Marcia Mae Jones

            On Thursday after midnight I did my usual search for bedbugs and found none. As that makes two weeks since the last sighting I'm going to stop these pre-bedtime searches and call the infestation over. When I got up to pee at 3:45 I did another quicker search just to make sure, since if I had them they would have been nearby after feeding on me while I was sleeping. 

            I worked on editing "U.S.S.R. / U.S.A." by Serge Gainsbourg in Christian's Translations, moving the chords back into position in preparation for publication on the blog. 

            I weighed 89.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            At 8:30 I started getting ready to go downtown for my first live tutorial in a year and a half. I had time to make coffee but not to drink it. I ate two apples before leaving. 

            Earlier in the morning my upstairs neighbour David had slipped his key under my door because pest control would be coming to his place while he was at work. Since I wasn't going to be here in the morning I asked my next door neighbour Benji to give David's key to the Orkin guy if he got here before I returned. At first Benji's refused because he and David don't get along but when I told him all he had to do was hand him the key and then tell him to slip it under my door when he was done, he agreed. I left my place at 9:00, knocked on Benji's door, handed him the key and left. 

            I found the east side of King's College Circle all closed off to traffic because of the big renovation project and so there was no northern route. Only cars going south towards College along the west side of the circle were allowed. I didn't wan't to look for another way to University College so I rode against the grain, but there was only one auto coming and I took the sidewalk until it was past. I usually lock my bike against the eastern part of the iron fence that runs around the southeast corner of the University College front lawn. That side however was behind a construction fence but there was just enough of the iron fence on the south side for me to lock my ride. 

            I immediately went to the office at University College to ask for directions to room B203. I've taken most of my classes over the years at University College but this was the first time that I've had one on the north west side of the building. Even with directions I had a bit of trouble finding the room. I had to go west down the main hall, turn right and then turn left again to go up to the second floor. But then I took a wrong turn before backtracking and stumbling on the room. It was empty because I was half an hour early. 

           I wanted to sit near a plug for my laptop and decided on the back of the room. The tables were put together in a seminar format with a space in the middle so I took a place that would be facing where the TA would be at the other side. I left my stuff there and went to look for a washroom. The only one I know on the west side is on the main floor and so I went back downstairs and found it. But after using it I left through the wrong door and it was locked when I tried to go back through. I had to go up to the second floor but there didn't seem to be a way back to B203 from that section so I found the stairs that went back down to the main southern hallway and found my way to a stairs marked A that took me back up to the B section and I found the room again. 

            I set up my laptop as a couple of other students arrived. The room has a small library behind glass doors at the front of the room. I went to see what it had of the twenty or so hard cover books and found it to be very diverse in that it had literature, philosophy and some French stuff. I noted that there is a biography of Nathanial Hawthorne and thought it might be helpful for next week when we'll be reading his Scarlet Letter. 

            Our TA Sarah arrived and was very friendly. This was her first time teaching in a real classroom since she started working as a TA at the beginning of the pandemic. I told her she was doing great so far. 

            Her attendance question was, "What do you like to do when you are outside." I answered that I like to ride my bike. 

            We learned Sarah is from Alberta and that her father is right now in Switzerland playing amateur hockey with some other old guys. 

            We started with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1836 essay "Nature": 

            "Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship." 

            I said he's saying that the era in which he lives has no Renaissance and no great art. It borrows art from past ages. In a sense it feeds from the dead but he wants a new Renaissance to come into being. His imagery of death symbolizes the art of the past while the Renaissance he invisions is evoked with imagery of nature and sunshine. 

            I said if this paragraph is typical of the Transcendentalists it does not fit with Professor Morgenstern's statement that the Transcendentalists were the US equivalent to the European Romanticists, since the Romanticists proudly drew inspiration from classical literature. 

            He begins with short sentences, then they grow longer and form into questions, creating tension. They conclude once again as short sentences. 

            Emerson's style is epigrammatic and Sarah thinks it's like that of Kanye West with similar preoccupations. 

            We have done a close reading, cutting the text apart. We should do this when we begin our essays and then expand into an argument. 

            Emerson's "Self Reliance" was written five years later. The key elements are individuality, the priority of the self as sacred, the genius as sacred, race, gender. What happens to the social life of a self reliant individual? It does not harm others but makes social boundaries. 

