Marla Landi

            On Sunday morning I woke up during the fourth hour of the day to the sound of someone downstairs at Popeye’s blasting Bangladeshi or Arabic pop music. They usually play it around that time but it’s not so loud. Although the restaurant isn't open 24 hours it seems like there is always someone down there. 

            I uploaded my translation of “Barcelone" by Boris Vian to my Christian's Translations blog and started the editing process to make the online text look like my document. 

            I finished memorizing “Disc Jockey” by Serge Gainsbourg and looked for the chords online but no one had posted them and so I worked out the first few on my own. 

            I finished reading the required sections of Thomas More’s Utopia. There’s an unintentionally ironic part in which Utopia is shown to be tolerant of all religions and yet any atheists are publicly shunned. 

            I finished all the Canadian Literature reading that I’d fallen behind on, plus the required reading for next week. There were a few accounts of the lives of Black pioneers in Alberta, a couple of which were obviously either transcripts of tape recordings of someone writing down an oral account word for word. It’s arguable that these are not really Canadian Literature unless all Canadian histories are Canadian Literature.

            I read the story "Canadian Experience" by Austin Clarke, about an immigrant to Toronto from Barbados who has trouble finding a decent job and finally jumps in front of a subway train. 

            More interesting was NorbeSe Philip’s poem "Discourse on the Logic of Language" in which she plays with various ideas about the tongue and relates them to “tongue" as also meaning “language". Some slaves somewhere at sometime that refused to stop speaking their language had their tongues cut out and hung high as examples for others. 

            For dinner I had a hot Italian sausage on toast with a beer while watching “Interpol Calling”. 

            In this story a gangster named Johnny Stefano is deported back to Naples after serving time in a US prison. Duval is called by the Naples police because they think Johnny might be up to something. Duval and Captain Pagano go to see Johnny and find him at his family's abandoned house on the land of their ruined vineyard. Duval recognizes Johnny’s three guests as extortion experts from Germany, Spain and France. Duval goes to see Johnny's sister Maria who insists that Johnny is trying to go straight. She tells Duval how the family vineyards were ruined by the phylloxera bug. Later Duval figures out that Johnny has stolen several phylloxera samples from a lab and is now breeding them. He and his partners are using them to extort the owners of vineyards throughout Europe. Duval tells Maria this but she doesn’t believe it. However after Duval leaves she goes to the family house to check and Duval follows her. Maria finds the glass cases containing the bugs and begins to smash them. When Johnny tries to stop her Duval arrives. Johnny eventually falls from a balcony to his death. This story wasn’t as interesting because Duval is suddenly carrying a gun whereas he never did before because Interpol agents don’t use firearms. 

            Maria was played by Marla Landi, who was a top model who later became the fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar. She started her own international wig business.