Sunday Sundries, 228

1. HBOTW [Human Beings of the Week]: Friends from Hiram High School days (I graduated in 1962), who on Facebook have helped me, over and over again, to reconstruct things I was trying to remember. This week--Tina Dreisbach and her husband (Paul) and Ralph Green helped me remember some things about music class in, oh, 1958! Facebook has its Dark Side--but, also, the Force surges there , as well!

2. I finished just one book this week--but it's a long one: Killing Commendatore (2017, 2018) by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (I obviously read the book in translation!), a novel I'd decided to read because I saw in some review somewhere that it had connections to The Great Gatsby, which I greatly enjoyed teaching for a decade at Western Reserve Academy.

There are connections (but we'll get to those in a moment), but there is also an auctorial connection: Murakami translated Gatsby into Japanese a little over a decade ago, and he has said that the novel had a tremendous influence on his own writing.

Okay.

In Commendatore, we have a narrator who lives near a mysterious very rich guy, a very rich guy with secrets (and a mansion), a very rich guy who wants to get close to someone he loves (sounding familiar yet?), a very rich guy who befriends the narrator (who's a successful portrait painter who now wants to branch out a bit).

But Commedatore is a novel much more weird than Gatsby (which, of course, has its own weirdness--green lights among them). Near the narrator's house is a shaft into the ground where weird stuff happens (and it sometimes serves as a portal); we have a spectral creature, the Commendatore himself, who appears and who has connections with some kind of parallel universe; we have a teenage girl (with connections to the Gatsby character--connections of which she is not aware), a girl who takes a painting class with the narrator, a girl who gets involved with him (no, not that way).

In the end we have a story about loss, about loneliness, about art, about the supernatural, about finding your metier, about the weirdness of life and its (sometimes) incomprehensibility, about coincidence, about love.

I read the book very slowly, about ten pages a night just before beddie-bye (it's nearly 700 pp long)--and they were ten pages I really looked forward to, pages that flew by each night. And, later, I would lie in the dark ... and wonder. And listen for the sound of a distant bell. (Read the book--you'll understand!)

3. We've started streaming on PBS the latest available season of Unforgotten, a series from the UK about a police unit devoted to solving old cases. It stars the wonderful Nicola Walker as the lead detective. This current season begins when some bones are found near a highway construction project. Whose are they? What are they doing there?

Last night we watched one of the most moving scenes I've ever seen on television--the cops discover the identity of the victim--and notify the family. I'll say no more. If you emerge dry-eyed from those moments, you'd better have your pulse checked ... are you even alive?

Link to some video.

4. No movie this week. We were going to go see Booksmart last night, but the thunderstorm warnings spooked me, so we stayed home and read and streamed instead. I wasn't really crazy about going to see it--but the reviews have been pretty good. Will probably still give it a look-see.

5. I used the word bailiwick this week--and immediately wondered where it came from. Checked it out. Learned ...

• It dates back to the 15th century--to Middle English--and initially referred to the jurisdiction of a bailiff--or other authority. Wick meant a village or hamlet. So ... bailiwick was the jurisdiction of a bailiff. Now, of course, we use it conversationally to mean "a person's area of skill, knowledge, authority, or work."

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

     - from wordsmith.org (a bit naughty--so it goes)

skitterbrook (SKIT-uhr-brook)

noun: A coward.

ETYMOLOGY: From Dutch schijtebroek (literally, shits his pants), from schijten (to shit) + broek (pants). Earliest documented use: 1652.

USAGE: “The royal skitterbrook’s advice to the remnants of his army, still holding out in castles and towns along the borders, was terse and characteristic: ‘Let each man look to himself. Expect no help from me.’” Thomas B. Costain; The Conquerors; Doubleday; 1949.