Warren Oates

            On Sunday morning I posted “L’amour en privé” by Serge Gainsbourg on my Christian’s Translations blog.

            I started looking for Gainsbourg’s “Shylock” but I doubt I’ll be able to find it. I think it was only sung once on television by Petula Clark and Serge Gainsbourg in a duet.

            I continued working on my short essay on “Au lecteur” by Charles Baudelaire. If I compare what I did yesterday I’ve made progress but it’s amazing how difficult it is to write a 300-word paper. It doesn’t give me a lot of room to prove my thesis.

            I had a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish gets a job selling insurance and becomes mercenary about it. He won’t leave Andy alone until he buys a policy. One burial insurance policy gives a coffin with only two handles because if there are six handles and it’s raining the pall bearers will just b tracking mud on each other. Another policy pays you double if you dream you are falling, hit the ground and die. Another policy pays you $15 a week as long as you live if you fall from the 79^th floor of the Empire State Building to the sidewalk and on top of that the payments start from the time you start falling so you are earning money on the way down. Andy goes to visit Amos to get away from Kingfish. He has a chat with Amos’s ten year old daughter Amadilla, who tells him a story she heard in school about a farmer that fell on his head and couldn’t work and make a living anymore. That inspires Andy to buy three policies from Kingfish. The Kingfish gets a call from Amadilla asking for her commission.

            This episode had a comical theme song for the character or Lightning sung by the Delta Rhythm Boys, though there doesn’t seem to be a recording of it outside of the show.

            I worked some more on my essay.

            For dinner I had a ham and cheese sandwich, some heated frozen savoury wedge French fries with a beer while watching Wanted Dead or Alive starring Steve McQueen.

In this story Josh is escorting a wet behind the ears first time criminal named Joe who is wanted for armed robbery and who has already given back the money. They are travelling by stagecoach to a town near the Mexican border when the stage is blocked by a tree that was cut down. Two wanted murderers named Kale and Cox who've just escaped from prison highjack the stage. Kale forces Josh to pretend he’s his prisoner while Cox poses as shotgun for the driver and Joe is to pose as a drifter. When they get to their destination Kale tells Cox to take the driver away and shoot him. Joe throws a rock at Kale and is wounded but it’s enough of a distraction for Josh to grab a gun and kill Kale and Cox.

Cox was played by Warren Oats, who became more famous than most character actors mostly because of his repeated appearances in the films of Sam Peckinpah. He only took the lead on a few occasions, the most famous being his starring role in Dillinger with Michelle Philips.

I worked for another hour on my essay on “Au lecteur” by Charles Baudelaire before winding down for the night:

In “Au Lecteur” by Charles Baudelaire, the poet’s use of enclosed ABBA rhyme reflects our containment in circumstances of repeated self-indulgence in vices that are merely kibble for the feeding of pet remorse. The rhyming couplet in the middle of each quatrain symbolizes the connection between the halves of our dual nature of penitent and libertine that is confined by another rhyme above and below it, representing the morally polluted environment that surrounds us. The rhyme serves to lift the dark weight of the poem and to convey that even a descent into hell is a type of flight and that in essence our plight is not as heavy as the poet’s words would convey if they had not been rhymed. The rhyme creates a buoyant dance so that the reader is not drowned in the slimy morass of her own dark self. The rhyme serves as elevator music for the ten-stanza drop to hell. The Alexandrine line form of iambic hexameter creates a greater distance between the outside rhymes at the top and bottom of each stanza than would be found in the more song friendly iambic pentameter lines that most readers would be used to. The effect of this distance causes the outside rhyme to become an almost forgotten connection, thus teasing the reader with momentary disorientation. This journey to the underworld is extended and made more difficult by the Alexandrine metrical structure that stretches the length of each line to the edge of breathing comfort. The reader is exposed as the embodiment of ennui, the only beast that makes a culture out of boredom. In the end the only certain reader of a poem is the poet. There is no god in this poem. The only supernatural being is the Devil and the only hint of salvation lies in the rhyme and in a sense of community with other human beings, that is the human rhyme of the author to the reader. Enclosed rhyme quatrains play the role of introducing issues in Petrarchan sonnets, which are resolved in the end by their accompanying sestets. In this poem there are no sestets and the quatrains mischievously serve as trouble making Petrarchan problem generators.