Sunday Sundries, 209

1. HBOTW (Human Beings of the Week): I meant to give these folks the award a couple of weeks ago, then forgot because of the tacit insistence of some AOTWs that I recognize them for their vile behavior during the week. But ... here we go: At the coffee shop--high school students whom I see at tables working together, helping one another, reading, writing, doing math, etc. As a former teacher I find it a very moving sight, and it gives me H-O-P-E.

2. Last night Joyce and I drove up to Solon--first, a stop at Mustard Seed Market for some baking supplies, then to the movies in Solon to see Green Book, a very affecting and surprising film based on an actual tour in the Deep South in the early 1960s that the Jamaican American pianist Dr. Don Shirley made with the other members of his trio (the other two were white). Concerned about his ... safety (the Civil Rights movement was underway; not all in the South were happy about it), Shirley hired a driver, a tough Italian American named Tony "Lip" Vallelonga. The two (slowly) became friends as they navigated the turbulent seas of race relations--in the South and with each other.

A "green book," by the way is the book available for non-white travelers in the South to use; it identified motels and hotels and restaurants where the white separatists allowed them to stay, eat, etc.

Playing Tony Lip was an almost unrecognizable Viggo Mortensen, who played Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings films. Here, he is pudgy, pudgy, pudgy (his over-eating is a character trait--one scene with a pizza in a lonely motel room is priceless)--and his diction is, well, not of Middle-Earth.

Don Shirley is Mahershala Ali, recognizable (kind of) from Moonlight and some popular TV shows.

Link to film trailer.

3. I finished just one book this week--a collection of poems by Barbara Hamby, a writer I'd not heard of until a couple of months ago when one of her poems--"Penelope's Lament"--appeared in the New York Times Magazine. (Link to that poem.)

I liked it so much that I (a) memorized it, (b) ordered this collection, Bird Odyssey (U of Pittsburgh P, 2018). The last six poems--all sonnets (loosely but artistically formed)--are called, collectively, "The Odyssey in Six Sonnets," and they are my favorite, by far, in the entire volume. (I taught The Odyssey for a couple of years to freshmen at Western Reserve Academy, so, yeah, I'm probably biased.) In these sonnets I love how she blends the then with the now: In the one I memorized are references to Charlie Chan and Huck Finn; the one about Circe mentions a double-D cup!

I enjoyed some of the non-Odyssey poems, as well, but some were just a bit beyond me--or, more accurately, I didn't have the patience to slow down and figure them out. My bad.

4. Joyce and I finished streaming two great things on Netflix ...

     - The Bodyguard is a six-parter about an Afghan-war-stressed veteran assigned as a bodyguard in London to the Home Secretary, whose views on domestic surveillance are, to say the least, not popular with many. The opening episode, where our fractured hero deals with a bomb threat on a train, is really good, and you mustn't forget it as the episodes proceed.

I found the middle episodes a bit ... dull (lots of sexual rolling around in bed), but the intensity was evident throughout--which is why it took me forever to watch them all. (This Old Soul cannot "take" of lot of intensity these days.)

     - The second was the new Coen Bros.' film on Netflix, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which we (pretty much) enjoyed all the way. It comprises six stories (one of which is Jack London's All Gold Canyon--not my favorite of the six, I fear--nor was the final one, whose ending I saw coming too soon--spoiled the effect). But what a pair of filmmakers those guys are! Joyce and I watched all their films in order a year or so ago--great fun. Would do it again.

Okay, one virtue of the final episode: It was almost all talking--a rarity in films today. I did enjoy that aspect of it!

BTW: Bill Heck, the cousin of one of Joyce's dear former students, played Billy Knapp in "The Girl Who Got Rattled" segment. He was the wagon train guide who fell in love with Zoe Kazan along the way--gave such a solid, convincing performance. Emotional, too.

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

     - from wordsmith.org

velutinous (vuh-LOO-tuh-nuhs): adjective: Soft and smooth like velvet.

from Latin velutum (velvet). Earliest documented use: 1826.

USAGE: “The rope was painfully soft, as velutinous as a cat.”

Olivia Hardy Ray; Annabel Horton, Lost Witch of Salem; Bublish; 2011.