Lucy Lee Flippin

            On Friday morning I memorized the second verse of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. 

            I worked out the chords for verses two to five and the chorus of “Shotgun” by Serge Gainsbourg. There’s just one verse and the finale left and so I’ll probably be done tomorrow. 

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

            I weighed 85.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            At noon I left for my first Modern Literary Medievalism class. I took the Bloor bike lane to St George and went south to Innis College. The room number is 313E but from the outside the building only looks like it has two floors. I learned that there is a third floor though. I was the first one from my class there and there was already a class in the room, so there’s no reason for me to leave that early next time. I finished the required reading of the first 124 pages of The Mere Wife while I was waiting. Once inside I plugged in my laptop for the first time in nine months and I got a message of “fan error” every time I tried to start it. Finally I got it going by switching to another mode or something. 

            The professor seems nice enough so far. 

            The critical summaries we have to submit at least six times during the course are not critiques but about what’s missing, what made us think. Respond but do not evaluate. Engage with the text. She wants one summary from each novel. Provide examples and connect it to what's being said in class. For the essay look at articles. 

            There is scholarly Medieval literature and Medievalism. Medievalism in the last 20 years has been part of scholarly study. Medieval lit and medievalism are a false dichotomy. For example, The Mere Wife is medievalism. Terry Jones of Monty Python was a medieval scholar. He has made films on his Medieval studies. An adaptation of a Medieval work can be Medievalism. Medieval Times is Medievalism, Malory’s Le Mort d’Arthur, Spencer’s The Fairy Queen, Don Quixote. 

            I suggested that giving alliterative form to a modern text could be Medievalism and Professor Caroll Balot agreed. 

            The name “romanticism” comes from medieval times. The gothic novel, Tennyson’s Idols of the King, the first book of sociology is called Suicide. It is about modernity and loss of enchantment.

            Religion was less dogmatic in Medieval times and I suggested that illiteracy helped that. She confirmed that and said the Archbishop of Canterbury made it illegal to translate the Bible because it could cause multiple interpretations. 

            WWI was a turning point. T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland invokes Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. His Four Quartets line “all shall be well” is also in The Mere Wife. Virginia Woolf said in most cases “Anonymous” was probably a woman. 

            Mere means a swamp. Gren is mistaken for “grain” which also has referred to the eucharist. Blank spots are part of trauma. There is tension between Christian and heroic in the gospels. No room at the inn. Shellshock. Hysteria comes from the Greek word for uterus. 

            I weighed 84.6 kilos before a late lunch at 16:00, which is the lightest I’ve been in the afternoon in over three months. 

            I weighed 85.1 kilos at 18:00. That’s the least I’ve tipped the scale in the evening in three weeks.

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:43. 

            I read another thirty pages of The Mere Wife. Gren disobeys his mother’s warning to never go down the mountain. He goes to play with Dylan while Dylan’s parents are throwing a New years Eve party. Dana comes to get him and enters the house calling for him. The guests are freaking out and think she’s a homeless person looking for a handout. She shouts for Gren to leave and she thinks she sees him do so but when she goes back up the mountain he’s not there. Willa tells Roger that the woman had a gun so he calls the police. Dana comes back down for Gren. She hears shots and panics. She kills Roger with a sword. She gets shot in the arm and the next thing she knows Gren is carrying her into the mountain. They descend into the swamp and come out in another cave. She digs the bullet out. Willa notices Dylan is missing and thinks her son is dead. A cop named Ben Woolf is on the case. Get it? B. Woolf as in Beowulf? After Roger’s funeral Willa has sex with Woolf. Roger was cheating on her anyway. It is discovered who Dana is and a major search is underway. That’s about halfway through the novel. 

            I had a potato with gravy and four pork ribs while watching Return to Green Acres. 

            It’s been almost twenty years since the show was canceled. Oliver and Lisa are still on the farm and seem happy. Lisa is a painter now but nobody likes her work. Oliver is still a lousy farmer and he continues to be the victim of Haney’s bad deals. Haney sells him what was supposed to be alfalfa but it turns out it’s poison ivy. Oliver says if one more thing goes wrong he’s going back to New York, then he falls through the floor. He sells the farm back to Haney. A farewell party is held and all their friends are there. Sam Drucker, Hank Kimball, Ralph and Alf Monroe, Arnold Ziffel the pig and Daisy Ziffel, the late Fred and Doris Ziffel’s daughter. Somehow the elderly Fred and Doris must have had a daughter immediately after Green Acres was canceled. Also Arnold is supposed to be still five years old although it doesn’t mention that it’s a different Arnold. Haney plans on buying up all the land in Hooterville because he’s made a deal with E. Mitchell Armstrong to tear up all the farms and develop Hooterville into a city. Daisy meets Armstrong’s son Brad, who is spearheading the development, but she doesn’t know that and they fall in love. Oliver and Lisa go back to New York but are not happy. Oliver is expected to defend wealthy clients who he knows have done wrong. Back in Hooterville Haney has told various lies to get everyone to sell their farms. Brad confesses to Daisy his involvement and now she wants nothing to do with him. Sam, Hank, Ralph, Alf, Eb and Daisy need a good cheap lawyer to fight Armstrong and so they go to New York to find Oliver. After getting lost for way too long they finally find them. He says he’ll help them. They go to see Armstrong and he says he’ll stop the development. They think they’ve won but Armstrong was lying. They all return to Hooterville to protest and block the bulldozers. Oliver and Lisa are arrested. Brad has a change of heart and goes against his father. Lisa has a brilliant idea. Armstrong is staying in Haney’s hotel. The community hooks machines up to the foundations of the hotel to make the building seem like there is an earthquake. Armstrong now believes he’s bought land on a fault line and backs out. Oliver and Lisa decide to stay and Oliver negotiates a deal that Haney is very unhappy with to get the farm back. 

            Eva Gabor was still in pretty good shape physically although she’d obviously had a face lift. She died five years later. 

            This story was not very well written. 

            Eb has married a character named Flo who was not in the original series. They have a large number of children and twins on the way. Flo was played by Lucy Lee Flippin, who has a degree in theatre, film production and oral interpretation. She worked as a professional ice skater before taking up acting. Her first TV appearance was on the first Bob Newhart Show in the 70s. She co-starred in the sitcom Flo as Flo’s sister. She played Eliza Jane Wilder on Little House on the Prairie.