after my final exam has been written. 

            At around 11:00 I logged on for this week’s Canadian Literature tutorial. 

            Our essay outline is due on November 3. It needs to be one to two pages in point form and no more than 2.5 pages. The essay itself will be six to eight pages or 1800-2500 words. A topic is not a thesis. The topics are listed on Quercus. It is a research essay that requires two to four academic sources, which could include, journal articles, chapters from edited book collections, reviews, interviews with the author, or newspaper articles. Limit research so that it doesn’t get too cumbersome. A narrow topic explored in depth is better than several shallowly explored topics. One can go incredibly narrow, even exploring one word. Focus on key terms like a specific theme from this course. Present a short paragraph explaining your rationale for choosing your thesis to approach this topic and how your thesis will argue the point. Present two to four main points to develop your thesis and give textual evidence for each point. Research and analysis need to build on your points. List your research sources and explain how they will help with your thesis. Analysis should explain how you plan to approach your textual evidence and what kind of interpretation you plan to develop. Present one to two lines to explain what your conclusion will be. Connect the textual evidence with your thesis. Focus on analysis rather than paraphrasing. 

            The Ask the Author assignment is due in twenty four days but my partner has not responded yet to my reach out. 

            Our short essays have been graded but the feedback needs to be reviewed by the professor before we get them back. 

            As I suspected, Professor Kamboureli is supervising Kelly’s dissertation. I wonder if that's a conflict of interest. Supervising a PHD candidate is a nurturing role and so if a student had a dispute with a TA the professor is supervising then the professor might defend the TA like a bear protecting her cub. 

            Some of the books in this course are so recent that not many books will reference them. 

            I asked if this whole thing about submitting an essay outline is new, since I made it to fourth year and only first had to submit an essay outline last year. She said it depends on the professor. 

            One doesn’t have to fit the thesis of the final essay exactly with the essay statement of the outline, but it should be roughly on the same topic. 

            The average marks for our short essays were 73-74. That seems pretty low. 

            She referenced something called “The Hamburger Essay" which some people remembered from high school. Looking it up I see that it's just a layered essay with five paragraphs: introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion. 

            The tutorial runs from 11:10 to 12:00 and at 11:40 we were still talking about the final essay.

            For the remainder we discussed Rohinton Mistry's "Squatter". I said poop is always a good metaphor. Some students found that part of the story disgusting. 

            I said the character of Savakshaw is extremely successful in an unrealistic way while Sarosh is an unrealistic spectacular failure. 

            I pointed out that Wonder Bread has come up in two stories so far and presented as something which is typically Canadian and yet Wonder Bread isn't Canadian. It's from the States. I guess it's possible that mentioning it references Canada’s tendency to borrow from the States and referring to white culture as “white bread" has been a common trope for decades. 

            I said the doctor that Sarosh visits seems to be a nod to James Bond's "Dr No", with the name “Dr No-Ilaaz” and with the sinister sounding radio controlled device that he suggested that Sarosh could have implanted. She argued that the doctor wasn’t sinister in this story and so she thought his name was more about discouragement. I found out that Ilaaz means either "treatment” or “cure” and so he’s a doctor named "No Cure". But he wouldn't have to be a villain to be a nod to Dr No. It could be an ironic reference. Dr No’s device for blocking missiles was also radio controlled and he had a guano mine. Guano is of course bat shit and so it would tie in with the scatological theme of the story.

            I had chips, salsa and yogourt for lunch. 

            In the afternoon I went to Freshco where I bought two bags of black grapes, one bag of green grapes, a pack of chicken drumsticks, a box of spoon size shredded wheat, old Canadian cheddar, margarine, canned peaches, hot salsa and Miss Vicky’s chips. 

            When I got home I caught up on my journal. I read the first canto of Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queen. Sir George the Knight, who doesn’t know he’s human because he was raised an elf in fairyland, is on a quest on behalf of a lady who is travelling with him along with a dwarf. They take shelter from the storm but wind up in a maze where he has to slay a dragon that is part woman and apparently represents the Catholic Church. After that they meet a wise old man who offers them shelter but while they are sleeping it turns out that he is an evil magician who weaves a spell to make George believe the lady is cavorting in bed with several lovers. He leaves with the dwarf in anger and rides away, leaving her behind. When she wakes up she rides after him but he is too far away. Meanwhile the magician disguises himself as George.

            I had a potato, a slice of roast beef and gravy for dinner. I’ve been using my oven so much to heat my place that I might have blown a fuse and so only the top coils work now. The roast beef was a bit rare but I ate it anyway while watching Interpol Calling. 

            This story begins with a woman named my meeting two men by the river. She hands a gun to one of the men and the other asks, “Where's mine?" She says. “You won't be needing one." He runs and is shot by the other man. The police find him in the Seine with no legitimate identification and his fingerprints showing nothing. Since his coat is from London the cops call Interpol. There are letters found in the coat pocket, mostly fake like his ID but one of them is faded and the lab fixes it to make it clearer. It’s a list of the initials of people that need to be kept quiet. The last one “MT” is dated for tomorrow. It says “MT is a sniff …” but the rest has been erased by water damage. The initials are murder victims and the dates fit with when they were killed. That means they have to find MT and prevent his death. Before each set of initials is another. Duval figures that the first set are those of the killers. He thinks that they are dealing with an organization of paid killers similar to Murder Incorporated twenty years before in the United States. They learn that the dead man was Thomas Mills, one of the killers. Mills’s letter was addressed to someone named Harry. Duval goes to London to look for him and Scotland Yard introduces him to Steve Taylor who helped round up Murder Incorporated in New York. He says in ten years the organization committed one thousand murders. Duval goes to see Helen, the wife of Thomas Mills in prison. She doesn’t seem to care that he's dead but as they are leaving she tells him that the man he wants is Harry Walters. When they find Harry all he knows is where Tom lived. They go there but the landlord says he knows nothing. After they leave the woman and the gunman from the beginning emerge from a back hallway. Duval is still trying figure out “MT is a sniff" and a police officer tells him it could be Cockney rhyming slang, as in “Apples and pears" meaning stairs; “Rosie Lee” meaning tea, but they often drop the second part and just say “Up the apples" or "Cup a Rosie". He says "Sniff" might be short for "Sniff and snorter" meaning “reporter”, who sniffs in the news and snorts it out again. Duval says to look for any London reporters with initials MT. They find a crime reporter named Mike Tinton and his address. Meanwhile Amy and her men head for that address to kill him. Duval gets there just in time to stop the shooter but after they arrest him they don’t notice Amy. While Duval is talking with Tinton Amy comes in with a gun. Tinton recognizes her as Amy Barnetti, the wife of Murder Incorporated's top gunman. Duval surprises and disarms her.

            Amy was played by Annabel Maule who co-starred in the TV movie “Wuthering Heights" and in the TV series "Time of Day". She is British and had a very bad US accent. 

            Helen was played by Sandra Dorne, who had lead blonde bombshell roles in British suspense and horror B films in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but the work dwindled out when producers didn’t think she was sexy anymore.