I re-found the music site that has the audio for the first verse of “Ghetto Blaster” by Serge Gainsbourg. It’s called Sounds Wave and I used it to work out the chords for the intro and about half the first verse. Tomorrow I should have the first verse finished, then I’ll go to Apple Music, which has the second and third verses and work out those. After that I’ll just have to work out the chords for the final verse by logic.
I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of four sessions.
I weighed 86.9 kilos before breakfast.
I did a bit more research for my paper before leaving for my final class:
Tolkien’s two Man-in-the-Moon poems are closely connected, published in the same year by the same publisher, but he was not the first modern poet to link the two original nursery rhymes. The Victorian poet and fantasist George MacDonald, whose writings Tolkien had read as a child, also wrote a Man-in-the-Moon poem. It appears in the ‘Another Early Bird’ episode in the children’s novel At the Back of the North Wind (1870).
Hey! diddle diddle / The cat and the fiddle / He played such a merry tune / That the cow went mad / With pleasure she had / And jumped right over the moon / But then, don’t you see? / Before that could be / The moon had come down and listened / The little dog hearkened / So loud that he barkened / ‘There’s nothing quite like it, there isn’t.’
Like Tolkien’s poem, MacDonald’s Man in the Moon has descended to earth, which explains how it is possible for a cow to jump high enough to actually sail over the moon. Tolkien’s poem gives a further reason why the moon is on earth – he has stayed up too late drinking fine brown ale.
Tolkien connected the rhyme with the Middle English poem known as ‘Mon in the Mone’, in which the local villagers rescue the Moon from the local jail by bribing the bailiff with drink. This poem is found in a manuscript miscellany of over a hundred texts written in English, French and Latin in about the year 1340, probably in the Shropshire region in the west of England. The western locality may well have appealed to Tolkien, for he felt at home in the west of England and admired the dialects and literary culture of the region.
I left for class at 12:15. When I got there the room was not occupied. I put my backpack down and went to the washroom. When I came back Andrew was there. He’s going to law school in Windsor next year. I told him I didn’t make it into the MA program for Creative Writing here at U of T and so this is the end of my academic career. He asked if I’d applied anywhere else. I said I don’t want to leave Toronto just to get an MA, especially considering how low my rent is here.
I started the opening dialogue by pointing out Bilbo’s questionable ethics in the riddle game that he has with Gollum. There is also his attempt to pick the pocket of one of the trolls at their camp, even though that’s not his mission. We argued about the word change in the riddle game. Professor Balot thinks that since Gollum said, “Ask another question” instead of “Ask another riddle” that it leaves the game open for change. I said “another” means another question of the same type, which is a riddle. “What have I got in my pocket?” is not a riddle. The narrator says himself that Bilbo knows the riddle game is sacred and so Bilbo’s pretending that his question is another riddle betrays the game.
I said Bilbo and the other heroes of The Hobbit are thinly veiled Englishmen. There’s a sense that even when what they are doing is not right, it’s still right.
Professor Balot said that the English are cultural amphibians.
I said the personification of the riddles in the Exeter book change one’s relationship to the thing that is the answer. The riddles in The Hobbit are not personified, but I added that maybe that was necessary. It would have changed the tension between Bilbo and Gollum if the riddle answers were given personalities.
The professor pointed out that Gollum answers the riddles with his mind while experience provides Bilbo with his answers.
Marianne did a presentation on Before and After Tolkien.
The Ring of the Nibelung inspired Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien hated A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s metatheatrical and that pulls us out of the fantasy.
Modernism defamiliarizes you from enchantment. The Hobbit is more meta than Lord of the Rings.
Fan fiction is more fantasy than a movie on which it is based.
Aria did a presentation on Thorin as a monster.
I said what makes Grendel’s mother scary is her silence. She is not given a voice. The Mere Wife adds a new dimension to Beowulf by giving Grendel’s mother a voice and thoughts that we can read.
Umberto Eco says there are ten kinds of Medievalism: Middle Ages as "pretext", Middle Ages used for "ironical revisitation", Middle Ages as a "barbaric age", Middle Ages of Romanticism, Middle Ages of "neo-Thomism", Middle Ages of "national identities", Middle Ages of "Decadentism", Middle Ages of "philological reconstruction", Middle Ages of "occult philosophy", and Middle Ages in terms of "the expectation of the Millennium".
I asked Professor Balot if she is offering any extensions for the essay. She said to email her and ask and she could give me an extra week. That would make the new deadline 23:59 on April 19. That will help because my research has been very time consuming.
I weighed 86.2 kilos at 17:00.
I had a very late lunch and then took a siesta from 17:30 until a little after 19:00.
I weighed 85.8 kilos at 19:30.
I cut two racks of pork ribs into sections of three ribs each and grilled them in the oven. I had three ribs with a potato and the last of my gravy while watching the last episode of Amos Burke: Secret Agent. I don’t think one can call it the season finale because the show was canceled halfway through the season.
