Michel Ray

            I spent a lot of Sunday getting caught up on my journal.

I only went out to mail my income report to Social Services.

I washed a pair of shorts just in case Monday is hot so I would have a clean pair to wear to Romantic Literature class.

I saw my neighbour Benji mopping the hall floor even though the landlord is back from his vacation. I asked him if he was trying to earn his Boy Scout merit badge. He said he just needed something to do and some exercise.          

I watched an episode of The Naked City but though this story took place in New York City, unlike the others I’ve seen, it wasn’t a characteristically New York story and it was more than a little contrived. The adolescent son of a Latin American dictator has come to New York and police protection has been assigned to him in addition to his personal bodyguard who is a former matador. The matador, who is a hero of the boy, is secretly part of a plot to assassinate the boy’s father and the plan is that at the moment of his father’s death, to avoid him coming to power as a legacy dictator, the boy must die as well. At 16:00 the next day the president will be assassinated. At that time every day the boy and the matador play a game that the boy loves in which he pretends to be a bull and the matador pretends to kill him, only this time the plan is for him to really slay the boy with his sword. When the time comes the matador can’t go through with it but two of the rebels anticipated this and show up at the hotel room with guns. The matador kills himself with his sword and the police guard stops the assassins.

The dictator’s son was played by Michel Ray, who acted until his final performance in the film, Lawrence of Arabia. He went to Harvard Business School and also became an Olympic skier in several winter games. He became a millionaire banker and married the daughter of Freddie Heineken. Michel is now worth $4.5 billion.

The matador was played by Michael Ansara, who was married to Barbara Eden for 16 years and who played the Klingon Commander Kang on three Star Trek series.

I finished reading William Wordsworth’s Preface to The Lyrical Ballads. He's essentially saying that the best poetry comes from appropriating the language and themes of the culture of the poor and the working class because their experiences are more genuine and evoke deeper emotions that after meditative reflection can be transformed into poetry. He also says that there is no difference between the language of prose and poetry.