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.