This was the conclusion of the story that began in the previous episode. Burke had come to investigate the death of his friend and war buddy Harlan O’Brien. O’Brien had been a security officer at the atomic plant. Burke finds that most of the citizens of the town of Sorrel behave as if they are hypnotized. They have a violent distrust of strangers that finally causes the entire town to attack Burke on the street. He escapes to Prince’s Laundry because Richard Prince was one of the only people unaffected by the brainwashing. It had something to do with the fact that he was deaf. But Burke finds Prince dead and spinning inside of one of the laundry machines. That is where the previous episode ended.
The mob led by the police chase Burke to the laundry and Burke escapes through the back. Anna Rodrigues has somehow gotten through the police roadblock and knows where to pick him up as she pulls up in her convertible and tells him to get in. She takes him to her beach house. She asks why he doesn’t carry a gun. We’ve seen him with a gun in every other episode but all of those stories took place in foreign nations. He tells her that he doesn’t carry one in the United States. I doubt if that’s true for any other US secret agents.
Burke goes to see “The Man”, the head of MX3. He tells Burke there is not enough evidence to send any more agents to Sorrel. He tells Burke that the case is closed. But then he gets a call that there is a warrant for Burke’s arrest for the murder of Richard Prince. Since the warrant has been issued by a US court Burke is duty bound to return to Sorrel.
He goes to see Anna before turning himself in. He says he’s met three sane people in Sorrel. Sharon O’Brien was not susceptible to brainwashing because of her drinking, Richard Prince was deaf, and Anna lives on the beach outside of the range of the Sorrel radio station.
Burke makes a recording of a Sorrel radio broadcast.
Sharon is in the hospital now where she is not allowed to drink. Burke sneaks in through the window to see her. She panics but Burke deliberately uses this to draw the police in to arrest him.
Anna has been hired by Bill Adams the Sorrel district attorney to paint a special varnish on a set of sculptures.
Burke’s murder trial begins with Judge Jed Hawkes presiding. Joan Lynnaker is the first witness and claims Burke attacked her in her garden. The second witness is John Norton, who is an MX3 agent and had been Burke’s contact in Sorrel. But after being gang beaten he was taken to the hospital for several days. Now he appears in court as if he is in a trance. The third witness is a cop who says he saw Burke beat Richard Prince to death with a chair leg. The fourth witness is Sharon who says that Richard Prince warned him that he read Burke’s lips when he said that he wanted to teach all of the women in Sorrel a lesson. Then Burke broke into her hospital room and tried to kill her.
Burke’s lawyer submits several tapes of the Sorrel radio broadcasts as evidence and wants them played in court. Judge Hawkes looks worried and says court is adjourned until the next day.
Hawkes tells Bill that the sculptures are being sent to a gallery in Washington run by a Socialist organization known as The Friends of Progress. Tomorrow is May 1, which is a big day for socialists. They will be blamed for what happens next and Sorrel will become the new capital of the USA.
Burke has a visit from Anna. Her hands are in bandages, She thinks the varnish she used on the sculptures irritated her skin. She also feels sick all the time. Burke tells her to get to a hospital right away because she has radiation poisoning from the varnish.
Later one of the guards hears a noise in Burke’s cell and investigates. He looks through the little sliding window and sees Burke hanging. He steps in to take Burke’s body down but Burke is only hanging by his hands. He kicks the guard and escapes. He goes to see Hawkes and tells him he made a call on the way there. It’s now a matter of national security. Two MX3 agents step in to guard Hawkes.
Burke tracks down the sculptures to a gallery in Washington. An agent comes in with a Geiger counter and finds all the sculptures to be radioactive. Burke says they were all painted with radioactive varnish so that it would be harder to discern which one conceals an atomic bomb. Hawkes tells Burke the bomb is set to go off in seventeen minutes. They open up the sculptures one by one but time is running out. Paul Lynnaker is brought in because he knows which sculpture holds the bomb but he refuses to cooperate. Burke plays Paul recordings of the Sorrel radio station broadcasts and slows the tape down to reveal subliminal messages from Hawkes controlling the minds of all the Sorrel listeners. Paul realizes it's true and tells them which sculpture hold the bomb. With less than ten seconds to spare, Paul shuts off the bomb. Hawkes is arrested.
Anna was played by Lynn Loring, who started as a child actor on the Studio One anthology TV series. By age seven she was in great demand as a TV spokesperson for various products. From the age of six to sixteen she played the role of Patti Barron on 240 episodes of Search for Tomorrow. She played Patty Walker on the short lived sitcom Fair Exchange. She played Barbara Erskine in the first season of The FBI. In the 1980s she became a producer for various Aaron Spelling projects. In the late 80s she became president of MGM/Universal Artists Television Productions. She was the executive producer of the movie Mr. Mom.
No comments:
Post a Comment