I worked out the chords to the first verse of “Mesdames, mesdemoiselles, mes yeux" (Madames and Madmoiselles, My Eyes) by Serge Gainsbourg and I think the rest of the verses have the same ones. It’s a matter of putting them in the right place. There’s no instrumental break so this song won't be hard to finish soon.
Before orange juice and grapes for breakfast I weighed 88 kilograms. Later after I took a shower I was at 89.
I took a siesta from noon to 13:30.
This was the eighth day of my fourteen day fast and so lunch was again tomatoes and avocados.
I took a bike ride in the afternoon. It was supposed to be seven degrees at the time and so I didn’t wear a scarf or gloves when I left my place. Once I was outside I realized it was colder than it looked and fortunately I had two scarves and my winter gloves in my backpack. After putting those on I had a comfortable ride to Bloor and Ossington.
I had a bowel movement when I got home and then weighed myself. I was at 88.8 kilos.
I worked on gathering quotes for my essay on George Eliot and Oscar Wilde’s theories of art and made some more notes:
Eliot describes the peasants as ugly and ungraceful and yet contented. She admits that some of the members of the upper classes are also ugly, but consistent throughout her descriptions of the peasants it is ugliness that comes to the fore (2). She does not say that some peasants are ugly but implies that they all are. Her inability to perceive beauty in the lower classes but only a charming homeliness reveals a bias that cannot help but skew her aesthetic assessment of them. The message is that the upper classes also sometimes have ugly members and so they should sympathize with the always unattractive lower class. Heavy clowns, rounded backs, stupid weather beaten faces (3). Her way to combat the unrealistic attractive rendering of the shepherd is to push towards ugliness and to declare that as the reality. Her purpose seems to be to not leave the rustics “out of our religion and philosophy”. The use of “our” suggests that the religion and philosophy are the possessions of the upper classes and not leaving the lower class out of it is a form of charity. Her insistence on describing the vulgar as both revolting and charming suggests a kind of fetishization. She wants readers who are drawn to loving the peasant because of his ugliness. She never once declares that the lower class are just as beautiful as the upper class. That would be the truth. In promoting the lie of the ugly peasant she is unconsciously creating art.
She mentions David Tenier’s peasant genre paintings as being truthful. And also Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's paintings of ragged children. “The Hireling Shepherd" by William Holman Hunt is presented as being an unrealistic example of peasant life. The main reason seems to be that the young man and the young woman who are flirting in the sunny painting are depicted as beautiful as if that was an impossibility. It really does not look any less real than the truthful paintings Eliot cites.
I got an email back from Thom Dancer in response to my argument that I didn’t get a question wrong in the quiz. He sent me a link for making appeals and commented that it looked like I had a pretty good case.
As usual on my fast I had tomatoes and avocados for dinner while watching Andy Griffith.
In this story Andy gets a letter from an ex-con named Luke Comstock. Andy had put Luke in prison ten years before after returning fire and permanently wounding him in the leg. The letter simply tells Andy that Luke is coming to see him. Barney thinks that Luke intends to kill Andy and so he deputizes Otis and Gomer to serve as 24 hour surveillance for the sheriff’s protection. Gomer is excited about the job but Otis doesn’t want to do it. Barney convinces Otis by telling him that if anything happens to Andy the next sheriff might not let him help himself to the jail cell. After a few days a bus arrives and we see a man with a limp carrying a rifle case get off. That night Andy gets a call from Comstock who says he is coming over. Andy sends Bee and Opie over to Clara’s and just in case he loads the pistol that he keeps on top of the china cabinet. Meanwhile Barney, Otis and Gomer are rushing in a clumsy way towards saving Andy. The doorbell rings and Andy answers it, inviting Luke in. Luke is carrying the gun case. Luke explains that his time in prison allowed him to think about his life and when he got out of prison he went into business. He now owns a chain of TV repair shops and he bought Andy a shotgun for hunting as a way of thanking him for stopping him from being a criminal. Meanwhile Barney sees Luke through the window with the gun and he turns off the lights from the fuse box so he, Otis and Gomer can sneak around the back and catch Luke. When the lights go out Andy and Luke go outside to turn them back on and then hear shouting, fumbling and thumping inside the house. Inside they find Barney, Otis and Gomer tied up in knots, having stumbled into a rope somehow in the dark.
Luke Comstock was played by Leo Gordon, who really did serve five years in prison for armed robbery and really was shot several times by the police before he was captured. Director Don Spiegel, who cast Gordon in his film “Riot In Cell Block 11” said that Gordon was the scariest man he’d ever met. Gordon was also a screen writer and his first successful script was The Crybaby Killer, which was also Jack Nicholson’s debut film. He wrote and appeared as a good guy in the western “The Black Patch”. He also co-starred in Roger Corman’s “The Stranger” and “Tobruk”, which he also wrote. He wrote several TV scripts for shows such as Bonanza, Gunsmoke and Maverick. When he was shot by John Wayne in Hondo, Wayne gave him hell for not falling backward. Gordon pulled up his shirt to show his bullet wounds and informed Wayne that he fell forward when it happened to him. He appeared in over 170 film and television productions.
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