Gloria Swanson

            On Sunday morning I worked out the first two chords for the intro to "Fugue" by Boris Vian and they seem to fit the ones that were posted online. 

            I finished memorizing "Love On the Beat" by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the chords and found a set on Ultimate Guitar. I transcribed them and tomorrow I'll look for more. 

            I weighed 84.2 kilos before breakfast. I worked on my Frankenstein presentation, mostly on the intro: 

 

            I will begin by looking at the unique way that Frankenstein's creature teaches himself to read and compare it to another author's hero's solitary achievement of literacy from a century later. This comparison will highlight that the monster's motivation for learning is societal acceptance. I will point out, with help from Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that the creature's struggle for inclusion is a hyperbolic parallel of the difficulties faced by women who strive for education in the Georgian era. This will bring forward my main point that Frankenstein's creation is symbolically an ironic woman: held back from education as women are, although in the form of a man; and judged by appearance like a female, but rejected for a reason that males would not face: the absence of beauty. 

            The fault for both the exclusion of women and the creature lies with society, which in this case is symbolized by Victor Frankenstein, who tries to draw a direct line between external characteristics and internal qualities, thereby establishing restrictions on learning and even existence. 

            I weighed 85 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I've been at that time in a week, but pretty normal for a Sunday. I had saltines with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Bloor and Bathurst. There were fewer pockets of slush and more puddles than yesterday. The way was fairly clear except at Bathurst where there is a big build-up of snow at the construction entrance for the Mervish Village complex. 

            I weighed 84.3 kilos at 17:00. I was caught up on my journal at 18:00. 

            I spent a couple of hours on my presentation and mostly just have the final paragraph to work out: 

            I will begin by looking at the unique way that Frankenstein's creature teaches himself to read and compare it to another literary hero's solitary achievement of literacy from a century later. This comparison will highlight that the monster's motivation for learning is societal acceptance. I will point out, with help from Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that the creature's struggle for inclusion is on a hyperbolic parallel with the difficulties faced by women who strived for education in the Georgian era. This will bring forward my main point that Frankenstein's creation is symbolically an ironic woman, in that he is held back from education as women are, although in the form of a man; and judged by appearance like a female, although rejected for the absence of beauty, which is a condition that most males would not face. The fault for both the exclusion of women and of the creature lies with society, which in the latter case is symbolized by Victor Frankenstein, who tries to draw a direct line between external characteristics and internal qualities, thereby establishing restrictions on learning and even existence. 

            The creature's education is unique in literature in that he learns to read without any direct assistance from anyone. The only other story that I know of that remotely parallels this type of solitary self education is the 1912 serialized pulp fiction adventure story, Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In chapter 7 of the 1914 novelization of the serial, the boy who has been raised by apes from infancy discovers a cabin containing several books. One of them is a picture dictionary through which he teaches himself to read by recognizing the letter patterns that accompany the pictures. 

            Tarzan's and the creature's means of learning to read differ in method because of differing motives that affect 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. But Frankenstein's 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 realistically 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 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 the 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 small but imperceptible chink" in the wall (110). 

            The creature is referenced with masculine pronouns by his creator, who also expresses fear of him reproducing (Shelley 170). This suggests that he was constructed with a penis. When the creature asks Victor to create a mate for him he specifies that he wants a female, and also says that she should be of "another sex" than himself, which shows that he accepts Victor's assigning him to a masculine gender and sees himself as the male of his unique species (Shelley 147-148). Yet his educational situation can be paralleled to that of women. His circumstance of being judged by his appearance also coincides in an exaggerated manner with aesthetic criteria that govern the lives of women. When a woman does not have beauty to advance her in this Georgian era, and even to some degree in our modern age, she is disadvantaged. 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. 

            Frankenstein's monster then is an ironic woman. He has a masculine body but is rejected for not having features that are pleasing to the eye. Pleasing features are what women are expected to settle for because if they insist on also being respected for their minds they are, as Wollstonecraft says, "hunted out of society as ‘masculine’(Wollstonecraft 23)". The creature is also "hunted out of society" because society stops at the surface in judging his appearance just as it does women. 

            We are all the creations of the society in which we live and so society for each of us to varying degrees is our own Victor Frankenstein. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and the last of my five-year-old cheddar. I had it with my last beer while watching season 5, episode 12 of The Beverly Hillbillies. 

            This was a charming story that featured film legend Gloria Swanson as herself. The Clampetts learn that Gloria Swanson is selling her mansion in their neighbourhood and auctioning off its contents. They think that means Swanson is destitute but she is really only selling her mansion to give the money to charity. She has other mansions and plenty of money. Even though Swanson hasn't made a movie in years, to the Clampetts she is one of the biggest current stars because they still show her silent movies at the theatre in Bugtussle, Tennessee. Granny is Swanson's biggest fan and so she is particularly upset over what she thinks is her financial downfall. 

            They go to Swanson's home where they find it open because the movers are carrying things out. They sit on Swanson's furniture to stop them from taking it away but the movers pick up the couch with Granny on it until Swanson shouts, "Put her down!" and comes down the stairs. She has the brownest tan I've ever seen on a white person. She's actually darker than half the black people one sees. She was only about my age in this episode. She finds the Clampetts charming and enjoys talking with them about her old movies, but they still think she is impoverished. 

            Since Jed is the owner of Mammoth Studios he orders a new silent film starring Gloria Swanson and co-starring Jed, Granny, Elly, and Jethro. The movie is a big hit in Bugtussle and Gloria comes for the premier. She plays a femme fatale who Jed is in love with but she teases him and toys with his affections. Granny and Elly urge him to leave her and he does, but Gloria just says, "Next!" and another man walks in. 

            Gloria Swanson was working in a Chicago department store at 18 when she went on a tour of a movie studio. She was picked out of the crowd to appear as an extra. After a few more uncredited roles she married actor Wallace Beery and they moved to Hollywood. Two years after her first extra work she starred in "The Pullman Bride", then "Shifting Sands", and then in 1919 "Don't Change Your Husband". By 1925 she was the highest paid actor in Hollywood. She was 30 when talkies came in but she made the transition effortlessly. In 1928 she was nominated for an Oscar for "Sadie Thompson", and another the next year for "The Trespasser". She starred in "Music in the Air" and "Father Takes a Wife". Her biggest hit was "Sunset Blvd" in 1950, for which she was nominated for another Academy Award. Her last movie was a co-starring role in "Airport 1975", in which she played herself. 

            

            

            

           

            

            

            

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