Peter Gunn

            On Wednesday I got somewhere between damp and soaked from riding through the light rain to class, but it wasn’t bad enough to feel uncomfortable during the lecture.

I told Professor Weinstein about Richard Maurice Bucke because he had included quotes from William Blake in his book Cosmic Consciousness. She seemed to be surprised by my pronunciation of his last name. Ever since I was fifteen I pronounced it like “Byook" but when I looked at the trailer for the film Beautiful Dreamers they say it like “Buck”. It shows I’m still learning.

            I brought the little Frankenstein’s monster action figure from my window ledge and had it standing on my desk during class. Only Gabriel let on that he noticed it.

            In our one-hour class we looked at Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan Or A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment”. She reminded us that loco-descriptive poems make of a fragment an aesthetic whole. A forum for the mind to revive itself. The landscapes of Romantic poems are converted to mental landscapes. Textual rather than mental constructs like Tintern Abbey become personal legends in which to take refuge. Coleridge’s lime tree bower is made into a moment for understanding that one can even convert a prison into a pastoral setting. It's the aesthetic rather than the mind that provides the solace. The poet is mythmaking from memories to create an aesthetic forum for mental revivification.

            Some see Kubla Khan as Coleridge confronting aspects of his nightmare. Dark Romanticism is also escapism.

            Before writing this poem the author had been sick. He retreated to a pastoral farmhouse for solitude. He was addicted to opium and his readers would have known this by now. He’d been reading a travel book while high on opium. He fell asleep and had a dream that inspired the poem.

            Kublai Khan in the 13^th Century was the fifth Khan of the Mongol Empire. The pleasure dome referenced is just a summer palace that Khan built at Xanadu in inner Mongolia.

            Unlike many Romantic poems, this is not rustic and not natural. He is either recounting or creating a dream. In loco-descriptive poems the locations are transformed to a mental landscape. This poem echoes the pastoral experience. The pleasure dome is a walled, protected paradise.

            The poem itself becomes the structure that Coleridge is writing about.

            The land within the walls would have been 22 square kilometres.

            The before and after is mysterious. The description of the fountain bursting is the experience of a surge from the natural world.

            The poem becomes a safe forum but not a pastoral bower. It’s a poetic challenge to architectural splendour.

            It has some kind of spiritual significance but it is less resonant of Christian religious sanctity.

            The last stanza diminishes the vision.

            The Abyssinian maid is a surrogate for the poet.

            What kind of vision is he describing?

            There is a wall around the dome and around the poet. He is protected by a mental wall.

            It had pretty much stopped raining by the time I started my ride home. I stopped at Freshco to buy paper towels and toilet paper but I also bought raspberries, grapes and yogourt. The cashier and the customer ahead of me were talking about their daughters’ costumes for Halloween. The customer’s daughter went to school as a pretty cheerleader but that night she would become a zombie or vampire cheerleader.

            That night I grilled a burger and watched the first episode of Peter Gunn. I remember the music but I don’t think I saw this show when I was a kid. It was created and directed by Blake Edwards, who did the Pink Panther movies and The Party. The music was by Henry Mancini.

            It was both dark and slick at the same time. The character of Peter Gunn was modelled after Cary Grant. Steven Spielberg was planning a reboot of the series on TNT but it never happened.

            In the first story some gangsters working for George Fallon have acquired a police car and police uniforms. They pull over the big mob boss, Al Fusary and gun him down. Fallon takes over his rackets. Peter Gunn hangs out at a club named Mother’s, mostly because his girlfriend Edie is the singer, but it also serves as his unofficial office and the staff is like a family to him. Mother tells Gunn that Fallon has begun to try to extort money from her and is asking for 50% of her profits. Gunn goes to ask Fallon to lay off mother. Shortly after that a bomb goes off at Mother’s. There is a 50-50 chance of her pulling through. Gunn hides in the back of the car of Fallon’s lieutenant, Dave Green. When Green gets in Gunn points a revolver at his head and forces him to drive to Mother’s bar. He takes him into the bombed out club and makes him sit on the floor. He tells him that he’s waiting for a call and that if Mother dies then he dies. Edie calls and tells him Mother will pull through but he doesn’t tell Green. He walks over, cocks his gun and points it at Green’s head. Green begins to give out information. Gunn makes Green call Fallon and to demand that he bring him $40,000 or he rats to the cops. Gunn tells Green to go behind the bar and make himself a drink. Edie walks in and Gunn is distracted long enough for green to hit him with a bottle. Green runs from the club but is gunned down by the fake cops. Edie had called the real cops who show up and arrest them.

            Edie is played by Lola Albright, who in this episode sang “Day In Day Out” by Johnny Mercer and Rube Bloom in a smoky voice. 

            Mother is played by Hope Emerson who was almost as tall as me and a little heavier. She usually played villains.