Shelley Berman

            Even though the postal strike is over there is a backlog that has made it so no one in my place has gotten any mail in a few weeks. Ontario Works sends me an income reporting form with a postage paid envelope every month but they send it early in December because they issue the cheques before Christmas instead of at the end of the month. I should have gotten my form last week but it didn’t arrive and so on Monday I used a PDF of the form that I’d downloaded. I didn’t have any postage paid envelopes though and so after filling out the form and attaching my pay statements I rode up to their office on Dundas and hand delivered it. The receptionist gave me a few forms and about five extra postage-paid envelopes just in case Canada Post has any more problems doing its job.
            On my way home I stopped at the big No Frills at Lansdowne and Dundas. I bought grapes, raspberries and a few Spartan apples. At the apple bin an old Portuguese man was picking a lot of apples. When he saw me picking apples up, looking at them and putting them aside it seemed to bother him. “Is good!” he argued. I told him that a lot of them have little dents. I got a package of mixed nuts, a strawberry rhubarb pie, margarine, yogourt and old cheddar. I took advantage of the fact that this store has a pharmacy section and I bought a bottle of alcohol, some lip balm and a pack of little dispensers of Purell that I can carry in my backpack for those moments when I shake snotty hands.
            The express cashier was a young woman who looked both like she had a cold and like she was bored. She didn’t smile at anyone ahead of me when she gave them their change but she smiled at me.
            I got caught up on my journal.
            I finished my second reading of the first act of Percy Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound".
            That night I boiled six mini-potatoes and two carrots and sautéed some mushrooms. I had them with gravy and a small chicken leg and watched a very intense episode of Peter Gunn. This begins with a comedian named Danny Holland doing his act. He’s doing one of those talking on the phone skits. The actor playing Danny is the real life comedian Shelley Berman and this is actually the tail end of one of his own skits. In the complete bit he works in an office building across the street from a department store and he sees a woman hanging by her hands from a ledge on the eleventh floor. He calls up the department store to alert them about the situation but he keeps getting put on hold and transferred to other departments until finally he gets through to someone. The part that appears in this story takes place while he is calling to the woman and reassuring her while she is waiting for help. She is also holding an umbrella and he tells her that if she falls she should open it. At the end of the skit the woman has been pulled in but the complaints department operator is now hanging from the ledge.

            Peter Gunn is at the show and comes to see Danny in his dressing room because Danny had called him. Danny tells Gunn that his wife Ann is trying to kill him. He gives the details of several attempts that she has made on his life and tells Gunn that his wife is quite insane. Danny says that when he suggested that Ann she see a doctor she blew up and he wants to hire Gunn to protect him. Gunn goes to talk with Ann. She is a very nervous woman and she also claims that her spouse is mentally ill. She has tried to get him to see a doctor but he refuses. She begins to cry and Gunn gives her his handkerchief. Gunn goes to consult with a psychiatrist who says that it’s very difficult to tell which one is lying but whichever one is telling the truth is in grave danger. Gunn goes back to see Ann but as soon as he steps through the door someone hits him over the head and he is knocked out. Ann is in Danny’s dressing room when Danny walks in and tells her that he killed the man she hired to follow him and also the man that she’d arranged to meet in her hotel.

            He tells her she’s crazy and grabs her by the throat. Danny is introduced by the MC and he comes out onto the stage looking disoriented. At first the audience does not know what to think and they begin whispering. The whispering is amplified in Danny’s mind until he briefly puts his fingers in his ears and it stops. He begins exaggeratedly adjusting the microphone height with facial expressions that make the audience laugh with relief. He accuses them of being conditioned and brainwashed in laughing at him doing absolutely nothing and it makes them laugh even harder. He asks if they’ve considered that when the host called him one of the best comics in show business that he just may be a pathological liar? Again they laugh. He says, “Fortunately for you he was telling the truth!” They laugh and nod. Meanwhile, Gunn and Lieutenant Jacoby are in Danny's dressing room investigating a smashed mirror and a trail of blood. They follow the trail out of his dressing room. Meanwhile Danny is doing a skit about a gangster trying get his gun out of his coat pocket but it’s stuck. Gunn and Jacoby follow the blood into the alley where Gunn finds the handkerchief that he’d given to Ann. Gunn opens a small door in the alley and Ann’s dead body falls forward from inside. Just as we switch back to the close-up face of an audience member hysterically laughing. It's a masterful bit of juxtaposition.

            As Danny continues his act, this time talking about how humans exhale poisonous gas that is nourishing to flowers, he sees that the police are standing at the back waiting for him to finish. Danny finished by telling the audience that no matter how mean, rotten or sinful they have been through this day, “Every time you breathe out you make a little flower happy". The audience laughs and applauds as Danny’s face becomes increasingly more intense and desperate and it the frame becomes a shrinking circle surrounded by black until the whole screen is black and the end music comes on. This was the best executed of the Peter Gunn episodes so far in terms of direction.
            Ann was played by Patricia Donahue.

