Rosemary de Camp

            On Tuesday morning I worked out the chords for the tenth verse of "Sans blague" (No Joke) by Boris Vian. 

            I almost finished editing "Trompe d’érection" (Missed Erection) by Serge Gainsbourg on Christian's Translations to prepare it for blog publication. 

            I weighed 85.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            I did some more research on Grendel for my essay. 

            I weighed 85 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 84.9 kilos at 17:00. 

            At 18:05 I logged on to Zoom for the Medieval Literature lecture. 

            Alex says Walton is on the way.

            I gave a recap of last week's class and how we had talked on Bisclavret and argued about who is the monster, the werewolf or the wife. 

            Professor Audrey Walton said every time she reads Marie de France she gets something different. 

            How Bisclavret represents the outsider figure, attraction, abuse outside-inside dynamics in Marie's private spaces. 

            Monsters. The man-animal hybrid dynamic. 

            Turning the class over to Alex for 15 minutes. 

            Bisclavret and Yonec. 

            His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, the first of the series being The Golden Compass. A human individual's inner-self manifests itself throughout life as an animal-shaped "dæmon", that almost always stays near its human counterpart. During the childhood of its associated human, a dæmon can change its animal shape at will, but with the onset of adolescence it settles into a fixed, final animal form. We took a demon quiz. 

            In Yonec by Marie de France. How is the hawk guy at parties? He says he will never be late. He thinks ahead. 

            I say that to change is to create and so changing into animals is a metaphor for being an artist.

            The animal for the sneaky person is a ferret. 

            The goshawk is a noble hunting bird. 

            There is a movement in Medieval studies to look at the role of animals in texts. 

            The servants at Royal College are dog demons. 

            Compare the hawk man to Icarus. 

            I said it feels like a New Testament Biblical narrative. The hawk as the angel of the lord coming to Mary and telling her she will have a baby. This story is named for that baby who only appears at the end. 

            Marie messes things up. 

            The Eucharist, Christ, visitation, love story, devotion. 

            Is he her demon? 

            How demons operate in Philip Pullman's text. Flexible when young and solidify at puberty. One's inner companion a glorified pet animal. Reflection of self tied to being. 

            She transformed while in the tower. Beauty as transformation. The king pursues her for beauty. She becomes unbeautiful and then beautiful again. Her beauty will kill her and her lover. Her beauty is described by her captors. She has no privacy because they are watching her. Her beauty comes back and is distrusted. Female appearance as dangerous. 

            I don't think her lover is being accusatory about her beauty when he says it brought about their death. He doesn't regret it. 

            I said she could have jumped out of the tower anyway if she was going to do it. 

            Her agency to jump was ignited by her dying lover. 

            Jenn mentions my gender switch comment from last week. 

            Both stories make a secret public. 

            In The Scarlet Letter Hester owns her letter. 

            Marie's texts are rich with lived experience, realistic, and socially accurate. 

            We took a break and I started dinner. 

            Talking about Halloween. I told the story of how my daughter stopped wearing costumes but still went out for Halloween in her regular clothes. When people asked what she was supposed to be she would say, "Mr. Comfortable". 

            Fables. 

            The Dog and the Cheese. Shadow may just mean reflection. 

            Wolf and lamb. The moral is more about social justice. Messy. 

            Laustic. 

            I said the Nightingale is a metaphor for her love. 

            A metonym is a word, name, or expression used as a substitute for something else with which it is closely associated. For example, Ottawa is a metonym for the federal government of Canada.

            Metonymy the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing. 

            The husband is brutal when the nightingale is captured. He kills it in front of her and throws it at her leaving a bloodied stain above her breast where her heart is. I said he is definitely trying to stain her consciousness. 

            Leave a mark of trauma. Violence as publishing. 

            Reliquary for relics. She wraps the bird in an ornate cloth. 

            The lays are the nightingale. In the beginning there is beautiful song of poetry, then lyric poetry, the love message. Witness, public form. Poetry as memorial in the end of Laustic, an elegy. At the very end it becomes the story we're reading. It becomes public in Marie. Laustic shows her general way. 

            I said I think Bisclavret is her best. 

            I asked why France didn't translate the Fox and the Grapes. She thought it was an interesting question but didn't know. I think it was just an accident. 

            During class I grilled some pork chops in the oven and fried two in the skillet. We finished before 20:30 and I had the biggest pork chop with a potato and gravy while watching episode 25 of the Beverly Hillbillies. 

            Pearl is upset that Jed doesn't spend his wealth on getting rid of some of the old things they have like the truck and the antique butter churn so that they can appear more acceptable to high society. Meanwhile Mrs. Mildred Drysdale feels the same way about getting rid of Jed and his family as her neighbours because her society guru Priscilla Ralph Alden Smith Standish, the president of the Women's Federation for the Preservation of the Perpetuation of the First Family Traditions of America, the greatest authority on colonial history, early American genealogical origins, and 17th and 18th Century artifacts, is coming to visit. 

            Mildred goes to the Clampett mansion to ask them to leave and she finds Pearl telling Granny that she and her pile of junk is a disgrace to Beverly Hills as Granny throws ham hocks at her. Mildred agrees with her and says the sooner she leaves the better, but suddenly Pearl tells Mildred she can't talk to Granny that way and chases her away with a barrage of ham hocks. 

            Later however Priscilla Standish knocks on the Clampett door looking for Mrs. Drysdale but she is stricken by the antique loom that is sitting in front of the door. Inside she finds an antique spinning wheel. When she hears those things belong to Granny she says she needs to meet her and so Jed takes her to the kitchen where Priscilla sees her churning butter. The table is full of pewter dishware and Priscilla is in ecstasy. She asks if she can take pictures and Granny thinks she's a revenuer and runs for her gun. But Priscilla is equally impressed with the gun and takes it from her to look at it because it has also been in the family for generations. Jed shows Priscilla an old trunk and inside she finds the family Bible that has a dedication to Queen Elizabeth I and recognizes it as an original Geneva Bible, sometimes called a Puritan Bible and it's 400 years old. 

            When Mrs. Drysdale rushes in thinking that Priscilla is being held captive she demands that the Clampetts be arrested and hanged. Priscilla tells Mildred that she has established that Jed is a descendant of the first man to come ashore at Jamestown, Virginia on May 13, 1607. The leader of that expedition was Captain Christopher Newport. She tells Mildred that when her family and Mildred's family arrived on the Mayflower, Jed's family was already there. 

            Then Priscilla says that Mrs. Drysdale would consider it an honour to wash the Clampetts' pewter dishes for them and she also insists that Mildred allow Granny to teach her how to make lye soap. Mr. Drysdale is getting a sadistic thrill from watching his wife wash dishes. 

            Priscilla was played by Rosemary de Camp, who established a reputation on the stage and on radio before venturing to Hollywood to act in her first movie in 1941. She played Nurse Judy Price on the popular Dr. Christian radio series. She tended to play loving small-town mothers like that of George M Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1942 and the mother of Doris Day's character in "On Moonlight Bay" and its sequel, "By the Light of the Silvery Moon." She played Mowgli's mother in The Jungle Book. In 1946 Howard Hughes crashed his plane into her house. She played Peg Riley on the first version of the TV sitcom The Life of Riley. She played the mother of Marlo Thomas's character on That Girl. She played Kate Bradley's sister on Petticoat Junction. She played Shirley's mother on The Partridge Family.

            

            

            For the fifth night in a row I found no bedbugs.