On Friday morning I dreamed I said to a couple of young women, “How are you guys doing?” and one of them was offended that I would refer to her as a guy. But then we all had a conversation and I explained that it wasn’t a gender reference. She admitted that she says “You guys” to her girlfriends. The other young woman was wearing a wire retainer that looked almost like a cage around her head.
I finished working out the chords for “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I’ll run through singing and playing the whole song in French. Then I might have to adjust my translation before running through it in English.
I wasn’t quite able to finish memorizing “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso but I should have it nailed down on Saturday.
I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions.
I weighed 87.3 kilos before breakfast.
I left at around 10:30 for my appointment with the dental hygienist at the Parkdale Community Health Centre. It’s nice that we don’t have to wear masks there anymore. The cleaning was a painful process because my gums are in such bad shape. My mouth felt like a carwash while she was working and it’s always hard to get a chance to swallow before I start feeling like I’m going to choke. I was exhausted at the end. Most of my teeth are whiter now but she seems to have ground off some of the fillings that Dr. Lake put on my two front teeth. They were white ten days ago but now they are discoloured and don’t look very good. Later I saw that my front teeth became whiter and so there must have been a temporary discolouration from the fluoride treatment. She gave me a new toothbrush, sulka brush, and some floss. I can’t get another cleaning appointment for six months. Dr. Lake called the U of T Graduate Periodontics Clinic to give me a referral and told me to call too. She also called two years ago but I never got a call back from them. I called them and left a message today.
I weighed 86.8 kilos before lunch, which is the lightest I’ve been since last Friday.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back.
I weighed 86.6 kilos at 17:30.
I was caught up on my journal at 18:30.
I worked on my Critical Summary. Here are some of the paragraphs I worked on:
Aers frequently states that the speaker in Pearl is responding to a woman. But he does not remember her as a woman. She was a toddler when she died as is shown when the speaker says to her, “You lived not two years in our land” (489-490). Therefore the “root of his bliss” is a child and not an adult. 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.
The speaker says, “Are you my pearl for whom I cried / For whom I grieved alone at night? / Much longing I for you have sighed / Since into grass you left my sight / Sorrow and grief with me reside / While you remain in true delight / In Paradise, in peace to abide (242-248). Aers claims that the speaker’s “strategy” here is to draw his daughter “into acknowledging the reality of this memory. 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”. But there is no strategy. The narrator 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 rather trying to understand the two identities he is faced with, 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 uttered by a female mourner.
Aers claims that the speaker is assuming a dominant male position from which to negate his daughter’s subjectivity, and that in doing so he is following “the courtly and romance traditions of love”. He writes that the speaker “tries to induce a sense of guilt in her, trying to make her see herself as a failing female, one whose refusal to fill the received role of female love object causes him great pain... he insists that he will fulfill his fantasy of reunion with the lost female” (325-36). But when the speaker says, “It is not meet that you, my pearl, make me repine;” he is not trying to make her feel guilty. His words are more a plea for mercy because he craves to be reunited with his lost child as any parent would. There is nothing in these lines that show him “trying to make her see herself as a failing female”. The fact that she is female is not the issue. The lost child being mourned could be of any gender and still would have been the source of his joy when she was happy, of his distress in she was suffering, and of his grief in her death.
Aers sees the City of God presented in Pearl as a model Christian Socialist community and claims the speaker rejects this world that is without social and political elites (409-92). But the narrator makes it clear before he speaks in those lines that he may be mistaken and he acknowledges his daughter as having the authority to correct him. He is confused by the fact that a toddler would die and immediately be not only suddenly transformed into a young adult but also become royalty in heaven.
Aers believes that the speaker is using the language of courtly love to manipulate his daughter as if she were the unavailable love object of courtly love poems (745-56). But the narrator is simply marvelling at how his child has been transformed. What he is missing is his lost child and not her current older form.
I had two large potatoes with gravy while watching season 2, episode 7 of Burke’s Law.
