Behind the Back of My Guitar

            On Wednesday morning I started singing my translation of “La complainte du progrès” by Boris Vian and made some lyrical adjustments as I went along. It’ll take a day or so before It’s ready to post on Christian’s Translations.

I worked out the chords for “Sensuelle et sans suite” (Sensual and Senseless) by Serge Gainsbourg, ran through it in French and English and then pasted it on Christian’s Translations. I’ll finish posting it there on Thursday.

 I worked on my poem series “My Blood in a Bug”.

I washed another one metre long by twenty-three centimetres wide section of the walking area of my bedroom floor. There’s just a narrow four-board wide strip along the northern wall of the west and central part of the room. But that strip has the most plaster and paint to scrape up so it’ll be quite a task. I expect to finish it on Sunday.

My landlord came because he wasted to check for a leak in my pipes. There wasn’t one but I took the opportunity to get my last three unreceived rent receipts from him.

Two of the six bagels I hadn’t frozen had gone mouldy and so I had to thaw out a frozen one to have with cream cheese and tomato for lunch.

In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. This story begins with Sapphire announcing that her friend in California has invited her and Kingfish to spend the summer out there. She insists that Kingfish come up with the money for the trip. At the lodge Kingfish opens a telegram for Andy and discovers that Andy has won a raffle for a 1948 Plymouth roadster. Kingfish schemes to get the ticket away from Andy by pretending he works for the government as an anti-counterfeiting agent. He tells Andy that he bought his raffle ticket with a fake dollar and he’s under arrest. But he tells him he’ll give him a break if he hands the ticket over to him. Andy says that he left the ticket in a suit that he gave away to a shelter. They go down to the shelter and find the ticket and Andy gives it to Kingfish. Back at the lodge Kingfish answers a call for Andy from the raffle people and tells the caller that he’s Andy. He is told that the prize would be presented to him at a big event in Jersey City. Since this event would be covered by the media Kingfish is worried that Andy will find out about it. He goes to see Stonewall the lawyer for advice. Stonewall says he has the blues because he’s had a falling out with a friend. He had been worried that his wife was cheating on him and so he wanted to tap her phone. Stonewall advised against it but he did it anyway and heard a lot of mushy talk between his wife and another man. Kingfish asks if they had the falling out because his friend didn’t take his advise. Stonewall says it’s because he recognized his voice over the phone. Stonewall advises Kingfish to get Andy out of town for when the raffle prize is presented. He tells Andy that they’ve discovered oil in Cuba and Kingfish spends his last $90 to pay for Andy to go there. The night of the prize give away Kingfish is presented with a 1948 Plymouth roaster.

I checked online and found that I got another A-minus for my second Indigenous Studies paper. I was worried because my TA got pissed off at me for challenging her “facts” while she was marking the essays.

            I looked into which of the songs from my 2017 rehearsals I should make a video of next and found that there are two or three. One is “Andalouse” by Gerard de Nerval and the other is “Andalusian Dream” my translation of “Andalouse”. The other possibility is Strip Tease but it’s a quiet song and the traffic noises were loud. There are other French songs that I could turn to videos but they are ones that I still practice and there are no good corresponding English versions and so I think I’ll just re-record those. I should be better at performing them now after two years of doing it every day.

            I tried to start a Movie Maker project for Andalouse but the program wouldn’t accept the Sound Recorder program. It’s weird that it accepted an M4A file for the last video that I made. The last time I used Cloud Converter but every attempt failed over an hour of trying. I tried Zamzar and it was slow but after an hour the file was converted. But when I started downloading the file it was five or more times slower.

            While I was waiting I read a chapter and a half of The Inconvenient Indian.

            I had an egg and a toasted bagel for dinner with a beer while watching an episode of Racket Squad. This story begins with a wealthy man that lost his daughter in a car accident going to a séance on the urging of his housekeeper. At first he is sceptical but then their seeming ability to manifest an “ectoplasmic” form of his daughter drew him in. The girl asks him for her mother’s diamond necklace and he brings it. She takes it and disappears. He goes to the racket squad and the captain comes to the séance. A man in a sailor’s suit appears and says he’s the captain’s old buddy from the navy but the captain had been in the air force and so the mediums are arrested as well as their “ghostly” accomplices. The captain shows the electronic gadgets that had been used to fool everyone.

            One of the con artists was played by Ruthelma Stevens whose film career consisted of supporting roles, mostly in the 1930s.

            After the show I checked my download and saw it had failed. I reconnected to the Coffeetime wifi and started again. This one went a lot faster but I accidentally started three downloads of the same file. A new one started every time I tried to reconnect to Zamzar even though I never could reconnect with Zamzar. One thing I don’t get is how a little 50 megabyte M4A file gets converted to a 654 megabyte WAV file. It took about three quarters of an hour for the first file to download. I changed its location and then deleted the other two. Movie Maker accepted the converted file.