Lisa Gaye

            I guess it was because I was nervous about my essay deadline but I didn’t get to sleep until after 3:30 on Wednesday morning and so I feel exhausted when I got up at 5:00. After I felt better although I was still a little wiped out. I didn’t have time to think about however because after yoga I needed to get back to work on my paper. I started at 6:00.

There was a distraction outside for a while as a young woman had doored a big guy with long white hair and a long white beard. I think she’d wrecked his bike just enough so he couldn’t ride it to work, and he was extremely angry about that to the point that he was shouting and swearing. She was immensely apologetic and not only offered to give him all the money in her wallet but also her transit pass. His response was only, “How am I gonna fuckin lock my bike?” After a few minutes a cop showed up and things got quieter. I went back to work on my essay.

After six hours the essay part was finished even though the paper was more than three hundred words short of the minimum requirement. I couldn’t think of anything more to say and besides it was too late. I needed to do the citations but that took me two hours and so I was a little over half an hour late for class.

            Someone had taken my usual seat and so I sat on the other side of the room and closer to Professor Li. They were discussing Oscar Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. They were going through it line by line as we’d started doing last week and thy were now at the lines, “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril”.

            I think it means that if you go too deep you are lost and if you don’t go deep enough you are lost.

            The next phrase we looked at was, “Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital”.

            I explained that if a work of art had depth then different people would reach into it at different levels, which would result in a wide variety of opinions.

            In the final line Wilde declares, “All art is quite useless.”

            I said that the artist has no intention for a work to educate the reader or to have any other effect. Obviously though artists do write in order to produce a reaction in themselves.

            Giulia did her seminar starter on The Picture of Dorian Gray and claimed that it argues that art is a reflection of morality. I would say it’s a reflection of self and morality just comes unintentionally along for the ride.

            We talked a bit about the novel. I said that Dorian Gray is already like a painting from the start. The professor agreed with me.

            The painter describes on page 129 of Chapter nine Dorian’s face having been everything that art should be, unconscious, ideal and remote. The professor commented that is not a description of a realistic painting. But the final picture was meant to be realistic.

            Dorian becomes devoid of life.

            “Science” and “fact” are Victorian buzzwords.

            Our second seminar started was by Kevin and he wrote about Oscar Wilde’s poem, “Symphony in Yellow”.

            He says that Wilde places the incidents of yellow objects in the scene like notes in music. Wilde says that a barge is loaded with yellow hay but in all my childhood on a farm I never saw yellow hay. He might have mistaken straw for hay. If hay turns yellow it’s dead and useless for feeding livestock. I doubt if someone would bother to load it on a barge because one would probably rather burn it.

            The professor says that Hellenism is everywhere in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, but less so Orientalism. She showed us some slides. One is of The Peacock Room designed by James Whistler using the Anglo-Japanese style. Another was of a peacock feather fabric design which is at the Victoria and Albert Museum but which can also still be bought at Liberty in London. She showed us a sample that she’d brought from home but this time didn’t pass it around.

            There are four stanzas in Wilde’s poem and he mentions yellow in every one but finishes with green. I discovered later that it was probably inspired by a much longer poem by Théophile Gautier called “Symphonie en blanc majeur” which Wilde referred to as “that flawless masterpiece of colour and music”. In that poem Gautier describes white and only refers to yellow early on when he says that the scene he is describing would make flowers yellow with jealousy and in the last stanza he asks, “Who would add pink?” Here is my translation of the first verse:

From their white necks curving and long

We envision tales of the north

On the old Rhine where human swans

Sing as they swim beside the shore

           

            Near the end of class we started looking at “De Profundis”, Oscar Wilde’s letter from prison to Lord Alfred Douglas. It was his love affair with Alfred that led, because of Alfred’s father, to Wilde being imprisoned for homosexuality. The letter has somewhat of an arrogant tone in that, while offering forgiveness to Alfred he tells him that he needs him to forgive him.

            I handed in my essay. This was our last assignment and so all I have left to work on from now to spring will be assignments for Indigenous Studies.

            I told the professor that a half-year course is too short for the subject of the Aesthetic and Decadent Movements.

            As I left University College the sun was giving the tops of the old buildings of the east side of King’s College Circle one last golden kiss just before descending behind the rooftops of the west side.

