Nina Simone

            On Saturday morning I translated the second verse of “A la pêche des coeurs" (Fishing for Hearts) by Boris Vian. 

            I finished working out the chords for “Tennisman” by Serge Gainsbourg and ran through it in French and English. Then I uploaded it to Christian’s Translations and began the editing process. 

            In the late morning I went to No Frills where I bought two bags of green grapes, one of red, a pint of strawberries, a half pint of raspberries, a strawberry-rhubarb pie (Why doesn’t anyone sell just rhubarb pies?), mouthwash (It took a while to find it because they switched the aisle so everything that was previously at the front is now at the back, except I guess for everything in the middle), and a jug of orange juice. When I got home all the raspberries had spilled in my bag. 

            I had crackers and old cheddar for lunch. 

            After a siesta I spent almost four hours finishing reading Brother by David Chariandi. At times it’s quite well written and he tells the story well. It has a few funny scenes and some interesting cultural references, such as the descriptions of West Indian food being cooked and eaten and an interesting description of the art that goes into being a Hip Hop DJ. But it’s a very sad story for the most part about a poor family falling apart and a brother being murdered by a cop. There were some interesting musical references such as Otis Clay’s "Lasting Love" and two songs that Nina Simone recorded: "I'm Feeling Good" by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse; and "Ne me quitte pas" by Jacques Brel, which I’ve translated and sing regularly in French and English. 

            I made pizza for dinner with another lengthwise slice of the round loaf of fruit nut bread as crust topped with sauce and old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching Interpol Calling. 

            In this story a very clever extortionist signing his name only as “George” firebombs a warehouse in Germany insured by a large company in London. He threatens to do even worse damage if he is not given 100,000 pounds. Duval tells the company to follow his instructions because Interpol can track someone with that amount. But the police think it’s an opportunity to catch him with the goods. Duval advises against it but come along. The money is left in a briefcase on a park bench. A boy on a bicycle puts it in his basket. They follow him but the boy rides down an alley that won't fit a police car and a few blocks afterward hands it to George who is wearing a hat and sunglasses. The boy Johnny is picked up but didn’t know it he was doing something criminal. Duval says something like I told you so. Duval knows that George knows that the serial numbers of the bills have been recorded by Interpol and so he would go to a non-Interpol participating country to exchange the bills. The two nearest are Iceland and Iraq and George and his girlfriend Carol go to Iceland. The plan is for Carol to split the money among all the banks in Reykjavik and then in two days draw it out in smaller notes. But Duval anticipates this and asks the International Banking Association to block the deposits. George is forced to try to sell the money on the black market in Tangiers but Duval; anticipates that as well. He coordinates with the police in Tangiers where Captain Ahmed informs him that there are five people that would buy George’s money. What they have done is issue warnings to four of them so that George will be steered towards the one that works out of a certain café where Duval and Ahmed wait. Several people come in over the next several hours until George enters and is shocked to see Johnny sitting at a table. By his surprise, Duval knows this is George and he is arrested. 

            I answered next week’s Canadian Literature tutorial question: 

            The ghosts of memory and mourning in David Chariandy’s Brother exist in a different context than the ghosts to which Al Birney refers in his poem “Canlit”. Canada did not lose 2.5% of its population in an internal conflict that ripped the nation apart in more ways than one. It is to the ghosts of an entire country that Birney refers when he says that "it is only by our lack of ghosts we are haunted" and he means that Canada did not have the deaths from such a cataclysmic event as the US Civil War to haunt us, nor a poet like Walt Whitman to convey that haunting and to thereby become a haunting ghost in himself. Birney did not mean that Canadian communities, families and individuals are not haunted by ghosts. He means that there is less of a national literature in Canada because there was not such a devastating national event as the Civil War to inspire it. 

  

            I also wrote my weekly question in response to the British Literature readings: 

            In Spenser’s The Faerie Queen the narrator personifies Chastity and identifies her with Queen Elizabeth I. Is all of this praise of chastity simply a way of flattering Queen Elizabeth and would the story take a different form if she'd been married? 

            I started reading The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline. I didn’t get very far but according to the summary it’s a science fiction story in which, after the global warming apocalypse, white people have lost the ability to dream and so they must drain the bone marrow of Indigenous people in order to be able to do that. It could happen!