We see the hands of someone wiring the handrails of a swimming pool stairs. Then we see Cornelius Gilbert taking a late night swim. As he climbs out the murderer flips a switch and Gilbert is electrocuted. Burke’s team investigates and then Burke arrives. Tim finds a torn piece of plaid. Les finds a gold St. Christopher medal in a footprint by the bathhouse. Burke finds Rowena Coolidge on the dock of the private lake giving a speech to an imaginary audience. Although she is not related to Calvin Coolidge she still plans on running for president. She says she is Gilbert’s guest and one of the passengers on the round the world flight that he makes every year. He asks if she has a gold St. Christopher medal and she does. Gilbert gave it to her as a souvenir of the trip. She plans to visit countries that the US has granted aid and exchange her homemade preserves for a return of the aid money. The travel agency is owned by Linda Murray on La Cienega. Burke goes to see Linda. She says she’s not surprised Gilbert was murdered. She used to work for him and dated him a few times. Burke gets the passenger list from her. Every passenger was given a St. Christopher medal. Burke figures the one without a medal is the murderer. That night Linda is working at her agency when someone bangs on her window. She closes the curtains and they try the door. She tries to leave through the back door and a man is standing there. She faints and wakes up with Burke. He tells her he is grounding the plane. He goes to see Milton Yeager who tells him he is too busy to murder anybody. He shows Burke his medal. Burke goes to see Horton Galbraith who immediately confesses to robbing the bank where he used to work of $1 million. When he realizes Burke was there on another matter it is too late. He refuses to tell Burke where the money is but when Burke arrests him he insists on taking with him his two potted geraniums. He drops one, breaking the pot and Burke sees the money is inside. But Horton has a medal so he is cleared of the murder. Burke takes Linda out to dinner. That night Tim is late reporting in. An officer calls to tell Burke that Tim’s car has been found with blood on the back of the driver’s seat. We see that Tim is being held hostage by a big bald headed giant played by Tor Johnson of Plan Nine from Outer Space and many other films but uncredited here. Tim wakes up with a headache and tries to attack his captor but he is easily subdued. Burke figures there must be a sixth passenger for the flight and he forces Linda to tell him who it is. Linda says she didn’t tell him because Adrienne Shelton wasn’t officially on the passenger list according to Gilbert’s instructions. Burke asks to see Linda’s medal and she shows it. Burke goes to see Adrienne. She didn’t know Gilbert was dead. She’s known him for seven years. They were involved years ago and she left him but he recently blackmailed her into taking the trip. Burke asks for her medal. She looks but can’t find it. She realizes she will be incriminated if she doesn’t have it and so she panics, tearing everything apart. She breaks down in tears when she can’t find it but Burke finds it on the floor where it fell after she smashed a vase. Burke gets a call from a man who warns him that either the plane leaves at midnight or Tim will be killed. Burke hears clicking and knows the voice is a tape recording. At half an hour before midnight the man holding Tim makes another call and connects the phone to the tape recording. Burkes team is trying to trace the call but after giving the message the man hangs up. Tim is tied to a chair in another room but manages to throw a pillow at the other phone to knock it off the hook. The bald man doesn’t notice until its too late that the phone line is still open. Burke has the address and goes there. He has a big fight with the giant, who it turns out is deaf and dumb. Burke beats him with some karate chops. Burke goes back to Milton Yeager and tells him he knows by the way he unconsciously uses sign language with his hands when he talks that he’s the murderer. Tim finds a plaid coat that has had a piece torn out. Yeager confesses. He says he had to kill Gilbert because Adrienne went back to him. Burke goes to Linda and kisses her.
Rowena was played by Nanette Fabray, who was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec. She was singing and tap dancing on the vaudeville stage as “Baby Nanette” at the age of four and then sang on the radio. She won a scholarship to the Max Reinhardt School of Theatre. She co-starred on Broadway in High Button Shoes. She won two Donaldson Awards for theatre and a Tony in the 1940s for Love Life. Her first film appearance was a supporting role in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. She won three Emmy Awards for her work on Caesar’s Hour. She then starred in the sitcom Westinghouse Playhouse. She played Grandma Romano on One Day at a Time. She was a panelist on 274 episodes of Hollywood Squares. She co-starred in The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County and Harper Valley PTA. She was hearing impaired for many years until four operations restored it. She became an activist and one of the forces behind bringing sign language and captioning to television. She once sang Over the Rainbow while signing it on live TV after being told not to. She is Shelly Fabares’s aunt and her own birth name was also Fabres but she changed it after Ed Sullivan mispronounced her name on national television. Mary Tyler Moore said she learned to cry on camera by watching how Nanette Fabray did it.
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