            Shelley Berman started out as an actor but in the mid 50s became a sketch writer for Steve Allen. He joined a Chicago improv troupe called the Compass Players, which years later became the famous Second City. Berman's first record, "Inside Shelley Berman" was the first gold record in comedy. He plays Larry David’s father on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He accused Bob Newhart of stealing his telephone act but Newhart says it was already a comedy tradition before Berman started doing it.

Jeanne Bates

            I spent a lot of time on Sunday writing about my latest Food Bank Adventure.
            That night I just had one piece of toast with my egg and my beer and I flipped the egg in the pan. For all of my life I’ve loved runny egg yolk but lately for some unknown reason I’ve found it seems to turn my stomach a bit. So I fried my egg on both sides and since there was less runny yolk I only needed one piece of toast.
            I watched an episode of Peter Gunn. The newly renovated Mother’s is about to re-open, but of course Gunn still uses it as his office. An old man named Victor comes to hire Gunn to find his daughter Ellen. She’s just been released from prison after serving four years but hasn’t come home. Gunn goes to ask if Lieutenant Jacoby knows anything about Ellen. He tells him that she had worked as a companion for a rich old lady but had let her boyfriend in to rob the woman’s safe. She could have served much less time if she’d only turned in her boyfriend but she refused. The implication for what motivated Ellen to be so blindly in love with her boyfriend was that she was of below average attractiveness. It was mentioned earlier by her father when he'd first approached Gunn that Ellen “is not a pretty girl”. Gunn looked at the police file for Ellen’s arrest and in response to the picture, Gunn said, “I see what you mean!” What Ellen had was a dark scar that ran from the corner of her right lip to halfway between her eye and ear. On the street Gunn approaches a woman banging a drum in front of a Christian mission and chanting "Don't pass by friend, keep the call / Drop a coin in the drum there's food for all / Give till it hurts friend, do what‘s right / Drop a coin in the drum, you’ll sleep tonight!” He puts a bill in the drum and says, “Hello Leather!” He says, "It beats liberating wallets eh?" She answers, "I get real weary for the old scam sometimes!” "Fight it Leather!" "It's a lot to fight handsome! A lot of shivers! The minute just before you make the snatch ... it's a kick every time!” Gunn asks Leather if she remembers Ellen from prison. Leather tells him he’ll have a hard time finding her now because the state paid for her to get plastic surgery while she was inside. She tells him it was a Dr Snyder that worked her over. Gunn goes for his wallet to give Leather something extra for the information but finds it missing. She hands it to him and says, “Just tryin to keep the fingers limber!” Gunn goes to see Dr Snyder and finds two hoods working him over. Gunn fights them off. Later Snyder explains his work at the prison. He claims that it's a solid medical theory that physical unattractiveness is a definite factor in crime and criminals. It’s probably more about how society and the cops treat less unattractive people.
            I’m pretty sure the Hippocratic oath applies to the relation between plastic surgeons and their patients but Snyder had no qualms at all about telling Gunn about Ellen or even showing him her medical file. He showed Gunn the before and after picture of Ellen. Really it was Ellen without the made up scar and with make-up on. He said Ellen was his only failure because she still refused to turn in her boyfriend. He said that she would say under the anaesthetic that she would be "at Guidos". Gunn knows a pizzeria named Guidos and he goes there, where of course Guido knows him well. Ellen is there every night getting drunk by herself. He tells her that her father is going crazy waiting for her. She starts to laugh and says that her father died when she was four. Gunn immediately knows that he’s been duped. He goes to Victor and forces him to tell him why he posed as Ellen’s father. He confesses that it was Ellen's boyfriend Marty. He couldn't find her because of her new face but he wanted to still be sure that she wouldn’t rat on him. Gunn finds Marty working as a mechanic. They fight and knock stuff over as usual until Marty gets hold of a Gunn and tells Gunn about how he had control over Ellen because she was so ugly. At that point there’s a shot and we see Ellen has followed Gunn there. She shoots Marty several times until he's dead.
            Ellen was played by Jeanne Bates, who was not unattractive at all and had in fact started out as a model. She started acting in radio and on the “Whodunit” mystery show her scream was the signature opening. She played The Phantom’s girlfriend in the 1943 film serial. She played Mrs. X in David Lynch’s classic “Eraserhead".

Robert Crumb

After going home from the food bank to drop off my groceries I went back out to No Frills. As soon as I walked in there was a Jamaican woman yelling across the grapefruits at a Tibetan man, “Cough on your own damn food!”

