Arlene Dahl

            On Tuesday morning I worked out the chords for the first four verses of “Glass securit” (Security Glass) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            I finished reading "Ruined Landscapes: Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes, Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination" by Heide Estes. Ruins are resurrected and transformed into new art by the very act of describing them. 

            I also read a couple of times the tenth century poem "The Ruin" from the Exeter Book. It’s probably describing the ruins of the ancient Roman temple in the city of Bath, England. 

            I weighed 86.4 kilos before lunch. My copy of The Buried Giant arrived in the mail two days after I finished reading it. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and stopped at Freshco on the way back to buy grapes and cheese. But they only had one bag of relatively firm red grapes. So I got that and a pack of five-year-old cheddar and then went over to Metro to get four more bags of grapes. 

            I weighed 85.9 kilos at 17:45. 

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

            I wrote three handwritten pages in stream of consciousness on the topic of ruins based on the things I’ve been reading over the last few days. I started transcribing my notes and here’s what I have so far: 

            Beauty in Ruination Ruins evoke satisfaction, remorse and sadness. When we look at ruins we reconstruct them in our minds. What we see is not the ruin but rather some unbroken semblance of what was ruined or some new form constructed from the unbroken fragments of the original. But at the same time we also want to ruin modern art and architecture that is still intact and replace it with something new. For example the altering of faces on billboards to make them look like skulls, vomiting colour coordinated Jello on certain museum paintings, and the ceremonial burning of a mound of books are all creative post post modernist demonstrations of ruination. We want to reconstruct the old and deconstruct the new. We do not delight in the ruin of great art and would like to see its ruins resurrected. But at the same time there is something aesthetically pleasing about deterioration. Age itself is ruination and there is beauty in the process of the aging of artistic shapes such as architecture and its materials, sculpture and even living organic shapes like human faces. Old buildings like the 160 year old place where I live with high ceilings that don’t exist in new apartment buildings. Ruins evoke a sense of pity and we want to witness the ruin renewed. But there is also a delight in the mystery of ruins. For instance, would we love Stonehenge as much if we knew its exact purpose, who created it and when? When we study Medieval literature we explore the ruins of a language. Most Medieval texts are ruined.

            I had a very small potato with gravy and two porkchops while watching season 1, episode 16 of Burke’s Law. 

            The story begins with the actor Gene Barry, who plays Amos Burke, singing “C’est si bon” at a party. Gene Barry was a professional singer before he became an actor and he sounds pretty good in this imitation of Maurice Chevalier. While he’s singing the doorbell rings and he continues singing while answering it. Then there is a shot and he falls to the floor. The next scene has Amos Burke investigating the murder that we have just witnessed. It turns out the person killed was Snooky Martinelli. To the surprise of Tim and Les, Burke looks at the body but doesn’t notice anything strange about it. Tim points out that the corpse looks just like him but Burke doesn’t quite see it. Snooky had a house guest named Seraphim Parks. Tim points out that the Seraphim are the highest order of angels. Burke finds her in bed brushing her hair 200 strokes but she loses count as Burke begins to ask questions. He asks her to name the other house guests. She says Binky Faucet and Louis Simone the race driver were at the party. The next day Snooky’s picture is on the front page and Burke is starting to see the resemblance. Burke goes to see Binky Faucet who is played by Carl Reiner faking a British accent. He was Snooky’s house guest for eleven years. They had an argument on the night of the party and he left early. He tells Burke he was discharged from the British Army because he killed a man. Tim and Les go to see Louis Simone who tells them Snooky stole his wife but having had the same wife made them like brothers. If he’d wanted to kill him he would have done so in Paris in a better atmosphere and when he was still passionate about his wife. Burke comes home and finds Seraphim lying on his couch. She says the door wasn’t locked. He decides to take her to dinner. She chooses Chez Charles. The house piano player Jango Jordon arrives and Seraphim shouts out, “Play it Jango!” Seraphim says Snooky had a fight with Carlos Varga at Chez Charles before the party. Burke calls the office to have them check on Varga. When he comes back into the dining room Seraphim is sitting with Jango at the piano. Jango is played by Hoagy Carmichael who is playing his own compositions and sings his song “How Little We Know”. Burke finds the former boxer Varga at a men’s grooming salon with his hair in curlers and getting a manicure. He says Snooky was his patron. Snooky didn’t understand him but his wife Eva Martinelli did. She’s arriving by boat from Mexico today. Burke comes to meet her ship. She calls him Snooky as she’s getting off. He plays along but later she says she knew he wasn’t Snooky. Back at Chez Charles, Burke is on the phone when someone takes a shot at him from outside a window. Les finds out that Eva Martinelli left the ship by helicopter for twelve hours before resuming her journey. Burke goes to confront her about it and thinks at this point that she’s the murderer. She says Snooky wired her and so she flew to him but what he wanted was more money. She says she could have killed him but was back on the ship when it happened. Burke goes back to Chez Charles and finds it closing but gets a cup of coffee at the bar. He talks with Jango who admits he was married to Eva. Burke says that Jango killed Snooky and then shot at Burke to throw him off so he’d think that Burke was the target all along. Burke says they have footprints that the killer left outside Snooky’s room. Jango pulls a gun and tries to get away but trips over Seraphim’s high heels which she is always leaving lying around. Later Burke and Seraphim are in his Rolls drinking champagne from those same shoes. Burke finds a feather and thinks that maybe she really is an angel. 

