Joan Plowright

            On Wednesday morning I had the chords for the first verse of  “Le complainte du progrès" by Boris Vian worked out. I also had memorized all but the last verse of “La poupée qui fait pipi" (The Poppet that makes Peepee) by Serge Gainsbourg.  

            I worked on getting caught up on my journal.

            In the afternoon I rode to my last Aesthetic and Decadence Movements class.

            Rhonda, Elizabeth and Marco, the students closest to my age, some older and some younger were already there. Rhonda commented that the old students are always there early. I said I prefer “ripe”.

            Elizabeth asked if anyone had seen “The Importance of Being Earnest" film before. I said I'd seen the play at Stratford and read it several times and had written an essay on it during Academic Bridging. Elizabeth said she’d taken the play in Academic Bridging as well. I asked if she’d had Theresa Moritz for an instructor but hers had been Barbara Rose, who is also very nice.

            Professor Li arrived earlier than usual and wondered if we all always come this early. I said that I come early for everything and might have gotten the habit because my mother was a schoolteacher and I used to ride to school early with her rather than take the school bus.

            I asked her if she teaches other courses. She said that teaches a four-year graduate course on Victorian Literature.

            She is also writing a book on Ethos as a moral concept. Elizabeth said it’s cool that she’s writing a book but Professor Li said that writing books is what one is required to do as an academic.

            Professor Li brought two boxes of donuts for us. She said she usually takes students out somewhere after the movie but she knows we’re busy. I think she means she found it too expensive.

            We watched the made for TV adaptation from 1986 that Professor Li says is closest to the play.

            I wrote down several choice lines:

Not a quote but an observation. Bunbury is to the country what Earnest is to the city.

            “If the lower orders don’t set us a moral example, what on Earth is the use of them?”

            “Girls never marry men they flirt with.”

            “The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous."

            “More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read."

            “The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

            “Behaving very well and feeling very well rarely go together.”

            “Her hair has turned quite gold from grief" is a line in both this play and in Dorian Gray.

            “If one plays good music people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk."

            On smoking: “A man should always have an occupation.”

            “A man who desires to get married should either know everything or nothing ... I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance."

            “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness."

            “To be bred in a handbag reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”

            “She is a monster without being a myth, which is rather unfair."

            “Hearing my relations abused is the only thing that makes me put up with them."

            “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his."

            “The truth isn’t the sort of thing one would not tell to a nice, sweet, refined girl."

            “Women only call each other sister when they have called each other a lot of other things first."

            “The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means."

            “I’d sooner die than go to Australia.”

            “I don’t think I would care to catch a sensible man. I shouldn’t know what to talk to him about."

            “A desire to be buried in Paris hardly points to any very serious state of mind.”

            “No gentleman ever has any money."

            “If I am occasionally overdressed I make up for it by being always immensely overeducated."

            “A man much talked about is always very attractive."

            “Half of the chaps who get into the bankruptcy court are called Algernon."

            “He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows."

            “I don’t quite like women who are interested in philanthropic work. I think it is so forward of them.”

            “Once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate."

            “Whenever one has anything unpleasant to say one should always be quite candid."

            “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.”

            “When I see a spade I call it a spade" "I am glad to say I have never seen a spade".

            “My first impressions of people are invariably right.” This line is funny because Gwendolyn said it twice about two opposite first impressions of Cecily.

            “One must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement."

            “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing."

            “Where questions of self sacrifice are concerned men are infinitely beyond us."

            “Three addresses always inspire confidence.”

            “Only people who can’t get into society speak disrespectfully of it.”

            “I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character.”

            “No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.”

            “The idea of being baptized as an adult is irreligious.”

            “If you are not too long I will wait here for you all my life.”

            “It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking the truth.”

            I noticed that Earnest was played by Paul McGann, who was in “Withnail and I”, one of my favourite movies and he was also the eighth Doctor in Doctor Who.

            Lady Bracknell was played by Joan Plowright and Professor Li pointed out that she was Lawrence Olivier’s second wife.

            We got our essays back and first off made the mistake of not putting the name of the authors or the works in my clever title of “The Artist is an Outlaw”. She noted that one of my paragraphs had not been developed to clarity. But she liked my transition between paragraphs about Satan and about Lord Henry as a satanic figure.  She thought I took one paragraph a little too far when I declared that Dorian Grey was the father of humankind. But she thought that my final line, stating that, “Dorian becomes the very thing that outlaw artists like Baudelaire and Wilde need to kill” was an excellent conclusion. I had been worried that she might find that too harsh. In my citations I guess I didn’t cite my own translations properly. Her final comment was, “Excellent work! Highly thoughtful, full of good points here and there. I was particularly impressed with the ending conclusion of the essay. Well done!” I got an A on my paper!

            I told professor Li how much I enjoyed the course and told her that she was a very good monitor for seminars and should be in the United Nations. She said she enjoyed having me in the class and she learned a lot. She admitted that I had been right when I corrected her about the name of a painting by William Morris. I said that’s what I like about literature courses. The professors like to learn from their students. I told her about being pushed down for asking questions in Indigenous Studies.

            I stopped at Loblaws on the way home where I bought a couple of bags of grapes. The cashiers are older and far more ethnically diverse at the Queen Street West Loblaws compared to Freshco in Parkdale and No Frills at Lansdowne and Dundas, which has almost all young women of Portuguese descent.

            I had a late lunch of a salami and cheese sandwich.

            I had taken a siesta in the late morning but I felt very sleepy around 19:00 and went to sleep until 20:00.

            I had beans and toast with a beer for dinner and watched Zorro.

            In this story we finally see the Eagle, the leader of the Brotherhood of the Eagle Feather. The Eagle’s headquarters is in Monterrey and he holds a meeting there of his agents. He announces that he has removed the gunpowder from almost all of the pueblos in California, leaving all but Los Angeles defenceless. Commandant Toledano is called away to San Diego to help protect it. He leaves his wife behind in Los Angeles and puts Sgt Garcia in charge of intercepting the gunpowder. It turns out that Raquel is also an agent of the Eagle and she writes a fake letter commanding Garcia that the gunpowder is no longer a problem. Don Diego hears this from Garcia and is suspicious and so as Zorro he watches the road leading to Los Angeles. He intercepts a load of hay that suspiciously has an armed guard. He stops the wagon and finds the gunpowder but suddenly the soldiers arrive and Zorro escapes. Garcia is told by the driver of the wagon, Salvador Quintana that the barrels under hay are kegs of wine and that he is the new owner of the in n. Of course that endears Quintana to Garcia and he escorts him to Los Angeles. Quintana’s plan is to store the gunpowder in the wine cellar but Zorro had anticipated this. He knocks out Quintana’s man in the basement and as each keg of gunpowder is slid down the stairs Zorro intercepts it and passes it out the window to Bernardo.