Eddie Albert

            On Wednesday morning I memorized the second verse of "Sans blague" (No Joke) by Boris Vian. 

            I memorized the third verse of "J'envisage" (I Imagine) by Serge Gainsbourg and adjusted my translation. 

            I weighed 84.7 kilos before breakfast but I only had time to eat two apples and drink a cup of coffee before leaving for English in the World class. 

            To avoid the construction on College I took the Bloor bike lane to Huron and then went south to Bancroft. That route doesn't seem to take much more time. 

            Chuanqi was just walking toward the classroom when I got there. We discussed poetry and he said he would never read his poetry out loud. I said poetry comes from an oral tradition and even if you don't read your work in public it improves it to hear how it sounds during the writing process. Frank arrived and argued that poetry doesn't have an oral tradition. He claimed Emily Dickinson's poetry wasn't written to be read aloud. I disagreed. Much of her poetry could be sung to the music of hymns that she knew. The editor Mabel Loomis Todd convinced the publisher, Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the power of Dickinson's poetry, by reading selections aloud to him. 

            Professor Percy said that after I mentioned "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" on Monday she resisted the temptation to start singing it. 

            The lecture was about Ama Ata Aidoo's "No Sweetness Here". Aidoo was born in 1942 on the Gold Coast of what is now Ghana. She writes of tension between the west and African world views.

            Professor Percy says her own essays in the 1980s conclude that everything is ambiguous. 

            At the centre of Aidoo's story is a boy who is an only child. Both the teacher and the boy's mama are solitary. 

            I said I think the teacher wants to be the boy's mother but at the same time, she is focused on the child's real mother. If she hadn't been so interested in the mother's affairs she might have saved the boy's life. 

            The narrator might as well be white She talks of taking the boy away to educate him. 

            Everyone else on her way to school is at work and so she talks to elders. There is mention of Dr. Aggrey, the first educated Ghanaian educator and missionary, who promoted education for boys and girls. The elders try to talk English with the teacher in an elevation of style. They use demotic English.

            The mother as a Methodist is moving away from the local culture. 

            I said that if the gender roles were reversed and it had been a male teacher talking about taking away a beautiful female student, it would have been considered a sexual attraction, so why couldn't this be the same? She teases the boy's mother that her son is so handsome that she is going to kidnap him and take him away from her. A lot of students spoke up against this and said her saying that the boy is beautiful is just her being maternal. But she adds that the boy's beauty was "indecent". At no point does the teacher justify taking Kwesi away because he is smart, an exceptional student, or that he has any potential whatsoever. In fact, he is painted as being of average intelligence. His only assets that are praised are that he is beautiful and handsome, is a good boy, and doesn't fight and that is why chicha has the idea of kidnapping him. 

            The professor didn't have time to discuss my essay and said for me to email her. 

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home because I needed a couple of things today even though I also plan to go there tomorrow. I bought three bags of grapes, a pack of four-year-old cheddar, a jug of orange juice, a jug of lemonade, and some mouthwash. 

            I had Breton crackers with five-year-old cheddar for lunch. 

            I weighed 84 kilos at 17:00. 

            I was caught up on my journal at around 18:30. 

            I wrote my Exit Slip survey about today's class. 

            I read "2 mothers in a HDB playground" by Arthur Yap, and most of "The Wizard of Khao-I-Dang" by Sharon May. The Yap poem is all in small-case and really more like a dialogue than a poem. The May story is told by a former Cambodian refugee who now works as an interpreter for meetings between immigration officers from western countries and Cambodians who have been in a refugee camp in Thailand for years. It talks about how subjective the process is for having one's application approved. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with Basilica sauce and four-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching an interesting episode of Ben Casey. 

            At the beginning of this story, Gene Billstrom, the general manager of a large corporation named Chem Tech suddenly goes berserk at a board meeting. He violently attacks all of the other executives, including the president, Henry Kessler, who is also his best friend, and whom he kills. 

            Billstrom wakes up in the jail ward of the hospital and he has no memory of what he has done. He is shocked to hear that he killed his own best friend. Casey can't find anything wrong and so he signs a release for Billstrom to be taken away. 

            But the next day as the police are escorting Billstrom away, Casey sees firsthand the symptoms that Billstrom displayed on the day of the attack. He begins to appear asleep and moves his mouth as if he is chewing gum, then he attacks the cops with incredible strength. It takes several men to hold him down. Much to the consternation of the authorities waiting to receive Billstrom, Casey orders him taken back to the ward. 

           Based on the symptoms, Casey now thinks that Billstrom has a variety of psychomotor epilepsy. It could be caused by a scar on the temporal lobes. Casey and Zorba want to run some tests. Billstrom agrees to them until his son comes to visit. It becomes clear that Billstrom was not a very good father or husband, despite providing his family with far more money than they needed. Now Billstrom feels guilty and wants to give up the tests and turn himself in. But Casey gets a court order to force the tests if Billstrom won't agree to them. Then Billstrom's alcoholic wife Ellen comes to see Casey. She is afraid to visit her husband but Casey takes her to him. The result is that they reconcile and Billstrom realizes his family needs him. He agrees to the tests and the possible brain surgery. 

            Billstrom was played by Eddie Albert, who started out in business but the crash of 1929 drove him to perform. He was a circus trapeze flier before he tried acting. In the early 1930s, he appeared a few times on Broadway. In 1936 Eddie starred in The Love Nest, which was RCA/NBC's first private live performance of a television show. He made his first movie in 1936 and had his first co-starring role the same year in On Your Toes. Just before WWII, while touring with a circus, he doubled as a spy and photographed Nazi U-boats. In 1940 he starred in An Angel from Texas, in 1941 he starred in The Great Nobody and The Wagons Roll at Night, and in 1942 Lady Bodyguard and Ladies Day. In 1943 he was the skipper of a landing craft at the battle of Tarawa and rescued 70 wounded marines while under enemy fire. He had a nightclub act with his Mexican wife Margo. In 1947 he co-starred in "Smash Up", in 1950 he co-starred with Lucille Ball in The Fuller Brush Girl, he got his first Oscar nomination in 1953 for Roman Holiday, in 1955 he co-starred in Oklahoma, the same year he played Winston Smith in the first TV adaptation of "1984". He co-starred in the 1956 film, "Attack". In 1962 "Who's Got the Action, He is best known for starring with Eva Gabor in the sitcom Green Acres. He said he took the job because knew it would be a hit and therefore a vacation from shopping himself around for movie work. He was an environmentalist and helped to launch the first Earth Day in 1970. 

            

I searched for bedbugs and found two small ones in grooves in the plaster just to the right of the frame of the old exit door at the head of my bed, about halfway up and two hands apart. They didn't have fresh blood inside.