Sunday Sundries, 220

1. AOTW: How about the woman in the grocery store this morning, a woman whose cart was blocking an entire shelf (with some things I needed, naturally), a woman who was texting merrily and just having the Best Damn Time ... while--politely, in cowardly fashion--I stood and waited for her to notice me--which took a bit of a while.

2. Last night Joyce and I drove down to the Nightlight, an independent (very small) cinema on High Street in Akron. We have known about the place for a long time but had never gone there. (Habit, Habit, Habit!) But last night they were showing Stan & Ollie, a film about Laurel & Hardy, a film that both Joyce and I have wanted to see.

The Nightlight is a simple place. A small concession stand, only one apparent employee, limited (but comfortable seating), two single-person unisex bathrooms (not that I needed one, of course). The young man working the concession (and ticket) area also came out just before the start to tell us about the film--and about some upcoming ones. A literate, intelligent, lucid young man. (It reminded me of our days of going up to the New Mayfield and hearing little talks before each film.)

The film was wonderful. I first heard about Laurel & Hardy from my dad (who loved them); Dad had told me about how he and my mom's brother, Ronald, had seen Way Out West together in Enid, Okla. (where both of them were at Phillips University). Dad said they had laughed themselves into two puddles of sweat. So I was touched last night when some of Stan & Ollie was about the filming of Way Out West (1937--Dad was 24--and two years away from marrying my mom).

This new film deals with that film--the team's break-up--their reunion in 1953 when they went on a tour to the British Isles, trying to attract crowds to give them some support for a new film they were planning about Robin Hood. (All is based on true events.)

The two actors (John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy, Steve Coogan as Stan Laurel) were superb--absolutely convincing in their roles--both masters of the mannerisms, facial expressions, movements of the two comic geniuses they were portraying. They never descended to caricature, and I believed both of them, absolutely, all the way through this very moving film about decline and fall--and friendship--and love (the two women who played the actors' wives were also great--Shirley Henderson as Lucille Hardy, Nina Arianda as Ida Kitaeva Laurel).

I loved the film (as did Joyce) ... and what was that wetness in my eyes? A leak in the ceiling?

Many years ago--at Aurora Middle School (pre-Harmon)--I used to teach film history courses, and I always showed Laurel & Hardy's The Music Box--about the two guys moving a piano up some steep outdoor stairs. There is some talk about that film in Stan & Ollie--and a sly reference to it when, on a steep stairway in an English city, their big trunk gets away from them and slides to the bottom. (That whole film (The Music Box) is on YouTube now.)

Link to film trailer.

3. I finished two books this week ...

     - In the Galway Silence (2018) is the latest in Ken Bruen's startling series of novels about Jack Taylor, a former cop in Galway (Ire.), dismissed for drinking, now an informal P.I. who has the worst experiences, I think, in P.I. fiction.

I first learned about Taylor (and thus Bruen) by streaming the series about him (Acorn? Britbox? I forget). I loved the series--and decided to read the novels. I'd originally thought the TV shows were dark. Nah. They glow with hope compared with the novels.

In every one he suffers some grievous loss (sometimes more than one)--physical, psychological, the death of someone he cares about. It is g-r-i-m.

In this current novel someone is going around killing people who don't deserve it. Some are known to Taylor; some, very close to him.

So ... vigilante time! (He's good at that, vigilantism!)

I love the unique style of the novels, too (Taylor almost always narrates--the p-o-v sometimes shifts, too.) Colloquial in style--though Taylor is a great reader--with a unique way of writing dialogue (as you'll see if you read them).

     - Regular visitors to this site know that I've been deliriously travelling through the writings of Kate Atkinson, whose work I accidentally stumbled across in a New York Times article about some writers making appearances in NYC (link to that piece from July 31, 2018).

Anyway, I thought I'd give her books a whirl--and what a whirl it has been, a life-changing one. She is one of the best writers I've ever read. From her first novel (Behind the Scenes at the Museum, 1995) to Transcription, 2018.

She also has written five detective novels featuring Jackson Brodie (the fifth will be out this year); I read these after I read her "literary" novels, discovering, of course, that there's little difference between them (between, that is, her "literary" and "detective" work). The same unique style, the same sly allusions to Shakespeare and other major writers (and popular culture), the same amazing movements about in time, in point of view.

I just finished her third Brodie novel, When Will There Be Good News? (2008), and she had me from the epigraph (an Emily Dickinson poem--"We never know we go when we are going"--which I loved so much I memorized it). This one involves--among numerous other things--a horrible murder of a mother and two of her children thirty years prior to the main action of the novel. One little girl escapes, and she has grown up to become a physician.

Brodie gets on the wrong train, which wrecks. He's out of it for a while.

Enter Reggie Chase, a teenager, who hears the crash, goes to it, saves Brodie's life. She's an amazing character--one of the bright lights of the book. She works for the physician (whose family was murdered) and ... well ... let's not spoil it.

Just this (which is true in all the Atkinson I've read so far): Everything's connected. Every single plot thread (and there are lots) is in the hands of the mistress of marionettes, Kate Atkinson. She is a WONDER.

Her next Brodie novel--Started Early and Took My Dog (2010) is on its way to me--and I've also got her short story collection (Not the End of the World, 2002) and her play (Abandonment, 2000).

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

     - from the Oxford English Dictionary--the OED says it's "rare"; we should make it less so!

imaginarian, n.

A person concerned with imaginary things; a fantasist. Also: one who stresses the imagination.

Origin: Formed within English, by derivation. Etymons: imagine v., -arian suffix.

Etymology: <  imagine v. + -arian suffix.

 rare.

a1729  E. Taylor Metrical Hist. Christianity (1962) 278 Constantinople calls Nicephorus A Laick vain Imaginarian.

1833  J. Montgomery Lect. Poetry  216 The greatest realists, and the greatest imaginarians,—if I may coin a barbarous word for a special occasion.

2003 Independent on Sunday(Nexis) 27 Apr. (Features) 15 Northern State are three white feminist rappers from Long Island who describe themselves as ‘vegetarian, humanitarian, imaginarian not a liberatarian [sic]’.

2005  J. Ehrat Cinema & Semiotic  i. 58 In the context of film theory, the debate between the ‘ontological film realists’ and the ‘imaginarians’ could certainly profit from this Peircean insight.