Steve McQueen

            On Wednesday morning I memorized the first verse of “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian and all but the last verse of  "La noyée" by Serge Gainsbourg.

            In the late morning I took a siesta so I’d be fresh for Aesthetic and Decadent Movements class that afternoon. I only slept for about half an hour and so I had time for lunch before leaving.

            There was no other class ahead of ours so I was able to open the little basement windows and air out the stuffy room.

            I worked on my journal with my laptop until class started.

            Professor Li gave us a review to bring us up to date.

            Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnets tangle love with death. It’s better to compare his work with that of other poets in order to understand it.

            Christina Rossetti’s poems have intricate form and feelings, artfulness of emotions and complex aestheticism.

            We looked at George Meredith’s long poem about a love rectangle, "Modern Love".

            I pointed out that his use of sonnets stretched to sixteen lines reflects an abnormal situation. Sonnets usually contain a resolution either in the sestet or in a couplet at the end but these don’t. I suggested that this might be deliberate in order to convey the idea that these entanglements have no resolutions.

            Someone suggested that there is a sense of surplus in the relationships because of the stretch to sixteen lines.

            The husband refers to himself in both the first and third person. I said that the observing “I” may be referring to the involved self as “he” because he is both a participant and an observer.

            The poem sometimes reads like a novel.

            One aspect of modernity may be that the wife is the first one to take a lover.

            The word “modern” may be there for irony.

            “Low sobs” are not loud and yet they “shook our common bed”. This is symbolic of repression. 

            “Little” is smaller than “small”.

            Her sobs “strangled mute” are tied with the “muffled pulses” of the darkness.

            The “heavy measure” of sleep relates to musical measure.

            In sonnet XLVIII the husband speaks in the first person displaying his psychology as he complains about women in general. He uses “sense” and reason and “senses” to refer to physical perception.

            “In most hearts”: For a Victorian male, opening the heart and being humorous and ironic were very manly things to do and to be honest was to be “earnest”. But the speaker here talks of feeling the truth.

            We took a five-minute break.

            Before looking at William Morris’s “Defence of Guenevere” she showed us his painting of the same name. But I found that although the painting is by Morris it was a portrait of his wife Jane Burden depicted to represent Iseult mourning Tristram’s exile from the court of King Mark.

            William Morris was a socialist who was dissatisfied with the grotesqueness of the industrial world. He believed that it enslaved thinking and caused alienation. To counter this he set up workshops for the design and hand crafting of wallpaper and fabric. The most prominent store that Morris worked with was the Liberty department on Regent Street. She passed a around a piece of fabric called “Strawberry Thief” designed by Morris that she’d bought at Liberty in London. She said it costs $92 per metre.

            Our first seminar starter this week was by Ling Sun, who says Guenevere is comparing her tears to the blood of Christ in the wine of the Eucharist.

            I pointed out that the idea of what is divine has been switched in the poem, as the colour blue is presented as that of hell while red becomes divine.

            The second seminar starter was by Robin, who connects Keats’s phrase, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” to the Defence of Guenevere. Guenevere claims to be innocent because she is beautiful.

            I told the professor that I plan on making my own translation of “Au lecteur” by Baudelaire and asked if I should upload it with my paragraph when I do my presentation in two weeks. She said that I should attach it.

            She commented that a lot of seminars she’s taught have had students not being engaged with the material but our class is outstanding.

            She wanted to know if hr teaching style was too aggressive. I told her that I like it because I’m an argumentative type of person.

            After class I rode to the U of T Bookstore to see if our Indigenous Studies textbook, Ways of Knowing by Yale Belanger was in yet and I was glad to see that it was. I was not glad to see the price of $112 on the shelf though. I took it to the counter and the clerk asked if I wanted to pay for something. I said I didn’t want to pay for anything because it was going to hurt. He said it always does. He was interested to know what course it was for. I was pleasantly surprised to see the price was lower than that listed on the shelf, although it was still pretty expensive at $97.60 after tax. The clerk asked if I wanted a bag and I said I think I’ve paid for it, although the bags are free anyway.

            I rode west on College to Brock and then went up to the back of the Dufferin Mall because my second Waterpik had died. In Walmart they only had two kinds of Waterpiks. One was another wireless one like I’d just had and the other was a plug-in kind about a size down from the one that my daughter bought me a few years ago. I got the plug-in model and it was $112.97 after tax. This was an expensive day!

            When I got home I went out to the liquor store and bought a six-pack of Creemore. When I walked up to the cashier she was telling someone, “He wants to put in a moat with snakes and alligators in front of his wall!” I asked, “Trump?” She pointed at me and said to the other person, “See? He didn’t even have to hear the name to know whom I was talking about! You’d have to be dead to not see how crazy that is!”

            I did some exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish wants Andy to buy a car with him with Andy making the first down payment. They buy a 1926 Overland Roadster but six blocks from the dealer the tire blows out. They open the rumble seat to get the tools and find a woman’s body. They are frightened and think the police will think they killed her. They park the car and hide in their office while worrying about the electric chair. Andy goes out to move the car and while he is gone a man arrives who used to be the owner of the car. He tells Kingfish that he left his mannequin in the rumble seat and wants it back. Kingfish tells him he can take it. When Andy returns he offers to pay Andy for his half of the car and Andy takes the money. Kingfish tells Andy he’s just been scammed because the body was a mannequin. Andy tells him he found that out a few minutes ago after Kingfish’s car got hit by a truck.

            I cut a rectangular focaccia bun in half and made two small pizzas with the rest of my sex trade worker sauce and my old cheddar cheese. They turned out well and I had them with a beer while watching the first two episodes of Wanted Dead or Alive, starring Steve McQueen. 

            I hadn’t even known that McQueen had been on a TV series. He plays a bounty hunter with a heart of gold named Josh Randall whose weapon is a sawed off rifle that he carries in a holster like a six-gun.

            In the first story, Randall arrives in La Tunas in pursuit of Carl Martin but walks in on Carl being busted out of jail by his brother Andy. The sheriff is killed and Randall is slugged over the head but manages to severely wound the escaping Car just before losing consciousness. When he comes to he is accused of killing the sheriff and busting Carl out of jail so he can track him down and get the reward. Randall escapes and goes after the brothers. He finds them at their ranch with their sister Louise, who hadn’t known her brothers had killed someone. Carl tries to shoot Randall but Louise stops him. He’s too weak to fight but Andy isn’t and ends up killed. Randall gets the reward and gives large amount of it to the sheriff’s widow. Someone says that if people knew he did things like that they’d be friendlier towards him but he says he doesn’t want the kind of friends that would need to know.

            Louise was played by Jennifer Lea, who was chosen to play Laura Petrie on the Dick Van Dyke Show but was ultimately replaced by Mary Tyler Moore.

            In the second story Josh gets a telegram from an old friend named Sykes, who is a retired Confederate colonel. He finds him injured at Fort Considine and being cared for by his daughter Jody. He learns that it was Jody that sent the telegram. Sykes has been wounded by bounty hunters because a fake wanted for murder poster for Sykes with a reward for $1000 has been posted all over the territory. Josh has to do detective work to discover who printed the poster. It turns out that it was Clara Hood, the wife of a deserter named Ben Hood that Sykes had put in prison for twenty years. Hood had died in prison and so Clara wants revenge on Sykes. Josh stops her and her brother and the fake wanted posters are collected for a bounty of $1 each.

            Carla was played by Joan Banks who was a radio star of the show Gangbusters among others in the 1930s. She didn't start having success in films and television until the 1950s.