Archimago

            On Thursday morning I had about half of “A la pêche des coeurs" (Fishing for Hearts) by Boris Vian memorized.

            I didn’t quite finish working out the chords for the instrumental parts of “Sparadrap” by Serge Gainsbourg. They go through a lot of changes I guess to make it a longer song than it is. 

            At 11:00 I logged onto my Canadian Literature tutorial. 

            Next week is reading week and so there will be no lecture, no tutorial and no discussion questions to answer. 

            We talked about David Chariandy’s Brother. 

            Someone was talking about the nickname “Scarberia" as if Chariandy made it up. There is also a lot of play with the word “Scar” like in "Scarlem". 

            I suggested that the flashbacks correspond to the unfolding events in the present. Michael's denial of his mother's complicated grief is followed by the main events leading up to his brother’s death. He puts “complicated grief” in quotation marks before that memory but afterwards he frees it from quotes and speaks about it as real. 

            Someone said complicated is simplistic. 

            Kelly’s fiancé is a physician and he advises people to do something that makes them happy every day. The visits to the Rouge Valley in the novel would qualify. 

            Freud wrote an essay on mourning and melancholia. Melancholia is what he called what is now known as complicated grief. He said that mourning is a natural response to loss that should not be interfered with. But melancholia is different. If someone loses someone they know who they have lost but not what that loss represents. Ruth’s loss of her son might be her loss of the Canadian dream from an immigrant’s perspective. 

            Why does community represent hope? 

            Flowers from the Rouge. From an unnameable colour to a description. 

            I said I’ve met very few people who are proud of being from Scarborough. She argued that that is changing and there are writers and artists now speaking proudly about Scarborough. 

            I said that there are lots of people that have drawn inspiration from Scarborough like Mike Myers. Wayne’s home town in Wayne’s World is definitely based on Scarborough. I’m sure that people can feel a sense of community in Scarborough but really it's only a walking place if one walks to a wilderness area. Unlike Toronto there are no nice old houses to live in and no old villages to enjoy walking through. Parkdale is a beautiful, old urban village that is far more diverse than even the area described in Brother. I’d say most people aren't proud of being from any suburb.

            I said that Ruth quotes the song “Feeling Good” when she says, "It is a new day." Someone else added that the song also talks about nature, which ties in with the Rouge Valley.

            I shaved and showered. Being clean shaven would make me more comfortable on Friday when I would be working on my essay all day. 

            I had chips with tomato sauce and scotch bonnet sauce and yogourt for lunch. 

            In the afternoon I went to Freshco where the grapes were very cheap but there weren’t many left. I got five small bags. I bought a half pint of raspberries, a pack of ground beef, five year old cheddar, two containers of Greek Yogourt, kettle chips and Arm and Hammer toothpaste. 

            I found a mouse trapped in my kitchen sink. I guess it had come for water in this dry apartment but then couldn't climb up the aluminium sides. When it saw me it panicked and really tried harder but it still couldn’t make the jump. When I tried to pick it up with a sheet of paper towel it somehow made the jump to the other sink bet then it was trapped again. I managed to grab it with the paper towel, put it in a plastic bag and released out on the deck. Hopefully it was the only one. 

            I finished typing out my stream of consciousness notes on the Fairy Queen: 

            Sexual Deceptions in Edmund Spenser’s The Fairy Queen 

           Two sexual situations in which Red Cross is present. One with Una and the other with Britomart. One in which he is deceived and the other in which the deceiver is Britomart. Red Cross is fooled by Archimago’s sprites, one of which has been metamorphosed to appear as Una, who is only named when falsely represented. The other sprite is made to appear as a young man with whom the fake Una is cavorting lustfully. Even though Britomart reveals her face and even though it is seen to be beautiful she is perceived to be a man by Malecasta. But Britomart seems unoffended by the environment in which she is visiting. She attends the feast politely and then goes to bed calmly trying to maintain her deception. Malecasta is portrayed as being lustful to an extreme degree she does not seem to be evil like Archimago. She does not attempt to deceive and is quite open about her lustful desires. She gets into Britomart’s bed because she finds her desirable. In a sense it is Malecasta who is the victim here. She is threatened by the angry Britomart, is overwhelmed and she suffers a fainting spell. Her six knights come to her defence. What causes Malecasta to faint. Is it the threat of attack or the fact that she discovers she had made advances on a woman? Usually someone as libertine as Malecasta would not mind being with a woman. She was feeling for the movement of a member. Britomart attacks because she feels her chastity is threatened. She deals more easily with being wounded by an arrow than with Malecasta’s advances. But is a woman a threat to her chastity? Britomart is angry with this lecherousness only after it had approached her in bed. She is not visibly offended by it as it was displayed by others during the feast. She does not seem to mind being flirted with as long as she is not touched. But both she and Malecasta are mistaken. Britomart thought that a man had come into her bed. Would she have been as angry if she had known from the start that it was a woman? There is the same moment of anger that causes her to leave with Red Cross as when Red Cross previously left behind the sexual situation that he’d thought Una had been engaged in. The sprites posing as Una and a lover. Malecasta is also referred to as a sprite. The Red Cross knight, the bed, the lust, the anger and the leaving are what these two situations have in common. Red Cross also drew his sword but was calmed by Archimago. 

            I spent some time analyzing the three stanzas in which the magician has his sprites create a deception for the Red Cross Knight. But my brain gave out.

            I had a potato and my last slice of pork cottage roll with gravy while watching Interpol Calling. This one was a bit unique. 

            A car is impounded in London because it was illegally parked. Unlike here in Canada cars that were impounded in London at least in 1960 were taken to a police garage. They also weren’t towed because apparently the police had a master key for all cars and the officer just drove the car to the pound. As part of the police routine all items in the car are inventoried and listed. This is a US car with French plates. When they open the trunk they find the body of a young woman who has been strangled to death. Shortly after this the owner of the car, Ben Stack shows up to claim his car. He is a US executive working for the French branch of his company and has come to London on business. He is arrested and he, the car and the body are shipped back to France where Interpol becomes involved. He admits that he got drunk before putting his car on the air ferry, but he doesn’t know where he had been drinking. They learn the woman was Marie Therese Sauvin and that she worked as a hostess at a club called D’Ambrosio’s. They also find Ben Stack's lighter in her apartment. Duval and Moray go to D’Ambrosio’s and learn that Stack had been there and had gotten into an argument with a Senator Landau. Stack is put in a line-up and Landau identifies him. Duval learns that D’Ambrosio has a vice record from the States. He goes to interview D'Ambrosio again and when he leaves he almost gets into the wrong car. It suddenly dawns on him that might have been what happened. Perhaps someone put the body of Marie in Stack’s car by mistake and later planted the lighter. Duval learns that D'Ambrosio just bought a brand new car. He locates his old car and finds that it is identical to Stack's. Then they learn that Stack has escaped custody. Duval is pretty sure he will go to D’Ambrosio's. Stack confronts D’Ambrosio, who admits that the body was mistakenly put in Stack's car. D'Ambrosio pulls a gun but Duval stops him just in time. D'Ambrosio admits he was running a vice racket out of the club but he didn’t kill Marie. His backer did to stop her from going to the police. His backer is Senator Landau. Landau is arrested and Stack is freed.