Janet Waldo

            On Wednesday morning I finished posting my translation of "Quand ça balance" (When Off Balance) by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the lyrics for his "Retro Song" but no one had posted them. There's a video of Zizi Jeanmaire singing the song and so I listened to it and tried to transcribe the words but my French is not good enough to capture lyrics from people singing them. One of the problems is the song title because one ends up with hits about retro songs by Gainsbourg or Jeanmaire or else the song “Where Do You Go To My Lovely" which mentions Zizi Jeanmaire. I’ll try again on Thursday and if I don’t get the lyrics I’ll move on to the next song. 

            It was a seasonably cool early spring morning. I had one window open during song practice and though the heat was on it wasn’t all that warm. People on the street were dressed sensibly for this time of year except for one woman covered in tattoos who was running in a tank top and shorts. She checked herself out in the window of Popeyes as she crossed the street. I guess if I’d spent as much on body art as she probably did and I was her age I’d brave the cold to flaunt it too.

            I weighed 88.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            I had my first coffee in three and a half weeks and so I was buzzing from breakfast on. 

            At noon I logged on for my Brit Lit 2 tutorial and while doing so I realized that I’d forgotten to take the bi-weekly reading quiz. I asked Carson to confirm that we are allowed to throw away the worst of the tests. He said he thinks so but he’s not directly involved with the quizzes. 

            Carson asked if any of us had read Virginia Woolf before. I said I’d read To The Lighthouse and “A Room of One's Own". 

            Carson told us there is a union demo today and that he still doesn’t know if there will be a strike. They want changes to hiring practices, they want note takers to be paid, and mental health support for undergraduates. 

            Of the essay he said that if feedback is important to us we should submit the paper before April 10. 

            Virginia Woolf lived from 1882 to 1941. She was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, which was a social circle of influential liberal intellectuals. Many of the members were literary characters such as Virginia’s sister Vanessa Stephens, Virginia’s husband Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Maynard Keynes. A group of relatively avant garde intellectuals. 

            Carson said he was blown away by Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in his second year and then read everything she wrote. Other novels include The Waves, Jacob’s Room and Orlando. In his opinion the short pieces we are looking at in this course pale by comparison to her novels. 

            What does Woolf mean by materialism? I said that it’s superficiality or the material surface of things. 

            She illustrates the opposition between the corporeal and the spiritual. He asked why she is against the details that identify the era. 

            I said current events should not be the focus of any art. It’s a sure way to make the work forgettable. 

            Someone said there is a specific form of engagement in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with plenty of continuity and Easter eggs but the characters are flat. 

            Our experience is much more fluid. 

            In philosophy materialism is a proposition that the universe is all substance. 

            Woolf was an atheist. She talks being caught by surprise by dematerializing shocks. She thought that behind daily life is the pattern of a work of art to which we are collectively connected. We are the music but she did not consider this to be about the supernatural. 

            I said that her effort to turn inward is really psychoanalysis. In this era religion has been deemed undependable by many people. Freud came along and transformed everything with presenting humanity with the depths of their own minds which could serve as a more graspable type of spirituality. 

            Carson pointed out that Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press actually published the first English translations of Sigmund Freud’s works. The modernists had an urge to understand the psyche. They found instinct to be at odds with social duties. 

            Woolf has a lot of praise for James Joyce’s explorations of the mind. Carson asked if any of us had read Joyce. 

            I said I read Ulysses out loud to my ex-girlfriend when we were driving and that I’ve read the description of hell in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to poetry crowds on Halloween. 

            Woolf wants to find how fiction can come to terms with the full complexity of human life. 

            Of “The Mark on the Wall” I said the mark serves as a focal point from which to explore the inner mind while the consciousness is distracted. 

            I said that Woolf plays with time in this story. She starts out in the past and ends in the past but the present is in the middle. The first thing she thinks the mark is, a nail, rhymes with what it is, a snail. The idea of the nail also returns in the middle as she imagines that it had been buried beneath the surface of the wall for perhaps a century and now emerges to watch the watcher. 

            Carson thinks that Woolf’s revealing what the mark was is cheesy. 

            But the true meaning is not about the mark. It’s an occasion for thought to reflect on its surroundings. Carson asked if any of us just sat and stared at an object when we were kids. I said that I’m a starer into space from way back. 

            I said the last paragraph is much more chaotic just before it comes to the reality of what the mark is. 

            I weighed 88.9 kilos before lunch. I had guacamole made from avocados and cilantro and ate it with plantain chips. 

            I tried to take a siesta at 14:00 but the coffee I’d drank kept me awake and so I only stayed in bed for half an hour. 

            I took a bike ride to Ossington and Bloor. 

            I tried to take another siesta at 17:00 but the caffeine wouldn’t let me. I could only stay in bed for fifteen minutes. 

            I weighed 88.7 at 17:55. 

            I worked on my essay for about an hour, finding places for quotes and the rephrasing of quotes.

            I made one more attempt at 19:00 to take a siesta and after lying in bed restfully for twenty minutes I finally did sleep for another twenty. 

            I weighed 88.1 kilos before dinner. I made lentil chili with sautéed onions, garlic, mushrooms and jalapeno, with tomato paste, and hot sauce. I had half a bowl of the stew with plantain chips while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story Barney becomes obsessed with finding a wife for Andy. One night while Andy is reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow to Opie the doorbell rings and a woman is there saying she got a call to meet Thelma Lou at Andy’s place. Over the next couple of minutes the doorbell keeps ringing and a steady stream of women come in to meet Thelma Lou. Then Barney comes in the back door and tells Andy that he arranged the whole thing so he’d be able to take the pick of the crop of potential wives. Andy orders Barney to tell the ladies to leave. Then Barney decides that the perfect girl for Andy would be the new school teacher, Helen Crump. He has Thelma Lou invite them both over for dinner without telling each that the other would be there. Before dinner Barney interviews Helen about her potential as a wife and finds that she can’t cook. She says if she was married that she would probably make frozen dinners but Barney thinks that’s wrong. Andy says he likes frozen dinners. Barney also thinks it’s inappropriate that she wouldn’t give up her career to be a housewife. Andy reminds Barney that they are living in the 20th Century. Barney decides right then and there that Helen is not the girl for Andy, but Andy thinks otherwise and invites her on a date for the next night. Barney tries to sabotage the date by having all the women come over again but it turns out that Andy is going to pick up Helen at her place and so Barney is stuck dealing with the women. Andy decides that he is going to court Helen. 

            One of the women that came to the door was played by Janet Waldo, who was discovered by Bing Crosby from a talent contest. Most of her early work was in western films but then Bing introduced her to radio and she fell in love with the medium. She specialized in playing teenagers until she was seventy years old. Even in her thirties she was able to convincingly play a teenager on live television as she did when she played a girl with a crush on Ricky. She became the woman of a thousand voices on several animated series. She was Judy Jetson, Morticia Addams, Josie of Josie and the Pussycats, Penelope Pitstop of The Wacky Races and Superman’s friend Lana Lang. 

            Another woman was played by Rachel Ames, who is the longest working cast member of the soap opera General Hospital.