On Thursday morning I finished posting my translation “Exercise en forme de Z” by Serge Gainsbourg. The next of his songs I’ll be working on is “Mélodie interdit" (Forbidden Melody).
I was feeling groggy all through song practice and my back was bothering me.
In the late morning I went to Freshco as usual for a Thursday. The red grapes were cheap and some of them were firm enough to buy. I also bought raspberries, pork ribs, a beef sirloin tip roast, ground pork, cheese curds, five year old cheddar, cheap old cheddar, Greek yogourt, apple sauce, spoon size shredded wheat, frozen fries, and hot salsa.
I was looking for scotch bonnet sauce in the international section but found piri piri. Later I ran across the scotch bonnet sauce elsewhere and decided to buy both to taste which is hotter. According to the Scoville scale, scotch bonnet is hotter but only by 50,000 Scovilles. Scotch bonnet is 350,000 Scovilles but there are plenty of hotter peppers and the hottest as of 2013, at 2,200,000 Scovilles is the Carolina Reaper. There are sauces containing the reaper but they don’t seem to be sold at No Frills or Freshco.
I had asked Carson my TA to tell me the exact selections from On the Origin of Species and Adam Bede that I need to read, since I wasn’t going to buy the course package in which they are presented. He got back to me in the afternoon and told me what I need. I made a separate file of the Darwin and Eliot texts. But for the Eliot I found that the PDF of Adam Bede I had was not editable and so I found an E-Book version so I could copy and paste chapter 17 into a separate document.
I finished reading Oscar Wilde’s "The Decay of Lying." It's another essay of his in the form of a dialogue. He says that art does not imitate life but rather life imitates art. He means that the way we look at nature is entirely shaped by how nature is presented in art. All art that tries to imitate nature rather than recreate and improve on it is boring and bad art. Art to be great art must exaggerate and lie.
I started reading the short story “The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster. It's a science fiction story published in 1909 and it's especially interesting because there is instantaneous video communication like we’ve had only for the last twenty five years through the internet. No one ever has to leave their room to work and all rooms everywhere in the world are the same. Everything is controlled by The Machine. All of humanity lives beneath the Earth. All food is artificial because there are no plants left on Earth besides some grass and ferns and the air above is unbreatheable. People rarely travel unless they are assigned a new room to live in. Vashti’s son Kuna lives on the other side of the world and he wants her to come to visit him for some reason he refuses to discuss through the Machine, which is unusual. It is a two hour trip by airship and so Vashti goes. It is not a pleasant journey because she gets touched by sunlight and by another person. When she arrives he tells her that the Machine has threatened him with homelessness, which is the ultimate punishment. He has done the unthinkable and ventured to the surface. He tells her the story of how he had to practice at developing his muscles in order to make the climb and how he went up the ladder. That’s as far as I got so far.
I had a potato, two chicken drumsticks and gravy while watching Andy Griffith.
In this story a farm girl named Frankie is in Ellie’s drugstore and she is admiring the makeup, the nail polish and the perfume but she doesn’t want to buy any because her father Flint wouldn't like it. Frankie leaves but Ellie wants to do something for Frankie by giving her some free samples, since she obviously is attracted to that sort of thing. Andy tells her to mind her own business but she convinces him to drive her to the farm where Frankie is hard at work sawing a log. This can’t be a poor farm since there are several hired hands in employment there. Ellie gives Frankie the makeup but Flint intervenes, tells them she doesn’t need it and asks them to leave. Later when Barney brags that he would have been tougher with Flint Ellie convinces him to go and get Frankie for her and bring her to her house in town. Barney goes but first of all Flint is three times bigger than Barney and Barney backs down from any direct confrontation. Instead Barney sneaks around the farm, evading Flint, until he finds Frankie and places her under custody. The result a few hours later is that Frankie, now Francis, is so attractive now she is unrecognizable. They take her back to the farm to show Flint. He doesn’t recognize her at first and when he does he acknowledges that she is pretty but tells her to get out of those things and get to work. Andy argues that Frankie is only a fair farmhand but as a beautiful woman she could attract a strong and hard working son in law. He demonstrates by introducing her and her new look to the farm hands and they all stop working to gather round her. This seems like a pretty fucked up conclusion. Frankie becomes more useful to her father by being attractive but she is still being defined by what use she can be to her father when she is clearly at least well into her twenties.
Francis was played by Edris March. She seemed like she had some acting experience but this was her first and last appearance on television as she apparently gave up acting after this episode and became a dance instructor and business owner. I’d have to say that she actually looked better without the makeup that she wore later and even when she was shown as supposedly not wearing cosmetics I think they used them to make her look less attractive. The main thing however was that beforehand her hair or wig was tangled and she was wearing unflattering clothing.
I finished reading “The Machine Stops”. On one level it was depressing because it presented people that never leave their homes and communicate only electronically just like the pandemic is forcing us to do now. But it was definitely a well written and well imagined story. The Machine that everyone has become dependent upon and which most people even worship begins to run down until finally the people run out of air and light and die horribly together in the unused tunnels between their rooms.
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