            The grapes weren’t in very good shape. I only found two bags that had moderately firm bunches in them. I got a pint of raspberries, some bulk walnuts, some mouthwash, a container of yogourt and a bag of Miss Vickie’s plain chips.

            Once I’d taken that stuff home I went back out to the liquor store to buy two cans of Creemore. I handed the cashier a $20 because I keep hoping to get back one of the new Viola Desmond $10s but she gave me back two $5s. Curses! Foiled again!

I had a toasted ham and cheese sandwich for lunch and took a siesta, even though I knew that Nick Cushing was coming over. I got about 45 minutes sleep before he shouted my name from the street. At that moment I’d forgotten that he was coming over and wondered who would be calling for me.

I tossed the clean laundry that was piled on the kitchen table onto the living room couch and we sat in the kitchen. I made tea and we chatted for an hour and a half. We talked about Robert Crumb. For some reason I’d thought that he hadn’t actually written most of the comics he drew but I was wrong.

            Nick left a little after 18:00.

I did some writing and that night I had an egg with toast and a beer and watched an episode of Peter Gunn. This story began with a clever bank robbery. A teller named Poole has strategically placed gas bombs near the stations of each of his colleagues as the bank gets ready for business in the morning. After the money has been distributed to each teller the bombs go off and they are all knocked out, except for Poole, who’s hidden a gas mask nearby. He puts it on and gathers up the money. He opens a door and the scarred hand of his partner Morrell reaches through to take it. Later a woman named Barbara comes to the still being renovated Mother’s and hires Gunn to find her boyfriend George Morrell. Later she meets with Poole and so obviously Morrell ran off with Poole’s share of the bank money and they’ve tricked Gunn into finding him. Gunn goes to see Lieutenant Jacoby, finds out the man has a record and gets a picture of him. Gunn goes to see a bookie named Willie at an arcade and finds out that Morrell has gone to a little town in Italy called Cassano. Gunn flies to Italy and takes a train to Cassano. In the station he is immediately accosted by an opportunistic man named Carlo who offers himself as a guide and a source of information but he says he doesn’t know Morrell. The only hotel is Albergo Carlotta. He meets the beautiful owner of the hotel and she is very flirtatious but she also claims not to know Morrell, although we see his scarred hand as he pours wine at another table. Gunn catches Carlo following him and Carlo tells him that Morrell is at an old winery on the hill. That night someone tries to run Gunn over and later in bed he wakes just in time to stop Carlo from stabbing him. He forces Carlo to take him to Morrell. He confronts Morrell about his attempts on his life but suddenly Poole appears from behind with a gun. Poole demands the money and tells Gunn that now that he can identify him he’ll have to die. Carlo stops towards Poole and in a strange move that appeared cowardly Gunn pushes Carlo towards Poole, causing Poole to shoot Carlo. Poole shoots Morrel and gets him to tell him the $125,000 is in the next room. Once again, a disarmed Gunn takes out the armed bad guy with fisticuffs. We don’t see him recover the money. We see him return to a now renovated and much fancier Mother’s with a scenic window waiting to have crooks thrown through it in future episodes. Edi asks Gunn if he wants to hold hands. He says, “I’ll try anything once!”

Poole was played by Ted Knight, who later became one of the many famous co-stars on the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

            Barbara was played by Sylvia Lewis, who was a series regular for two seasons of the 50s TV series “Where’s Raymond?” and was also a dancer and choreographer on that show and others.

Carlotta was played by Nina Roman Rhodes Hughes, who co-starred in a now forgotten soap opera called Morning Star that only ran for one season. She was there when Robert Kennedy was shot and insists that there was a second gunman. She now lives in Vancouver.

Parkdale Legal Has Helped A Lot of People

            Some of the symptoms of the cold that I thought that I was coming down with on Thursday were still there on Saturday but they were barely recognizable as a cold. It was as if the cold that went away in October had sent me a little postcard from wherever it went.

            I started learning the chords to Serge Gainsbourg’s song “Jane B”, the music for which is actually Chopin’s Prelude in E-Minor, Opus 28 Number 4. I don’t have much time to learn it because there are only a few more Chopin days till Christmas.

            I was on my way to the food bank when I realized that I’d forgotten my phone and so I went home to get it. In terms of the length of the line-up, whether I come at 9:45 or 9:55 it doesn’t make much difference. About one person takes a place in line every ten minutes. About ten minutes after I arrived, one of the regulars, a tall, thin guy in a poor-boy cap and a slim, knee length overcoat, took his place behind me, but left a space of about two meters and stood on the west side of the steps of 1501 Queen Street West so as to let tenants come and go. Ten minutes later a woman arrived and parked her cart directly behind the cart that was in front of my place in line. The guy behind me told her to get behind him but she argued that the space should be filled up because other people would use it as an excuse to butt in. I told her that we wouldn’t let anyone go in front of her but she wouldn’t buy it. She insisted that the guy move his cart ahead to take his place in line ahead of her. He finally gave in and the woman, satisfied with her little victory said, “Good!” Then she left her cart and went inside the entryway of 1499 Queen to sit. When I passed through there to go downstairs to use the washroom there must have been twenty people hanging out in there. It was like a down and out cocktail party without the cocktails.

