Edgar Buchanon

            On Wednesday morning I finished memorizing “Vie, mort et resurrection d’un amour passion” (Life, Death and Resurrection of Passionate Love) by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the chords online but was not surprised that no one had posted them, since it’s really more of a recitation to music than a song. But I think it could actually be sung to the music and so I’ll work out the chords as if it were a song. 

            At midday I logged on for my Brit Lit 2 tutorial. 

            We started talking about the paragraph assignment. Someone asked about how much quotation to use. Carson said just whatever your analysis calls for. Be efficient with evidence. Focus on one or two details of a particular angle. 

            The link is the least important element for this assignment. Don’t reiterate what you have already said. Gesture towards making a bigger point. Make a concise, compelling, coherent argument. I pointed out that the professor had said that the link was entirely irrelevant for a single paragraph assignment. 

            The main point is not necessarily a thesis. Get down to business as soon as possible. 

            I asked if it would be okay to submit the assignment in the form of a haiku and he laughed. He said he was tempted to say yes. 

            We talked about Northanger Abbey. 

            Not a lot is known about the life of Jane Austen because her family destroyed a lot of her correspondence. What survives are her published works and some excellent letters. Northanger Abbey was her first novel but it was not published until after she died. 

            It is a satire of Gothic Romance novels. Ann Radcliffe is mentioned and according to Wikipedia Northanger Abbey is a parody of Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. 

            Carson asked us to define Gothic fiction. I said it usually portrays the dark side of the modern aristocracy in ancient buildings in sublime settings. There are elements of classical or medieval revival.

            There are things lurking in the shadows and there is horror but it is sexy at the same time. Someone said it is pulpy. There is emotional tension. People think strongly. There is usually a patriarchal villain. Gendered archetypes. 

            Satire and irony highlights the disconnect between the ideal and the real. 

            Catherine is not a heroine. 

            There is no patriarchal control. 

            I say that Catherine changes gender in a sense. Her activities and manners when she was younger are portrayed as having been behaviour more typical of a boy. 

            She is not interested in excelling at anything. 

            I said that metafiction is literature that talks about itself as being literature. 

            Carson mentions Georg Lukács' The Theory of the Novel. He draws a relation between the novel and irony. The novel is an epic for a world without god. The novel highlights the dissonance between the world and its characters. 

            I said the greatest irony of Northanger Abbey is that Catherine a heroine with no free will. She is being written as the story unfolds by all the other characters and that's true right to the end. 

            Three of us read a section of chapter 3 in which Henry teases Catherine about young ladies keeping journals. What he says in praise of journals although at the same time making fun of them.

            Some novels done in a journalistic style are epistolary, like Dracula. 

            Is irony a tool of criticism or nihilism? Flirtation is often done ironically. 

            I had saltines and old cheddar for lunch. 

            In the afternoon I received a package that my daughter ordered for me. It came by post but I didn’t open it until after my bike ride. 

            It looked warmer outside than it has been lately and some of the snow was melting but really it felt just as cold in the shade as before. The Bloor bike lane was a little messier because there had been melting during the day. I went to Ossington, south to Queen and then home. 

            When I got home I went over to the liquor store to buy a six pack of Creemore. 

            I opened Astrid’s gift and it was a Meteorite condenser microphone for computer recording. At first I was alarmed by a cancer warning but I looked it up and calmed myself when I read that the plastics in the mic could only cause cancer if they could get inside of one’s body. It would have to be exposed to extreme temperatures in order to pass through the skin. 

            I tested it against my old Shur microphone and the old one is definitely fuzzy by comparison. If I got an extension for it and could figure out how to mount it for standing and singing I could use it for song recording. I think I can mount it on my regular mic stand just by balancing it, so all I need is a long extension usb cord so I can stand and sing in the middle of the room. Anyway I won’t need an extension for video chats online or for my tutorials so I don’t need to buy one until my course is over.

            But then when I tried to go in the system to increase the volume and then clicked on something to listen to the mic it started screeching through the speakers and I had to disable it. I hoped that after a restart the next day this would not happen. 

            For dinner I made pasta, topped by the rest of my sauce and some cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story a handyman about Bee’s age comes by and offers to spray her flowers. Bee finds Mr Wheeler so charming that she starts to fall for him. When Andy sees how Wheeler makes Bee feel he figures that they could offer him a few more jobs to do, like fix the roof. Wheeler stays in the guest bedroom instead of his truck. The next day when he’s about to climb the ladder to the roof he suddenly claims his back is bothering him. Andy ends up fixing the roof. The next day he’s going to paint the porch but suggests Bee needs to be taken for a picnic and so Andy paints the porch. Later when Andy introduces Wheeler to the mailman and they shake hands the postman tells Andy that he’s never shaken hands with a handyman that had such soft hands. Andy gets suspicious and calls the sheriff of the town where Wheeler says he worked last. The sheriff knows him well and calls him Goldbrick Wheeler. He says he‘s a notorious freeloader who leaches off people for a few weeks at a time before moving on. That night Andy is cleaning his shotgun and he hints to Wheeler that he should be asking Bee to marry him soon. Wheeler gets in his truck and drives away. 

            Wheeler was played by Edgar Buchanon, who would two years later become famous as Uncle Joe on Petticoat Junction. He graduated from dental college where he met his wife. They practised together for eight years. He took up amateur acting and then in 1939 turned pro. He appeared in over 100 films and in the mid 50s was the star of Judge Roy Bean for 39 episodes. After dinner I worked on my paragraph assignment a little more and knocked it down to 1300 words before my brain got tired at 22:45.