Vaudeville

         

          On Thursday the history class that uses the lecture hall just before us had a guest lecturer. He must have been fairly well known because there were people in the audience who aren’t part of the class.
After the instructor for that class had left, she and the guest came back, looking for something at the podium, just as our Professor Baker was arriving. The other instructor said that she would just be a minute but Baker said, “It’s perfect! I forgot to bring your essays! I’ll be back in fifteen minutes!”
She was back to start her lecture about twenty minutes late, and the Thursday class is only one hour long.         
           The plan had been to discuss both James Marshall’s “George and Martha” and Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad are Friends”, but there was only time for Marshall’s work.
Of George and Martha she used the adjectives, “innocent”, “crafty”, “courtly”. The word “innocent” is actually the negative of “nocent”, which means harmful, and so innocent means “unharmful”.
Marshall says of his own drawings that they are artless and raw, and that he allows his hand to shake a little before he is finished rendering the characters. Marshall is an accomplished violist and he compares the lines he uses to outline George and Martha to the lines that the alto voice of the string family makes in a piece of music. Her declares that books are theatre and just as opera is dependant on the artifice of show the more artificial books are, the more truth they tell. The only things that distinguish George and Martha from one another are the cultural props they wear, such as a man’s hat and a woman’s hat.
          At one point the professor called to a young woman in the back, telling her that no matter what was so amusing on her computer, she would like her to pay attention to the lecture. Apparently the girl just had a digital copy of the book we were looking at and was smiling at the images. Later Professor Baker said to her, “I’m sorry I yelled at you for smiling!”
          At the end of the class we got our midterm essays back. I was extremely disappointed with my mark of 75%, which is only a B. That’s the lowest mark I’ve gotten on a midterm English essay since I was in academic bridging. I’ve gotten at least an A-minus on all my essays and so logic would say that I’m improving at writing academic essays, unless I’ve sustained brain damage somehow since last year. I want to dispute the mark, but the protocol is that I have to first consult my TA before I take it to the professor. I didn’t really like Christina from the start because I knew there was something wrong with her. I sent her an email, asking for a separate consultation from the one for essay two, but she said we could talk about both papers at the same time. I had wanted to have a clear understanding what went wrong with the first one before even starting the second. It seems that other than email exchanges, each student only gets a total of half an hour with their TA in this whole course. Professor Baker had said in the syllabus that we could see our TAs more often if we wanted, but I think they get paid by the hour and there’s a limited budget.
          That night I watched the John Spotton 1965 documentary, “Buster Keaton Rides Again”, which is basically about the making of “The Railrodder”, which Spotton co-directed. It was shot in Canada and involved Keaton riding a single passenger track maintenance vehicle from the east coast to the west. Buster’s third wife of twenty-five years was with him for the shooting. She was middle-aged and about twenty years younger than him. They filmed his sixty-ninth birthday party during the trip. They appeared to have a charming relationship. She basically served as his nagging nurse and they were both nuts about baseball.
          Keaton’s polite arguments with the director over what would be the funniest way to do a given scene were interesting. Buster’s superior experience often won out, like when the director wanted him to do his laundry on the speeder but Keaton said that him trying to read an oversized map in the open wind would be much funnier and it was.
          In addition to the documentary, there was some interesting biographical data on Keaton as well, such as the fact that he got his nickname from Harry Houdini, who saw the young Keaton boy take a tumble down a stairs and commented, “That was a buster!” Reportedly, one time while the four or five-year-old Buster was performing on stage with his parents, his father picked him up and threw him at a heckler. In order to sidestep child labour laws, Buster’s parents sometimes told authorities that Buster was an adult midget. Buster’s mother was billed as the only female saxophone player in the United States. By the time Buster was eleven years old, he was writing gags for his family’s act.