The Power of Punctuation

            On Tuesday morning I’d worked out the chords for the first verse of “Mozart avec nous" (Mozart Is With Us) by Boris Vian and part of the chorus. I also worked out the chords for the chorus and part of the first verse of “Velours des vierges” (Velvet Virgins) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            Around midday I started doing my laundry and finished a little after 13:00.

            I got a notice that my paragraph assignment had been marked and I got an A minus. Since the TAs were instructed to mark rigorously I’ll consider it an A. It's a relief to get an A minus after those two courses I took in the fall in which I had to fight to get a B. This is what Carson Hammond wrote:

            

            This is a very strong reading of Keats' poem, particularly given its brevity. Throughout, you do great job of weaving together an analysis of the text's overall theme/"content" with that of its formal presentation. Given that Keats' speaker is fixated on the nature of time/temporality, moreover, it's fitting that the more "formal" aspects of your reading attend to things like the significance of punctuation (i.e. that em-dash) and the delayed resolution of those multiple "when"s. Except for one moment of slight disorientation (see marginal note), I have little to offer by way of criticism, as you managed to pack a great deal of insight into quite a short space. Well done; looking forward to your next! 

            So I basically hung the meaning of the poem on the punctuation and it worked.

            For lunch I had kettle chips with salsa and some of that bland coconut, carrot and cauliflower puree. 

            I didn’t take a bike ride in the afternoon because I'd already ridden back and forth to the laundromat three times, which is a total of about fifteen blocks. 

            I re-read “The Cry of the Children” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and “To India” by Sarojini Naidu. The latter was written in 1943 and she was in prison from 1942 to 1943. Considering how conducive being cooped up is to writing I’m guessing this poem was written while she was incarcerated. 

            I re-read the introduction to Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species and since I'm ahead on my reading I decided to read the first chapter, even though it's not required. He just starts off by showing how natural selection works among domesticated species in order to set up how it works in the wild. 

            I boiled two potatoes and had them with gravy while watching the last episode of the second season of The Andy Griffith Show. I don’t call it the season finale because it was really just like any other episode with no sense of trying to close things down with a bang. That period of television in the early sixties didn’t really think in those terms. There were no story arcs like there are today in every sitcom. Most did not even have a series finale until Leave It To Beaver ended with reminiscences and an explanation of how Beaver got his name. The first major series finale happened in The Fugitive. Nobody seems to have done any research on when season finales started becoming a big deal. 

            This story begins on a Saturday morning with Andy and Barney coming to work but both having misplaced the keys to the sheriff’s office. Fortunately Otis has a key to let himself in to sleep off his Friday night drunk. They wake him up through the cell window and he unlocks his cell and opens the front door. Before Otis leaves they discover that there is a letter for him in the mail from his sister in law. She says that she and Otis’s brother Ralph are coming that day to visit him. Otis confesses that he has been writing her letters on the sheriff’s office stationary and she has gotten the impression that he is a deputy. Otis says Ralph has always been the successful member of the family and he is worried about what will happen if they realize he’s just a drunk. Andy decides to deputize Otis so he won’t be lying about working in the sheriff’s office. Since Otis swears to uphold the law he has to dump out the illegal alcohol he hides at home. His brother arrives but he doesn’t believe at first Otis is a deputy. Later Ralph disappears and then stumbles into the jailhouse drunk just like Otis usually does. Ralph lets himself into a cell and confesses to Otis that where he lives he is the town drunk. Similar stories about brothers that are supposed to be more successful but aren’t have been done hundreds of times in the history of television.