Robert Easton

            On Tuesday morning I memorized the first verse of "OK pour plus jamais" (Okay for No More Always) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            When I went into the bedroom to get my guitar I found a bedbug trying to crawl into a dent in the plaster at the top of the upper hinge of the old exit door at the head of my bed. 

            I weighed 84.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            I left at 11:00 for my first Bildungsroman seminar and I got to University College at 11:30. My class wouldn't start until noon and so I plugged in my laptop and went online. I found out that I got an A+ on my Medieval Literature course. That was a pleasant surprise. These marks are pretty subjective though. Someone else might have given me a B for my efforts. There's now an all gender washroom but I noticed female students waiting until I was finished before going in. 

            Just before 12:10 our Professor Audrey Jaffe arrived. She's very skinny and looks older than me. She took attendance and paused on my double name. 

            Drop boxes for assignments are in something called PeppeR on Quercus. She says she hates Quercus. 

            She wrote the word "Genre" on the blackboard. All genres are made up by critics to make life easier for themselves. 

            Bildungsroman. A novel of building, education, development. 

            What is crucial is how culture represents itself to itself. What is real? Ideological concerns of what it means be a person. 

            Two of the most canonical bildungsromans are Jane Eyre and David Copperfield. She wants us to tear the genre into pieces. A bildungsroman is a set of instructions for living not presented as such. How to and not to live. There are negative examples. The teaching mechanism is subtle. It's about you. We are still invested in the same narratives. 

            Culture teaches us to live in novelistic terms. The novel has made us what we are. Structure in our experience is not random. There is meaning in finding the structure and the relationship between past, present, and future. The way to read becomes a recipe. 

            The bildungsroman started in 1795 with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, which we won't read because it has a million pages. It is a novel of self-realization. He gives up his ideals to accept his circumstances. It becomes a self-realization. This is example number one and European literature accepted this as a model. 

            Interrogate. Don't take anything for granted. It is not just literature but about people. A model for the individual. Effect on readers. Folding the individual into the universe. The individual must also fit. What is special about you and how to be like everybody and still be you. A narrative of not one damn thing after the other gives form. 

            Why does it start the way it does and why end a certain way? 

            Jane harvests her memories selectively in hopes of having a common memory with the reader. No possibility. She throws a book at the master of the house. Don't do it or do it? She thinks in terms of negatives. There is no distracting information. 

            There is a structure of interruption like Prince Harry's Spare. 

            The novel starts with new behaviour. She does something she never did before. She is only free if she submits to a template for the whole.

            I say I see parallels with the beginning of Jane Eyre and Frankenstein, such as in the use of arctic imagery to create a sense of internal desolation. She says that's a gothic element that both novels share. 

            The secondary readings are important for the whole semester. 

            A baby can recognize itself in the mirror. Identification like in the novel. We see our reflection in her. The fictional ego. The complete image is a free standing ideal. There is a difference between you and the image so you have to identify. Me is over there. Recognition is misrecognition. You is made up. Images are glamourized. There are many mirror moments in Jane Eyre creating identity issues. A mother's eyes are also a mirror. How you look to yourself is not about the self or you wouldn't look. The baby leaning forward towards the mirror. 

            The Benveniste article. Language is still about the self as subjectivity. I say "I" only to "You". I becomes you. Each speaker sets their self as the subject. Interesting to someone out there. Make the self be by saying I. Speech acts. Swearing is a performance that is not true. Even autobiography is not true. It is a constructed narrative. How are you? Fine. No one is fine.

            I told her about the dream I had as a kid in which I looked out the window and saw myself looking in. She agreed that is creepy. She said The Turn of the Screw has a part that is like my dream. I ask why this image of the self is scary while the image in the mirror is not. She suggests because one is not supposed to be there in another place. 

            Parallels with Cinderella. Victim narratives. 

            Don't take anything for granted. To get the image one must throw out everything that is not part of it. Jettison the bad stuff when we see the image. 

            We picked our presentation dates. I claimed March 7 when we talk about the second part of Frankenstein. 

            There are lots of versions of you. There's a new one every time you say I. 

            She hasn't been at University College since before the construction began and wondered what is going on. Someone told her it's a parking garage but also a geothermal project that will go deeper than the CN Tower is tall. It will reduce U of T's emissions by 15,000 tonnes. There will be no more cars on the circle so I won't be hit and run again when I'm riding my bike. 

            I weighed 83.7 kilos before a late lunch at 14.56, which is the lightest I've been at that time in two weeks. 

            I weighed 84.2 kilos at 17:15. That's the least I've weighed at that time in eleven days. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:00. 

            I scanned three more black and white negatives to complete the set so I can put the scanning project aside until spring. One was damaged to abstraction and the other two were mostly of a houseplant. 

            I've read the first tenth of Jane Eyre. This ten year old is a little too sophisticated and eloquent for someone who has been shuttered away and suppressed as Jane has been. The story begins just as she begins to do things differently than she has before. She has had enough and she is rebelling. Her name seems a lot like Eire for Ireland but it's apparently an old English name with perhaps Norman origins. Her rebellious behaviour motivates Mrs. Reed to send her away to school and she is glad of it. Jane tells Reed off because Reed has branded her as being deceitful, but she points out that Reed and her children are more deceitful than she is. She prefers the stories of the Bible rather than the Psalms because they are more interesting. 

            I had a small potato with gravy, two chicken wings and a chicken back while watching season 3, episode 31 of The Beverly Hillbillies. 

            Luke Short's boy Beau comes out to California. Granny has matched Beau and Elly since they were twelve and Granny thinks Beau is there to marry Elly. That seems to be his intention but Elly has never liked him because she would never marry a boy she could beat up. Apparently all the girls back home are crazy about him. 

            Since Beau has said his father warned him against Hollywood sireens, Jane has the idea that if Elly dresses like a sexy movie star it will scare him away. But when Elly kisses him suddenly he wants to marry her. Elly then dresses in old and dirty clothes and he likes that too so she can slop the pigs back home. 

            Jane then convinces Beau that he's an international playboy and belongs to all women. She bribes some attractive bank employees to fall for Beau and Jethro. Then Granny starts shooting at Beau for jilting Elly. Finally they learn that Beau didn't come out west to marry Elly but to join the army.

            Beau was played by Robert Easton, who as a child was one of the high IQ Quiz Kids that were featured on TV and radio shows. He became a master of dialects and was called the man of a thousand voices who often coached other actors. For example he coached Forest Whitaker in the Ugandan accent that won him an Oscar. He also coached Gregory Peck on his German accent in The Boys from Brazil. But I've seen Easton in several shows in which he is always a naïve southern yokel. He played Magnus Proudfoot on the original radio version of Gunsmoke and on the TV version he played Chester's brother. His first film appearance was in Undertow in 1949. He co-starred in The Red Badge of Courage. He played Brian McAffee on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. He voiced X20 and Phones on the puppet adventure series Stingray. He played a Klingon Judge in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. 

            I searched for bedbugs and didn't find any.