Roger Delgado

            On Sunday I worked out the chords for the second verse of “A la pêche des coeurs" (Fishing for Hearts) by Boris Vian. The rest should just be alternating repetitions of the chords of the first two verses. 

            I made a push to finish memorizing all of the rest of “Lucette et Lucie" by Serge Gainsbourg but I didn't quite nail it. Probably on Monday I’ll have it in my head. 

            Song practice went a lot more smoothly than it has for the last few days and tuning was easier. On several occasions I was able to get the B string back in tune without the tuner and when I did use the tuner it didn’t take as long. I ended up finishing 45 minutes sooner than the day before, although that’s still more than fifteen minutes more than the bad side of normal. 

            I had old cheddar on crackers, and a bran muffin for lunch. The muffin was too much. 

            I wrote this weeks tutorial question for British Literature: 

            Comparing Andrew Marvell's and John Milton's poetic accounts of the reasons for the creation of Eve: In stanza 8, lines 61-62 of Marvell’s "The Garden" there is a musical structuring of assonance, rhyme and internal rhyme. “But twas beyond a mortal’s share / to wander solitary there.” The lines connect not only at the end rhyme but also with “beyond a" and "to wander". “Beyond a” waltzes in assonance with “mortal” as does "wander" with “solitary.” Marvell carves meaning from these harmonious sound connections. The musicality and the flow draws the reader’s emotions into the intellectual message that lays out the key reasons for the first person to have a companion: It is beyond mortal to wander solitary. The phrasing of these verses could easily be made into a song. 

            Compare this to lines 444-445 in Book 8 of Milton’s Paradise Lost: “And be so minded still. Ere thou spak’st / I knew it no good for man to be alone.” Milton is simply using words to tell a story here, with much less applied artistry. There is of course vision and creativity in the overall epic of Paradise Lost, but in its finer details there is less delicacy of form. By eschewing rhyme, slant rhyme, internal rhyme and assonance, along with the rhythms that those techniques evoke, he fell short of beauty. In choosing to simply tell a story in blank verse, while claiming that rhyming is a “vulgar” practice, was it really because Milton was not up to the task of the artful sculpting of language? 

            I piddled around with my British Literature essay for a couple of hours. 

            At around 19:30 at least ten cop cars converged in the area. One stopped at O’Hara and Queen, four went up O’Hara, I assume to the West Lodge apartment complex, one blocked Queen Street at Lansdowne and kept its siren on while it was sitting there. It was very annoying. I assume the rest went up West Lodge east of Lansdowne. 

            For dinner I boiled some catalini hollow spiral pasta and topped it some of the sauce I’d prepared the night before and the cheese. I had it with a beer while watching episode four of Quatermass II.

            In this story Quatermass determines that the asteroid that is sending the hollow meteors to earth is artificial and probably comes from one of the planets or moons of our outer solar system where the atmosphere is similar to the gasses in the meteors. He suspects that it’s Titan the moon of Saturn. Each meteor contains a creature in gas form that can take over the consciousness of any human that finds the space object. He also thinks that they share a collective consciousness so that whatever one knows they all know. Quatermass prepares his rocket for launch as a last resort to aim it at the asteroid and cause a nuclear explosion if things get out of hand on Earth. Quatermass sends Fowler back to the ministry to collect all the files on the synthetic food plant but when he does so there is a device inside the filing cabinet that infects him with the gas. Quatermass meets with a journalist named Hugh Conrad and they drive up to a pub in the prefab village where the people live that work at the plant. There is a celebration going on as an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs McLeod are going to renew their vows. Quatermass buys everyone drinks and pumps the couple for information. They are all very happy working at the plant because they are well paid and in fact right now they are laid off with full wages. They call the people in charge and the security staff “zombies” because they never talk with them. They recognize Hugh Conrad from his columns and realize they are being pumped for information. They become angry because if their bosses learn they’ve been talking they will be fired. Suddenly a meteor crashes through the ceiling. The workers have been told that some objects just get accidentally blown out of the plant. Quatermass and Conrad leave and it seems that Conrad might have touched the meteor. They go into the plant and Quatermass tells Conrad to phone the story back to his newspaper. He does so but reveals in the call that he is infected and is about to lose control. Meanwhile Quatermass dons a spare uniform and investigates one of the tanks. Inside he finds one of the inhuman aliens bubbling in a noxious fluid. 

            Conrad was played by Roger Delgado, who played the first Master on Doctor Who. In fact the character was created specifically for Delgado to play. He certainly was the best one up until Missy came along. I don’t think I’d ever seen him as a good guy before. After this appearance in Quatermass he became popular as the character Mendoza in the TV series “Sir Francis Drake". Delgado's death was one of the reasons that his friend John Pertree quit Doctor Who. 

            Mrs McCleod was played by Elsie Arnold, who was in the cast of the TV series Jane Ayre. 

            The barmaid was played by Queenie Barrat.