Bobby Pickett

            On Tuesday morning I memorized the first verse of "De velours et de soie" (The Silk and the Velvet) by Boris Vian. 

            I finished working out the chords for "No Comment" by Serge Gainsbourg and ran through it in French and English. I uploaded it to Christian's Translations and I should have it published on the blog tomorrow. 

            I weighed 84.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            I left for the final Bildungsroman seminar at 11:15. 

            There were three presentations. Isabelle and Nicolette spoke on the first half of Never Let Me Go. Nicolette was very hard to hear because she speaks in a quiet voice and on top of that she was wearing a mask. 

            Hailsham is a memory touchstone. 

            The story asks if anyone has free will. 

            I said the situation of the clones moving quietly towards their doom reminds me of World War I in which many young people did the same. There is also the fishing and lumber industries, which have incredibly high on the job death rates. About 100,000 fishermen around the world die at sea every year. People know the risks but they inherit these métiers and just move forward to a possible death anyway. Daisy agreed with my comparison. 

            I said that what struck me about the novel was the idea of these clones who exist just to provide organs for non-clones nonetheless thinking that certain non-clones such as tramps and sex workers are trash. I find this ironic because to become trash would save their lives by helping them slip under the radar of the society that wants to kill them. 

            Vera presented on the second half of the novel. She talked about characters like Ruth living in their imagination. 

            I said that ties in with Peter Pan and a little bit with David Copperfield. Imagination is a form of self defence against growing up. Dora in David Copperfield refuses to be anything more than a child wife and she dies in that state. The clones literally die shortly after growing up but there is a legitimate reason for Peter to fear adulthood because growing up is a kind of death. There is an entire life of living in the imagination that must end when someone becomes an adult. 

            Professor Jaffe reminded us of how much the character of Morningdale who is mentioned in Never Let Me Go, resembles Victor Frankenstein.

            What is human? 

            When we speak of the other, other to what? 

            Bertha in Jane Eyre is repressed anger. 

            What we want from a novel is self recognition. 

            Bildungsromans are models for living. 

            Our humanity is found in copying humans in novels which is a clonelike thing to do. 

            Human envy. Creating the other that envies us. The other is arbitrary but realistic.

            She talked about our test. We'll be doing it online next week. No citations are necessary but short quotes are great. 

            I mentioned that some of us didn't grow up with a keyboard in front of us and so we can't type as fast. She said we have the option of hand-writing our test and then scanning it. I think I might just go ahead and type mine. I just want her to consider that if mine's shorter than others then it's because I couldn't type as fast. 

            The professor told us that she's taught a lot of seminars on the Bildungsroman but we were exceptionally good. I told her that she was good at drawing us out. She said it doesn't always work but it did this time. 

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home and bought cilantro, soymilk, soy ice cream, and coffee. I chatted with the cashier Amelia. I observed that she's been there since Price Chopper and she told me that she was there before that when it was Food City. I didn't even know there was ever a Food City at that location. I mentioned how Freshco still has those pneumatic tubes at every cashier's post. She says hardly any stores have those anymore but it's the best system because no one wants to have too much money lying around so this way they can just send it away. I said it reminds me of the movie Brazil in which everything was done with pneumatic tubes. She hadn't seen it. 

            When I got home I realized that I'd forgotten to buy sea salt. I always seem to forget something at the supermarket these days. 

            I weighed 83.3 kilos at 15:15 and that's the lightest I've been at that time in three weeks. 

            I weighed 83.4 kilos at 17:30, which is the lightest I've been in twelve days. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:44. 

            I only had fifteen minutes to work on my essay before dinner. I wrote one sentence for my intro:

            In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the creature's rejection by his creator is a metaphor for the disenfranchisement of women and others who do not enjoy sufficient membership in society. 

            I steamed some broccoli and added it to an asparagus, cucumber, scallion, avocado, and grape tomato salad with the last of my raspberry vinaigrette. I ate while watching season 6, episode 12 of The Beverly Hillbillies. 

            Jethro is going for his interview to join the army reserves, but his family thinks he's joining up. Granny still thinks the South won the war and so she makes Jethro wear her grandfather's Confederate uniform and take his squirrel gun. But Colonel Blake at the Reserves office has on the side been put in charge of a Civil War re-enactment. So when Jethro shows up dressed as a rebel, Blake thinks he's one of the actors that's been hired for the fake battle and recognizes his uniform as that of a Tennessee Volunteer. He tells Jethro that next Monday he'll be dug in with other Confederates at Culpepper Plantation and be surrounded by the Union Army. He takes Jethro's 150 year old squirrel gun away and says it's too modern and not authentic because with weapons like that the south would win the war. Jethro runs home to tell Granny that they're starting the Civil War all over again. She dresses up as a southern belle and goes down to the Reserve office with Elly to spy for the South. By that time the other actors have arrived and Granny eavesdrops while Blake goes over the plans with the actors who are dressed as Union soldiers, including the actor playing General Grant. Grant seems drunk to her and so she knows it's really him. Granny runs home, grabs her Confederate flag and heads off to warn the soldiers at Culpepper. This is continued in the next episode. 

            The sergeant who sits at the front desk at the Reserve office was played by Bobby Pickett, who was an actor and musician whose first backup band was The Beach Boys. He became the singer for Daren Bailes and the Wolf Eaters. He co-wrote the novelty hit "The Monster Mash" after one of his bandmates suggested that they do something to showcase Pickett's dead-on impersonation of Boris Karloff. Mel Taylor of The Ventures played drums, and Leon Russell played piano on the recording. Both Boris Karloff and Bob Dylan loved the song but it was banned by the BBC. Pickett auditioned for The Monkees but was turned down for being too old. He wrote several other parodies including "The Monsters' Holiday" and "Star Drek". He starred in "Monster Mash the Movie", and "It's a Bikini World". 

            I made it to twenty-five days without seeing a bedbug. That matches January of 2022. The record to beat is forty-nine days from the very beginning of this problem in early June of 2021 until the end of July of that year. I've got to go twenty-four more days before I start feeling a cautious assurance that they are gone from the building.