Sunday Sundries, 223

1. AOTW: Two awards this week--one being a "group" award. 
     - This last week I have been stunned by how many drivers, waiting either on side streets or parking lot exits to enter the road I'm on, decided they'd just "go for it" and not wait for a safe, clear entry. One evening I had to brake--hard--three different times for morally challenged drivers to get on the road in front of us. (And two of those times? No one at all in my rear mirror!)
     - This was a doozy. We were driving east on a two-lane road. I had a tailgater on me, annoyed, I guess, because I was going only 5 mph over the speed limit. As we approached a crossroads--and a stoplight--our lane widened and became two--one for left-turners (including us). I turned on my left signal. As I moved left, the AOTW zoomed by us on the right, then veered in front of us into the left-turn lane. Again, I had to brake hard to avoid a collision.

2. I've finished several books since I last did a "Sundries" (March 17). I'll say only a few words about each--realizing your patience is probably as limited as my memory of the books.

     - The first was the final (so far) of Kate Atkinson's series of novels about Jackson Brodie, a former cop, sometime P.I.: Started Early, Took My Dog (2011). (Good news: A new one is coming late this spring!) Like most of Atkinson's fiction, this one is a dazzler of organization. A couple of stories going on (are they linked? of course they are!), leaping around in time (time is Atkinson's servant, not her master), a case of an unofficial child "adoption," some dead folks. As always, Brodie arrives-- puzzled, damaged, frustrated, hopeful--at the conclusion. And, as always, I grieve that the book is over.

     - Next: the latest by Jasper Fforde--Early Riser (2018)--a sort of cop story about a time in the future in the U.K. when winters have grown ferocious, fierce, endless. Corporate control of so many things. Rumors of mysterious creatures roaming the winter darkness. We follow Charlie Worthing, a kind of official, who stumbles around figuring out the heinous things that are going on. And sort of resolving them.

I've liked Fforde's work since reading The Eyre Affair, 2001, and his subsequent novels about Thursday Next, who roams around in the worlds of books--actually involving herself with characters and landscapes from them, entering them. Wildly imaginative and so much fun to read. (Link to list of the Thursday Next novels.)

     - Kate Atkinson has a single collection of short stories, Not the End of the World (2002), and they display (no surprise) her usual gifts of organization and allusion and surprise. Because they are shorter (obviously) than her novels, the stories are not as complex. They remain ... odd. One story is about a woman, no real cat-lover, who takes in a stray that proceeds to grow to an enormous size--as big as a full-grown tiger. The neighbors are alarmed (duh).

     - Finally--a recent (well reviewed) biography: Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier's First Gunfighter, 2019, by Western historian Tom Clavin.

I was a real Hickok freak when I was a boy in Oklahoma. That weekly TV show had ensnared me back in 1951 (when it premiered) and held me to its demise in 1958. Guy Madison was Hickok (who bore but faint resemblance to the actual dude murdered in Deadwood in 1876, the same year, coincidentally, as Custer, another long-haired hero of my youth--oh, did I learn later about him!). In the series, Hickok's sidekick, "Jingles," was Andy Devine (see pick of the pair). (Link to some video.)

I also read--more than once--that kids' book Wild Bill Hickok by A. M. Anderson, 1947, Webster Publishing, one of their "American Adventure Series" that featured Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Chief Black Hawk, and other notables.

So, anyway, I was ready for this new biography, and I indeed learned a lot from it. A big surprise? His English ancestors had farmed land owned by William Shakespeare! I had not known, either, that near the end of his (short) life, his eyesight was failing him, and he was getting by on his rep. Clavin's prose is not especially remarkable, but he really did the work about this iconic Western figure.

3. As I wrote in a previous entry, Joyce and I saw a recent production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Hanna Theater in Cleveland--Great Lakes Theater Festival. There was so much to love and like about it (as I wrote). But one thing that did annoy me (and has annoyed me about other productions of Shakespeare plays I've seen throughout the years)? The insertion of dialogue--often about contemporary things. At the GLTF production, for example, we heard a joke about the Master's golf tournament--and some other things. The audience laughed (I didn't). All it did for me was yank me out of the story, out of the world they'd worked so hard to create. Self-defeating.

4. That's enough!

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

     - from wordsmith.org

bibliotaph or bibliotaphe  (BIB-lee-uh-taf)

noun: One who hoards books.

ETYMOLOGY: From Greek biblio- (book) + taphos (tomb), which also gave us cenotaph Earliest documented use: 1823.

USAGE: “A more pertinent example of the morbid bibliotaph is recorded by Blades; this was the late Sir Thomas Phillipps, of Middle Hill, who acquired *bibliographical treasures simply to bury them*. He bought books by the library, crammed his mansion with them, and *never even saw what he had bought*.” Holbrook Jackson; The Anatomy of Bibliomania; University of Illinois Press; 2001.