            I re-read about half of the first act of Percy Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”. It seems to me that Shelley is drawing a parallel between Prometheus and Jesus, except that he's taken that "God, why hast thou forsaken me moment” from the Jesus myth and extended it over thousands of years. Also, just as Christ’s mother was said to be consoling him at the foot of the cross, Prometheus’s mother, the Earth is also there with him. There is also piercing, as the spears of glaciers have penetrated Prometheus’s body. Prometheus was being punished by Zeus for having given humanity the internet just as Jesus was crucified for having created the hands-free phone device.

            At 10:30 everyone swarmed out of the entryway to get in line. A few places ahead of me in line a woman with glasses and black hair was telling a woman with long and prematurely snow-white hair that last year she had weighed 125 kilos but lost 35 kilos. She met her boyfriend after losing the weight and now she’s gaining it back and he’s complaining that she’s fat.

            The guy behind me complained about people that leave their carts in line and then go elsewhere. He thinks people should be forced to stay with their carts. Like me, he’s one of the minority that misses the system of drawing numbers.

            He said there’s a church here in the west end that has a Christmas food hamper that might be a monthly food hamper. He named the church but I can't find anything about it. I told him that there's a pay-what-you-can supermarket in the junction. Looking it up now I see that it’s called “Feed It Forward” and it’s at 3324 Dundas West, just east of Runnymede. It’s run by a chef named Jagger S. Gordon. On their Facebook page I noticed a couple of people complaining about having been asked for a $5 donation for their food hamper but most of the reviews are positive. From what I’ve read the “pay-what-you-can" really is "pay-what-you-can", including nothing. There is certainly nothing officially posted about a minimum.

            The guy behind me said that Parkdale Community Legal Services is being evicted from their location at Noble and Queen. They have been told by the Usher family that they have to leave by January 1, 2019. A new building is being constructed at the site and Parkdale Legal had been scheduled to move into an office on the third floor. Negotiations continue and the clinic says the landlord has breached the lease agreement. One would think that with a building full of lawyers they should have a judicial advantage.

I remember when the Usher family used to have a surplus food store in that building. It seemed to be stocked with canned and packaged items that had been acquired from other stores that had closed. There were often rare items and everything was cheap.

I told the guy behind me that 19 years ago it was with help from Parkdale Legal that I beat my then new landlord in his attempts to evict me and everyone else in my building. He’d just bought the place from the guy I’d rented my apartment from and he tried to use the old trick of claiming that he needed the building for his family to live in. Of course what he really wanted to do was clear everybody out so he could renovate and yank up the rent. Anyway, we won and that’s thanks to Parkdale Legal.

I think I made my companion feel bad when I told him that I only pay a little over $600 for a one-bedroom apartment. He said that he pays $600 for a room with a shared kitchen and bathroom and that his fellow tenants steal his food from the fridge. He complained that they especially take the milk that he gets from the food bank though they would never be seen going to the food bank themselves.

I’ve shared kitchens and bathrooms before but of the two I am particularly thankful to not have to share a bathroom with anyone.

Across the street from where we were standing is a store called “In Vintage We Trust”. In their window they had large letter-shaped balloons hanging that spelled out “DEPOP”. I said it out loud and wondered what that was about. He explained what “Depop” is but either I misunderstood or he had the wrong info. I thought he was telling me that Depop is a line of vintage clothing, but it seems to be a shopping app for an online marketplace. Maybe In Vintage We Trust sells their clothing through Depop or maybe they provide a space for people selling through Depop.

I got downstairs at around 11:00. The tall, shaved-headed volunteer, whose name I think is Steve, was at the reception desk. As I handed him my card I told him, “You were wrong!” I reminded him that we’d had an argument a couple of years ago at the old location and that he’d insisted that marijuana would never be legalized in Canada. He didn’t look up at me but looked bored and responded, “But then Justin came in.” I told him that Trudeau was already the prime minister at the time. He just shrugged and said that if the Conservatives get in they could repeal it. I told him I didn’t think they’d do that.

My volunteer was the young woman who’s been volunteering there for about a year and a half and usually works at the reception desk.

