Hope Emerson

            There was an icy wind blowing into my apartment on Thursday morning when I got up but the heat was also blasting very high. I found that keeping one living room window open a third of the way was a good balance.

            I spent about half an hour in the morning on my essay. I reworked my introduction

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience represents human consciousness as being divided into day and night. Within each of these he creates a pantheon of tropes with characteristics that he associates with one or the other half. His symbolism of the sun uses light and images such as bright clouds, white sheep, flowers and birds that are typical of daytime pastoral settings to represent the natural state of human existence, or the good part of man. On the dusk side of Blake’s twilight we will find some of his richest and creative imagery. He uses winter as a metaphor for poverty, and orphan children as the most extreme example of the poor that in their vulnerability bear the brunt of a heartless class system. Also infesting Blake’s human darkness is the worm that represents the negative aspects of lust that reach across the terminator into Blake's day to infect female sexuality as symbolized by the rose. Blake’s night nourishes a twisted urban jungle in which the king of beasts is the tyger of industry. The question that arises from this division is, are these two sides reconcilable? The answer will be yes and no. We are rooted in the darkness but we have the ability to turn to the light.

and started composing my conclusion.

Blake uses metaphors taken from the nature of nighttime to represent the facets of human nature that work against the natural world and he adopts pastoral symbols from daytime to depict humanity’s true nature. But is it possible for someone to move into the sunlit side of Blake’s world and to eschew the darkness of his night and winter? There is no harmony or reconciliation between the two sides, as although the light of natural happiness must be continuously reached for, we have in our physical nature an entity that generates our psychological midnight. In our brain grows, as it did for the first man, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and so the darkness of psychic nighttime is in our DNA. The images of vines that frame either side of the text about the first poet for Blake’s Introduction to Songs of Innocence resemble spiraling strands of deoxyribonucleic acid. Of free will, Blake would say that we have the ability to turn towards our truer nature that pipes with glee, but we must do it from where we are rooted in the darkness and turn towards the light like the sunflower.

            I decided to do my laundry but it was also the 15^th of the month, which is the day I have to send in my income report to Ontario Works. When I looked for the monthly form with the prepaid postage envelope though I couldn’t find it. I suppose it’s possible that I misplaced the one for November, but it’s not likely and so either their office failed or the postal office lost it. It dawned on me that the forms might be available in pdf online and so I found one. After filling it out and packing up my laundry I slipped it into a mailbox on my way to the Laundromat.

            While my clothes were in the was I rode down to Freshco specifically to buy honey but I also picked up some honey tangerines with the leaves still attached, two packs of raspberries, a bag of grapes and a whole chicken. The chicken was under $7, so that was a pretty good deal.

            When I got home I put the chicken in the freezer because I had a roast to cook later on that evening and that would last me a few days.

            On my final trip to the Laundromat, Richard, the receptionist for the second floor offices of PARC was just arriving to do his washing. A friend was helping him bring his stuff in because Richard only has one leg and travels on crutches. His friend wanted to know if Richard needed assistance when he brought his things home but Richard insisted that he’d be able to handle that by himself. I didn’t ask but I couldn’t see how he would need help carrying the same amount of laundry in one direction but not the other. Maybe he meant he’d be calling a cab. When Richard opened up his bags of dirty clothing they smelled horrible.

            Richard told me that a snowstorm was coming that afternoon. I went home, had lunch and took a siesta. Sure enough, it was snowing when I got up at 16:27.

            I got caught up on my journal.

            In the evening I put garlic, salt, rosemary, thyme, pepper, chopped onion and olive oil into a pestle and ground the mixture into a paste which I rubbed all over an outside round roast. I put it in the oven on high for twenty minutes and then I roasted it at medium heat for about two hours.

            I worked for another hour or so on my essay.

            The roast turned out pretty good and I had a slice while watching Peter Gunn. This story begins with three middle-aged thieves cutting open a safe. Once they’ve burned a hole big enough to step through, George and Tiny go inside to get the jewels and pass them through the hole to Casper. Tiny hands Casper the last tray and says “That’s it” but Casper tells him, “There should be more. Take another look.” While he is doing so, Casper absconds with the gems. Later, Gunn arrives at Mother’s after hours and finds Mother at the piano entertaining her staff with a couple of Vaudeville numbers. Her style of singing and even her voice are reminiscent of Jimmy Durante but more expressive. She sings “Oh Look At That Baby” by Walter Hirsch, Bennie Krueger, and Joseph M. Verges. 