            Eva was played by Arlene Dahl, who after high school won the Miss Reingold Beer contest of 1946. She won a modelling contract and did some local theatre. She went to Hollywood at the age of 21 and signed briefly with Warner Brothers. Two years later she was at MGM where her first film was The Bride Goes Wild. She co-starred in Slightly Scarlet, A Southern Yankee, Reign of Terror, Scene of the Crime, Ambush, Three Little Words, watch the Birdie, Inside Straight, No Questions Asked, Caribbean Gold, Jamaica Run, Here Come the Girls, The Diamond Queen, Woman’s World, Bengal Brigade, Wicked as they Come, Fortune is a Woman, and Journey to the Centre of the Earth. On TV she hosted The Pepsi Cola Playhouse in the 1953 season. In 1959 she quit acting and became a writer on astrology and a beauty columnist. Later she formed Arlene Dahl Enterprises and marketed cosmetics, perfume and lingerie. One of her six husbands was Fernando Lamas by whom she was the mother of Lorenzo Lamas.

January 31, 1994: I posed for the Arts and Letters Club and they were kind of a snooty bunch

Thirty years ago today 

            On Monday I worked at the Ontario College of Art. In the afternoon I posed for the Arts and Letters Club. They were kind of a snooty bunch.

Tammy Grimes

            On Monday morning I worked out the chords for the chorus of “Glass securit” (Security Glass) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the second of two sessions. It went out of tune a lot. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            I finished reading the required part of the introduction to the essay The Ruins of Modernity, by Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle. I think we want to reconstruct ancient ruins and ruin modern constructions. New art can’t come about without old art being ruined. All Medieval literature is ruined by the very fact that its authorship is ambiguous. Also by the fact that it is written in a ruined form of English and can be translated in many ways. To translate is to unruin by ruining. 

            I started reading “The Giants Beneath: Cultural Memory and Literature in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.” By Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 86.6 kilos at 17:15. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:06. 

            I finished reading “The Giants beneath: Cultural Memory and Literature in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.” By Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun. Literature is a form of memory and it often remembers other literature. 

            I started reading "Ruined Landscapes: Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes, Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination". By Heide Estes. Christian Anglo Saxons identified with the Biblical Jews. There are Anglo Saxon poems that are variations of the stories of the flood and of Exodus. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a porkchop while watching season 1, episode 15 of Burke’s Law.

