Zsa Zsa Gabor

            On Tuesday morning I memorized the fifth verse of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian.

            I memorized the first verse of “Glass securit” (Security Glass) by Serge Gainsbourg and worked on revising my translation. He repeatedly refers to “tequila aquavit” and so I assume he’s talking about a cocktail known as “Enemy Lines” that mixes the two liquors. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of four sessions.

            I weighed 86.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I went onto Amazon to track my order of the novel Pearl and saw that it was six blocks away. A minute later there was a knock downstairs. I looked out my window and spoke to the guy below. He said he had a package for Christina. The book wasn’t scheduled to arrive until Friday. The other book I ordered, The Buried Giant has been shipped by Royal Mail. I envision King Charles driving a little old lorry slowly over winding cliff roads in England trying get my book to the ship. 

            I finished reading “Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf”. Acker claims that the sword that Beowulf used to kill Grendel’s mother appeared before him and vanished after he killed her. But every translation I’ve read said that he simply noticed the sword hanging on the cave wall and grabbed it. The latter makes more sense poetically because the sword dissolves after he’s used it to kill the last member of the race that crafted it. 

            I weighed 86.1 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and stopped at Freshco on the way back to buy six bags of grapes (from which I’d first removed most of the soft ones), some bananas, and a pack of Sponge Towels. After talking off my gloves to unlock my building I put them back on before grabbing the cold metal of my bike frame to carry it upstairs. 

            I weighed 85.3 kilos at 17:45. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:45. 

            I made three pages of cursive stream of consciousness notes towards the presentation I have to do on Friday. Then I created a document for the presentation and started transcribing and expanding on my hand written notes. I’m still only on the first page but here’s what I have so far: 

            Both the ancient poem Beowulf and the modern novel The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley are about identity being maintained in objects or locations as containers, as vessels of culture through cultural history. The sword in Grendel’s mother’s cave serves that symbolic function in Beowulf , while in The Mere Wife the mountain and the mere hold Dana’s lost history. In the latter case the history has been displaced and moved into the mere under the mountain by another class that serves to be the equivalent of the Danish Vikings in Beowulf. There is no mountain in Beowulf but there is a mere and caves beneath it. A mountain with a lake inside is both a high and a low place. Grendel and Grendel’s mother must ascend to attack the Danes while Dana and Gren look down upon the upper class community at the base of the mountain and attack from above. Even when everyone is inside the mountain, Dana and Gren look down upon them from the skylight. 

            Dana represents Grendel’s mother just as her son Gren represents Grendel. But Dana is not as mysterious as Grendel’s mother. 

            Of the sword that Beowulf uses to kill Grendel’s mother, Paul Acker in “Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf” says that it appears before Beowulf but in the Norton Anthology translation by F. Klaeber and in the Broadview Anthology translation by R.M. Liuzza it is said that Beowulf was granted by grace the perception to see the weapon hanging on the wall of the cave. That does not mean that the sword materialized before him as Acker implies but simply that he noticed the sword that was already there. The latter makes more sense poetically because the sword dissolves after he’s used it to kill the last member of the race that crafted it.

            I had a potato with gravy and some pork ribs while watching season 1, episode 3 of Burke’s Law. 

            In the home of famous writer and adventurer Cable Roberts the maid is played of all people by Zsa Zsa Gabor. I don’t think much thought went into casting for this show. Each episode had more than a handful of famous guest stars and I think they just put their names in a box and said, “Okay, the next one will be the maid” and then pulled out a name at random. So Zsa Zsa is showing the new chauffeur around the house when they walk into the safari trophy room and find Cable Roberts’s body slung over a screen in such a way that his head looks like it’s mounted with the animals. Burke arrives. They’ve learned Roberts was shot with his own hunting rifle twice from two different angles and distances. They try to interview Cable’s secretary Arthur Clark but he’s too upset. Burke interviews Mrs. Roberts and finds her standing on her head. Then she flirts like crazy with Burke. He interviews Zsa Zsa and she flirts too but has information as well. She says a taxidermist delivered a stuffed gazelle and left angry. Then there was an older woman also angry who said she was Mrs. Roberts. They go to see the older Mrs. Roberts and Burke thinks she is Cable’s mother but she reveals she was his wife and was actually younger than him. They go to see the taxidermist and he gives a lot of attitude, refusing to answer questions and even takes a couple of swings at Burke, who then punches him in the stomach. Later they watch a movie of Cable Roberts shooting a lion. Tim explains that it demonstrates that a hunter uses two shoots: one from a distance and another throat shot close up. That’s how Roberts was killed. Burke goes back to the younger Mrs. Roberts. She says she adored her husband but didn’t like or love him. Burke goes to see Cable’s hunting partner Harry Riggs who reveals that he hated Cable’s guts. He says that the film footage was faked and that he did all the shooting while Cable hid behind a blind and then the film was edited to make it look like Cable was the hunter. Then at the station the older Mrs. Roberts confesses in one room while in another room the taxidermist, who turns out to be her son, is also confessing. Burke lets them both go. He goes to see the younger Mrs. Roberts again and suggests she has a lot to gain from Cable’s death. She calls for Arthur and then Burke reveals that he knows Arthur killed Cable and also that he knows that Arthur was Cable’s brother. He knows this because one can’t get a passport without a birth certificate and so he found out Arthur’s full name. Burke says he knows Arthur killed Cable because Arthur said he saw Cable mounted like an animal. But when Zsa Zsa discovered the body it was mounted, however the screen fell over and so Arthur couldn’t have seen him that way unless he'd killed him. Arthur says that when he heard Cable deny his son the same way he denied him as his brother, he had to kill him. 

            Zsa Zsa Gabor started acting on stage in Vienna in 1934. After her first divorce in 1941 she followed her sister Eva to the US. Her first movie was a small part in Lovely To Look At in 1952. The same year she starred in Moulin Rouge. In 1953 she was the spokesperson for Paper Mate. She co-starred in Death of a Scoundrel, The Girl in the Kremlin, and The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk. She starred in Queen of Outer Space. By the 1960s she was so famous for her off screen persona that she would often appear on screen as herself. She played the villain Minerva on Batman. She was arrested for slapping a police officer after he stopped her for having an expired license. She told an interviewer that she’d danced with Hitler twice but later said she’d meant to say Tito of Yugoslavia. She had a total of nine husbands. She said she’d never hated a man enough to give him back his diamonds. She said, “Husbands are like fires. They go out when unattended”; “I am a marvelous housekeeper. Whenever I leave a man I keep his house”. She said that to marry an actor is to be in a love triangle with him and himself. One of the strangest things she said was, “A man only hits a woman if he loves her deeply”. In addition to Hungarian and English, she was also fluent in French, Italian and German. Her right leg was amputated in 2011 and she died in 2016.