Kathleen Crowley

            On Wednesday I spent an hour trying to figure out the chords to Serge Gainsbourg’s “Elisa”. I’ve found four sets of chords for the song, and on a simple strumming song one set usually fits with my voice, but in this case there’s a distinctive bass line and the chords that I’ve found don’t cover it note for note. I’ll try again tomorrow.

            On my way to OISE I had just passed Spadina when another cyclist came up beside me and asked if I was late for class. I thought maybe he was in my Romantic Literature class but he explained that he’d been in Children’s Literature with me four years ago. He told me that he’s dropped out since then and is now working full time as a bike courier.

            Despite leaving home at 10:20 I was still fifteen minutes early for class. I sat on the floor and looked at a copy of my essay, making a few notes on my thesis. Professor Weinstein arrived about ten minutes early, as usual. She practiced remembering her students’ names while we waited. When it came time to go in though the other class hadn’t cleared out, she used a French revolution term that she’s used before in the same context: “Shall we storm the barricades?”

            I moved her desk for her, lifted the projector screen and opened the blinds.

            She asked for a volunteer to take notes for someone with a disability. I felt guilty about not stepping up, but I don’t feel fully confident in my note taking.

            She referenced global warming indirectly by noting recent weather and told us that Romanticism is one of the few literary disciplines that discuss eco-catastrophe.

            She talked a bit more about our assignment and stressed that we couldn’t really on impressionistic and associative analysis. We’ve got to discuss how the text yields up the meaning we are claiming.

            Her lecture was the first one on William Wordsworth’s Prelude.

            The Prelude was posthumously published in 1850 but Wordsworth had worked on it throughout his adult life. It was meant to be the prelude to an epic poem entitled The Recluse that he aimed would join all of his concerns. He addressed the Prelude to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was already ill.

            He begins by talking about the difficulty of locating a theme for his epic and goes through the possibilities. He was having trouble getting started. He’s paralysed and unable to give voice to the breeze. The Prelude became the epic. He appropriated the epic form but turned the epic insight inward.

            The Prelude is about the roots of his creative powers and his connection with nature.

            There are several editions of the prelude but most scholars use the 1805 Prelude.

            Books 1-4 cover his life from infancy through university

            Book 5 talks about his debt to reading

            Books 6-7 cover his trip through the French Alps, when he crossed the Alps but missed it and his time in London.

            Book 8 talks about the connection between love of nature and love of mankind.

            Book 9 covers the French Revolution, the hope of liberty, egality and fraternity; and the reign of terror.

            In the Prelude he is working through the implications of spiritual solace.

            Book 1 begins with a prayer to the muse. Wordsworth invokes the wind. To be inspired is to be blown into. There is a corresponding creative breeze within. This is the constitutinist view: that the mind is an active part in the creation of the world. We see the world through schemata. The creative breeze is a storm that breaks the frost.

            In Romanticism the inherited traditions were rebelled against but also used.

            Nature chastises him for not writing about her, the one he’s always turned to. The voice of the river that flowed near his home and in his dreams. The Derwent River and by extension Nature lulled him as a lullaby.

            I asked about the River Wye near Tintern Abbey. According to the poem, Wordsworth remembers bounding over those hills as a child and being moved to passion as an adolescent by the same landscape, but according to the Norton notes, Wordsworth didn’t visit Tintern Abbey the first time until he was 23. I wondered if he was fictionalizing his memories and if when he talked about bounding over the hills he just meant any hills that he bounded over because all nature is connected. Professor Weinstein said that he might have visited Tintern Abbey as a child, since he was free to wander around the countryside, but he didn’t go to Tintern Abbey as a destination until he was 23. But she said I was right and that we should think of the Wye and the Derwent as mental landscapes. That sense of interconnectedness is called organicism.

            The Romantics mythologized themselves and created a persona with these experiences.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home where US grapes were still cheap and I bought four bags. I bought some Mexican blackberries and raspberries and Canadian blueberries, as well as some yogourt, milk and a strawberry-rhubarb pie.

            It was a very warm day for this time of year and so I thought it would be a good day to hand wash my sweatpants and hang them over the deck to dry. But the sun doesn’t reach the deck at this time of year and so they were still wet at the end of the day.

            In Perry Mason, Mr Lacey, the editor of a Lonely Hearts Club magazine has been running an ad posted by someone claiming to be a beautiful but lonely heiress. Those posting ads in the magazine need to rent a post box in Lacey’s office but only a man comes to pick up the mail from the heiress’s box. Despite hundreds of responses the ad keeps running. It’s lucrative for Lacey but the post office thinks he might be defrauding the postal service and so he comes to Paul Drake’s Detective Agency to ask him to track down the heiress. Paul says he’ll do it for $200 and he begins by dictating to his secretary Margo an answer to the ad that is different from the usual responses. Lacey thinks that it just may work and that he could make money from this heiress and so he makes a deal with a conman named Charlie Baily, who is calling himself Charles Barnaby for this grift. Lacey intercepts Paul’s letter and makes a copy using Barnaby’s name. When the heiress, Marylin Cartwright responds to the letter, we see that she is running a con of sorts as well, but it’s unclear why. When Charlie and Marylin meet they both play the parts of people in love at first sight. He plays a simple, clumsy, poor but pure hearted country bumpkin from the south and she acts like that’s exactly what she’s looking for. Lacey expects that they might get $70,000 from Marylin but he is upset when Charlie tells him he’ll only get $1000 out of the deal. Also part of the con is Charlie’s girlfriend and partner, Deloris Coterro. Her job is to come in later and utilize her volatile personality for “the blow up” as Charlie’s jealous wife. Deloris is upset by this con because usually the women they bilk are homely but Marylin is too pretty. Paul figures out what’s going on and goes to Mason for advices. He tells him to call the bunko squad on them. Charlie and Marylin have decided to get married and he tells her that he owns some land with oil on it that he needs $50,000 to access. They meet at Charlie’s place and are about to go get married. She gives Charlie a cheque and Charlie opens a bottle of champagne that he’d been chilling. He takes a drink but before Marylin can, Deloris bursts in for the blow up. She attacks Marylin and she runs out and then she hits Charlie with her purse. Charlie reels, collapses and dies. The bunko officer arrives. Delores thinks she’s killed Charlie but the cop says he was poisoned with prussic acid in the champagne. Marylin is wanted for murder. Her stepbrother George, who was the one that picked up the mail from her post box comes to Mason to ask him to defend Marylin. Mason goes to see Marylin and she tells him that her sister Helen had advertised in the same magazine and had also met Charlie. He bilked $16,000 from Helen and had also gotten her pregnant before the blow up. The result had been that Helen committed suicide. Marylin was determined to trap Charlie and Deloris and turn them over to the police. Mason says he’ll defend her if she surrenders to the police. In court, Mason asks Deloris why she bought a hypodermic syringe the night before the murder. She says she’s a diabetic but Mason points out that an insulin needle does not need to be as long as the one she’d purchased. He reveals that she injected the prussic acid into the unopened bottle because Charlie had told her that he really intended to marry Marylin. Deloris had intended to kill both of them.

            Marylin was played by Kathleen Crowley who I saw several times on Maverick in a recurring role.

            Deloris was played by Anna Navarro, who was Hispanic but born in the US. The way she spoke in this episode was supposed to be with broken English, but it didn’t sound natural. I suspect that it was scripted that way to make her seem stereotypically Mexican.

            This was the first episode in which we see Paul Drake's office, which seems to be conveniently in the same building and on the same floor as Perry Mason’s office.

            Paul’s secretary was played by Gail Kobe, who went on to be a producer on several soap operas.