            I stopped at Loblaws to buy a couple of bags of black grapes. Ahead of me was a young Latina mother with her two very exuberant children, a boy and a younger curly headed girl. I remembered having seen the woman with her son in the same area on Queen Street a few days before. The boy had said something to her I guess about his gender and suddenly she stopped to speak to him in a very serious voice to stress, “You are a male! You are a male boy!” She was buying fruit and a few healthy baked treats. The boy wanted a bag of Doritos but she told him, “We don’t eat that! We have blueberries, we have blackberries and apples!” She was surprised to hear her son inform her, “Yes we do eat it because they gave it to us at school.” Both children were very outgoing and made eye contact with me and smiled while we were waiting.

            I had a late lunch of cheese on toast.

            It was too late to take a siesta and so I just forced myself to stay awake and tried to get caught up on my journal.

            I had oven fries with salsa and melted cheese with a beer for dinner while watching the thirteenth episode of Zorro. This was the end of the first third of the first season and marked a turning point because it was the end of Captain Monastario being the villain of each story.

            As the story begins Monastario has arrested Don Diego because he has finally deduced that he is really Zorro. Diego takes it all very calmly but plays dumb. Meanwhile the Viceroy Don Esteban makes a surprise visit with his daughter Dona Constancia. Monastario holds a dinner party in his honour and to show how successful he has been in running Los Angeles shows him that he has captured Zorro. As he has a copy of Zorro’s costume he has dressed Diego as Zorro. But when he unmasks him Esteban and Constancia recognize Diego because they are old friends. They do not believe that Don Diego is Zorro. Diego asks to speak with Esteban and Constancia in private. When Monastario comes back in the room Esteban asks him why he is so sure that the man in the costume is Zorro. He answers that to have the same build, height and moustache as Zorro is too much of a coincidence and so it is definitely Zorro. But suddenly it is revealed that while Monastario was out of the room they had dressed one of the soldiers in the costume. Angrily Monastario challenges Diego to a swordfight. It’s another very fake battle because while Diego does not use skilful swordsmanship he shows great reflexes in avoiding Monastario’s sword, hitting him with furniture and slapping him on the ass. Suddenly Diego’s servant Bernardo, dressed as Zorro, comes riding up to the inn and throws a knife at the door. The viceroy has planned on dismissing Monastario all along but now has him arrested and puts Sergeant Garcia in charge.

            Constancia was played by Lisa Gaye, who played Gwen Kirby on the TV series “How to Marry a Millionaire”. Most of her films were rock and roll B movies of the 50s. She said she got on the back of Steve McQueen’s motorcycle once but never did so again because he drove like a suicidal maniac.

           

Mating Call of the Fireman in Heat

            I slept straight through till 4:30, despite having gone to bed an hour and a half early.

            I’ve got "Titicaca" by Serge Gainsbourg half memorized.

            I worked a bit on my essay until 12:30 and then I went to bed until 14:00.

            When I got up the deadline for my essay was 24 hours away and so I had half a bag of jasmine rice coconut crispy rolls for lunch and went dark to work on my paper. I took a few minutes in the evening to post my blog and then went back to work. I had a whole chicken in the fridge and would normally have cut it up but I didn’t want to spend the time and so I just grilled the whole hen. I had one of its legs, a potato and gravy for dinner and kept on working.

            There have been so many fire trucks lately that I wonder if the sirens are their mating call and they are reproducing.

            Since I was writing about both Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire I added a bit about Gautier because he’s a connection between the two authors. I translated some parts of Baudelaire’s poems and part of a poem by Gautier so I could quote them in a way that made sense to me even though there were translations for both poets available.

            I went to bed at 00:40.