            Lucy Brewer knocks on a hotel suite door. No one answers and so she pulls out a key and lets herself in. The water is running in the bathroom and while going to turn it off she finds a dead body in the shower. She starts to call the police when she sees a smorgasbord and so she stops to eat. Then she feels sleepy. When she wakes up she feels hungry again and after eating calls the police. Burke and Tim arrive. They ask Lucy if it’s her room. She says no it belongs to the hotel. She says that the day before that she was walking when a guy offered her $500 to rent a room under her name, to order a bar set up, keep the change and not come there until morning when everybody is gone, then she could use the room. She says she does favours for a living. The manager gives them the license number of a car that was parked outside the night before. The car belongs to Jill Marsh who says she just happened to get tired and park there. Burke learns that the corpse is Jason Shaw and also that someone called Jill Marsh from the suite. Tim talks with Shaw’s secretary Marian but she doesn’t give out much information until Tim tells her she’s pretty. Then she asks him to dance. Tim finds that Jill Marsh has been called by Burton Reese forty times in two months. Reese has a mansion but they find him in his greenhouse feeding meat to violent carnivorous plants. He says he was in the suite with Shaw and that Jill is his daughter. He says that a used car dealer named Hamilton Murphy was also there. They go to see him and he says Janek Cybowski was also there. They go to see Janek and it turns out he and Burke are friends. When Burke leaves he finds Jill parked outside. She says for him to leave her father alone and to pick on the other three men. She saw three men leaving after her father left. Burke and Tim go back to the suite. Tim says they found cellulose flakes on the table and Burke realizes they were playing cards. Burke has heard of a secret poker game played once a year with a limit of $1 million. Burke goes to see Murphy who admits he hired Lucy. He also lets slip that someone named Julian was also in the game. They find Julian Clarington in his wine cellar. Tim brings a subpoena to Marian to look in Shaw’s records. Marian admits she was in love with her boss. Tim learns Shaw was under investigation for fraud. He finds also that Reese invested $3 million in Shaw’s company. Reese says he was hoping Shaw would go bankrupt and his investment would be a delightful tax loss. He goes back to Janek who says Shaw was telling a girl on the phone that he was leaving the country. Burke goes to Marian and asks why she killed Shaw. He had left a single plane ticket to Brazil in a safety box and asked her to bring it to him. She killed him because he wasn’t taking her with him and she put him in the shower because he was dirty. 

            Jill was played by Tammy Grimes, who almost made the US Olympic swim team in 1952. She studied at the Neighbourhood Playhouse and made her stage debut in 1955 in Jonah and the Whale. In 1959 Noel Coward heard her singing in a club and cast her to star in his play Look After Lulu for which she won a Theatre World Award. She won a Tony in 1960 for her starring role in The Unsinkable Molly Brown. On TV she starred in The Tammy Grimes Show in 1966 but it only lasted for six episodes. She co-starred in Three Bites of the Apple, Play it As it Lays, and America. She won a second Tony for Private Lives. She spent several seasons performing at the Stratford Festival in Canada. She recorded several albums of songs and poetry. She hosted CBS Radio Mystery Theatre. In her 70s she had a successful one woman show called An Evening with Miss Tammy Grimes. Her first marriage was with Christopher Plummer and by him she was the mother of Amanda Plummer. She said she never wanted to be America’s sweetheart but rather something they didn’t understand.

January 30, 1994: I don't know if Nancy came down to pick my daughter up or if I went up to drop her off

Thirty years ago today

            On Saturday and Sunday as usual I had my daughter overnight and at least until Sunday afternoon. I don’t know whether her mother came down to pick her up or if I went up to drop her off.

June Allyson

            On Sunday morning I memorized the ninth verse of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. There are five verses left to learn. 

            I finished transcribing the chords for “Glass securit” (Security Glass) by Serge Gainsbourg that were on Ultimate Guitar and looked for more but there were no more posted. I worked out the chords for the intro and part of the first line of the chorus but they don’t match those that are on Ultimate Guitar. They hear E to A minor while I hear F to B flat. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. 

            I weighed 87.3 kilos before breakfast. 

            I read another 10% of The Buried Giant. 

            I weighed 87.4 kilos before lunch. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of lemonade. 

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

            I weighed 86.3 kilos at 17:15. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:20. 

            I finished reading The Buried Giant. Axl and Beatrice arrive at the top of the mountain around the same time as Sir Gawain. Wistan and Edwin get there shortly after. Gawain reveals that his mission is not to slay the dragon but to protect it. After the war Merlin cast a spell on the dragon’s breath so that it would expel a mist that made people forget their reasons for fighting. He argues that the dragon will die of old age soon anyway and so why not let it live? But Wistan is determined and both Axl and Beatrice agree with him. Gawain and Wistan fight an honourable sword duel and Gawain dies. Wistan enters the cave and cuts off the dragon’s head. He then says that now there will be a Saxon conquest of Britain. Axl and Beatrice begin descending the mountain but Beatrice is very ill and Axl is too old to safely carry her. A boatman offers help and he’s the same boatman they met earlier. He offers to take them both to the island and determines that he knows they care about one another enough to be together on the other side. But nonetheless he can only take one at a time. Axl doesn’t want to let her go but Beatrice says it’s okay. We don’t know if Axl will wait for the boat to return because that’s the end. 