We started at the bottom of the first shelf where there were two kinds of granola. One was a vanilla almond flavoured cereal and the other was the better-known brand of Dorset granola. She recommended the Dorset because it had sunflower seeds. I added, “And moonflower seeds, and Jupiter flower seeds …” I don’t know why I was being so silly. I don’t think I was entertainer her and I was barely entertaining myself. Anyway, I took the Dorset. It had raisins, dates, almonds, hazelnuts, pumpkin seeds, banana and of course, sunflower seeds.

We moved to the top shelf and she asked if I wanted any Kuna Pops. I told her I had some already and they’re really just flavoured air.

Also on the top were little plastic jars of teriyaki sauce. The jars looked like the containers in which I get prescription creams at the drug store, except that they were transparent. The brand name on the teriyaki sauce is Chef’s Plate, which seems to be another online store. You order from a list of recipes and they send you the fresh ingredients and the instructions on assembling the meal.  I assume the teriyaki sauce comes along with certain recipes. I took one of the containers but she gave me another three.

They haven’t had any health bars at the food bank for a few months but this time the Larabars were back. These ones were apple and also had dates, raisins, almonds and cinnamon.

There were a variety of canned vegetables and soups but I just took a can of chickpeas. I’d had a bad experience with the last can of chickpeas that I’d gotten from the food bank, but that was the first time in many. The garbanzos had hard outer skins on some of them that came off in my mouth and when I pulled them out they resembled toenail clippings. It was disgusting and on top of that I think I got food poisoning. The company name was Arz and I don’t think I’ll take chickpeas with that label again.

The last item I selected was a litre of pure apple juice.

I finally remembered to ask the name of my helper whom I’ve seen so many times. She said it was Stephanie.

At Angie’s station there was lots of milk, both chocolate and white, but I didn’t want 2% so I turned it down. The small yogourt containers on display were Astro 0%, which I think has sucralose in it. Angie pulled some small containers of Activia: four lemon and two pineapple and so I took those. I didn’t take any of the frozen generic ground chicken, hot dogs or bologna, but Angie gave me an extra bag of three eggs.

The guy ahead of me was bent over and really loading up from the bread section, picking up various muffins and buns with the tongs. He was taking so long that Sylvia said she’d serve me and I could get my bread afterward.

She offered me some chanterelle mushrooms, but I didn’t have a plastic bag handy and so she said I could take one of the big paper bags piled up beside the door. I was still holding the eggs that Angie had given me because I didn’t want them to be crushed under something else but when I reached for a paper bag I dropped one of the bags of eggs. Sylvia kindly and patiently got me another bag of eggs and a plastic bag for the mushrooms. She also gave me two onions, five carrots, ten potatoes, two somewhat dried up cobs of corn, a kiwi that was too soft and an apple. From the bread section I just grabbed a bag of six rosemary focaccia triangles to toss in my freezer.

I assume that next week they’ll be giving out tickets for Christmas turkeys.

As I was riding away from the food bank I got a song in my head as I often do. I was silently singing “Where Do You Go To My Lovely”, the 1969 ballad by one-hit-wonder Peter Sarstedt but I suddenly segued into Billy Joel’s 1973 song “Piano Man” and realized that they are pretty much exactly the same song in structure, right down to the chorus and that there is only a slight difference in the notes. Either lyric could be interchanged and sung in the style of the other. 

Of course Sarstedt’s song is better because it’s slightly more lonely and because it mentions Zizi Jeanmaire.

Minerva Urecal

            On Friday I got caught up with posting some stuff on Twitter and it overlapped into the early afternoon. Because of that I got started about an hour later than planned on doing my laundry. On my way to put my clothes in the dryer I stopped off at the drug store to pick up my filled prescription of cortisone cream.

            I took the last of the three months of the act-terbinafine pills. I didn’t experience any of the possible side effects such as liver problems during that time but I’m glad that I no longer have to remember to take one every day.

I had a late lunch followed by a late siesta.

I cut up and roasted a chicken that had been thawing in the fridge for 24 hours and was still half frozen. I made gravy from the liquid left over from the ginger garlic ribs I'd cooked last week but I made it too thick. I'll see if I can thin it out later.

I watched the first episode of the second season of Peter Gunn. The story somewhat paralleled the premier of the first season with some hoods trying to sell protection to Mother. The only difference was that in the first story there was a bomb that wrecked Mother’s and in this one the crooks wrecked the place by hand. But this story begins with them bombing a grocery store that wouldn't buy protection and killing the owner. There is a new Mother because Hope Emerson died in between the first and second season. She has a similar look and manner but she’s much shorter. Minerva Urecal had a similar background in Vaudeville to Hope Emerson. I don’t know if she had the same musical talent though. Anyway, the hoods walk in after Edie finished singing "Deed I Do" by Fred Rose and Walter Hirsch. 