People Are Places

            On Monday morning I started finishing on my essay at 6:00 right after yoga. I had breakfast and coffee while working and by 9:00 I was done with the writing. But then it took me six hours to do the citations and so I missed the Indigenous Studies lecture. I also missed the first twenty minutes of tutorial but when I got there everyone including Safia, our TA, was just sitting around complaining about the fact that our professor has not included anything about Canadian Indigenous studies in our course. Safia told me that we weren’t actually having a tutorial because she wasn’t feeling well and had only come in to pick up our essays. I gave her mine. I learned that our second essay topic had been posted and that we have to compare two treaty documents and write a paper on our reflections. I asked if they are Canadian documents and somebody said they are both from the US but when I downloaded them later I saw that they are both Canadian. Safia asked me if I’d gone to the lecture. I said that I’d just spent six hours on citations. A young woman called out, “Cite while you write!” It’s good advice but it doesn’t always work. I often write three times as much material as I use and so I would be doing mostly useless citations if I were to cite while writing. I joined in with the complaints and declared that this is the shabbiest course I’ve ever taken. The readings are not posted ahead of time. For whatever he lectured about today there were no readings. I heard that a couple of students were arguing with him during the lecture. I suggested that he doesn’t talk about Canadian Indigenous Studies because he just doesn’t know anything about them. Safia confirmed that he’s admitted that. I asked why then our textbook is specifically on the subject of Canadian Indigenous Studies. She said she’d have a talk with him about it.

            We left about fifteen minutes early.

            I stopped at Loblaws on the way home where I bought a strawberry rhubarb pie and three bags of black grapes. The escalator between the ground and second floor was only going up and so I had to go back down in the elevator. I assume there’s a stairs somewhere. I made another detour to Freshco to get a jug of vinegar but I also bought a half pint of raspberries.

            I had a late lunch of potato chips with salsa.

            It was too late to take a siesta but I didn’t feel that sleepy anyway. Maybe I was still pumped from being in essay mode. I submitted a digital copy of my essay online as that was required too.

            Here’s my essay:

People are Places

Cultures define themselves by the environments with which they interact. All ecosystems are in flux and this is especially true of rivers. Because rivers exist in motion, groups of people whose lives are interdependent with them have nomadic cultures that span the territories traversed by their flow.

Some examples are: the Wǝlastǝkwewiyik of New Brunswick who named themselves after the Wǝlastǝkw or Beautiful River; the Mississauga in Ontario who drew their title from mississakis, meaning “many river mouths” and the Onödowá’ga or Those of the Big Hill in the Great Lakes area of New York.

What these three groups had in common was harmony with the fluctuating ecosystems with which each moved in cadence. All of them planted the three sisters and travelled by way of lakes and rivers.

Halfway down the Beautiful River on its eastern shore where the Big and Little Shiktehawk streams feed it was an important place for the Wəlastəqwewiyik because it was the beginning of the shortest route from the Wǝlastǝkw to the Miramichi. They would canoe fifteen kilometres up the Shiktehawk and make a twenty-three-kilometre portage to the Miramichi, which flows to the ocean.

“Shiktehawk” means “Where he killed him”.  War parties of Kanien’kehá:ka or People of the Flint Stone Place of eastern New York  would portage from the Kaniatarowanenneh or The Big Waterway to the head of the Beautiful River and descend to attack Wəlastəqwewiyik settlements. It was on the perdue between the big and small Shiktehawks that a Wəlastəqwewiyik chief and a Kanien’kehá:ka chief fought for an afternoon until the Kanien’kehá:ka chief was defeated and buried there.

Sixty-and-a-half kilometres downstream from Shiktehawk the Eel River, “Madawamkeetook” or “Rocky at its Mouth” flows into the western side of the Beautiful River (Raymond). For its last nineteen kilometres the Eel becomes turbulent and a portage of eight kilometres was required for those trying to reach the Wǝlastǝkw. On a plateau, to guard the east end of that portage the village of Meductic or “End of the Path” was built.

When winter approached hunting parties went up the Beautiful River until it froze, stored their canoes and travelled on the ice. A group of ten would have two French guns between them. They hiked north to the St Lawrence and in the spring made moose hide canoes. In these crafts they paddled back down the Wǝlastǝkw to retrieve their birch canoes and returned to Meductic to begin the sowing season.

They downed trees with stone axes and burned stumps to plant corn. They planted three kernels and three beans under mounds a meter apart so the beans would climb the stalks. They also sowed squash, pumpkin and tobacco. After planting they dug roots, came back to weed the corn, dug more roots, returned to hill the corn and then went upriver to catch salmon. After drying the fish they went back to harvest the corn, some of which was boiled, dried and stored and the rest was left to ripen and then pounded to meal for cakes.