            I read part of the essay “Introduction” to Ruins of Modernity, by Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle. It speculates on why we are so fascinated with ruins. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce, a chopped pork burger, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 1, episode 14 of Burke’s Law. 

            Burke is at a pool party thrown by Victor Haggerty where the young and handsome artist Beau Sparrow tries out a new invention that is supposed to catapult him into the pool. It is not a smooth dive and he comes up floating after cardiac arrest. Because Victor is a hypochondriac he always has his doctor nearby. The doctor tries to save Beau but he dies. Because Beau was in perfect health, Burke investigates the possibility of foul play. Tim says some bolts are loose on the catapult. The lab can’t figure out what caused his death. One of the party guests was Countess Erozzi and Burke goes to see her. She says she wasn’t Beau’s only lover. There was also Victor’s secretary Jean Samson. At Beau’s studio there’s a paint gun full of green paint but Tim says green would be a bad choice for a small studio. Burke goes to see Jean. She says she had no romantic interest in Beau but merely saw his potential as an artist. He goes to see Charles Banner, the designer of the catapult. He says Victor’s doctor finds his hypochondria profitable. Burke asks Victor if he can speak with his wife. While he’s there Jean comes in with some papers for Victor. Burke asks her for a date. He goes to talk with Liz Haggerty and charms her with his knowledge of her Pekinese dogs. She says she loved Beau. Burke comes to Jean’s apartment and she says she thought he was joking about dinner but she has steaks to grill anyway. They start to kiss but then he learns that Victor was seeing the countess and he leaves to talk with him. Victor says he supported the countess because she’d been disowned by the count. Burke talk’s with Liz’s secretary. She says Liz wanted a divorce. Burke goes back to Jean and apologizes. They begin kissing again but Tim comes to tell him Liz tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills. Burke finds out Liz was giving a lot of money to Beau. He tells her Victor loves her. He goes to see the countess and learns she was giving Beau money too. She says she was angry enough to kill him but didn’t. She says he knows a woman like her could never love anyone and that’s why he should know she didn’t kill him. Les finds that no one tampered with the catapult. They are all just poorly made. They go back to Beau’s studio. Burke figures something out about the paint gun with green lead paint in it. Burke rushes to Victor where he is receiving oxygen by his doctor but Burke tears off the mask. He puts a flame next to the tank nozzle and nothing happens. He says it’s nitrogen, which is not poison but cuts off the oxygen. Charles says Beau borrowed a nitrogen tank from him last week. Nitrogen tanks are grey but Beau painted it green like an oxygen tank. Beau wanted to kill Victor to marry Liz. Beau accidentally killed himself when he was given what they thought was oxygen after his accident in the pool. 

            Jean was played by June Allyson, who had an accident at the age of eight that put her in a steel brace for four years. Swimming therapy gave her back her mobility and she began dancing. Her first job was as a tap dancer at the Lido Club in Montreal. Her Broadway debut was Sing Out the News in 1938. She had a brief relationship with John F. Kennedy before he was president. She could cry on cue. She co-starred in Best Foot Forward, Two Girls and a Sailor, Little Women, The Secret Heart, The McConnell Story, The Shrike, Meet the People, Her Highness and the Bellboy, The Sailor Takes a Wife, Two Sisters from Boston, High Barbaree, Good News, The Bride Goes Wild, The Stratton Story, The reformer and the Redhead, Right Cross, The Girl in White, Battle Circus, Remains to be Seen, The Glen Miller Story, Executive Suite, Woman’s World, Strategic Air Command, Interlude, My Man Godfrey, A Stranger in My Arms, Curse of the Black Widow, and The Opposite Sex. She played a 14 year old girl at the age of 34 in Too Young to Kiss. She hosted The Dupont Show with June Allyson from 1959 to 1961. The character of Amy in Joan Blondell’s novel Centre Door Fancy was based on her. She said men desired Cyd Charisse but she was the girl next door they’d take home to mother. In later years she became a spokesperson for Depends.

