Blanche Dubois

            I was feeling heavy in the stomach and burping cumin on Friday morning after having eaten fried falafel the night before.

            I spent a lot of the day re-reading A Streetcar Named Desire. What a sad ending. Blanche Dubois is such a tragic character, but despite her flaws is the only likeable character in the play.

            The feeling that I’d had the day before that I might be coming down with a cold was mostly gone.

            I read the Sylvia Plath poems that were required reading for my course. I don’t think that I had read them all before. She really was a poetic genius with powerful imagery and with tragic force that contemplated mortality and with a pain-tempered ecstasy that overwhelmed her own fragile interior. She harvested agony and drew honey from a broken heart while writing with distance about her journey to suicide.

            I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay about a former movie story named Miles Crawford who, when his career failed, studied to become a lawyer. Years later his son gets into a knife fight with a friend and kills him. He is charged with first-degree murder. Ed Rutherford, the best criminal lawyer around is hired but he is not convinced of Todd’s innocence. Miles proposes that Ed handle the backbone of the case but that Miles will be the front man in court. His final statement to the jury is a powerfully moving “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” type speech, which causes the trial audience to applaud. Because of the prejudicial reaction the prosecutor asks to make his summation the following day. The next day the lawyers are called into the judge’s chamber and a movie is played in which, 30 years before, the actor Miles Crawford had given word for word the exact same speech as he had given that day. Crawford asks that they watch the conclusion of the film, which shows the young defendant being found guilty and given the death sentence. Todd is found guilty but the judge, having been moved by the film, chooses a life sentence with an early chance for parole over the death penalty.

            I re-read the Frank O’Hara poems for our course. There were far fewer poems from O’Hara than from the other poets, which I think was because Scott Rayter accidentally posted his PowerPoint presentation on Blackboard rather than a full collection of poems. O’Hara was interesting because of the little jabs of surrealism he would throw into his poems among the more free flowing lines that simply observed ordinary reality.