            After the revolution ten thousand Loyalists settled along the Beautiful River, edging the Wəlastəqwewiyik away from their traditional territory. Officials came to ask a chief by what right the Wəlastəqwewiyik held the lands. He pointed at the graveyard and said, “These are the graves of our grandfathers, these are the graves of our fathers, these are the graves of our children!”.

In 1851 there were settlers squatting on reserved land in Meductic but rather than remove the illegal occupants the federal government purchased a small two hundred acre plot for a new reserve up the Beautiful River where it is fed by the Meduxnekeag in the town of Woodstock.

In 1945 a centralization plan was hatched to move all the Wəlastəqwewiyik to Kingsclear near Fredericton. The Wəlastəqwewiyik were able to fight geographic centralization through political centralization.

The band purchased more land in 1992 and now the reserve has 426 acres. In 1996 they began commercial fishing operations that work at a profit and in 1997 they started several successful business ventures on the reserve.

Their Wiskolamson “The Wind Blows Very Strongly” renewable energy project has five wind turbines in operation and there are plans for building more. The project is expected to provide clean power to 6000 homes.

The Wəlastəqwewiyik have lived, fished, hunted, gathered and farmed from one end of the Beautiful River to the other for centuries. Although their intimate interaction with the river has been compromised, they continue to maintain a culture based on their traditional relationship with the river. The Maliseet Nation Conservation Council continues to assess and advance the health of the Wǝlastǝkw watershed's ecosystem.

“Maliseet" is a Mi'kmaq word for the Wəlastəqwewiyik, meaning “one who speaks carefully". It is the speech of the Wəlastəqwewiyik that may have named the large group of Eastern Woodland people that share with them the Algonquin language, as their word "ɛlæˈɡomoɡwik" means "they are our relatives". Their relatives in the Great Lakes region were the Anishinaabe, who are also river people.

The Humber River was called Cobechenonk by the Anishinaabe for “leave the canoes and go back”. Long before European contact the Anishnaabe traversed the Toronto Carrying Place Trail from the mouth of the Cobechenonk to the place at Ouentironk or Lake Simcoe called Toron-ten by the Wendat and meaning "the place where trees stand in the water”.

In the late 17^th Century the fur trade compelled the Onödowá’ga or Seneca to come from the south side of Lake Ontario to establish villages on the north shore. Near the mouth of the Cobechenonk at the beginning of the portage on the eastern bank they built Teiaiagon, which sometimes had five thousand people and fifty long houses. Around the village the three sisters were sown in raised mounds that protected the seeds from late frost. The leaves of the squash shaded the mounds to keep roots cool and discourage weeds. Men fished, hunted, made war, traded and cleared fields and women tended crops.

In the late 17^th Century the Mississauga, a river people that had mastered the waters of Ontario, moved south from the northeast shore of Lake Huron to the mouths of rivers like Cobechenonk on the north shore of Lake Ontario, forcing out the Onödowá’ga that had colonized the area for forty years. They established their own settlement across the Cobechenonk from Teiaiagon.

They planted corn on the riverbank and at the mouth of the river. Small parties hunted game during peboon or winter, tapped maple trees in seegwum or spring, met with other groups to fish in neebin or summer, and harvested wild rice on riverbeds in tuhgwuhgin or fall. They used maple syrup to season rice and game. Birch bark was used for utensils, containers, wigwam covering and transportation. When they moved they left the wigwam frames behind, rolled up the birch bark and paddled away in light and fast birch bark canoes.

In 1787, three Mississauga chiefs signed the Toronto Purchase Treaty. The British bought Toronto from the Mississauga for £1,700 and a few trade items. But the chiefs had not signed the document and the legality of the treaty was questionable. In 1805 a new treaty was signed by eight chiefs with a payment of ten shillings. The Mississauga were reserved exclusive fishing rights in Etobicoke Creek and other tributaries to the west but there is no record that this was ever honoured.

Between 1783 and 1820 Loyalists moved into the traditional homelands of the Mississauga to clear their hunting grounds for farms and to overexploit the waters. It took two generations for the federal government to settle the Toronto land claim with the Mississauga of the Credit First Nation for $145 million.

