Sunday Sundries, 231

1. Human Being of the Week (HBOTW): A wonderful visit this week with former Harmon Middle School student Susan Peterson, whom I taught during her 8th grade year back in the mid-90s. She's about to start an MFA program at the U of Pittsburgh (writing) and is moving with her family from Austin, Tex., where she's lived for quite a while. Great to "catch up"--and see how this talented writer is set to pursue a dream she's long had.

2.  I finished two books this week ...

     - The first was James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1836), the 2nd in the 5-volume chronological story of Natty Bumppo (aka Deerslayer, Hawk-eye, Pathfinder, etc.), stories collectively known as The Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper did not write the tales in order of Natty's age, but that's the order in which I'm reading them. (As I've mentioned here before, I'm reading all five of them--and have started The Pathfinder.) (There's a signed first edition of the novel on ABE right now for $27,500.00!)

I'd read Mohicans a couple of times before (college, grad school), and, of course, there was that 1992 film, very loosely based on the novel (the love between Daniel Day-Lewis (Hawk-eye) and Madeleine Stowe (Cora) is not in the novel). (Link to film trailer.)

Cooper would not be a bestseller today--his prose, as I've said, is as thick and tangled as the 18th-century American forests he writes about so fondly.

Mohicans is a sad story--two characters you really like die near the end--and it also reveals the casual racism advanced by Cooper. He's forever talking about the "natur'" of white men and others, especially American Indians.

But--if you're patient--there's some excitement. Capture by Indians. Escape. Near-torture. Feats of marksmanship by Hawk-eye. Examples of human devotion--both among and between the Indians and whites.

Oh, and in case we haven't understood, an Indian elder says in practically the last sentence: "'The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red-men has not yet come again'" (877, Lib of Amer edition).

Before I read the novel in college, I'd read--countless times--the version of the story in the old Classics Illustrated comic.

It amused me how--reading the book this time--images from that comic would pop into my head at key moments in the story, moments that the comic had illustrated!

When I finish the books, I'm going to re-read the comics, too.

     - The second book I finished was a debut work by Katherine Duckett--Miranda in Milan (2019)--a sort of prose sequel to Shakespeare's The Tempest. The question seems to be: What did Miranda and her father, Prospero, do when they got back to Milan, where Prospero had once been the duke before being ousted by his brother, Antonio (who also goes back to Milan)?

I liked the idea--and I enjoy reading contemporary sequels and adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. (I've read a lot of them in the past decade or so.)

But this one disappointed me. It upsets what we thought we learned in The Tempest (about Prospero, about Miranda, about Antonio), and it quickly descends into a book about magic--and witchcraft--and hidden tunnels--and some almost Frankenstein-ian fussing with the creation of life.

And Miranda, we learn, is discovering things about her sexual identity--not that I care much about that. But it just seems so .... forced ... considering what we learned about her in the play.

Oh well. I'm still glad I read it. The Tempest is, I think, my favorite of all of the Bard's plays, and anyone who can bring those characters back for a visit--even if the visit does not go well--is fine by me!

3. We finished the latest seasons of some of “our" shows that we've been streaming as we are preparing ourselves for the arms of Morpheus. Bosch, Shetland, The Unforgotten--we finished all of them this week (it took a while because, as I've said here, we "do" only about 10-15 min per show/per night).

The Bosch season I didn't enjoy so much because I had read not long ago the Michael Connelly novel which formed the source for the season. I knew what was happening--what was going to happen. So ...

We love Shetland. The principal actor, Douglas Henshall, is just tremendous, and there's a very strong cast throughout. The current season was about human trafficking--not the most pleasant thing to end the day with! BTW, we followed the advice of friend Chris and watched the post-season interview with Henshall. What a great few minutes that was!

And The Unforgotten, a series about cold cases in England, is anchored by that wonderful actress Nicola Walker. She and Henshall don't dare appear in the same series: There won't be a dry eye in TV Land! Anyway, Walker plays the leader of the cops who are investigating cold cases, and this one (which involves the murder of young women--a favorite, it seems in TV crime drama) drives Walker near to despair.

So now we're watching bits of the new HBO film Deadwood (we were addicts to the original series), the early seasons of Waking the Dead (another Chris recommendation--another "cold-case" drama), and we're about to start Luther (if I can get BBC America to behave).

4. I've been reading my way through the novels of Wilkie Collins (1824-89), pretty much in the order he wrote them. I've about finished The Fallen Leaves (1879), and last night I came across this amusing/annoying comment from the point of view of the principal character, a young man from America (a Socialist!), now in London, falling in love and whatnot: "But some of a woman's finer sensibilities do get blunted with the advance of age and the accumulation of wisdom" (181, Pocket Classics Edition).

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

     - from The Oxford English Dictionary

bumbledom, n. Petty local bureaucracy; officious and pompous behaviour by minor officials; officials of this type collectively.

Origin: From a proper name, combined with an English element. Etymons: proper name Bumble, -dom suffix.

Etymology: < the name of Mr. Bumble, from Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens

1847 Express  10 Sept. 2/2 That head-quarter of Bumbledom, the Mansion-house of the City of London.

1856 Sat. Rev.  2 12/1 The collective Bumbledom of Westminster.

1865 Spectator  22 Apr. 427 There spoke the true spirit of parish Bumbledom.

1921  S. E. Morison Maritime Hist. Mass.  xxii. 340 A banquet, not for owners and bankers and all bumbledom, but for the mothers, wives, and sweethearts of the workingmen who built the ship.

1991 Times  9 July 15/1 Bumbledom can be thanked for prevaricating over the future of the Hampton's site for a full 32 years.

2011 Daily Tel.(Nexis) 23 July The Blue Badge Scheme..is maladministered with varying degrees of inefficiency and bumbledom by county councils throughout the country.