The hoods offer Mother protection and she tells them to get lost. When Gunn hears about the shakedown he begins to investigate. Gunn goes to see Lieutenant Jacoby and finds him on the police shooting range hitting the bull’s-eye every time. Gunn asks, “What do you win?" Jacoby says, "I get an extra $16 a month for taking pistol practice". Gunn says, “You don’t look like you need the practice”. Jacoby says, “I need the $16". That night Gunn goes to a rooftop to seek out an elderly man with a British accent known as “The Owl”, who is one of his quirky informants. The Owl spends his nights looking at the stars though his telescope, but in particular he watches Sirius, which is his “baby" because those nights behind the wall, Sirius was the brightest star he could see. The Owl reluctantly tells him that the boss behind the protection racket is a man named Clegg and his front is a certain novelty company. Gunn goes there and is confronted by one of Clegg’s hoods that'd threatened Mother. The hood won’t let Gunn talk with Clegg and threatens him not to come around again. As Gunn is walking away he tells Gunn to say hello to the Owl. Gunn goes back to the rooftop and finds the Owl dead. Back at Mother’s, three of Clegg's hoods come to once again offer to sell her protection. When she refuses they begin to trash the place. Mother punches one of them across the room and the whole club breaks into a brawl. Even Edie is hitting guys with her shoe. Gunn comes in, gets Edie out of the way and tells her to call the police and tell them to meet him at the novelty company as he goes to confront Clegg. As soon as he enters the place he has a gun to his head and he’s disarmed and escorted to Clegg’s office. He tells Clegg the police will be there any minute and when Clegg and his man turn to look out the window Gunn knocks a shelf over on them and escapes into the warehouse. There’s a lot of fighting in the dark as they go after him. Clegg accidentally shoots his man while he’s fighting with Gunn. Among the novelties lying around is a boomerang which Gunn throws and strikes Clegg’s forehead causing a terrible wound. Clegg begs for a doctor. Gunn reminds him of the people he killed and asks what he would have done if they’d asked for a doctor. Gunn walks away from Clegg as he begs but the police arrive and he tells them that Clegg needs a doctor. Mother’s place is trashed but she will rebuild like she did last year.

The new Mother, Minerva Urecal was a veteran of Vaudeville, radio, film and television. She starred in the 1957 TV series “The Adventures of Tugboat Annie”, which was based on the film series of the same name, which was based on a series of stories in the Saturday Evening Post and on the real life character of Thea Christiansen Foss, who built and owned the largest tugboat company in the western United States. I vaguely remember "The Adventures of Tugboat Annie" from when I was a kid. The 39 episodes of the show were filmed in Toronto Harbour. It was popular in Canada but didn’t catch on in the States.

Herbie Mann

            I was wide-awake at 4:30 on Thursday and so I just got up half an hour early. I decided to use the extra time to shower and shave and so I only started yoga seven minutes earlier than usual. I started to feel around that point that I might be coming down with another cold. After half an hour or so it was fairly obvious that I was in the early stages of my second virus of this fall.

            I started studying at almost exactly 6:00, mostly looking at my lecture notes and doing some reading online on specific points that I’d written down.

            By 7:45 I was tired again and so I went to bed and slept for an hour. After that I studied until 10:00 and then got ready to leave to write my exam.

            As I rode to class I did an exaggerated impersonation of Elvis singing Blue Christmas. The secret to imitating Elvis is to pretend that you have swallowed a deep fried peanut butter, cheese, sardine and pickle sandwich whole but that it’s stuck halfway down your Presley and you are trying to cough it back up while singing at the same time.

            When I got to the classroom Professor Weisman was already handing out our test booklets. We started at 11:10 and the exam ran till noon. There was a choice of two essay topics and we had to compare two authors in our essays. I picked the one about the still, sad music of humanity, which is a phrase coined by Wordsworth and so I compared William Wordsworth and William Blake. I said that Blake’s “Songs of Experience” could be seen as a parallel to Wordsworth’s still sad music, although Wordsworth is more forgiving. Experience and hearing the still, sad music both come from maturity. Certainly the very title of “Songs of Experience” suggests sad music as well except that Blake is doing the singing. I didn’t realize until after the exam was over that I’d neglected to use textual examples to support my argument and so I’ll probably lose marks for that.

            After the exam I rode directly to my doctor’s office and I was more than half an hour early for my appointment and so I just sat and wrote my account of my day so far in my lecture notebook.

            I saw Dr.Shechtman a little after 13:00. He didn’t think that the problem with my banged shin was anything worse than a bone bruise but he said it was going to take a while to heal. He's been my physician for 35 years and he’s never given me a wrong diagnosis, so I’ll take his word for it and stop worrying.

            He looked at my toenail and assured me that though there’s just a quarter each of clear nail growing out of the bases of my big toenails that the fungus is dead and the discolouration will gradually be gone each time I clip it off but it will take about a year.