If we live in relation to the ecosystem of a place it becomes part of our identity. When cultures such as those of the Europeans allow such a relationship to gradually fade over centuries, the pain of separation from one’s environment is far less painful. But when the loss of place is sudden, as was the case for the Wəlastəqwewiyik, the Mississauga and many other Indigenous groups, the alienation is devastating.

            That night for dinner I had the last of my chicken legs, a potato and some gravy while watching Zorro.

            This story begins with a funeral for Martinez, the man that had impersonated Zorro in the previous episode. But it turns out that Martinez is not dead and that Captain Monastario has him holed up in a cave in the hills. Monastario asks him to pose as Zorro again so as to discredit the hero. He tells him to rob the jewelled crown of the virgin from the monastery as Zorro and he can keep the crown. But while he is committing the robbery one of the padre’s Native servants tries to stop him and is killed. When Don Diego hears that Zorro was seen riding to the mission he changes to Zorro and goes there but is surprised when Native start shooting arrows at him and calling him a killer. He can’t appear as Zorro again until he figures out what’s going on. He goes to the local cantina with some fake jewels that are convincingly similar to those that had been on the stolen crown. The same dancer as in the last episode is performing for the crowd and when she is finished and people are tossing coins he secretly throws a fake ruby among them. The jewel gets a lot of attention and one of Monastario’s men goes back to tell the captain. Monastario figures Martinez has been locally spending the jewels and he goes out to the hills to confront him with Don Diego following. Monastario stabs Martinez while he’s sleeping but it was really leaves under a blanket, as Martinez had anticipated betrayal. They have a sword battle and Martinez wounds Monastario’s hand. Don Diego can’t let Martinez get away and so he comes forward and takes up Monastario’s sword. What proceeds is a fake looking battle as Don Diego pretends to be a clumsy swordsman so as not to reveal that he is Zorro while still successfully warding off Martinez. Clearly the actor playing Martinez is toning down his skill for the battle with Don Diego. Don Diego wins while making it look like an accident.

            Shortly after dinner my not having taken a siesta earlier caught up with me and I went to bed an hour and a half early.

Savage Sirens

            On Sunday morning I got a third of “Titicaca” by Serge Gainsbourg memorized. I discovered that I didn’t have all the words in one of the lines and so I tracked those down and had to adjust the translation.

            So many sirens today one would think that they had become an industry. Maybe they’ve learned to harvest the sound as an energy source to power a city of deaf people. The siren shooting vehicles are like a tribe of savage cowboys shooting up the town on a Sunday night. All this while I was trying to concentrate on writing my Indigenous Studies essay.

            I took an early siesta in the late morning and when I got up at 13:00 and except for making a quick lunch and later a quick dinner, I worked steadily for almost twelve hours. By half past midnight I had finally whittled my notes down to just over a five-page essay. I went to bed thinking about how I was going to pull the home part of the paper into some sort of harmony with the Toronto part.

           

Elvera Corona

            On Saturday morning my hip was bothering me more than usual. I assume it’s been aggravated by modelling work.

I memorized the first verse and the chorus of “Titicaca” by Serge Gainsbourg.

            I worked a bit on my Indigenous Studies essay, which is due in two days.

            I finished listening to The Zombies discography. Besides “She’s Not There”, “Tell Her No” and especially "Time of the Season" most of their stuff sounds like any British invasion band.

            I went to No Frills where I bought three bags of grapes, a half pint of blueberries, a small whole chicken, mouthwash, Greek yogourt, salsa and a jar of roasted peanuts.

            I had cheddar on toast for lunch.

            I worked on my Indigenous Studies essay.

            I did my exercises in the afternoon while watching another seven minutes of The Naked City episode "A Turn of Events". Continuing to investigate the murder of the guy in the office the cops interview a taxi dance club manager and then some fancy people on a balcony overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. 

            I spent almost three hours straight working on my Indigenous Studies paper. There’s really not much of an essay there yet with only about a day and a half to go.

            I baked oven fries, put salsa on top and then melted cheese. I had them with a beer for dinner while watching Zorro.

