I memorized the fifth verse of “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso and there is only one verse left to nail down.
I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the second of two sessions. The power went out for a few minutes halfway through. That’s the first time it’s happened while playing the electric but I just continued playing without the volume.
I weighed 88.1 kilos before breakfast.
I worked a bit more on my Critical Summary:
David Aers in his essay “The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl” writes that death is a “challenge to human identity, the disclosure of an utter powerlessness framing our will to control others”. He says, “we mourn, inevitably, for our selves”. These are good theses and there is evidence in the poem Pearl to validate them. But Aers proceeds to screw his argument into gender specific examples that distance it from proving his original point.
Aers claims that the male gender of the mourning parent in the poem Pearl makes him more possessive. I argue that the parent’s and even the child’s gender is secondary to the main point that mourning comes from a sense of possession. The dreaming parent’s reaction to their dead child appearing alive before them could easily be that of a mother. Possessiveness of our children comes from a sense that they are a crucial part of who we are. When our child dies we feel a sense of loss for the part of ourselves that existed because of that person.
Aers frequently states that the speaker in Pearl is responding to a woman. But the child was a toddler when she died as is shown when the speaker says to her, “You lived not two years” (489-490). But when the narrator’s daughter appears before him again she is described as a comely maiden and a bride of Christ. As the speaker indicates she only died the day before this meeting and so she has been instantly advanced to marriage age, which could have been as young as twelve years in Medieval times. But there is nothing in the speaker’s dialogue with his suddenly eloquent child that shows that he is responding to her gender as a young adult. His same choices of language would not be out of place if the child being addressed happened to be male.
Aers says that the child is being expected to fulfill “the traditional feminine role of nurturing life source”. But in this case he is not asking for nurture. Not all pleas relating to one’s survival involve a request for nurture. He could be appealing to a child of any gender in this case.
I weighed 87.6 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown. In Little Korea there’s a new restaurant called Bone Soup Malatan. On the way back I stopped at Freshco. I bought five bags of green grapes, two packs of strawberries, two packs of blackberries, bananas, a jug of orange juice, Earl Grey tea, and a pack of red lentil crisps.
I weighed 86.6 kilos at 18:00.
I was caught up on my journal at 19:11.
I worked some more on my Critical Summary:
Aers claims that the speaker’s “strategy” is to draw his daughter into acknowledging the reality of the memory of being his child. “Once she does so, the fantasy of the past can frame the present relationship in a way that will allow him to continue the familiar masculine role that combines rhetoric of worship with the practice of controlling female identity to fit the idealizations and demands of male language”. He’s had no time to plot a strategy. He is reacting to not only suddenly seeing his dead daughter again but also to seeing her in a holy form. Clearly his question, “Are you my Pearl?” is an attempt to understand if she is who he thinks she is. He is telling her that he missed her and suffered in her absence as any parent would. He is not trying to control her identity but trying to understand the two identities he is faced with, which are the one in his memory and the current reality. There is no “male language” being spoken here. These are lines that could just as easily be spoken by a female mourner.
I had four potatoes with gravy while watching season 2, episode 6 of Burke’s Law.
At a coin auction a collector named Cartwheel is about to reveal something special. The auctioneer sends an assistant to fetch Cartwheel from the auction item storage room but she finds him hanging dead from a lariat. However he was not killed by hanging but rather by strangulation before being hung, and a silver dollar had been pressed against his windpipe. Cartwheel lived in Epitaph Flats, which is a wild west themed tourist town an hour away from Los Angeles and the car he came in is missing. Burke finds mud on the floor by the back exit door and it hasn’t rained lately. A piece of paper in Cartwheel’s pocket reads “Big Mouth Annie $3000” and he has a torn piece of cloth in his hand. Burke and his team drive to Epitaph Flats. They have to leave the car in the parking lot outside town. They get arrested for not being dressed in period costumes. The sheriff is a beautiful woman who says the fine is $10 each. Neither of them have enough and so she locks Tim and Les in jail. Burke tries to explain this is serious but she won’t listen and so he locks her in jail and frees his men. He sends Tim and Les to talk with Big Mouth Annie. Burke is chased by deputies and ducks into an alley where he meets a drunken old miner named Alkali. He tells Burke that Cartwheel works out of the saloon. Burke goes to the back of the jail and passes Sheriff Xenobia her keys then asks her out to dinner. Burke meets Cartwheel’s partner Jackson Trade. Together they own the town. Tim and Les talk with Big Mouth Annie the blacksmith. She gets furious when they mention Cartwheel. She’s happy when she hears he’s dead and says there’s plenty in town that would kill him. She says start with Chickasaw Pete, Jack Trade or Sundance. Tim and Les rent Alkali’s buckboard with him in it and go looking for Cartwheel’s car. Burke talks with Sundance in the saloon. He’s not surprised that Cartwheel’s been murdered because he cheated most everybody. Tim and Les find Cartwheel’s car and inside is a rare silver dollar. Alkali says he found some and would dig for more. Burke talks with Chickasaw Pete the owner of the saloon. He’s from Flatbush but he’s 1/32 Chickasaw. He says he was there at the saloon when Cartwheel was murdered but can’t back it up. Burke meets Xenobia for dinner. She remembers she locked Burke’s chauffeur in jail but Tim and Les let him out with the key. The lab says the torn piece of cloth is from a money bag at least 75 years old. Alkali must have found a bag of old coins. Burke goes to see Jack Trader who has access to the newspaper archive. He finds one about a mine payroll robbery in 1889. A money sack containing 250 silver dollars was never recovered. Tim says each coin is now worth $400. Burke finds Alkali back in the alley. He says Cartwheel bought his sack for $500. Burke goes back to Sundance and tells him he knows he’s the killer. That’s why he started the shootout late because he hadn’t got back from killing Cartwheel in LA. Burke says he knows he’ll find the sack at Sundance’s house. Sundance pulls a gun on Burke but he’s distracted by Alkali and Burke disarms him. They start fighting and Sundance tells some of the actors that it’s time for the daily brawl and so they join in. Tim comes and joins the fight until they win and Sundance is booked for murder.
Xenobia was played by Diane McBain, who started modelling for ads as a teenager. She was signed with Warner Brothers during her senior year at high school. Her first film was a supporting role in Ice Palace. She starred in Young and Eager, Black Gold, and Claudelle Inglish. She co-starred in Borderlines, A Distant Trumpet, I Sailed to Tahiti with an All Girl Crew, Maryjane, The Mini Skirt Mob, The Deathhead Virgin, and Spinout. She played Daphne Dutton for the two seasons of Surfside Six. She toured Vietnam with Bob Hope in 1967. She played Pinky Pinkston on Batman. After being beaten, robbed and raped in her garage in 1982 she suffered from PTSS but she also became a rape counselor.
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