            I asked him to renew my prescription for the cortisone cream that I use for psoriasis on my elbows and knees, since what I have won’t last the winter. He had me step into his office while he wrote it out and I put my socks and shoes back on. I asked him how he was and he began to complain that his shoulder had suddenly started bothering him that morning, along with his back. I said, “You exercise, don’t you?” He answered, "Not really. My wife and I go for walks, but that’s about it.” I've seen his wife. She's an attractive woman. I said, "But didn't you mention that you rode a bike?" I'm pretty sure he'd said once that he belonged to a riding club and that they’d go on excursions for a day. You know, those lines of about ten cyclists in spandex and helmets and with expensive bikes that one sees on weekends. He told me with some sadness in his voice that he hasn’t done that for quite a while either, and added, "I used to play baseball too until I blew out my right shoulder!" When I'd asked him how he was I hadn't expected to end up feeling like I was his doctor.

            On my way home I stopped at Freshco where the red grapes were a little soft, so I got some green ones, which weren’t much better. I also bought some raspberries, some cheddar cheese (why do I bother to add the word cheese? I don’t think there are cheddar rutabagas) and a jar of honey.

            It was a relief to be free from school for a month, though I will probably use my holiday to do all of next term’s reading. My relief was somewhat haunted by the fact that I’d forgotten to include textual examples in my in-class essay, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.

            Before going home I dropped my prescription off at Vina Pharmacy, but told them I’d pick it up the next day.

            I went out and bought a can of Creemore. I usually don’t drink beer on Thursdays but since I’d skipped my Wednesday beer to study, I made up for it.

            After a late lunch I took a late siesta.

            That night I ate my last three pork ribs and watched the last episode of the first season of Peter Gunn. As usual, the plot was pretty thin but they pulled out all the stops by bringing back some of the quirky characters from previous episodes. This story begins with two hoods breaking into an artist’s studio. It’s weird that all criminal activity in this show is done by guys in suits and hats. Aren’t burglars supposed to wear black so as to blend in with the night? They’ve come to steal a painting but Luther, the artist wakes up and grabs a gun that he seems to have been sleeping with and confronts the thieves. But the crooks did something clever that I’d never seen in a crime show. The taller one puts up his hands in surrender and steps in front of the shorter one. Then the shorter one pokes his gun out from under the armpit of the guy in front and kills the painter. Next we see Gunn in his apartment and the doorbell rings. An attractive blonde woman in early middle age has come to hire him. This is the first time he’s seen a client outside of Mother’s. The woman won’t give her name but tells Gunn that the painting that the thieves stole from Luther was of her. She does not say so but the implication is that it’s a nude portrait. She says, "Luther and I were …” She needs possession of the painting because her husband is a public figure and the scandal would destroy him. At Mother's, Edie is singing "Just You, Just Me" by Jesse Greer and Raymond Klages. 

            Gunn goes to Luther’s studio where a beautiful beatnik abstract expressionist painter in black named Sabrina is standing on her head. He says he’s looking for a Luther painting and she directs him to Wilbur. She tries to get Gunn to stand on his head but he says, “My change will fall out!” At Wilbur’s, Herbie Mann is playing the flute (although he is uncredited) accompanied only by a man in dark glasses gently playing two finger cymbals, though he plays them with both hands as if they were large. 

            During the solo, Wilbur’s silent girlfriend Capri goes into a trance and begins to dance to the music. It isn’t very interesting dancing though, just a lot of shaking and bending forward. Wilbur tells him that two men named Shaw and Maddox had been trying get hold of Luther’s painting before he died. Gunn goes to the warehouse district and knocks on a door where he is let inside to talk with Shaw and Maddox. They say they have no painting until he offers them $10,000. He finds out the woman’s name is Elsa Keyes. He says he’ll be back with the money. Gunn meets with Elsa and finds out that she is the wife of a state senator. Gunn goes to see the little pool shark named Babby, who has a special platform on wheels on which he stands when he’s shooting. He has appeared on Peter Gunn a few times and there is a signature piece of comical music that Henry Mancini has composed that always plays when Babby is on screen.  

            Babby tells Gunn that Frankie Barber is the one looking to buy the painting. Gunn goes back to Shaw and Maddox. They disarm him and take him in where Frankie is not happy to see him. Shaw and Maddox tell them to start bidding and Gunn says $10,000. They go back and forth until Gunn says $20,000 and Frankie pulls a gun. He shoots both Shaw and Maddox and runs out of the warehouse with the painting, firing backward at Gunn as he leaves. Gunn is still unarmed. He jumps Frankie’s convertible as he’s driving away. They struggle as the car careens down the alley and finally crashes into a pile of boxes. The cops arrive just as Gunn is knocking Frankie out and then tells them to take him away. Gunn fishes the portrait out of Frankie’s car, unrolls it to have a look and then walks away with it. It would have been funnier if the portrait had been an unrecognizable abstract expressionist painting of Elsa’s "soul" all along.

