Bill Baldwin

            On Thursday morning I finished memorizing "Fugue" by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I'll look for the chords but I doubt there are any that have been posted, so I'll start working them out. 

            I wasn't quite able to memorize the fifth verse of "Love On the Beat" by Serge Gainsbourg. I should be able to get it tomorrow. 

            I weighed 84.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            I worked on my Frankenstein presentation for the Bildungsroman seminar. This is what I have so far: 

                                  Presentation: A Vindication of the Rights of Monsters 

               He worked from his hidden point of vantage to understand and master this language 

            The creature's education is fairly unique in literature in that he learns to read without any direct assistance from anyone. The only other story that I know of that has a parallel to this type of self education is the 1912 serialized pulp fiction adventure story, Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The segments were collected into a novel format in 1914 that can be read as a Bildungsroman. In chapter 7, the boy who has been raised by apes from infancy discovers a cabin containing several books, not realizing that the cabin belongs to the murdered father he never knew. One of the books he finds is a picture dictionary through which he teaches himself to read by recognizing the letter patterns that accompany the pictures. 

            The difference between the self education of Tarzan and that of Frankenstein's creature is one of motive, and that affects the format of their learning processes. Tarzan already has community with a shrewdness of apes and communicates in their language. He merely wants to learn to read for the sake of interest and has no human readers to imitate. The creature feels the need to become literate in order to gain the ability to communicate so as to attain fellowship with and the acceptance of humans. He learns from others by observing them in secret through a small hole in the wall. Tarzan's self education is a very slow process and it takes him until the age of fifteen to be able to read. Frankenstein's creature learns to read in about a year. Even achieving this in such a short time by direct instruction would have made him the greatest reading prodigy to ever walk the Earth, let alone gaining that skill indirectly by watching people through a small hole in a wall. 

            But the creature's roundabout education can be seen as a metaphor for the academic limitations many women were stifled by in the Georgian era in which Frankenstein was written. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Shelley's mother Mary Wollstonecraft says that, "The little knowledge acquired by women with strong minds is... more random and episodic... acquired more by sheer observations... What women learn they learn by snatches." This speaks of a narrowness of range that can be symbolically represented by learning through a crick in the wall as the creature does. 

            The creature is referenced with masculine pronouns by his creator, who also expresses fear of him reproducing. This suggests that he was probably constructed with a penis. Yet his educational situation can be paralleled to that of women. There is also the aesthetic element. When a woman does not have beauty to advance her in Georgian era society she is disadvantaged. Despite probably being male, the creature's only disadvantage is his extreme ugliness. 

            I weighed 83.8 kilos before lunch, which is the lightest I've been at that time in nine days. 

            In the afternoon I ventured out through the salty brown slush to Freshco. Queen Street had been heavily salted and so it wasn't slippery, but it was like riding through wet sawdust. 

            The Freshco parking lot was full but the store seemed empty, I guess because a lot of customers are pedestrians who chose not to go out into the storm's aftermath. I bought two bags of grapes, five apples, a bunch of bananas, orange juice, limeade, kettle chips, frozen lima beans, and shampoo-conditioner. 

            I weighed 84 kilos at 17:00. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:38. 

            I worked some more on my presentation: 

            Victor's creature has a physique whose characteristics seem to be drawn from the extremely masculine end of the gender spectrum. Someone recognized as male would not normally be judged aesthetically to the degree that a woman would. But the fact that the creature's only insurmountable disadvantage is his appearance, in addition to being an ironic joke wrapped in a tragedy, is also a statement about society's aesthetic judgement of women. Wollstonecraft says, "The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sun-beams... when the summer of her physical beauty is past and gone." Frankenstein's masculine creature is condemned to an exaggeration of the feminine hell of being judged by personal appearance and being ostracized because of it. 

            Victor Frankenstein is to blame for not educating his creation. Unlike a true scientist he rejects, based entirely on superficial judgements, that which he brought into this world. A scientist would want to study the mind of his creation and upon even the most superficial examination into his child's awareness and mental capabilities would have revealed a thing of beauty from a scientific perspective.

            For supper I had a potato with gravy and steamed lima beans while watching season 5, episode 9 of The Beverly Hillbillies. 

            Granny wins five free dance lessons from a dance school but it turns out that the teachers, Marvin and Marita don't even have a studio. When Jed finds out he lets them teach out of his house. Drysdale thinks they are taking advantage and threatens to have them arrested for teaching without a licence. But they flatter him in how he moves his body and suddenly he wants them to perform at the annual bankers convention, but with Drysdale as the headliner. Marvin and Marita practice their vaudeville style routine with dancing and jokes. "Did you hear about the guy who put bandages in the refrigerator?" "What for?" "Cold cuts!" 

            Drysdale comes with Jane to show their dance routine to Jed and Granny. Granny says, "They ain't no Velma and Buddy Ebsen!" Jed, played by Buddy Ebsen says, "Who?" Buddy Ebsen got his start in a popular dance duo with his sister Velma. The night of the bankers convention, Jed does Buddy Ebsen's old soft-shoe routine which involved deliberate rhythmic moments of almost stumbling. 

            The emcee for the convention was played by Bill Baldwin. During WWII he was a war correspondent. He became the announcer for Edgar Bergen's popular radio show and the Mario Lanza Show. He was the fight announcer for the Rocky movies. He became the president of AFTRA (The American Federation of Radio and Television Artists) in 1970, and served three terms. 

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