Ann Blyth

            On Thursday morning I memorized the thirteenth verse of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. There is one verse left to learn. 

            I wasn’t quite able to memorize the fifth verse of “Dispatch box” by Serge Gainsbourg. I screwed up a couple of words on the final line. I’ll get it tomorrow and may even finish learning the words. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the second of two sessions. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing my Kramer electric guitar. 

            I weighed 87.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            I worked on tweaking this week’s Critical Summary. 

            I weighed 86.9 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and stopped at Freshco on my way back. I bought five bags of grapes, two packs of blackberries, one pack of blueberries, some bananas, a pack of five-year-old cheddar, a pack of chicken drumsticks, three containers of hummus: roasted red pepper, roasted jalapeno, and spicy; a big bag of Verona coffee, salsa, a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips and some detergent. 

            I weighed 86.9 kilos at 18:00. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:53. 

            I worked on this week’s Critical Summary and finished before dinner: 

                                              Forgetting Trauma Versus Lost Mourning 

                             History is a needle for putting men to sleep – Leonard Cohen. 

            In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant the ability to remember of both the Briton and Saxon communities is fogged by the breath of a dragon. They forget many things but mostly they forget the war that divided them and the genocide that was inflicted on the Saxon people by the Britons. We learn that this enchantment of the dragon’s breath was cast by Merlin as a way of maintaining peace. If no one remembers hating or being hated they stop fighting. The memories are still there but sleeping beneath the surface of consciousness. Sometimes they emerge in dreamlike fragments but they are more often buried by Merlin’s spell of forgetting. 

            In “Monuments, Unreal Spaces and National Forgetting,” Yugin Teo suggests that some personal and public forgetting is a good thing but when it is forced on a mass scale it can cause serious side effects, such as interfering with the natural healing process of national mourning. 

            The dragon is a symbol of raw, savage, primitive violence and so it is ironic that a dragon would be the instrument for the inducement of the mass forgetting of armed conflict. But an analogy can be drawn between the dragon of The Buried Giant and other forms of mass forgetting that exist in modern times. For example, Remembrance Day is an annual event that commemorates the combatants who fought in the service of Commonwealth nations in conflicts we have been involved in since World War I. This collective of living and dead warriors can be compared with Querig the dragon in The Buried Giant and the periodic nature of staging an annual event of remembrance can be analogized with her exhalation. The annual breath of Remembrance Day is ironically also a day of forgetting because the intention of remembering one thing often results in the forgetting of something else. We remember the warriors who fell during World War II but our doing so serves to displace from our memory the fact that for every fallen warrior there were two non-combatants who lost their lives at the hands of many of those combatants who we memorialize (World War II Casualties). 

            When we remember our side’s victory over German fascism in the second world war we forget that some of the soldiers being honoured participated as they advanced through Germany in the rape of hundreds of thousands of German women (Rape). We forget also that fascism was not really defeated but rather repressed and driven underground. What happened to all of the faithful fascists who were defeated in the war? Did they forget about a political ideology for which they had previously been willing to risk their lives? No, they simply lost their connection with a collective memory that had an army to provide support and amplification for its beliefs (Denazification). 

            Teo points out that Ishiguro blurs the divide between individual and collective forgetting. The eradication of good and bad memories to rid the people of their unpleasant recollections of war in The Buried Giant also can be analogized to the use of electro convulsive therapy (ECT) to alleviate depression by destroying cells in the memory centres of the brain. Just as some victims of the mist in the novel experienced varying degrees of memory loss, patients who have undergone ECT have complained of everything from temporary amnesia of recent events to the permanent erasure of decades of their lives (Read). But there are people who seem legitimately happy as a result of receiving ECT. It could be that some memories interfere with maintaining a happy life while others give one the will to continue living. If a memory keeps an individual or a society in a positive and functional state, it may not matter if the memory is real. 

            Teo says forgetting is sometimes important but forced amnesia as depicted in The Buried Giant and in the real world may be too much of a quick fix for large scale social trauma. Perhaps we are too impatient and should allow individuals and communities to remember. Simply waiting for mourning to run its course may be more effective in the long run. Time heals all wounds. 

                                                                      Works Cited 

"Denazification." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 6 February, 2024,   

             https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification. 

