The Defence of Guenevere

            On Sunday morning I started memorizing “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian.

            I memorized the first and most of the second verse of “La noyée". It’s about the speaker trying to save someone from drowning in forgetfulness of him.

            I washed a section of my bedroom floor that’s covered by the foot of my mattress at the southwest corner of the room.  There actually wasn’t much dirt in that area but there were lots of little splatters of white paint to scrape up.

            I answered the reading questions about “The Defence of Guenevere” by William Morris.

            What type of mindset is created through bodily images in this poem?

            In stanza one: “She threw her wet hair backward from her brow /Her hand close to her mouth, touching her cheek // as though she had had there a shameful blow”. The image conveys defiance and shame combined.

            In stanza five: “To my unhappy pulse that beat right through my eager body”. “Unhappy” and “eager” together shows that she is conflicted. She is restless.

            In stanza seven: “hair like sea weed” gives the sense that she has a sub-human beauty.

            In stanza nine: “Both our mouths went, wandering in one way / and aching sorely, met among the leaves / our hands being left behind, strained far away”. It creates a sense of tension between infidelity and chastity.

            In stanza eleven: “Blood upon your bed … Your hands are white lady, as when you wed / Where did you bleed?”  It is as if she has become virginal again and lost her virginity again.

            The rhythm is iambic pentameter and the rhyme is terza rima with a scheme of aba; bcb; cdc and so on. It makes the narrative continuous as it moves forward but looks back at the same time. It could only work as a song without a chorus and without an instrumental break. It has to keep going until the end.

            Guenevere is defending hers and Launcelot’s honour.

            The poem is explaining, justifying, revealing, confessing, excusing.

            This poem is ripe for parody. I imagine Matt Lucas from Little Britain performing as Guenevere through his schoolgirl character Vicky Pollard who talks very fast and makes up ridiculous excuses to never take the blame for anything.

            The poem fits the definition of a dramatic monologue as long as there are no other voices. I think she was quoting Gauwaine and so it’s still hr voice. She’s speaking not to the reader but to unseen lords and revealing things about herself.

            For John Ruskin the grotesque is fundamentally two-faced like the Melpomene and Thalia masks of Greek tragedy and comedy. It has to be a combination of the ludicrous and the horrible resulting in laughter and anger in response to the human condition.

            I did some exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Andy gets kicked out of his room for making too many demands of his landlord. Kingfish wants Andy’s $10 and so he offers his couch for a week but Sapphire won’t have that bum in her home. Kingfish knows she won’t turn Andy out if he’s sick and so he has him fake an illness. They try to figure out an illness that will fool Sapphire and look in a veterinary book, which they figure is about medical treatment for veterans. Sapphire takes Andy’s temperature and he heats the thermometer with his cigar and so when she sees how high it is she becomes alarmed. Kingfish calls Shorty the barber to pretend to be a doctor but Sapphire is not convinced. She ends up kicking them both out.

            I went out to dinner with my upstairs neighbour David downstairs at Sho Izakaya. I learned that he’s Jewish and wondered why he hadn’t gone to Israel instead of Canada. He said he was philosophically opposed to the required military service. He’s been in Canada for almost thirty years and worked down at the port lands for twenty-one years.

            He had a bowl of noodle and vegetable soup but he didn’t even eat half of it. He said it was too salty. I had the sashimi chef’s plate and had expected a lot more for $20. What I got was a little plate of three kinds of raw fish, including salmon. It was good but I’ve gotten larger portions and more variety at other Japanese restaurants. For a while I thought that what they’d given me was just an appetizer and something else was coming. David tried to get the waiter’s attention several times and he ignored him. I finally turned once, said, “Excuse me” and he came over. I wonder if there was some racism there. It was nice to get together with David but I think he was pretty disappointed with Sho Izakaya. I was too and I won’t go back there.

             I answered the reading questions about “Aesthetic Poetry” by Walter Pater.

            He says poems like “Defence of Guenevere” are coloured through and through with Christianity while at the same time rebelling against it. This can be seen in stanza three where an angel offers a choice of beautiful fabrics of long blue and short red. One chooses the heavenly colour of blue but it turns out to represent hell.

            During the Middle Ages Europe was constantly at war. Aesthetic poetry resets itself in those days but uses Christianity to sweeten and calm the violence. Everything is made more genteel and calm than it probably really was.

            I was going to skip dinner at home but what I’d had was so insubstantial that I made an egg and toast and had a beer with it while watching Annette. At the barbecue Steve is dancing with Annette when Laura reminds him that he’d brought her there but he tells Laura that nobody brought anyone. Laura begins to make her insinuations about Annette stealing her necklace and suddenly Jet blows up. She tells her to say what she means and Laura finally says that Annette took her necklace. Jet comes forward with clenched fists and tells her to take it back. She backs her up to the pier and punches her as they both fall in. Jet thinks she’s ruined the party but Steve tells her she didn’t and he was rooting for her in the fight. Annette comes home very upset thinking that she has caused all the trouble. She rights a note, packs her things and heads for the station to take the train back to Beaver Junction.  It’s only when Mike comes to see her that Uncle Charlie discovers that Annette is gone. Mike rushes to the station and convinces her to come home. The next day is the entertainment committee rehearsal at Steve’s place. Annette goes even though she knows that Laura will be there. Steve invites Laura to do her song first but when she begins to play the piano one of the keys makes a strange sound. Steve looks in the piano and finds Laura’s necklace. Laura apologizes to Annette and Jet apologizes to Laura. Laura sings a song called “Don’t Jump to Conclusions” and everyone joins in. Mike walks Annette home and they have a date the next day. That’s the end of the series because that was the last season of the Mickey Mouse Club.

            That night I was trying to transcribe the poem "Au lecteur" by Charles Baudelaire but Word kept locking down for editing and so I would have to close it in my Task Manager in order to reopen it. I tried to save the document after every word but sometimes it would shut down in the middle and I would have to retype what I'd lost once I got it back up again. This has been happening every few days for the last several months. This time after having to close Word and restart it three times I was fed up and I downloaded Apache Open Office. I’ll keep it as a backup for now but if Word continues to screw up I’ll just get rid of Word altogether.

            My second Waterpik seems to have died and so I’ll have to go and buy another. This time I think I'll go back to the plugged in kind because the battery was too much of a hassle on this last one.