Sunday Sundries, 218

1. AOTW: The dude who, yesterday, approaching our car, turned left right in my face, forcing me to brake--HARD--to avoid broadsiding him. Joyce heard from me some words she rarely hears ...

2. I finished a couple of books this week ...

     - The first was Kudos (2018), the final novel in Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy--a series I did not know existed until a former student of mine, Alexxa Gotthardt, told me about it in the coffee shop a month or so ago. (So I need to go back and change some of her grades ... not: She was a superior student). The three novels, narrated by a writer who's moving here and there for various reasons (writers' conferences, etc.), all deal principally with the stories of the people she encounters during the day--on an airplane (this one begins with such a scene--as does the first in the series), at restaurants, in hotels, at the conferences. And everyone is so intent on telling his or her own story that we don't often get much about the narrator's story.

There's a funny scene in this one when the narrator is being interviewed by a journalist, but the interviewer is so interested in his own story that he never really gets around to the interview! The narrator comments at one point about "the mutual narcissism of human relationships" (56).

Cusk is a learned writer--but never really obtrusively so. There are allusions to Hesse, Tennyson, and some others here.

There are no chapters or numbered divisions--just occasional space breaks to indicate a time/venue change.

And now I'm resolved: When I finish my journey through the works on Kate Atkinson, Cusk is next!

     - I also finished the latest collection of pieces of John McPhee, whose wonderful nonfiction I've been reading since the days of A Sense of Where You Are (1965), The Headmaster (1966), Coming into the Country (1977), and those other dazzling works. I think I've read pretty much all of them.

McPhee will turn 86 next month, and in this new book--The Patch (2018)--he alludes now and then to his declining physical capacities. (He used to climb mountains, canoe all over the place--do pretty much whatever-the-hell he wanted; no more.) And this is sad to read--especially since, I, though more than a decade younger than he, am "enjoying" some of the same ... transformations.

His writing does not have those same snaps of electricity that it once did--but it's still McPhee! And I especially enjoyed the last, very long piece "An Album Quilt" (99-242), which is a collection of sections from earlier writing he's done throughout his career--sometimes snippets, sometimes a few pages long.

What a talent! And what a pleasure to have been able to read and learn from him all these years--these decades.

3. Yesterday afternoon, Joyce and I drove over to the Cinemark in Cuyahoga Falls for a 3:55 showing (the only one of the day) of the WW I documentary by Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) called They Shall Not Grow Old.

What a stunning piece of work. (By the way, if you see it, stick around after the final credits: Jackson talks for about a half hour on film about how they did what they did--why they made the choices they did, etc.)

As you probably know, technical experts standardized the film speed (the WW I movie cameras were hand-cranked, and the speed varied from camera to camera--thus, the "jerky" movements you see)--and now the movements of the soldiers (and others) seem perfectly "normal"--i.e., like yours and mine. Jackson's team also colorized the film, and the overall effects--the movement, the color--humanizes that old film in ways that just stunned Joyce and me.

Jackson begins--and ends--with some old b&w jerky footage so that when the restored footage begins, it seems truly miraculous.

He focuses tightly on some things: the enlistments, the training, the voyage from England to France, life in the trenches, an attack across "no-man's land" to the German lines--an attack that saw vast casualties on both sides. (He reminds us that about a million British soldiers died in the war.)

We see these men as human beings--human beings, by the way, who are mesmerized by the camera. He tells us afterward that most of them had probably never even seen a movie camera before.

A remarkable afternoon at the cinema. (Link to film trailer.)

By the way--one of the best high school teachers I had at Hiram High School (1958-62) was Mr. Augustus Horatio Brunelle (1894-1978), and he had served in France with the U. S. Army during WW I--but not in a trench-warfare capacity. Since he was a Ph.D. candidate (U of Wisc, where he was working on his dissertation in classics at the time he enlisted), they assigned him to an office: He could type--a valuable skill then. When he came back from the war, his dissertation advisor was gone, and his new one didn't like his topic and told him he would have to start over. Mr. Brunelle instead took some teaching--and preaching--jobs before ending up at Hiram High and, eventually, changing my life.

4. Had a weird experience streaming the most recent season of Vera via BritBox (or is it Acorn?): The subtitles were out of sync, about five minutes off. That was disconcerting. And, yes, we use subtitles for some of the British shows: We can't always understand our own language!

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

     - from Oxford English Dictionary

† magirist, n. An expert in cookery.

Origin: A borrowing from Greek, combined with an English element. Etymons: Greek μάγειρος, -ist suffix.

Etymology: <  ancient Greek μάγειρος cook (further etymology unknown) + -ist suffix.

N.E.D.  (1904) gives the pronunciation as (mădʒəiə·rist) /məˈdʒaɪərɪst/.

 Obsolete. rare.

  1716  M. Davies Diss. Physick  12 in Athenæ Britannicæ  III Magists, Magirists..Geoponists, Hygiests, Prophylactists, Remedists.

1814 School Good Living  53 To their Magirists was given an appointment of culinary artists.

Derivatives

 magiristic adj.(in form mageiristic) relating to cookery.

1892 Punch  21 May 249/1 Immortal contributions to mageiristic lore.