Sunday Sundries, 169

1. AOTW: Okay, this happened this week--and it has happened myriads of times before. So I'm hoping the AOTW Award will affect its frequency (hah!). I'm driving north on Ohio 91; a guy roars by me on the right (his lane is ending), then--only about a hundred yards ahead--he turns off into a little strip mall. So ... he saved, oh, perhaps seven seconds by his AOTW move. Risked his car, mine, his health, mine, burned unnecessary gas and rubber--all to get into the mini-mart seven seconds earlier than he would have.

2. Last night, Joyce and I drove over to Kent (snow falling--lightly!) to see  the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. (Link to film trailer.) Frances McDormand plays a very frustrated mother and ex-wife (her ex-has left her for a 19-year-old). Her teenage daughter was raped and murdered not long ago, and the cops seem to have given up on the case. So ... she rents three billboards on a local highway and chides the police for not doing anything. And ... stuff happens as a result. (Woody Harrelson does a great job as the local police chief.)

It is a film about anger--the mother's, her ex-husband's (he's physically abusive), one of the local cops (played wonderfully by Sam Rockwell), her son (Lucas Hedges--whom we saw last week in Lady Bird!), the community, and on and on.

And we see the consequences of uncontrolled anger in the lives of just about everyone. And the consequence ain't all that good!

But it's also a film about forgiveness--not everyone for everything--but forgiving for human error rather than human evil. And it's about a change of heart--which, perhaps, is the most difficult change of all.

I did think the film went on a bit too long (my bladder agrees), but I loved how I got surprised a few times--surprise: one of the things I love about films (and books).

So ... do they catch the murderer? Worth going to see to find out!

3. I finished three books this week

     - The first is one I've been reading slowly in bed at night--ten pages or so a night: One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858, by Rosemary Ashton (ret. from University College London).

Ashton follows the stories of her three prominent characters throughout that summer when the Thames reeked because of an unresolved sewage-treatment issue--and the temperatures were soaring. Darwin was nearing publication of his classic Origin of Species (1859), Dickens was writing and dealing with a separation from his wife (a scandal in that era--a scandal that threatened his unsurpassed popularity), Disraeli was working to try to do something about the Thames.

The research here is astonishing--the sort of work that in another era would have consumed an entire career. But Ashton was able to read all of the major periodicals of the day because, well, they've been digitized--enabling quick searches and discoveries.

And so we get an incredible amount of detail about these men and that portion of their lives that found its way into the press--which was a lot. (In fact, I think she should have done one more text-pruning before publishing: a bit much here, even for a fact-dork like me!).

Learned a lot ... too bad I can't remember it all!

     - As you may know, I'm working my way through all of the Faulkner novels I somehow missed (avoided)? in my Younger Days, and this week I read Requiem for a Nun, a sequel of sorts to Sanctuary (see an earlier post). Temple Drake reappears (now married to Gowan Stevens, nephew of Gavin, who appears in other Faulkner tales).

This one has in it a horrible murder--of an infant. A black woman, Nancy Mannigoe, who works for the Stevenses, is the culprit (she readily admits it)--but things are complicated. (Imagine that! in Faulkner!). Temple and her uncle (Nancy's lawyer) visit the governor at 2 a.m. on the day of Nancy's scheduled execution--a visit intended to explain the complex contexts of the infant's death. But all for nought (though this scene is how Faulkner lets us know all that's been going on).

He originally intended the story to be a play--and it is set up as one (acts, scenes, settings, dialogue), with some lengthy local history and explication prefacing each act. The play, sans explication, has been performed often.

The novel contains one of Faulkner's most oft quoted lines: The lawyer Stevens says, "The past is never dead. It's not even past" (Lib of Amer ed., 535). Earlier, Stevens said, "There's no such thing as past either" (521). So ... gee ... I wonder if the "past" is what's on Faulkner's mind in this novel?

For contemporary readers, Faulkner can be tough to read--for a variety of reasons: (1) the thick paragraphs, the complex sentences; (2) the racial epithets that flow easily from the mouths of his Mississippi characters--sometimes making Huck Finn look almost PC by contrast!

     - The third book I finished this week is a short one, the final book by Sam Shepard, who died on July 27 of this year. I've loved Shepard's work--on the stage and elsewhere. Spy of the First Person is a short memoir/novel/hybrid about a dying man, a man whose life and illness (ALS) resemble Shepard's. Someone appears to be watching him--spying on him as he moves through the final stages of his illness.

Of course, we figure out very quickly that it is Shepard himself doing the "spying." Outside himself watching himself. Memories flow. Some regrets. Some conundrums. He still wonders at nature (he's in Arizona, visiting the Mayo Clinic branch there). But he thinks about the other places he's lived in the West; he thinks about parents and grandparents and children and siblings. As he slowly loses the ability to do anything physically.

This book is very affecting for a variety of reasons. We know, of course, that Shepard did not survive. We know what an fantastic effort it must have been to complete this book (with the help of his family and Patti Smith). By the end, he could only dictate.

On a personal level ... I've had three friends die of ALS. And every moment of this reminded me of every moment of that. Deeply painful memories.

But Shepard somehow retained a buoyancy that comes across in these pages. A tremendous final feat of imagination, determination, celebration.

Oh, will I miss Sam Shepard!

4. Final Word: a word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers. I knew fell but had not seen this version of it ... let's give it a comeback!

     - from the Oxford English Dictionary

fellish, adj.

Fierce, savage

Origin: Formed within English, by derivation. Etymons: fell adj.1, -ish suffix1.

Etymology: < fell adj.1 + -ish suffix1.

Obs. rare.

1638   R. Brathwait Barnabees Journall (new ed.) iii. sig. S3   Never was wild Boare more fellish.