Kevin McCarthy

            On Tuesday morning I uploaded "Sermonette" by Boris Vian and began preparing it for blog publication. 

            I finished memorizing "Martine boude" (Martine Broods) by Serge Gainsbourg and worked out the chords for most of the first verse. 

            There was an email from my Medieval Literature professor telling us that she is ill and so tonight's class is canceled. I hope she's better next week but I was glad I didn't have to go there tonight.

            I weighed 85 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday, I cleaned more of the grooves where the sliding windows go in the right-hand set in my living room. There was still one groove left to clean when I stopped for lunch. Hopefully, I'll get it finished and maybe even clean some of the sliding windows on Thursday. 

            I weighed 84.9 kilos before lunch. That's the lightest I've been at that time in a week. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 85.1 kilos at 17:30. 

            Today I emailed Professor Percy and said, "Regarding our research paper, I am interested in the hybrid Acadian dialect known as "Chiac". I think that only about 9% of it is in English but its use of English is a crucial characteristic. In 2018 it was voted the most beautiful spoken language in the world. My question is, would Chiac be a valid subject for a research paper in this course, even though only a tenth of it uses English? 

            She responded later, "Chiac is a French dialect, so technically doesn’t qualify. BUT: you can just think of a slightly larger category, such as the relation between Chiac and English in Canada. If, for instance, you search in the “Canadian Newstream” database (I added © library sources, and that’s the main Canadian one) for the words Chiac and English, you might find recent articles about performers who, say, perform in both languages. That seems quite up your alley. For a final paper, too, you could look at the language situation in the Maritimes and the relation of English with other languages. You’d need further to focus it – and musical performance would be a suitably sharp focus. 

             I responded, "Of course, it would be an English paper and focus on the use of English, but also how the written, spoken, and sung English is enhanced by the French and Migmaw that it harmonizes with. I think it's pretty hard to think of a phrase like "J'etais pretty pissed off" as being of a French dialect. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, chiac is technically not a French dialect but rather: "a specific type of discursive switching between French and English among individuals who are highly bilingual and have Acadian French as their mother tongue but Canadian English as their first or second language. Although the discursive code of chiac is precisely constrained and ethnoculturally recognizable, it cannot properly be considered a language or dialect as such." Certainly, purist Francophones do not recognize it as French and the discursive is ostracized because of its English content. My focus would be on how chiac is used in literature, especially songs and poetry such as rap.

            I was caught up on my journal at around 19:30. 

            I read the poem "The Cattle Thief" by Pauline Johnson. The trochaic emphasis gives it a sense of urgency. That the lines are often an octameter long makes them breathless. The chief is referred to twice as a lion and this is ironic because the symbolism of the lion is meant to represent how the British symbolize their own ideal characteristics: brave, noble, strong, and proud. The chief's daughter's accusations to the settlers are spoken entirely in Cree and so none of it would mean anything to them.

            I completed an online survey for my English in the World course. It was nothing challenging and just asked for my own experience and opinion. We get full marks for doing it but I just stumbled on the survey and only then saw that it was something we had to do before the end of the day. 

            I had a potato with gravy and three small chicken drumsticks while watching episode seven of Ben Casey. 

            In this story, Dr. Dave Taylor returns to County General after already having served as a resident and leaving to go into private practice. Casey is not glad to see him because he thinks Dave is using resident work as a crutch because he can't face life on the outside. 

            Meanwhile, a former patient named Elizabeth Collins is re-admitted with the complaint that she can't breathe. She is put on a respirator but Casey is sure she doesn't need it and thinks she is a hypochondriac. He pulls the plug on the breathing machine and when she repeatedly begs for him to turn it back on he tells her that the fact that she could talk for that long proves that she can breathe. He plugs it back in but tells her that he'll wait now for her to say, "Pull the plug." Dave thinks Casey is too hard on Elizabeth but Casey draws a parallel between Elizabeth's case and Dave's. 

            Elizabeth files a complaint against Casey. Zorba reminds Casey that even hypochondria is an illness and that as a doctor he is expected to be compassionate with everyone. So Casey backs off from both Dave and Elizabeth. 

            One day while Dave is talking with Elizabeth he admits that he is afraid. He decides to give up medicine entirely, but Casey argues against that. Later we learn that Dave has become the much-needed doctor for a remote farm area. Inspired by Dave, Elizabeth asks Casey to pull the plug. She has difficulty at first with breathing without the machine but gets used to it. 

            Dave was played by Kevin McCarthy, who appeared in over 100 movies in seven decades of method acting. He played Biff Loman in the 1951 screen adaptation of Death of a Salesman, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. He starred in the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". He had a one-man show called "Give 'em Hell Harry" about Harry S. Truman and he performed it for over twenty years in 48 states. 

            I did a search for bedbugs and didn't find any.