Marcel Aymé's “Le passe muraille” (The Wall Phaser)

            On Friday morning I almost finished editing “Le velours des vierges” (The Velvet Virgins) on Christian’s Translations. I’ll finish posting it on Saturday on move on to the next of his songs. 

            I took a siesta at 12:15 and got up at 13:45. 

            I had my last can of beans with salsa and plantain chips for lunch. 

            I got an email from my TA in response to my explaining my assignment to him. He said that my explanation does make it clearer but if I wanted to have my mark changed I would have to insert the explanation into the assignment and resubmit it. He suggested that my writing is so good that I’m bound to do well in this course so I shouldn’t worry too much about this little assignment. He added that he thought my comment in tutorial comparing Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Curse For A Nation” to Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” was very astute. I responded that I think Hard Rain was more directly influenced by Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”. I also said that I think Ginsberg, Dylan and Browning were all influenced by William Blake. 

            I took a bike ride to Ossington and Bloor. Coming home west along Queen the sun was directly in front of me and so glaring that I couldn’t even see the light change to green. 

            I finished reading the short story “Le passe muraille” (The Wall Phaser) by Marcel Aymé. This was the best of the stories from my dual language book so far. A boring lower level office worker discovers that he has the ability to pass through walls. He goes to a doctor who gives him some pills to take for his problem but he puts them in a drawer. He’s not very ambitious and does nothing with the power for a couple of years. But when he gets a boss that starts to treat him unfairly Dutilleul begins to use his power to drive his boss insane by poking his head through his office wall and shouting at him. After his boss is taken away to a mental hospital Dutilleul starts to become a master burglar who calls himself The Werewolf. He becomes famous and very popular. He allows himself to be captured because no one has any real cred in the underworld unless they have been in prison. He escapes every night but sometimes sticks around to give the guards kicks in the behind from nowhere. Sometimes he escapes and spends the night in the guest room at the warden’s home or steals books from the warden’s personal library. Finally he escapes for good and changes his appearance. One day he falls in love with a young woman who he learns is married to a cruel husband who locks her up behind several walls in their home. Dutilleul comes to her through the barriers and they begin a relationship. But one day Dutilleul gets a headache and absent mindedly takes two pills that he finds in his drawer, thinking they are aspirin. The next night becomes to his lover again but when he is leaving the pills take effect and he becomes trapped forever inside the outer wall of the house. It has been adapted in French films a few times since 1951. 

            I found a dead mouse on my kitchen counter. I don’t know how it died. I certainly haven’t put any poison out. It was a tiny one and I have seen a bigger mouse running around. 

            I filled out a long online survey for U of T. It covered a lot of areas but one section on mental health didn’t have any intermediate choice between having been depressed “several times” and "not at all". So after inaccurately clicking "several times", before the next set of questions there was a page with a mental health help line. I guess that page might have appeared anyway but it seems odd that they wouldn’t have an option of "one or two times". 

            I read for a third time the required chapter 17 of George Elliott’s Adam Bede, but I decided to also read the chapter before it. It made a lot more sense because chapter 16 involves a breakfast with Pastor Irwine while chapter 17 has a comparison between Irwine and another rector. Chapter 16 gives a better account of Irwine’s personality so we can understand the comparison. 

            I had two potatoes with gravy for dinner while watching Andy Griffith. In this story Mayberry has a new mayor who wants the sheriff’s office run by the book. He doesn’t like the fact that Mrs Ambrose drops off her baby at the jail to sleep in a cell while she’s shopping. He especially doesn’t like it that Andy lets moonshiner Jess Morgan go home in the middle of his sentence to harvest his crop so it doesn’t spoil. Andy assures the mayor that Jess will be back in three days but the mayor thinks Jess has skipped the county. When Jess is half an hour late returning the mayor insists on going after him. They drive out to Jess’s place only to find him in a tree. The mayor thinks he has climbed the tree to avoid capture and so he goes to climb the tree himself to get Jess down, only to find there is a bear at the foot of the tree. The mayor barely escapes the bear and ends up in the tree as well. Andy reminds the mayor that if he’d just let him do his job this wouldn’t have happened. 

            Mrs Ambrose was played by Janet Stewart who was on the SS Andrea Dorea in 1956 when it collided with the SS Stockholm. She was rescued obviously since this show aired in 1963. 

            Mrs Morgan was played by Helen Kleeb, who played Miss Mamie Baldwin on The Waltons.

            Mayor Stoner was played by Parley Baer who was the voice of Ernie Keebler, of the Keebler cookie elves. He played Chester on the Gunsmoke radio series. He started out as a circus ringmaster and owner and that’s where he met his wife Ernestine Clark who was a bareback rider. They were together for 54 years. Her father was the first trapeze artist to do a triple somersault. He said radio was a perfect actor’s medium because if you play to five million listeners you are giving five million performances.