            After she’s finished, Casper walks in and tells Gunn that he needs protection for Timothy because someone is trying to kill him. He needs Gunn to watch out for Timothy until he can get him out of town tomorrow. Gunn says, “Let’s hear what Timothy has to say.” Casper leaves to get Timothy. George and Tiny come in and threaten Gunn for information about Casper. Since Casper never gave his name, Gunn can quite honestly say he has no idea what they are talking about. They leave and then Casper comes back in through the back door. He says Timothy is at the back of the club and to make sure he brings him to the train station the next morning at 5:30 so he can get Timothy out of town. Casper leaves. Edie and the others beg Mother to do another song. She begins “Bill Bailey” by Hughie Cannon while Gunn goes out back to meet Timothy. Gunn returns with a seal on a leash and tells everyone to meet Timothy. Gunn takes Timothy looking for Casper and leaves him in the open convertible for some stupid reason while he goes into Vladimir Sokolwaski’s artist’s studio. Vladimir is recording an avant-garde piece of music. He’s shaking a tambourine, dangling a cymbal from his teeth and banging on it with a mallet while doing a non verbal chant that sounds something like, “Oooh nayeeo nanaeeyo!” when Gunn knocks at the door. Gunn looks at the bare walls and asks, “What happened to all your paintings?” Vladimir indicates his recording equipment and declares, “These are my paintings! I have found true expression for the soul in sound paintings!” He plays a recorded piece for Gunn that he calls “Ode to a Purple Baboon” and does an interpretive dance while it is playing. There are chimes and non-rhythmic drums, along with one voice sounding like it’s imitating a sheep and another an ape accompanied by some kind of whooshing sound. It’s actually pretty good. I wonder if Mancini wrote it. Vladimir turns it off and declares that he cannot look on it anymore. Gunn asks, “Look?” Vladimir says, “Piotr, you are a peasant! You are a pleasant peasant but a peasant! You are listening! You must not listen, you must see! With your ears!” Vladimir goes over to a pedestal on which is an object covered with a drape. He announces, “This is my Madonna! My Mona Lisa! You will be the first to see it!" He pulls off the drape to reveal a record player and says, “I call it ‘Raging of the Azaleas’!" He plays the record and it sounds like there's some theramin in there, plus someone imitating a cat in heat and someone else chanting in a lower voice, “Hoowee! Hoowee awah ..." That was pretty good too. Gunn interrupts and asks him where he can find Casper. After a payment of $50 to Vladimir, Gunn is directed to a flophouse. Once Gunn leaves, Vladimir puts on all of his sound paintings at once and stands in ecstasy in the middle of the room. When Gunn returns to his car, of course Timothy is gone and being loaded by George and Tiny into their car and driven away. Gunn goes to Casper’s room and finds the place has been ransacked. Under a pile of junk he finds the beaten but still okay Casper under some overturned furniture. Casper explains that the reason George and Tiny wanted Timothy was because Casper had put the diamonds in a fish and fed it to Timothy. Gunn figures that George and Tiny will try to use the shipping reservation that Casper made to also ship Timothy out of town since it would be impossible to find a fence for hot diamonds in the same town where they were stolen. Gunn brings Jacoby and a bag of fish to the train station. When they see George and Tiny carry a large crate to the shipping counter, Gunn has Jacoby carry the fish near by. Timothy gets excited and busts out. There’s a short tussle with George and Tiny but Gunn and Jacoby make short work of them. Timothy is taken to an animal hospital where the diamonds are safely removed.

            I was impressed with the musical performance of Hope Emerson. I knew that she had started out in Vaudeville but I’d never heard her sing before.

            Vladimir was a similar character to ones that Peter Sellers would play in later Blake Edwards productions. He was played by Henry Corden who was born in Montreal, but raised in New York. He had a long career as a character actor in supporting roles and became the second voice of Fred Flintstone in the 1970s.