January 29, 1994: Saturday was my day to be with my daughter

Thirty years ago today

            Because it was Saturday I would have had my daughter with me. But I was almost two months behind on this diary and so I don’t know if her mother dropped her off at my place or if I went up to Scarborough to pick her up.

Elsa Lanchester

            On Saturday morning I finished memorizing “Glass securit” (Security Glass) by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the chords and found a set right away on Ultimate Guitar, then started transcribing them. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the final session of four. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I went down to No Frills where I bought a bag of red grapes, four bags of cherries, some bananas, a pack of strawberries, a pack of naan rounds, a pack of two artisan naan, salsa, skyr, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips. 

            I weighed 86.8 kilos before lunch. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of lemonade with cranberry juice. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I weighed 86.7 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:08. 

            I read several more pages of The Buried Giant. Wistan and Edwin have been reunited. Edwin deceives Wistan that he is following the lure of the dragon but he’s following his mother’s voice in his mind and later confesses. Meanwhile Axl and Beatrice are still making their way towards their son’s village. A boatman lets them float down the river for free in two baskets but they are attacked by pixies. They want Beatrice and tell Axl that she will die a horrible death with him but a peaceful one with them. He fights them off and he and Beatrice make it to shore. They come across some children who give them shelter. They find the children have two goats to which they have fed poison. One of the goats has been eaten by an ogre that has died as a result. The children want Axl and Beatrice to take the other goat up the mountain to feed to the dragon. Axl refuses but Beatrice wants to do it because the dragon’s breath is causing everyone to forget. Axl gives in and they are making their way up the mountain with the goat. Earlier Sir Gawain remembers a genocide committed against the Saxons by Arthur’s knights. I’m 4/5 of the way through the novel. 

            I grilled two pork burgers and had one between two mini naan rounds with chili sauce, Dijon, horseradish, dill pickle, and Ted’s Tingly Sauce. I had dinner with a beer while watching season 1, episode 13 of Burke’s law. 

            Professor Kingston runs a roadside museum called Antique Americana. He has mannequins dressed in period costumes and arranged to commemorate moments in US history. One is the St. Valentines Day massacre. After a few other fake looking scenes he shows his customers an antique electric chair depicting the execution of Fannie May Flann (There is no such person among the list of female victims of the electric chair). Kingston pulls a switch and suddenly a real woman’s dead body instead of a dummy lurches forward. Burke is called and on the way in he pauses to look at a fake gravestone with the inscription, “He Called Bat Masterson a Liar”. Gene Barry played Bat Masterson before he played Burke. The woman looks like she was beaten to death. A ring of untanned skin around her finger shows a wedding ring has been removed. He interviews Kingston who says he works alone but his daughter Sarah works there sometimes. The rest of the time she’s a tennis bum and she’s going out with a married man. He says a married man should only go with a married woman because they have more in common. Among Kingston’s items they find an old swimsuit calendar and one of the models is the dead woman. The calendar was made by the Beacon Printing Company and they go there. The receptionist Mrs. Ormsby has a picture from long ago of herself and her son at Kingston’s museum. She thinks a son should always be with his mother. He asks about the model and she says to talk to Mr. Smith. Smith looks up the calendar month and year and finds the body is that of Eleonora Davis. He gives Burke her address. He says she was more interested in being behind the camera so they taught her about photography. He introduces Burke to Harold the photographer who thinks that it’s wrong for women to pose in bikinis. He prefers to take pictures of women wearing clothes. Burke calls Les and tells him and Tim to check out Eleonora’s address. Les tells him that Eleonora wasn’t beaten to death but with carbon monoxide. Les and Tim talk with Eleonora’s landlady Mrs. Mulligan. She wants to be paid for information and so Tim gives her some money. They ask about Rudolph Davis. She says Ellie Davis left him because he was broke. One of Burke’s girlfriends happens to have Eleonor’s most recent address. She got it from her friend Tootsie to whom she was recommending Canadian Air Force exercises. At Eleonor’s studio they find photo negatives of various people in compromising positions along with notes on how much they paid her to not publish the photos. At Burke’s office are two boy scouts and one little brother who found a mannequin in the lake behind Kingston’s museum. On the mannequin was a wedding ring that they give to Burke. Burke goes to talk with Rudy and with Kingston’s daughter at a tennis court. Rudy is surprised to know his wife is dead but he’s happy about it. So far on this show almost everybody that hears of a murder is glad. Sarah says Eleonor was refusing a divorce unless Rudy paid her $3000. Burke goes back to Smith because he figures out that the wedding ring was his late wife’s. He gave it to Eleonora. He provided the models for the compromising photos but he didn’t know it was for blackmail. He asked her for the ring back but she wanted $1000. He started beating her until she was unconscious. Mrs. Ormsby told him she was dead but she wasn’t so she took her to Kingston’s where she killed her with carbon monoxide from his antique car. She says she did it all by herself but Burke knows she needed help. He suddenly realizes that Harold is her son and he helped her. He’s the one who stupidly put the ring on the mannequin. 