            Elsa was played by Hungarian actor Hanna Hertelendy.

            Sabrina was played by Jackie Joseph, who played Audrey in the original Little Shop of Horrors. She was also president of the Hollywood Dumpettes, a ladies group for divorced wives. 

            Again, Capri was played by Capri Candela and there is still nothing I could find out about her besides her appearances on Peter Gunn other than that she played a dancer in one episode of One Step Beyond.

            

John Clare

            Veganism is a very urban idea. Very few people that were raised on farms become vegans because they already live close to nature. Veganism is a misplaced attempt to commune with the nature that city people feel distanced from.

            I was comfortable riding to class with a few layers and my winter gloves, but at Dovercourt and Bloor a thirtyish woman with no coat and wearing a short black dress with black stockings crossed against traffic from the northeast corner diagonally to the southwest corner. She looked like she might be an Indigenous Latin American, perhaps from Brazil.

            At Bloor and Brunswick a guy with a small conga drum was walking around and very loudly and eloquently talking to himself.

            When I got to the classroom there was no Economics class and some of my fellow students had already gone in. Gabriel had set up Professor Weisman’s desk and lecterns and so I just had to roll up the projector screen and the window shades.

            Professor Weisman announced that she had a root canal yesterday and so she’s on codeine and she’s not going to stand as much nor project her voice and so she asked the people at the back to move closer.

            For the last lecture of the year we looked at John Clare, the peasant poet.

            Both John Clare and Charlotte Smith are important for canon formation.

            Clare for a long time was considered a minor Romantic poet but no anymore. He had no formal schooling. He was one of the rustics that Wordsworth admired for their simplicity. There is some criticism that the rustics were a bit of a Roman holiday for the Romantics.

            Clare learned the basics of reading and writing as a child but became a voracious reader and sometimes would fast in order to save the money to buy a book. His writing never developed to a mastery of proper grammar and spelling and there is a lot of debate as to whether his works should be published as written or standardized.

            There was a vogue for peasant poetry when he first became published in 1820.

            He became mentally ill and possibly schizophrenic but his asylum poems are interesting.

            Clare’s poem, "The Lament of Swordy Well" encapsulates many of the themes we’ve studied in this course. It was written in the 1830s but not published until the 20^th Century.

            Swordy Well or Swaddywell Pit was an ancient stone quarry first used by the Romans. In Clare’s youth it served as a waste ground for gathering firewood or for grazing sheep. But then the practice of enclosure came, which decimated common grounds. Tracts were purchased by absentee landlords and worked by hired labourers. Swordy Well was enclosed, converted to private property and was dug up for limestone to use on roads.

            We’ve seen prospect poems and loco descriptive poems about human beings in a landscape but in Swordy Well the landscape is speaking in the voice of homelessness. Nature speaking in the voice of a homeless man was a first for English literature.

            The professor had me read the first four stanzas to the class.

            The landscape is complaining about having been violated. He presents Swordy Well as being from among the parish poor. It is not begging and not trying to attract pity for charity though the poor often have no choice. It is asserting an authority to ask for customary rights and some degree of justice to keep his own because he is still of value.

            Swordy Well’s only justice is poetry and the lament parallels that of the peasant poet. 

            One of the social justice issues was the discussion of leisure, which could not be taken for granted. To experience a landscape at leisure was a rallying point.

            The mention of the absence of butterflies at Swordy Well shows that it is about more than subsistence but also aesthetics.

            There are no streams or soil cover. There is only poetry. There have been permanent changes to the landscape and so it is not enduring like Tintern Abbey. This is a direct counter to Wordsworth. The verse that begins with “There was a time …” is a Wordsworthian account that echoes “The Immortality Ode”.

            Swordy Well barely, but still recognizes his self.

            “Why I call a Christian Turk is they are Turks to me”. “Turk” was a racist term for a cruel and tyrannical man.

            I told the professor that Swordy Well is now a nature preserve and so there is life there again.

            I stopped at Freshco on my way home and bought grapes, raspberries, bread, yogourt and paper towels.

            When I got home I called my doctor’s office to make an appointment to see him early Thursday afternoon about my shin injury, because it doesn’t seem to be getting any better after two weeks. 

            I typed out my lecture notes.

            Though Wednesday nights I usually have a beer with dinner I skipped it this time so I could focus on preparing for my exam the next day. I didn’t watch Peter Gunn for the same reason. I had a quick snack of some kuna pops and a slice of bread with cheese at my computer and kept on studying.