Suzanne Pleshette

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

            I finished memorizing "Lavabo" by Serge Gainsbourg and searched for the chords. I found one set on a few sites that says it's all E minor except for the chorus. I'll start working them out tomorrow. 

            I weighed 84.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            As usual, on Wednesday, breakfast consisted of a bowl of grapes because I had to leave for English in the World class. I'll leave later next time because there is always a class in that room ahead of ours. That class tends to get out early and so I went in before the other students had left. 

            After we were seated I approached Chuanqi and asked if I could give him some advice. He welcomed me to do so and so I told him that he had to stop apologizing to the professor every time he raised his hand to contribute to the discussion. I told him he was doing the class a favour by speaking and he thanked me. He spoke several times during class and he took my advice. 

            Our Saturday assignment will be on the outer circle as delineated in the Seargeant and Swan chapter of English in the World. 

            Jamaica Kincaid's story "On Seeing England for the First Time" is shortened in our book. The map of England is compared to a leg of mutton and a special jewel. A leg of mutton is attainable but a jewel is not. 

            I say she has a Freudian resentment of her parents that she blames on England. 

            The longer sentence about fabric could reflect the unraveling of the cloth. 

            Drawing a map is a declaration of war. I say it's certainly an infiltration to make students outside of England draw one, but it's hard to see as a declaration of war. 

            She says there is no prolonged dawn or dusk in Antigua and apparently that is true. Twilight is shorter at the equator and longer where we live in Canada. The reason is that, as seen from the equator, at all times of the year, the sun’s path in relation to the horizon is more vertical. The sun drops quickly down to the horizon and sinks to bring sudden darkness. 

            Near the end of the story, she expresses some extreme prejudices about the English people and then claims that someone like her can do no harm with such prejudices. I say she is expressing the idea from the school of thought that declares that racialized people cannot be racist. While I agree that power and privilege give power to racism, I don't think anyone is free from being racist and I don't think that anyone's racism is entirely harmless, especially if widely published. 

            What social power do you need before your prejudices are taken seriously? 

            She is being sadistic in saying that one reality has to die. 

            Jamaica Kincaid was removed from school at 16 and sent at 17 to be an au pair in the US. She dedicated her book to Velma Pollard who wrote books for children in which they could see each other.

            The Lorna Goodison poem "Lessons Learned from the Royal Primer" mentions "Jamaica's curse cloths" and it turns out that is where the curse "Blood clot" comes from. I'd always thought that it was wishing someone to have a blood clot but it's really calling someone a sanitary napkin as in "blood cloth". It's sort of like our "douchebag" only it sounds more extreme and disturbing. 

            I had Breton crackers with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade for lunch. 

            I weighed 85.2 kilos at 17:00. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:49. 

            I completed the Exit Slip survey from my class for today. There were questions about Jamaica Kincaid's essay and Lorna Goodison's poem. 

            Kincaid's idea of the sublime steepness of the cliffs of Dover being something her views of England can jump from is a type of suicide of her long-nourished prejudices about England and the English people. 

            Goodison's Bombo of the Congo is an infantilized symbol for all the colonized Congolese people. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar and had it with a beer while watching episode 21 of Ben Casey. 

            In this story a wealthy and arrogant tycoon named O.J. Stanley learns that his daughter Carolyn plans on getting married. Seconds later he is hit by a bus. Witnesses say that he appeared to deliberately step in the vehicle's path and that it was an attempted suicide. Carolyn tells Casey that he did it because he knew it would cause her to put her marriage on hold. She convinces her father to meet her fiancé Eddie but when he does he asks her to let him talk with him alone. Eddie comes out of the meeting telling Carolyn it's all over and walking out of her life. Carolyn tells her father that she will punish him by being with a different stranger every night from now on. 

            Casey learns from Stanley that he doesn't want his daughter to marry anyone because her grandfather recently died in a mental hospital of a disease of the brain that is now beginning to affect Stanley and will also eventually attack Carolyn. Carolyn thinks that her grandfather died years ago and she does not know about the brain disease. Casey advises Stanley to tell her and he eventually does. She has another twenty years and plans to make the best of them. 

            Carolyn was played by Suzanne Pleshette, who came from a wealthy New York family. She made her Broadway debut at the age of 20 in the play "Compulsion". She started out as the Fourth Girl but before the play had finished its run she became the lead. In films, she co-starred with Jerry Lewis in "The Geisha Boy" and in Hitchcock's "The Birds". She co-starred with Troy Donahue in "Rome Adventure" and "Distant Trumpet" and this led to their marriage. Her most famous role was as Emily Hartley the wife of Bob Hartley on "The Bob Newhart Show", which lasted for six years. 

            I searched for bedbugs and for the second night in a row I didn't find any.