Sunday Sundries, 174

1. AOTW: I thought I was not going to able to confer this award on anyone this week (save myself: I am always a prime candidate!), but this morning, in the grocery store parking lot, I could not turn into a parking space I craved because the AOTW had decided that she needed the space to unload her shopping cart. I know ... I know ... this is hardly egregious. But I'm getting grumpier in my latter years (remember Grumpy Old Men?). And so ... we have a winner!

2. We went to Kent last night to see The Shape of Water, the much-nominated film. And ... both of us were disappointed (expectations too high?).  I felt it was kind of a lumpy smoothie that tried to blend ingredients from Wolverine (recovering from bullet wounds), E. T. (healing powers in the touch),  Twilight (the glowing creature), Beauty & the Beast (duh), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (duh, duh), La La Land (dance number), Splash (Tom Hanks finds a mermaid! Bathtub!), and, oh, I Led Three Lives, that old TV series, 1953-56, about counterintelligence and the Soviets (link to an entire episode on YouTube). And more, I'm sure ...

Because the events took place in the 50s, there were some quick references to racial hostility and homophobia. But nothing that was ever really developed. Nothing really surprised me, either (spoiler alert: I knew she was going to speak/sing before the film ended)--except the stunning brutality here and there, brutality that probably makes Sam Peckinpah smile from his grave. (Link to film trailer.)

3. I finished just one book this week, but it was a long, dense one, so ... say nice things about me! I've been reading the William Faulkner novels that I'd somehow missed over the years (or skipped?), and this one, A Fable (1954), was next on my list. It won all kinds of awards--including a Pulitzer and the National Book Award--but I can't imagine that lots of people actually read it (as opposed to buy it!).

The text is often dense (even for Faulkner), and if you let your attention drift much (Is that a comment on one of my Facebook posts? Lemme look!), you will very likely miss something significant.

It's a story of World War I--a sort of alternative, what-if? kind of story. It involves a dozen soldiers (a corporal is their ring leader) in the French army who decide that enough is enough: They want to organize a cease-fire, sans the approval of their officers.

And they pull it off. The Western Front goes silent. And there are many who are happy--many who are not. You can guess.

Things turn out both not-so-good and very good for the corporal.

There are some powerful scenes in the novel--some wrenching ones, some grisly ones. But--let's keep it a hundred here (!)--I had to make myself finish it.

And just another snide comment: We have changed so much as a reading culture in my lifetime that I cannot imagine people buying and reading this novel today. I think we're far too impatient for it--and Faulkner's language and diction--ever challenging--are even more so here.

But, hey, it wouldn't be a Faulkner novel without some memorable sentences. One solider says, "'A man ain't even the sum of his vices: just his habits'" (998, Lib of Amer edition).

And a little earlier I got a Frankenstein rush: "It will be his own frankenstein [sic] which roasts him alive with heat, asphyxiates him with speed, wrenches loose his still living entrails in the ferocity of its prey-seeking stoop" (994).

I'm almost through with Faulkner--a few to go (none of the famous ones). And I'm a-gonna do it!

4. We're still streaming a couple of cop shows each night--about ten minutes of each, then shifting to the next. Line of Duty, Vera. And we're also streaming Olive Kitteridge (HBO), a miniseries with Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins (who was in Shape of Water), a series based on the wonderful novel by Elizabeth Strout. We've almost finished the 3rd of the 4 parts. (Link to trailer for series.)

5. Last Word--A word I liked/didn't know this week from one of my several online word-of-the-day providers:

     - euhemerism (yoo-HEE-muh-riz-uhm, -HEM-)

MEANING:

noun: The idea that gods are based on historical heroes whose stories became exaggerated in retelling.

ETYMOLOGY:

After Euhemerus, a fourth-century BCE Greek writer, who proposed that the gods of mythology were based on real heroes whose accounts became exaggerated with time. Earliest documented use: 1846.

USAGE:

“I suspect that the scholarly assumption that somewhere beneath the legend there must lurk a real historical founder is a modern case of Euhemerism.”

Robert Price; “Of Myth and Men”; Free Inquiry (Buffalo, New York); Winter 1999/2000.