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.