            Mrs. Ormsby was played by Elsa Lanchester, whose parents were members of the Social Democratic Federation and didn’t believe in marriage or god. They were famous because of the Lanchester Kidnapping Case in which Elsa’s mother Edith was kidnapped by Elsa’s grandfather and placed in a mental hospital because he believed she could not be sane if she refused to get married. Edith later became the secretary of Karl Marx’s daughter. Elsa wanted to be a dancer and so Edith enrolled her in Isadora Duncan’s Paris school. In 1920 she started performing as an Egyptian dancer in English music halls. At the same time she founded the Children’s Theatre in Soho where she taught dance. Her theatrical debut was in a West End production in 1922 called Thirty Minutes in a Street. In 1924 she and her partner Harold Scott opened a nightclub called Cave of Harmony where they performed plays and cabarets. The club was a hangout for writers like Aldous Huxley and H. G. Wells. Her first movie was an amateur production in 1925 made by her friend Evelyn Waugh called The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama. Her first professional film appearance was in One of the Best in 1927. H.G. Wells wrote three screenplays for her and on those sets she became involved with Charles Laughton. They married in 1929 and two years later she discovered he was gay but they stayed married until he died in 1962. Her first Hollywood film was as one of the wives in The Private Life of Henry VIII. She played Mary Shelley and the Bride in The Bride of Frankenstein. She co-starred in Rembrandt. She was nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role in Come to the Stable. Throughout the 50s she had a nightclub act and one woman theatrical-musical shows. She wrote two autobiographies: Charles Laughton and I and Elsa Lanchester Herself. She considered her acting style to be vaudeville because she was playing directly to the audience rather than the camera.

January 28, 1994: I got paid but not enough to pay the rent

Thirty years ago today

            On Friday I got paid but I still didn’t have all the rent.

Una Merkel

           On Friday morning when I got up there were two cop cars sitting across the street in front of the Daol Korean restaurant. After yoga there was only one car and the cop inside just sat there for hours looking at his phone. What a job! At 8:00 he got out of his car with a flashlight and shone it inside the restaurant. Then he walked down Dunn Avenue about a quarter of the block to see if there was a back entrance. After that he got back in his car and sat for a couple more hours. After 10:00 I noticed he was gone so I assume the people came to open the restaurant and he talked to them. Maybe they’d called to report an attempted break in or something. 

            I memorized the ninth verse of “Glass securit” (Security Glass) by Serge Gainsbourg. There’s just one verse left to nail down and so I might have that done on Saturday. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the third of four sessions. 

            I weighed 86.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            At 12:10 I left for Modern Literary Medievalism class. I started off the opening dialogue talking about how Ben Woolf in The Mere Wife feels weighted down by his tattoos, some of which are of monsters. And also about how in Beowulf the hero doesn’t seem to be only motivated by glory in deciding to die fighting the dragon. When the dragon burns his home Beowulf blames himself, thinking he had offended god against the old ways. Maybe this refers to a conflict between pagan traditions and Christian faith. So his insisting on fighting the dragon alone might be a type of penance. We spent most of the rest of the class discussing Beowulf and the dragon. 

            There is no tragedy in Christianity. 

            The professor mentioned The Revelation of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. I read that last year but had forgotten about it until she mentioned the idea of god being a mother and I remembered that Julian was specifically talking about Jesus being a mother. 

            The dragon is not humanized like Grendel and his mother. 

            Epic literature versus the novel. Epic literature is hierarchical while the novel expresses more complex democratic ideas. Beowulf is more like a novel. 

            There is an incompatibility between heroism and kingship. 

            Nina did her presentation on Overing’s essay, “Beowulf on Gender”. Gender is not fixed but renegotiated through language and context. Armour is masculine. 

