The Landfills Are Starving

I spent most of Wednesday formulating a thesis for each of my essays that are due next week. I’ll be showing Sean the opening of my paper on Nietzsche after class on Thursday and I’ve requested a meeting for before the weekend with Andrew Lesk to have him look at my thesis on Gabrielle Roy’s stories. My Nietzsche paper is tentatively titled “The Corruption of Conscience” and I plan on arguing on Nietzsche’s behalf while pointing out some small issues I have with how he thinks that conscience came into being. For my Roy essay I might go with the heading “Lost Landscapes and the Shape of Secrets” and my thesis so far is that the contrast between the hills and the prairie in relation to the conflicting emotions of exile and belonging gives psychological meaning to the geographical features of each place. But I will also look into the power that belonging to two places might give to the space between them.

I went across to the Dollarama to buy shaving cream and saw that they’ve totally rearranged the place. They’ve got one single counter now going the length of the front window. Now the cashiers work with their backs to the street. It looks like they’ve made a lot more room for cheap disposable merchandize with this arrangement. This is good, because the landfills in the suburbs are starving to death.

I cooked that night for the first time in a month, though it seemed like had been years. Frying garlic was like music to my nose. I was still vegetarian until Easter but I made a chilli with black eyed peas.

I watched the rest of volume one of Rock Legends on the Ed Sullivan Show. The chequered jackets that the Jordanaires wore while backing up were not a good contrast the Elvis’s flamboyant attire.

In Volume two, Ray Charles did a strong performance of Eleanor Rigby, though he changed the lyrics slightly to try to make Father Mackenzie seem more objective. Al Hirt played his hit “Java” while a group of female dancers dressed sort of like harem dancers did a weird westernized version of a Middle Eastern dance. Miriam Makeba did her big hit “Pata Pata”. Bobby Darin sang “Beyond the Sea” and even did a little dancing. Dominico Modugno sang his song “Volare”. So, like the title says, they were all “rock classics”.