            She says if Emerson is Kanye then Thoreau is Champ the Rapper. There is a rapper named Champ but I think she must mean Chance the Rapper since he is sort of a Kanye protegée. 

            The ideas of Thoreau are held up by modern Libertarians. 

            She asked us to compare Emerson's "Self Reliance" with Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government." I said they both begin with a quote from someone they revere, so they are riding in on someone else. This is ironic because it isn't really self reliant. 

            I said Thoreau is more practical than Emerson. Emerson presents the theory while Thoreau outlines how he thinks it should be put into action by not paying taxes and going to jail. I repeated a story about Emerson bailing Thoreau out and asking, "Henry, why are you here?" to which Henry responded, "Ralph, why aren't you here?" 

            We compared references to nature in the two texts. Emerson: children and "brutes", the roses outside his window as fully in tune with their being as roses. Thoreau: wood and earth and stones and wood as negative and low, soldiers as mindless wooden men. 

            Sarah will be gone to the Czech Republic for two weeks and so the head TA will be taking over.

            I went to the washroom again and went the wrong way again when I left. I had to once more climb the stairs and then go back down the main stairway to get out. 

            I rode behind the provincial parliament building and up Queen's Park Crescent to Bloor, east to Yonge, south to Richmond, west to Duncan, north to Queen and then west towards home. I stopped at Freshco where I bought three bags of seedless globe grapes, one bag of dark blue grapes, a pint of strawberries, two half pints of blueberries, a bag of naan, five year old cheese, skyr, two cans of peaches, salsa, Parmese pasta sauce, saltines, a jar of honey, Folger's dark coffee, half a ham and Greek yogourt. 

            I tied my shopping bag in a knot and hooked it over my right handle bar as usual but while riding under the railroad bridge the knot came loose and the bag fell. I lost half a pint of blueberries, some strawberries and some grapes. 

            I weighed 88.5 before lunch. 

            I weighed 89.7 kilos at 18:45 but I can't see how I could have eaten a kilo at lunch. 

            I cut up a whole chicken, rubbed the pieces with olive oil, salt and chili powder and roasted them in the oven. 

            After posting my blogs late and typing my tutorial notes it was already after 20:00. 

            I downloaded The Scarlet Letter from Library Genesis. It's not the Penguin edition listed in the syllabus but it's from Oxford University Press so I assume it can't be bad. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a chicken leg while watching an episode of Gomer Pyle. 

            In this story Gomer and Carter are still in Washington and the big concert is approaching. Carter is acting as Gomer's coach and manager as they get ready to meet the director of the show Dan Merrill. In the cafe of their hotel Carter asks a man to move so he can sit beside Gomer but then the man gets beaten to the very last seat and has to leave without eating. The audience learns that man is Dan Merrill. On the way to meet Merrill the elevator doors close on Merrill before he can get on and he loses his hat, then Carter and Gomer take Merrill's cab. At the rehearsal Gomer sings a song selected by Carter and gestures with the lyrics as Carter has instructed him. Merrill says don't do that and tells him the song is wrong. It needs to be The Impossible Dream. Carter argues with Merrill and says it has to be his way. Next we see Carter standing before a superior officer who tells him to do it Merrill's way or else lose his stripes. He is told the vice president and maybe even the president will be there. When Carter repeats that to Gomer he loses his voice. Carter tries various treatments right up to almost show time but Gomer still has no voice. Gomer goes for a walk and sits dejected in front of the Lincoln Memorial. An old soldier comes and sits beside him and hears his story. The man tells Gomer to be a hero and get over his fear. The man walks away. Gomer starts reading the Gettysburg address out loud and gets his voice back. Gomer comes back to the concert just in time and brings the house down with his rendition of The Impossible Dream. 

            The waiter in the cafe was played by Marcia Mae Jones, who was discovered in her baby carriage and did her first film at six months of age. At the age of seven she appeared in Night Nurse as one of two children being targeted for murder. At twelve she played the victim of a bully in These Three. At thirteen she played Klara in Heidi. She played Lavinia in The Little Princess. She played opposite Buster Keaton in his short lived TV series.