            A metonym is a part that represents a whole vs metaphor. Armour is a metonym. Two things on their own and both at once. If a sword is a metonym, having the sword vs being the sword. 

            The second presentation was on Thomson’s essay, “The Composite Unity of the Entangled Self in Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife”. Both individual and part of a group. If we stop people from talking with their hands it will limit their thought process. Network meaning is greater than that of the individual. You are constantly becoming yourself. 

            Actor network theory comes from eco theory We're all cyborgs now. The Greek chorus has no power to influence. 

            I weighed 85.4 kilos before lunch at 16:00, which is the least I’ve weighed at that time since last Friday. 

            I took a late siesta. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos at 18:15. Again, it’s been a week since I’ve been that light in the evening. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:49. 

            I read a few more pages of The Buried Giant. Gawain, Axl, Beatrice, and Edwin make it through the tunnel to safety in the forest. But as soon as they do Edwin runs back to the monastery where he learns that Wistan was wounded fighting the Briton soldiers. Edwin is supposedly being taken to where Wistan is recovering. Edwin puts together what probably happened. Wistan lured the soldiers into the tower that was probably a former Saxon slaughterhouse. He fought the soldiers as he backed up the narrow stairway to the top of the tower. But there was a moat around the inside of the tower that Wistan had already filled with firewood and dried hay. From the top of the tower Wistan tossed down a torch to set the wood aflame, thus trapping the soldiers inside. Then he jumped from the tower into a hay wagon that he'd placed below. We don’t yet know how he was wounded. 

            I grilled four pork chops but as usual the pack had six and so this time I fried the other two. I had one of the fried ones with a potato and gravy while watching season 1, episode 12 of Burke’s Law.

            A truck is hauling a house at night but when it slams on its brakes to avoid an accident. The lurch causes a dead woman to crash through the window. The woman was shot. Her husband was an oil millionaire named James Royal. They were divorced a year ago. Joey Carson and his lawyer Ben Gardner come to see Burke at his home. Carson has come because he knows James Royal as a customer at his nightclub. He says the singer at his club, Eudora Carey dated Royal. Burke goes to Missing Persons at the station to check if Royal has been found and he runs into an elderly acquaintance named Samantha Cartier who is reporting the kidnapping of her friend Deborah. The officer at the desk is creating a file for Deborah until he learns that she’s a cat. Burke drives Samantha home. On the way Burke learns that Samantha lives in an apartment in the building she owns and that Eudora is one of her tenants. She says Eudora’s father and her uncle come to visit her a lot and they are a very affectionate family that is always kissing. They go to Eudora’s apartment and find a dead body. It’s James Royal and he’s holding a suicide note in one hand and a gun in the other. A marriage license is found for Eudora and Royal. Meanwhile two homeless beatniks find Deborah and begin taking care of her. She likes cappuccinos. Burke goes to Carson’s club and learns that she’s in Las Vegas. He sends Tim after her and since it’s out of his jurisdiction he can’t approach her as a cop. He tries to charm her and she seems swayed. She invites him to her room but while they are getting comfortable she tells him she knows he’s a cop. He tells her that her husband is dead and so she agrees to return to LA. Based on information from Samantha, Burke thinks that Deborah might have been in Eudora’s apartment at the time of the murder. The beatniks read in the paper that there is a $500 reward for Deborah and so they turn her in. The lab finds the blood of Royal on Deborah’s claws and that of the killer. Eudora killed the first Mrs. Royal and the lawyer Ben Gardner killed Royal They find Deborah’s claw marks on his hands. Later Burke is in his Rolls Royce with a date and she turns on the TV. A show called Burke’s Law comes on. He says, “You must be kidding!” 

            Samantha Cartier was played by Una Merkel, whose first film role was co-starring in Love’s Old Sweet Song in 1923. She was a stand-in for Lilian Gish in The Wind in 1928. She co-starred in D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln in 1930, The Bank Dick, Kill the Umpire, and The Good Old Soak. She had a famous hair pulling fight with Marlene Dietrich in the 1939 film Destry Rides Again. She won a Tony Award for her starring role in the 1956 Broadway play The Ponder Heart. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her supporting performance in the 1961 film Summer and Smoke. Her last movie was Spin Out starring Elvis Presley.