Diana Lynn

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

            I blog-published “Enemy Lines”, my translation of “Glass securit” by Serge Gainsbourg and also posted it on Facebook. Tomorrow I’ll start learning his song “Dispatch Box”. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the final session of four. It sounds better with the new G string and stays in tune a little better but the B and E still go off quite a bit. 

            I weighed 86.8 kilos before breakfast. 

            I finished reading the essay “Monuments, Unreal Spaces and National Forgetting” by Yugin Teo. The writer puts national forgetting in a positive light. The idea is that there would be no peace if everyone remembered everything. It reminds me of how shock therapy destroys the brain cells in the memory centre to alleviate depression. 

            I weighed 87.5 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been at midday in ten days. 

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

            I weighed 86.8 kilos at 17:45. It’s been eleven days since it’s been that much in the evening. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:30. 

            I read “Navigating Wonder: The Medieval Geographies of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant” by Matthew Vernon, Margaret A. Miller. A comparison is made between how vague geographies are used in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight and in The Buried Giant. 

            I started re-reading “Monuments, Unreal Spaces and National Forgetting” because I’ve decided to write this week’s critical summary on national forgetting. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 1, episode 20 of Burke’s Law. 

            A dead body is found floating at the beach. A police lab assistant recognizes the woman as this month’s Beach Girl in Girlicue Magazine. The editor of the magazine doesn’t know her name but her picture was sent in by Martin Van Martin. Burke goes to the Van Martin mansion and finds Mrs. Van Martin using a vibrating belt machine while intermittently stopping for drinks of booze. She tells him her husband is closing a big oil deal in a secret country. She says she sponsors artists like Arthur Reynolds. She’s very drunk and calls to her butler to tell him to put her to bed and to use the fireman’s carry. Tim finds there are callouses on the fingers of the corpse like those of a guitar player. Now he remembers that he saw her photo in the window of El Greco’s Guitars. El Greco says he made a guitar for her and her name was Carrie Cornell. He made another for her friend Pee Wee Wilson. He says Carrie killed the wood of her guitar. She was a tramp but she played with magic fingers. She played at The Floating Pancreas. Burke and Tim go there where the proprietor Pork Pie Hannigan knows right away they are cops. Pee Wee is on stage singing, “Strawberries / Bottle of wine / My love grows and grows / Strawberries / Bottle of wine / Only my love knows / Only my love knows / Young love tarries in my broken heart…” I suspect they made up this song for the show. Good voice though (It’s Joanie Summers, who had a hit around that time with “Johnnie Get Angry”). Pork Pie says she doesn’t sing as well as Carrie. He tells them one night he saw Carrie Cornell and Nancy Barstow clawing each other at the beach. They were fighting over Martin Van Martin. Nancy lived with Carrie but didn’t belong since she wasn’t a kook. Pee Wee said Carrie was going to fix Martin’s wagon. She says Carrie had something on Mrs. Van Martin and her beach bums Arthur Reynolds and Big Bwana Smith. Smith taught her skin diving and surfing. Smith and Reynolds share a warehouse. Burke and Tim go there. Reynolds is played by William Shatner. He tells them they should become artists because police work is bad for the feet. He says among the many careers he’s held he’s also been a policeman. He says Carrie was destined to be on a slab. Nobody liked or understood her. He says Carrie was into Bwana Smith. Bwana is a vegetarian who can get juice from a rock. Smith says Carrie was not nice because she ate meat. He doesn’t even step on ants. Burke and Tim go to the party Marian Van Martin is throwing for Arthur. Burke finds Mrs. Van Martin in another room with a golf club and putting. She says she can’t have a drink until she gets the ball in the hole because this way when she passes out it’s an achievement. He asks her about Nancy Barstow and it causes her to swing the club wild. It hits the large unsculpted block of plaster behind her and it falls over, breaks and reveals the dead bodies of her husband and Nancy Barstow. Burke later finds Marian in the tub washing herself clean of her husband. Burke goes to see Pork Pie who says he was obsessed with Nancy but one never kills a beautiful woman. Carrie was struck on the right side of her face by someone left handed. Arthur is left handed and so they go to the warehouse. It’s dark and someone shoots arrows at him. It’s Smith who admits he killed all three victims. He killed Carrie because she ate meat but he killed Nancy because he caught her with Van Martin who had no muscles. He keeps shooting until Burke fires his gun at the ceiling. Smith stops and tells him he shouldn’t shoot people with guns because bullets make the body ugly. He says the jury will understand that they were dirty so he had to kill them. 

            Marian was played by Diana Lynn, who was a piano prodigy at 10. Her first movie appearance was in The Hard Boiled Canary. She co-starred in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, My Friend Irma, My Friend Irma Goes West, You’re Never Too Young, The Kentuckian, and Bed Time for Bonzo. In the late 60s she operated a travel agency. She died of a stroke at the age of 45.