Sunday Sundries, 167

1. AOTW: Hard to believe but the same driver--the same previous winner of this prestigious award--executed the same maneuver on me that won her the award last time: viz., approaching me in the parking lot at the health club as I am exiting, then swerving left in front of me to enter one of the parking lanes. No signal, natch. But a brief smile from me: the first two-time winner!

2. Last night, Joyce and I drove over to Solon for two tasks: (1) Mustard Seed Market for some flour and honey; (2) the Solon cinemas to see The Man Who Invented Christmas, the story of Dickens' efforts to write A Christmas Carol in 1843. We both loved the film--loved it. Blathered on and on about it all the way home. In their biographies of Dickens, neither Peter Ackroyd nor Fred Kaplan comments much about the difficulty Dickens had with the writing (the film shows him as blocked--and severely so); in fact, he seems to have written it quite easily, thank you. And there were some other chronological issues we'll not get into.

But still. The film is really about an artist at work--about what influences him or her, about how, for a writer, the characters begin to inhabit the artist's space, live there--even chiding and challenging the writer. Christoper Plummer was fantastic as the image of Scrooge (and there's a funny scene, by the way, as Dickens tries to come up with a name for this character), giving the Old Dude some slight hints of humanity.

I also enjoyed the back-and-forth with Thackeray (also accurate in its way).

I confess: I had tears in my eyes at times. For all kinds of reasons. A Christmas Carol has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. When I was a little boy, there was a professor at Phillips Univ. (where my dad and grandfather also taught), Earl Oberg, who had memorized the book and gave public performances during the holidays. (A few years ago I found on eBay a recording of what he'd done!) I read the book. Some years, I used it with my middle school students (in dramatized form); some years, I took kids on field trips down to the Cleveland Play House to see the production. I was first terrified by a movie when I saw that  old  one with the scene of Scrooge in the graveyard. And on and on.

I also went on a "Dickens Kick" some years ago and read all of his novels. I've read the major biographies. And so ... Emotion won on Saturday night. And I was glad about it! Sure, I could quibble about some things, but I won't. I'd rather weep.

Link to trailer for the film.

3. I finished two books this week ...

     - The first was the latest by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, which was a perfect book for the Likes of Me (seriously deprived). I read it via Kindle, at night in bed, a chapter at a time, and I loved it. Tyson has an amusing, even ironic style and the rare ability to make obscure things clear (more or less!). The little book is basically a summary of what we know right now in astrophysics: from the Bang to black holes to multiple universes to life on other planets to ... I don't want to take a test on the book (or even a reading quiz), but I did enjoy reading it. He has the ability to make Dumb People (me) feel, well, less so!

     - I also finished Intruder in the Dust, 1948, the next in my series of Faulkner-novels-I've-not-previously-read-so-I'd-better-do-it-before-it's-too-late. And I liked this one--a lot. It's in Mississippi (duh), and an old (crotchety) black man has been arrested for the murder of a white man--and it looks as if he will not survive a single night in jail (a lynch-and-burn mob is assembling). The old man sends for lawyer Gavin Stevens (a recurrent character in Faulkner) and tells him he did not commit the murder. And Stevens' teenaged nephew, Charles "Chick" Mallison, is sure the old man could not have done it, and so with his (black) friend Aleck Sandler and with the surprising help of an older white woman, Miss Habersham (Dickens is smiling!) they go to the cemetery where the victim is buried, and they become, well, intruders in the dust.

The action moves along well, though there are (this is a Faulkner novel after all!) some astonishing sentences, a page or more long, with riffs on everything from racism to the South to the Meaning of Life.

Faulkner can be uncomfortable to read (the voice of a white man writing about black people in rural Mississippi in the 1940s--some Words You Don't Want to Read are scattered throughout). But check out this passage about white privilege--from 1948. Just some of it (I'm too lazy to type it all):

"...--the whole white part of the county taking advantage of the good weather and the good allweather roads which were their roads because their taxes and votes and the votes of their kin and connections who could bring pressure on the congressmen who had the giving away of funds had built them, to get quickly into the town which was theirs too since it existed only by their sufferance and support to contain their jail and their courthouse, to crowd and jam and block its streets too if they saw fit: patient biding and unpitying, neither to be hurried nor checked nor dispersed nor denied since theirs was the murdered and the murderer too; theirs the affonter and the principle affronted: the white man and the bereavement of his vacancy, theirs the right not just to mete justice but vengeance too to allot or withhold" (394, Lib of Amer edition).

4. We've started streaming the final season of Longmire, and, again, I'm struck at how different the TV version is from the novels (which I'm slowly, slowly reading). It's a cliche, I know, but I like the books better.

5. Final Word: a word I liked this week from one of my onlne word-of-the-day providers:

     - from dictionary.com (I knew the word torpor--did not know this form of it):

torporific [tawr-puh-RIF-ik]

adjective

1. causing sluggish inactivity or inertia.

Should you contemplate purchasing a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, a "mega-genius" according to Aaron (in private), he will tell you beforehand that García Márquez "is so rococo and torporific you'll need an insulin shot every twenty pages."

-- John Nichols, On Top of Spoon Mountain, 2012

ORIGIN

The English adjective torporific is Latinate but not Latin. Latin has the noun torpor “numbness, stupor” and the suffix -ficus “making, producing” (as in magnificus “grand, great”), but not the compound torporificus. Torporific entered English in the 18th century.