            This story begins in a cantina where customers are being entertained by a beautiful and very talented flamenco dancer. After her performance two men get into a sword fight over her affections but one is an excellent swordsman and the other is killed. Monastario arrests him but tells him he can use his swordsmanship to win his freedom. Monastario plans to invite all of the important landowners of Los Angeles to a dinner party and to have the swordsman arrive dressed as Zorro and rob everyone. The plan is to turn the people against Zorro. But Don Diego also attends the party and when the fake Zorro begins to rob everyone Diego slips away to change to Zorro. He defeats both Monastario and the fake Zorro in sword battles and his reputation is saved.

            The dancer was played by Elvera Corona, who got a bit of work in television but not enough for much to be known about her. She certainly was on of the best Spanish dancers I’ve seen on TV.

            I worked some more on my essay. At the end of the day I managed to whittle my notes down from 37 to 29 pages.

Yma Sumac

            On Friday morning I finished posting “Des vents des pets des poums” (Farting Up a Storm) by Serge Gainsbourg on my Christian’s Translations blog and started memorizing Gainsbourg’s “Titicaca”. The song is about a woman that is said to be an Inca princess that the speaker wants to have sex with. Of course Titicaca is a lake between Bolivia and Peru but Gainsbourg is saying he wants to plunge in her “Titicaca”, meaning her vagina. I suspect that the character is inspired by the singer Yma Sumac, who claimed to be the last Incan princess.

            I went to Freshco in the late morning where I bought raspberries, grapes, cinnamon bread, a pack of chicken drumsticks, old cheddar, three bags of milk, oven fries, spoon size shredded wheat, orange juice and olive oil.

            I had spicy oven fries for lunch.

            I finished my second reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray. It really is a great book and I’m glad to have read it again although it was time consuming given that my essay is due in five days and I’ve barely started it. I did make three and a half pages of notes while reading though.

            Having worked twice this week doing short poses by body and especially my hip was sore since Wednesday morning. On top of that I’d been too busy to do my afternoon exercises. I finally did them that Friday while watching the ending of the accidentally silent Naked City episode “The Sandman” and the first six minutes of another one that downloaded without audio called “A Turn of Events”.

            As far as I could tell The Sandman was about a washed out boxer that had killed a cop and when his brother or friend ratted on him, in an emotional moment he killed him as well.

            “A Turn of Events” begins with a man in an office looking out on Coney Island getting shot by a hand coming through a door. The wife is interviewed and a gun is found in her drawer. That’s as far as I got.

            I wrote a second page for the rough draft of my essay on Artist as Outlaw. I talked about both Oscar Wilde’s and Charles Baudelaire’s use of Satan as a rebel figure. In a mockery of the Roman Catholic mass Baudelaire wrote “Les Litanies de Satan” (The Litanies of Satan), not because he was a Satanist but because he wanted to put the church in its place. Wilde’s character of Lord Henry is clearly that morning star who fell from heaven as a rebel. Lord Henry’s artist friend Basil is a metaphor for the creator and Dorian Gray himself is Adam. The painting of Dorian becomes an externalization of his own soul.

            I started working on the third page of the first draft of my Indigenous Studies essay.

            I had a potato, a chicken leg and gravy for dinner while watching Zorro.

            With the story arc of the first nine episodes finished this tenth story stands alone. It begins in the fort with the soldiers discovering one morning that their flag has been replaced with Zorro's symbol of the letter zed (zeta in Spanish). They try to get it down but the rope has been removed and none of them can climb the pole. When Captain Monastario sees it two peasants begin to laugh and so he has them arrested. He tells them that their punishment is to repair the stable roof by sunset the next day or else receive sixty lashes and sixty days in jail. They will need thirty buckets of pitch from the tar pits, which are many kilometres away, and they will be given no wagon and no help. This is an impossible task. When Don Diego hears of this he feels bad that the prank he pulled as Zorro has caused such suffering of innocent people. Meanwhile Monastario decides that the only way to catch Zorro would be to have an ally among the people he serves. He pretends to give Sergeant Garcia a dishonourable discharge from the army so that he can go undercover as a peasant. He is shunned by everyone but Don Diego who buys him a drink. Garcia tells Diego that he wants to join forces with Zorro. Later Zorro comes to see him and tells him to meet him at dawn at the signpost of the La Brea Rancho. Garcia goes to tell Monastario but Zorro follows him and learns of the plot. At dawn Monastario, Garcia and several lancers arrive at the signpost where there is a note telling Garcia to meet him at San Vincente Rock at the base of the mountains. They ride several kilometres to the rock but on it is painted the message for him to meet him at the top of the mountain. They climb to the summit but of course Zorro is not there. Meanwhile back at the fort a soldier receives a written order forged in Monastario’s hand to put every bucket at the fort into Monastario’s coach and to drive it to the tar pits. At the pits Zorro forces the soldier to fill the buckets with pitch and to take them back to the fort to help repair the roof of the stable. Zorro cuts several bushes and moves them to camouflage the tar pits and then he rides to meet the returning soldiers. He taunts Monastario and leads him on a long chase. Zorro's horse jumps the tar pits but Monastario and his men wind up tumbling into them. The roof gets tarred and so does Monastario.

