Sunday Sundries, 155

1. AOTW: Oh, no one special. The usual--though we had a near-winner last night when a guy pulled out in front of us from a side street, forcing Danny to brake--and hard.

2. We finished Season 3 of The Doctor Blake Mysteries (all that's so far available to stream on Netflix--though there has been a Season 4, and Season 5 is about to head into production, I've read).

And I wept at the end when Lucien (Dr. Blake) and Jean ... you know ...

I'd also wept earlier in the evening at the end of Saturday Night Live: Weekend Update--Summer Edition (via Hulu) when Michael Che, who is co-anchor with Colin Jost, signed off by saying, "And I'm Dick Gregory." There's a young man--a talented young comedian--who knows where he came from, knows that without Gregory's ground-breaking work, he, Che, would not be sitting in that seat. I looked over at Joyce: Tears there, too. (For those who don't remember, Gregory passed away on August 19.) A classy salute from Che ... 

3. I've been reading a recent book about English poet (and Classical scholar) A. E. Housman (1859-1936), author of A Shropshire Lad (1896), a collection of poems that were and remain highly popular. (The new book--see image--is by Peter Parker (no relation to, you know, Spidey): Housman Country.)

The Shropshire collection includes one of the first poems I ever memorized ("When I was young and twenty"--for a high school assignment), and I've memorized a couple of others recently, including "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now" (a few months ago) and, just last week, "Into my heart on air that kills" (see entire poem below). Gonna learn some more of them, too!

In the New York Times today was an op-ed piece about the value of memorizing poetry--a subject I have written about in this space before--and a topic for a talk I gave at WRA about a half-dozen years ago (when I'd reached 100 memorized poems; now I'm at 211!). (Link to the NYT piece.) 

I started having my students memorize back in the 1980s--and never regretted it ... well, I did regret not doing it sooner!

Into my heart on air that kills 

  From yon far country blows: 

What are those blue remembered hills, 

  What spires, what farms are those? 

 

That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain, 

The happy highways where I went 

  And cannot come again.

4. I finished but one book this week. Some of you know that I've been reading the novels of William Faulkner that I'd never gotten around to. This week it was Sanctuary (1931), and I realized--not too many pages after I'd started--that I had read it previously. But ... it was a long, long time ago. Early in our marriage. The summer of 1970 or 1971 (before our son arrived in the summer of 1972; that changed everything!). When my year of teaching middle school was out, I made a pile of books by the couch in our tiny living room and sat there, reading my way through them, for most of the day. One was Sanctuary.

But ... this time ... I didn't stop. I liked it. Admired it. Didn't remember a lot of the detail. (Can you imagine? I mean, that was only about a half-century ago!)

It's one of Faulkner's grimmer novels (which is saying something). It involves a young woman, Temple Drake, who ends up at the mercy of some Bad Dudes (principal among them is Popeye--I know, I know). (The Popeye cartoon was first syndicated in 1929, only a couple of years before Sanctuary, so ... who knows? The OED traces the term popeye back to 1928; here's the definition: A protruding, bulging, or prominent eye.)

Anyway, Popeye is the worst of the worst, and let's just say that Temple, uh, suffers a little in the book. (I will not mention the corn cob.)

Some other good stuff is going on: the legal system in the South, town-v.-gown, substance abuse, murder, etc. A real feel-good family novel!  Perfect for Christmas Eve!

FYI: Sanctuary was the novel he wrote after As I Lay Dying (1930), a novel I read with Dr. Ravitz back at Hiram College in the mid-1960s, a novel I taught to my WRA juniors, 2001-2011.

5. A rough emotional week: the deaths of a wonderful former student, of a great high-school friend and teammate ...

6. Soon, we're heading up to Lenox, Mass., to visit my brothers and help celebrate my mom's 98th birthday!

7. Final word--A word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers.

     - from dictionary.com--hadn't realized that verisimilitude had an adjective cousin!

verisimilar [ver-uh-sim-uh-ler]

adjective: having the appearance of truth; likely; probable: a verisimilar tale.

QUOTES

We may sense in the increasing pressure to produce novels that are lifelike, probably, verisimilar, an effort to tie the Novel down, to clip its wings so that it will not be guilty of the extravagances of moral imagining.

-- Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel, 1996

ORIGIN

Verisimilar comes from Latin Latin vērīsimil(is) (vērī, genitive singular of vērum “truth,” and similis “like”) and -ar, a suffix with the general sense “of the kind of, pertaining to, having the form or character of.” It entered English in the late 1600s.