Sunday Sundries, 162

1. AOTW: Health club. Locker room. Danny is by his locker, preparing to strip for the shower. Nearby--a bench (about 8 feet long). In comes the AOTW. Chooses a locker right near Danny. Spreads all his things out the entire length of the bench. (No room for Danny's things.) Makes no eye contact. Is too big to punch. But you're never too big for the AOTW.

2. Last night Joyce and I drove to Kent to see Blade Runner 2049, which I've both wanted and not wanted to see. I loved the original Blade Runner in 1982 (I was not yet 40!), saw it with Joyce and my dear former student John Mlinek down at the theater on Shaker Square. At the time I thought it was the best film I'd ever seen. So, as I say, there was some ambivalence about going to see the new one.

But when I saw that Ridley Scott was involved (he directed the original), that sealed the deal--and it didn't hurt that Ryan Gosling was in it (we both like him a lot).

Here's what I was afraid of: What I'd liked about the original was its talkiness--lots of dialogue, lots of chat about what a human being is. (And, yes, the special effects were dazzling.) And I was afraid, this time, that it would be all boom-boom-boom-BOOM the way so many films are now.

Link to trailer.

And, yes, there was some of that (not all that much for a film way over two hours long)--but mostly it was talk and suspense and more debate about what it means to be a human being--not all that bad a debate to be having in These Dark Days.

Joyce and I both loved it.

And, sure, we could (and did) cavil about some things, but, for the most part, we were both very (gratefully) surprised. It retained the heart of the original.


3. I finished two books this week ...

     - The first was Housman Country: Into the Heart of England (2017) by Peter Parker (no, not that one), a book I've been picking away at for a bit. I've memorized a few poems by A. E. Housman (1859-1936)--in fact, one of the first I ever had to memorize in school was his "When I Was One and Twenty" from his collection A Shropshire Lad (1896) (link to poem), and I've memorized a few others from that volume. (Parker includes all the poems in the back of his book.)

Parker's is a work of astounding scholarship. He tells us (among other things) about Housman's life (he taught classics at University College London), about the publication of Shropshire (and his only other one--Last Poems, 1922), about Shropshire itself (Housman never lived there), about the enduring influence of the poems on other writers, on our ideas about the countryside and country life, on musical composers, on artists, and, most powerfully, on generations of readers in the U. K. It was enormously popular, was Shropshire, and WW I soldiers carried it with them--as did their sons in WW II.

The book dazzled me. Just an amazing piece of work.

     - The second was the first novel (The Invisible Circus, 1995), by Jennifer Egan, whose complete works (not that many) I've begun to read, in order of publication, because of the phenomenal reception of her new novel, Manhattan Beach (which I've bought but will not read until I finish the earlier ones).

Invisible Circus is a novel about a traumatized young woman, Phoebe, who has lost both her father (illness) and her older sister, Faith (whom Phoebe idolized), to suicide in a small Italian coastal town. Phoebe is wandering through her world, messed up, and she abruptly decides to go to Europe to retrace her sister's steps--and to go to the town where she leapt into the sea.

Well, along the way she hooks up (in more ways than one) with her sis's former boyfriend (nickname: Wolf), who is engaged to someone else (they're living in Germany), but he heads off with Phoebe to protect her on her journey. Well, "protect" may be a bit generous!

Anyway, by novel's end they arrive at the little coastal town, and ... ain't tellin' no more!

By the way, a little thrill for me on page 30: "After dinner they carried bowls of Häagen-Dasz upstairs to her mother's giant bed. A rerun of The Rockford Files was on. True to form, Jim Rockford fell in love with the woman he was trying to protect and his old dad was threatened by thugs outside the silver trailer."  (Yes, as some of you know, I'm a Rockford Freak.)

Anyway, I enjoyed reading this novel. Intense. Painful. But relies a bit on coincidence--almost like a Victorian novel. Still ...


4. Final word--a word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers:

     - from the Oxford English Dictionary

dinlo, n. and adj.

Forms:  18– dinlo, 19– dinilo, 19– dinlow.

Origin: A borrowing from Romani. Etymon: Romani dinilō.

Etymology: < Romani dinilō foolish, stupid (also as noun in sense ‘fool’), of uncertain origin

In Romany usage and slang (Eng. regional (south-east.)).

 A. n.   A foolish or half-witted person; an idiot.

1873   H. Smith Tent Life with Eng. Gipsies in Norway xxxvi. 425   Ambrose can talk, can't he? The mumply dinlo!

1956   D. Reeve in Countryman Summer 266   Ain't that the unbelievingest child in the world? You brazen dinilo, I'm a-gittin' an old stick now an' I'll stripe you till you'm dead.

1997   Pamela & Tommy Lee's Secret Video in uk.rec.sheds (Usenet newsgroup) 27 Aug.   I'm a right old dinlo.

2009   @666hammerette 10 Mar. in twitter.com (O.E.D. Archive)    Can u believe that 5 weeks ago some dinlow pinched my grey rubbish bin!!!

2012   R. Penfold Posy Wild Flowers vi. 87   I understand how hard it is to learn anything if your teacher is impatient and he regards you as a ‘dinlo’.

(Hide quotations)

 B. adj.  Esp. of a person: foolish, idiotic; daft.

1907   Jrnl. Gypsy Lore Soc. 1 191   Instead of saying grace, he was thanking God for the dinilo gorgios.

1934   W. Starkie Let. in Listener 28 Nov. 916/2   He's only a ‘dinilo gorgio’, brother: he talks like a gorgio—which is the same as talking like a fool.

2011   @JackDiko 5 Aug. in twitter.com (O.E.D. Archive)    Full of dinlo misfits! I'm like Cristiano amongst these fools!

2013   @SpursJodie 27 Mar. in twitter.com (O.E.D. Archive)    Your gonna think its dinlow but it cracks me up.