Eve Brent

            On Thursday morning I spent an hour just opening two Open Office song files with Microsoft Word just so I could save them as Word files. I was able to revise a bit of my translation of “Malaise en Malaisie” (Malaise in Malaysia) by Serge Gainsbourg but there are still a couple of lines to work out.

            Microsoft Teams kept popping up. After song practice, I went into the task manager and closed six Microsoft Team copies that were active in the background. I went online and asked how to disable Microsoft Teams. The answer was easy and so I went back to the task manager and found I could disable it from start-up. I disabled a few other useless things while I was there like Cortana and Corel. 

            I weighed 87.8 kilos before breakfast. 

            Just before 10:00 I logged onto Zoom for the Global Modernisms lecture. We had three presentations and Apala asked who wanted to go first. I said I would, but I had trouble at first sharing my screen and it took a few minutes. Apala suggested that I could email it to her, and she could play the slide show but I wanted to do it myself. PowerPoint was timing to open up and Apala asked if I’d let Zoya go ahead and do her presentation first, but I said that if I stopped it now and started again it would take the same amount of time to load all over again. Finally, it came through and it seemed to be a successful presentation. 

            Here is my slide show:

            I got a lot of compliments from other students in the chat. Apala reminded me that if I were to expand it into an essay I would have to research and cite other scholars to back up my arguments against David Richards. I knew that. She said it was excellent anyway. 

            My screen froze just as Zoya was beginning her presentation on Laura Winkiel’s “Modernism and Empire” and Heart of Darkness. The sound came back on for a second after about five minutes while the screen was still frozen. But then it was gone again. My cursor was dancing all over the place making it difficult for me to close everything, leave and log back in. By the time I’d returned Zoya had just finished. I sent her an apology in the chat and explained why I’d missed her presentation. 

            Natalia gave her presentation on Winkiel too, talking about the age of empire. Critical perceptions of Modernism at the end of the age of empire. Perspective on Raymond Williams, Said and Jameson. Cause and effect of imperialism in literature. Winkiel on Jameson. He’s critiqued for using the term “third world.” Other scholars give more credit to the autonomy of these regions. Said says globalization is the result of empire. She sends a link to other Jameson essays. 

            My computer froze while I was trying to post a blog, so I had to manually restart. While coming back on, Windows did the updates it’s been wanting to do for the last couple of days. But updates never make the computer faster.

            I weighed 87 kilos before lunch. 

            I took a siesta at 14:00 and when I got up, I started getting ready to go for my bike ride. I grabbed my phone just before heading out the door and saw it was 15:10. That meant that I’d gotten up from my nap at 14:30, thinking it was 15:30. I took my jacket and scarves off and went back to bed with my boots on for another twenty minutes. When I got up, I was all ready to go and so I left earlier than usual. 

            It was one degree above zero and so there had been less melting of the snowbanks and fewer puddles than yesterday. I rode to Bloor and Shaw and took Shaw all the way to Queen. There was more snow on Shaw because less had been removed. 

            I weighed 86.5 kilos at 17:30. 

            I posted my Discussion comment: 

            I missed Zoya’s presentation on Winkiel because of technical problems. Natalia gave her presentation on Winkiel too, talking about the age of empire; critical perceptions of Modernism and Empire; and recent scholarship on the topic. There were perspectives from Raymond Williams, Edward Said and Frederic Jameson. Jameson moves the critical focus from the temporal to the spatial. Jameson was critiqued for using the term “third world.” I remember when I and everybody I knew or heard used to say, “third world”. But then my daughter pointed out to me that it’s both an insulting and inaccurate term. Natalia says that other scholars give more credit to autonomy of these regions. 

            What I find most interesting about Winkiel’s essay is what she mentions what Viswanathan says about the school curriculum in India having developed an idea of English literature before it was developed in England. It’s intriguing but I’d like to see that outlined to understand how it’s true. A comparison of school curriculums would be in order, and I wonder if he presents those in his book. 

            A fair number of students mentioned my presentation positively in their comments. But also, a surprising number remembered me saying things I didn’t say. 

            I rubbed seven chicken drumsticks with olive oil, salt and cayenne. I had two small potatoes, the last of my gravy, and a drumstick while watching an episode of Adam-12. 

            This story takes place after Malloy brought one of his girlfriends over to have dinner with Reed and his wife. Donna liked it so much that now she’s now dropping hints about marriage. Malloy is not happy with the situation. Throughout their patrol, Reed keeps arguing about how great marriage is while Malloy extolls the benefits of bachelorhood. Meanwhile, Marty the liquor store owner has been robbed again. It happens a lot and he’s even lost teeth because of it. Later the store is robbed again. Malloy catches one of the thieves who is very disappointed that he only got $60 because another robber hit the place three hours before. They find an accident where a car has gone through a guard rail and down a hill. They get the car off the driver’s legs and then she mumbles about a baby. They later find the baby in good health in the bushes while the mother will be incapacitated for a while. The accident happened because she was in a rush to reach the beauty parlour. That night they are called on a noise complaint. It turns out to be a domestic dispute as Vera Whitley is blasting the TV to drown out her husband Ben Whitley’s records. They see that she has thrown hot grease on her husband’s arm. She becomes verbally abusive of Ben while the cops are there as he starts crying and she calls him a baby. As they leave Malloy says to Reed, “And you wanted me to get married!” 

            Vera Whitley was played by Anne Whitfield, who at the age of seven was in the cast of the radio soap opera One Man’s Family. She co-starred in the movie Juvenile Jungle. She left Hollywood at the age of 38, went back to college, and earned a degree in Mass Communications. She became a water quality educator at the state department of Ecology. 

            The woman under the car was played by Eve Brent, who co-starred in Gun Girls. She is best known for playing Jane in the movie Tarzan’s Fight for Life and then continued the role in the Tarzan TV series. She said being typecast as Jane killed her career. She won a Saturn award for her role in the slasher film Fade to Black.