"Rape during the occupation of Germany." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 1 February, 2024,

             https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_Germany. Read, John, Sarah

             Hancock. 

“ECT: Dangerous on Either Side of the Pond.” Psychiatric Times, 5 April 2021,

             https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/ect-dangerous-either-side-pond 

“World War II Casualties.” Wikimedia Foundation, 1 February, 2024,

             https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties 

            I had a potato with gravy and my last three pork ribs while watching season 1, episode 24 of Burke’s Law. 

            Pop artist Arny Zygmunt is found impaled on one of his canvases. Zygmunt was an incurable practical joker. The gallery is owned by Burl Mason, who also plays a detective on TV. Mason says he’s solved the murder already. He shows Burke gallery receipts from before the exhibition opened to the public. Zygmunt showed the painting first to his private donors and he sold four paintings. Burke observes that there are only four receipts but there are five paintings missing. Mason doesn’t know anything about it. One of the receipts is from Mr. Harold who has a poodle parlour. Burke goes to see him. Harold thinks Zygmunt’s assistant Gwenny Trent killed him. Harold says Zygmunt had possession of an incriminating postcard from his married lover and planned to expose the affair in one of his pranks. Les goes to see a kiddy show host named Silly McCree. Silly meets Les in the control room and kicks the technician out, who deliberately leaves the microphone on before he leaves so that everyone hears Silly talk trash about the kids in the audience and also admits that he poisoned Zygmunt because he had possession of his dishonourable discharge card from the army. Tim goes to see Deirdre DeMera who is also a pop artist. She spray paints three women in bathing suits with a different colour each and has them roll around on a giant canvas. Tim tells her he’s there about Zygmunt’s murder and she runs into the ladies washroom. Tim won’t go in after her, I guess because he thinks it’s inappropriate. A painted girl named Piggy says Deirdre said she killed Zygmunt. Tim asks her to help get her out of the washroom but Piggy makes him promise to go out with her first. He agrees and she goes in but after a fight with Deirdre she comes out and collapses unconscious. Tim calls Sergeant Ames who arrives and retrieves Deirdre. Ames finds out that Zygmunt had a phony prescription card for narcotics in Deirdre’s name and that’s why she shot him. The lab finds that Zygmunt was indeed poisoned but not enough to kill him and he was shot but only with a minor wound. Burke and Tim go to see Gwenny Trent who has her own forge. She thinks Barney Blake killed Zygmunt over her. Barney loved her but she loved Zygmunt. Zygmunt got hold of Barney’s credit card and went on a spending spree. She says Burl Mason has the missing canvas. Tim goes to the airport where Barney skydives. Barney says Gwenny killed Zygmunt because he had four queen playing cards that showed her posing in the nude. He told her he was going to mail them to her highly moral family including a mother with a bad heart. Burke goes to see Mason and threatens to ruin his ratings with jail time if he doesn’t talk. Mason says he was dodging taxes with several aliases and bank accounts but he had all the names and accounts on one card and Zygmunt got hold of it. Burke concludes one of the incriminating cards is a fake and the real one is still on the canvas on which Zygmunt was murdered. The card is a membership card in the Communist party belonging to Harold. When Burke confronts Harold about it he freaks out. It’s amazing that in 1964 there was such stigma about communism in the States. 

            Deirdre was played by Ann Blyth, who was already performing on the radio while only in elementary school. She was a member of the Children’s Opera Company of New York and made her Broadway debut at 13. The show was Watch on the Rhine and she was in it for two years. She was signed to Universal Pictures at 16 and her first film part was a co-starring role in Chip Off the Old Block. She co-starred in Babes on Swing Street, Swell Guy, Killer McCoy, Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, Bonaventure, The Great Caruso, The World in His Arms, Kismet, The Buster Keaton Story, A Woman’s Vengeance, Red Canyon, Top o the Morning, Free For All, Thunder on the Hill, One Minute to Zero, All the Brothers Were Valiant, Slander, and Once More My Darling. She starred in Our Very Own, Katy Did It, Rose Marie, The Student Prince, The King’s Thief, The Golden Horde, I’ll Never Forget You, Sally and Sainte Ann, and The Helen Morgan Story. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Mildred Pierce. In the 70s she did ads for Hostess cupcakes.