Aneta Corsaut

            On Thursday morning I memorized the second and third verses of "Quand ça balance" (When Off Balance) by Serge Gainsbourg and almost nailed the fourth one down. 

            I weighed 89.8 kilos before breakfast. 

            In the late morning I took a bike ride to Ossington and Bloor. As I was climbing Brock there was an empty wine bottle slowly rolling down making a beautiful bell like sound as it went. I could still hear it far behind me as I approached Dundas. If I’d had the time I would have followed and videotaped it. The sound would make a great sample in a music recording. 

            I stopped off at Freshco on my way home. Most of the grapes were out of shape but I managed to find five bags that had mostly firm ones. I got a half pint of blueberries, a pint of strawberries, a jug of red grapefruit juice, a bottle of Garden Cocktail, four bars of Irish Spring soap and a tube of Arm and Hammer toothpaste. Also, since I will be breaking my fourteen day fast tomorrow I bought salad ingredients: leaf lettuce, scallions, dill, cilantro, asparagus, broccoli, avocados, tomatoes, mushrooms and three kinds of salad dressing: balsamic, fig balsamic and sun dried tomato-oregano. 

            Before lunch I weighed 89.5 kilos. For lunch I had the usual tomato and two avocados with lime juice. I was looking forward to tomorrow when I could put dressing on it and also drink black tea. 

            I finished researching Oscar Wilde’s "The Critic As Artist" and read more than half of his “The Decay of Lying”, taking down quotes toward my essay as I went along. The latter has much more that I need for my argument: 

            “It is only by the cultivation of the habit of intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to race-prejudices.” 

            “As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.” 

            “There is no sin except stupidity." 

            “Aesthetics are higher than ethics.” 

            “Aesthetics are to Ethics what sexual selection is to natural selection.” 

            “If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture." 

            “As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance.” 

            “The modern novelist develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling and often ends by writing novels which are so lifelike that no one can possibly believe in their probability.”

            “There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true.” 

            “Ruskin once described the characters in George Eliot’s novels as being like the sweepings out of a Pentonville omnibus.” 

            “The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art." 

            “what is interesting about people in good society is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask." 

            “The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art’s subject-matter we should be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, have no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind.” 

            “One touch of Nature may make the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will destroy any work of Art." 

            “Nature is the collection of phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her own.” 

            “the object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty. Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.” 

            “Facts are vulgarizing mankind. The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie. the amusing part of the whole thing is that the story of the cherry-tree is an absolute myth." 

            “the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilised society."

            I weighed 89.3 kilos at 17:51 and 89.4 kilos before dinner. I guess that increase was because of a tenth of a kilo of grapes. I had my last dinner of tomatoes and avocadoes with chopped scotch bonnet pepper and lime juice and ate it while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story Opie has a new teacher who he calls Old Lady Crump. He doesn't like her because she’s started giving him history homework. Andy suggests that he might be a little young to be learning history but tells Opie to do the best he can and if he doesn’t know the answers to tell the teacher that he'll come by it naturally. But Opie takes this as permission not to do his homework. At school Miss Crump, who is actually an attractive young woman, is very upset (a little too upset) with the boys for not trying. When Opie tells her what his father told him she goes to the sheriff's office in a rage and gives Andy hell. Andy feels he's really put his foot in his mouth and tries to make up for it. So when the boys come in to tell him that Miss Crump might be quitting he pretends that is a good thing and then declares they don’t need to learn about Indians, Red Coats, Cannons and muskets and the shot that was heard round the world. Suddenly the boys are interested in hearing about those things and so Andy tells them a very dramatic friendly account of the American Revolution in the Andy Griffith style that first launched his career. They like the story so much that Andy suggests they form a history club called The Minute Men but to make the club exclusive they Have to remember the dates and places in their history book. Miss Crump is taken aback the next day by the change as the boys are all avidly discussing history and arguing over the most important points. She returns to Andy to compliment him and to ask how he did it. He explains that he just put a little extra jam on the story. 

            Helen Crump was played by Aneta Corsaut, who co-starred with Steve McQueen in The Blob in 1958. She played Irma Howell on the one season sitcom Mrs G Goes to College. She played Miss Crump on The Andy Griffith Show from 1963 until the series ended in 1968 and then continued it on Mayberry RFD from 1968 to 1971. On the first episode of that series she and Andy get married. She and Griffith had an affair while she worked on his show. She played a pawn shop owner in the series The Blue Knight. She played a cop’s girlfriend on Adam 12, the head nurse on the sitcom House Calls and appeared on several episodes of Matlock.