Harriet E. MacGibbon

            On Tuesday morning I worked out the chords for the intro and the first three verses of "J'envisage" (I Imagine) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 85.3 kilos before breakfast.

            I tried to do research for my essay but I got tired and decided to take an early siesta at 11:30. I got up at 13:00. 

            I weighed 84.8 kilos before lunch. 

            I still felt tired after lunch and laid down without sleeping for half an hour. 

            I took a bike ride downtown and back an hour earlier than usual. 

            I weighed 85.3 kilos at 16:00. That's the most I've weighed at that time in over two weeks. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 16:51. 

            I finished copying excerpts from an essay on Chiac. Many francophone students at the University of Moncton find university French too formal and it drives them towards less structured English. 

            I logged on for Medieval Literature class. But my image was labeled as "User" again and so I logged off and logged onto Zoom then logged back into the class. 

            We had a review and we were broken off into groups of two to discuss comparisons between Bede and Beowulf and maybe Judith. I said it can definitely be compared to Judith because they are both Pagan conversion therapy. The professor gave us a poll to ask how similar Bede was to Beowulf. I didn't think they were similar at all and so I picked 1 out of 10 but I misunderstood because it turned out that the professor meant that 1 indicated the most similarity. 

            Etiology means origin, root cause, and origin stories. Why tell an origin story? This course is an origin story. Why take it? There's a politics to it. 

            Celtic literature didn't survive. All we have are stories that the English wrote down. Celtic speakers covered much of Europe. 

            Grendel's hand being ripped off makes it a very old story. 

            I said Beowulf fights Grendel on his own level by fighting unarmed but shows himself to be more of a savage. Also, it's a hand, not a paw and a hand makes Grendel human. In losing his hand he's kept from being human. Manuscript means handwritten and hands write manuscripts. 

            If one loses one's head the story is over. Symbolic violence of beheading in Judith. The blemmya was a medieval fictional creature with no head but a face on its torso. There are various spellings: blemmye, blemmyae, blemmyes. There were legends from ancient Greece to Africa. The earliest legends are from Libya and Ethiopia. 

            Maybe ninety percent of the beginning of the manuscript is missing. It is a headless manuscript. Acephalous means not or no head. Judith is a headless poem but is also about headlessness. 

            We broke off into groups to discuss how many ways there is the loss of a head in Judith. 

            The general loses his head but also a general is the head of an army and he is lost. 

            I pointed out this line, about losing one's head to drunkenness, "Then the king collapsed in midst of bed so drunk on wine that his wit-locker was of sense empty." 

            The general's corpse also loses its head as it is another degree of headlessness to not have your body buried with its head. 

            I say the poem moves from multiple heads to one head, that of god. Unity of the god figure.

            Pagan through a Christian lens. There's a hymn at the end. 

            I think elements of the battle scene come from an oral pagan tradition. 

            Elegies: cycle, the natural world, pastoral. Realistic accounts of bereavement. Elements found in human grief. Searching behaviour. A sense that the lost person is about to come home. The impulse to answer the door. Scanning the horizon, wandering around. John Bowlby writes about attachment theory and the deep desire to find the other that is lost. In "The Seafarer" thoughts are a bird. 

            The professor found her dog had 11 pups before she got her from the Humane Society. Animals search too when they grieve. The Elegy poems talk of animal cognition. 

            I said, "The Wanderer" reminds me of "Un Canadian errant" by Antoine Gérin-Lajoie. 

            Greed comes up in the poems with longing. Eaten by longing. 

            Our TA Alex started a Discord page for our course with multiple channels. Sign up for a date and write what you want from topics covered in class before that date. 

            Class went right up until 21:00. 

            I started food cooking during the break and so I had a potato with gravy and a chicken leg with a beer while watching the fourth episode of The Beverly Hillbillies. 

            This story begins with Granny setting up her still outside by the swimming pool. Jed says that their neighbour Mr. Drysdale told him that he'd better not let Mrs. Drysdale see it. They assume it means that she's an alcoholic and she'll be tempted. From then on they interpret everything they hear about Mrs. Drysdale in terms of alcoholism. The fact is that she is a hypochondriac and is always drinking things to cure her imagined illnesses. 

            Mrs. Drysdale is in a spa in Boston and she tells her husband she wants to come home and meet her new neighbours in order to find out if they are the right kind of people. Mrs. Drysdale thinks that anyone that didn't arrive on the Mayflower is a foreigner. Mr. Drysdale wants her to stay in Boston.

            Meanwhile, Jed and his family discover the telephone. They get a call from Mrs. Drysdale but she faints as soon as she talks to them. 

            Mrs. Drysdale catches the next plane and comes to the Clampett house. Mr. Drysdale tries to get her back in the car and they are each pulling on an end of her fox fur. Jethro thinks they are fighting with a real fox and aims his shotgun. Mrs. Drysdale throws her fur up in the air and Jethro shoots it. Mrs. Drysdale faints and is unconscious in the limo. Jed and Granny think she's juiced again. 

            Mrs. Drysdale was played by Harriet E. MacGibbon, who had a long career on Broadway before acting regularly on the screen. Her first movie was a supporting role in WC Fields's first talky, The Golf Specialist. From 1934 to 1937 she played Lucy Kent on the radio soap opera Home Sweet Home. Her theatrical roles were diverse but on the screen, she was typecast as a snooty society lady. 

            I searched for bedbugs and found one on the old exit door just above the floor at the head of my bed. It left a black smear when I killed it and so it definitely wasn't healthy.