I memorized the seventh verse of "Trompe d’érection" (Missed Erection) by Serge Gainsbourg.
During song practice, I think that I saw a coyote walk through the Dollarama parking lot, lunge at some pigeons that some fool had spread seed for, and then cross Queen Street to go up O'Hara. I guess it could have been a stray dog but it looked an awful lot like a coyote.
I weighed 84.9 kilos before breakfast.
I took a siesta from 11:10 to 12:40.
I spent twenty minutes on my essay.
I weighed 84.4 kilos before lunch.
I took an early bike ride, but it started raining and so I turned south at Brunswick and Bloor and headed home.
I weighed 84.7 kilos at 16:00. That's pretty low for that time on average over the last few months. It's surprising that such a low number is the heaviest I've been at that time in eight days.
I was caught up on my journal at 16:47.
At 18:00 I logged on for my Medieval Literature lecture.
I said Marie de France's story "Lanval" would be creepy in the beginning if the genders were reversed. If Lanval was a lady being approached by a fairy king's male servants. The scenario would be something like, "Lady Lanval, our boss has had you under surveillance and now he wants to meet you. Can you come with us please?"
We talked mostly about the Marie de France story "Bisclavret". A lot of female students sympathized with Bisclavret's wife's perspective and thought that there was evidence that she had reason to fear Bisclavret before she found out that he was a werewolf. I didn't see much evidence that would point to that. I said her fear of his anger may not have been based on his anger but on male-dominated society's treatment of women in general.
I say that Bisclavret has a severe disability that renders him constantly frightened of having someone find his clothes even by accident.
The professor said something about allegorizing violence.
Later the king's people torture Bisclavret's wife until she confesses. There is no justice.
She said something about queer space related to Bisclavret's relationship with the king.
Marie de France is opening up social spaces. There are lots of forms of identification.
I said it did seem uneven when Bisclavret's wife was tortured while her second partner was not, even though Bisclavret attacked them both.
The clothes have power.
Bisclavret is a Celtic name. A pagan and not a Christian name.
It just occurred to me that Bisclavret is the only one named in the story.
I said that it seems that literally the clothes make the man here and with no clothing, one is not human.
We looked at an essay on monster theory by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen called "Monster Culture". He presents seven famous theses on all monsters.
The first is that the monster body is a cultural body. The monster's body incorporates fear, anxiety, and fantasy, giving them life and independence. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and projection, the monster exists to be read. It houses everybody's anxiety.
The second is that the monster always escapes. The monster in "Alien" is given as an example.
The third is that the monster is a harbinger of category crisis. It is a Linnean nightmare, defying every natural law of evolution; by turns bivalve, crustacean, reptilian, and humanoid. It seems capable of lying dormant within its egg indefinitely. It sheds its skin like a snake, its carapace like an arthropod. It deposits its young into other species like a wasp ....
The fourth is that the monster dwells at the gates of difference. Any otherness can be constructed through the monster's body.
The fifth is that the monster polices the borders of the possible.
The sixth is that fear of the monster is really a kind of desire. We envy its freedom and sublime despair.
The seventh is that the monster stands at the threshold of becoming. They ask us to re-evaluate our cultural assumptions. They ask why we created them.
I said it sounds like the monster is a personification of the sublime. Professor Walton had me offer a definition of the sublime. I said when nature is dangerous it presents us with a fear of death. If we deliberately face that reflection of our fears we experience an elevation of the self in response.
Monstrum comes from "demonstrate". From the Anglo-Norman and Middle French monstre. In Old French as mostre in the sense of ‘prodigy, marvel’. From classical Latin mōnstrum, meaning portent, prodigy, with the base of monēre to warn.
The monster can be positive. I mentioned Leeuwenhoek's observation of protozoans through a microscope and how he called them gigantic monsters.
I said that Bisclavret fits into thesis one if we think in terms of the wife's initial image of a werewolf coming entirely from her imagination.
I pointed out that in this story a werewolf seems to only look like a wolf, so unless all wolves are monsters what makes him a monster is being a wolf with a human mind.
I said the wife doesn't escape even though she is sent away. The fact that her descendants are cursed with being noseless suggests a severe binding.
Bisclavret is still a werewolf in the end.
I say she is also policing his possibilities by making it impossible for him to become human again.
An article said that the beginning and end of the text are bookends. I said that I disagree that the end echoes the beginning because the ending is a resolution to a problem presented at the beginning. The wife's distrust and fear of the werewolf are not shared by Bisclavret's friends in the end. The king and his entire court accept that he is a werewolf and he seems to be the royal werewolf now.
Is she a monster? I say she draws this other man who she does not love as her accomplice in a plan she has already devised to forever banish her husband from humanity. She offers her body to this other man and he does whatever she wants. This seems like monstrous behaviour to me.
Walter Benjamin's Against the Grain offers a way of reading past stories to see the hidden abuse.
She's a survivor. Female survival.
How happy is this relationship?
They've taken Marie de France's Fables out of Broadview online.
I asked the professor for permission to write about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for my presentation. She said I could but I might want to save it for my final essay. I realized that might be true, so I think I'll write about Grendel instead.
During the last half of class, I roasted a pork sirloin, boiled a potato, and heated some gravy. Dinner was ready shortly after class ended. I ate while watching episode 18 of The Beverly Hillbillies.
Granny and Pearl are still fighting over control of the house. Jed thinks Pearl should focus on her yodeling. He says that Beverly Hills men love it and gives the example of how when Mr. Drysdale heard her yodel he was in tears. The fact is that he was crying from the pain of listening to it.
Meanwhile Mrs. Drysdale returns from Boston to announce she is going to a health spa in Arizona. Mr. Drysdale has heard what a great housekeeper Pearl is and asks if he can come and talk to her. He is thinking of hiring her but because she doesn't know he's married she thinks that he is interested in marrying her.
Jed and Granny go to give Mrs. Drysdale a wheelbarrow full of Granny's lye soap. Mrs. Drysdale smells it and thanks them, saying it can be spread around the rose bushes. She tells them she is leaving so that her husband Milburn can have his new wife. She means she will be his new wife when she comes back from the spa but they think she is being replaced by a younger woman.
Drysdale comes to visit Pearl and she tells him to relax and take his shoes off. She sees he has a hole in his sock and takes it off to darn it. He tries to get it back from her and she begins to tickle him. That's when Jed and Granny walk in and think that Pearl is the "new wife".
Jed informs Pearl alone that Drysdale is married, then he talks to Drysdale alone and tells him he can't have Pearl. Then Drysdale asks if he can have Granny. Jed goes and talks to Granny and Pearl and they form a plan to make them both unattractive to him. They pretend they are drunk and start fighting over Drysdale by throwing dishes at each other until he runs away.
This episode of The Beverly Hillbillies and 66 others was directed by Richard Whorf, who started out as an actor on the Boston stage before moving on to Broadway in The Banshee in 1927. He moved to Hollywood in the 1930s. His film acting debut was in Midnight in 1934. He played Jigger Pine in Blues in the Night. He directed his first short film in 1942 and then the feature-length movie Blonde Fever in 1944. In the 1950s he started directing TV series, such as the entire second season of My Three Sons and the entire one-year run of Mickey. He was also a costume designer and won a Tony Award in 1954 for Ondine. His brother Benjamin Whorf was a famous linguist who studied the language of the Hopi.
For the fourth night in a row, I found no bedbugs.
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