            

Lacenaire, Murder and Poetry

            On Thursday morning I finished working out the chords to “Des vents des pets des poums” (Farting Up a Storm) by Serge Gainsbourg and began posting it on my Christian’s Translations blog.

            I worked on translating parts of two poems by Théophile Gautier that are referenced by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray because I might use them for my essay. One poem is about the mummified hand of the poet and murderer Pierre François Lacenaire as seen in a museum:

With depraved curiosity

I touch it despite my disgust

that it is still stained with cruelty

this cold flesh with its down of rust

Mummified and yellow

like the hand of a pharaoh

Stretching faunlike fingers

as if temptation lingers

            The other poem is about Venice:

On a scale chromatic

breasts dripping pearlescent beads

Venus of the Adriatic

rises, white and pink from the sea

On the azure waves the duomos

follow the phrase with pure contour

like throats rounded and swollen

while lifting the sighs of amour

The skiff arrives and I’m deposed

to a pillar its line is snared

before a facade in rose

on the marble of a stairs

            I had potato chips and salsa for lunch.

            I finished my translations.

            I grilled three chicken legs in the early afternoon because I had to go to work later and there would be no time when I got back. Half an hour before leaving I boiled a potato.

            I read more of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde before heading out and took the book with me.

            I worked for Peeter Maimik in the Design department of OCADU at the top of the pencil box. I think that every instructor I’ve worked for this year in Design has been a TA, whereas in the Fine Arts department it’s the people in charge of the courses that do the teaching in the life drawing sessions.

            I did a set of one-minute poses, another of twos and one more of fives before the break. I got a lot of reading done since Peeter didn’t ask me to do anything again for 40 minutes. He was just going from student to student and talking about their work. I felt kind of guilty just sitting there and the students were getting pretty bored. Finally he asked for two 20-minute poses. I finished ten minutes early.

            The way home was fairly clear but I’ve gotten very cautious while driving at night along stretches where I am crowded close to the streetcar tracks.

            When I got home I heated the dinner I’d already made. I had a potato, a chicken leg and some gravy while watching Zorro.

            In this story Don Nacho and Zorro’s father Don Alejandro are scheduled for trial but they are optimistic because the governor has guaranteed them a trial by a fair judge. But Monastario has a trick up his sleeve to make it so the two dons are found guilty and executed. He sends Sergeant Garcia to escort Judge Vasca to Los Angeles but as Vasca is known for his appetites the plan is to delay his journey with a feast so that the trial can take place without him. Garcia challenges Vasca to an eating contest, which Vasca easily wins in record time. Desperate for another way to delay the judge Garcia dopes his wine with a sleeping potion and puts him in a room at the inn. But Zorro has anticipated trouble and has come to make sure Vasca makes it to the trial. He forces Garcia to drink the sleeping potion and when he conks out he has his servant Bernardo dress up as Garcia. They made the story impossibly convenient by having Vasca sleepwalk and so Bernardo just guides him out the door. They rush him in a wagon to Los Angeles but Monastario starts the trial early with his own crooked lawyer Alcalde presiding. However, Zorro gets there ahead of Vasca’s carriage and just as Alcalde is about to declare the defendants guilty, concealed by the curtains behind his desk Zorro pokes his sword in his back and whispers for him to carefully consider his decision. He has no choice but to find the dons not guilty.

            Judge Vasca was played by Sebastian Cabot, who later became a star on Family Affair and later his own show “Checkmate”.