Sunday Sundries, 233

1. AOTW: This one is easy: I was poised in the intersection of Rts. 91 and 303, waiting to turn left. The light shifted to amber--uh, oh. I got ready to turn quickly, when as the light turned Full Red, a driver approaching me gunned it through the intersection, blowing by me like an ill wind. I honked (prayed he didn't loop back and show me his Uzi), turned left (I had no choice--I was in the intersection), thereby earning some honks of my own.

2. We went to the Kent Cinema last night (a favorite since we first went there in the early 1970s--and also where son Steve had his first date at the end of his 8th grade year)--to see Yesterday, the new Danny Boyle* film about a global power outage (for twelve minutes). While it's black, our "hero," Jack Malik (played well by Himesh Patel), is on his bike and is hit by a bus. When he wakes up in the hospital--and in the days afterward--he discovers that there has been some sort of reality shift in the world--no one, for example, seems to have heard of The Beatles (and some other things, we later discover).

Malik is an aspiring musician, so he gets the idea to perform The Beatles' songs (those he can remember--the albums, etc. no longer exist)--and, of course, he becomes an immense success. But then ... go see it!

The film was so cleverly done in so many ways--graphics, jokes, etc. And SNL's Kate McKinnon appears as an unctuous agent/manager, interested only in her own wealth and prestige.

And there is a Big Surprise near the end. (Go see it.)

The Beatles' first hit was "Love Me Do," released in the fall of 1962, my freshman year at Hiram College. So I basically came of age listening to them (and seeing them on Ed Sullivan's show), so I found myself, in Kent last night, with tears in my eyes as I heard that stunning array of songs they created. I remember this, too: When their semi-documentary (Let It Be) came out in 1970, Joyce and I sat through it twice at the old downtown Kent movie theater. We'd been married less than a year.

The ethical issues in the film are in the forefront, too, and they eat at Malik throughout.

Link to film trailer.

3. I finished three books this week--one from my nightstand:

     - The "nightstand" book was the latest YA novel by Cori McCarthy, who attended Harmon School, graduated from Aurora High; I didn't get to teach her (grrrrrr), though I did teach her older brothers. Anyway, Cori has had a very successful career (link to her website), and I've read all her books, have seen her expanding as a writer.

Her latest--co-authored with her partner, Amy Rose Capetta--is a blend of some of her favorite things: King Arthur, Star Wars, Tolkien. The novel is a series of what-if? ideas: What if King Arthur were a young woman called Ari?** What if she pulled Excalibur? What if Merlin--living backwards through time--is now a teenager? What if all of this took place "out there"--in space, on other planets? What if the Evil Force in the universe is a greedy mega-corporation controlling planets? What if Ari and Gwen (Guenievere) were attracted to each other? What if Merlin had a love life?

And on and on.

Arthur-Star Wars-Tolkien fans (like me) will have a romp of a ride through this novel--with a Very Big Surprise on the last page. Other readers will get an education from McCarthy-Capetta. And all readers will have a great, surprising time.

     - The second book I finished was one I'd been working my way through at the coffee shop--Shakespeare's Library: Unlocking the Greatest Mystery in Literature, 2019, by Stuart Kells, a literary historian.

Those who know a bit about the Bard's life know that the absolute absence of books that can be traced to his personal library--the failure of his will to even mention books--has been some of the kindling that has supported the flames of conspiracy theories: Shakespeare must have been a pseudonym for someone else. Kells goes through each candidate--acknowledges the strengths of his qualifications before dismissing him.

We get a different look at Shakespeare. Kells presents him as one who was a master adapter of other material (his plays came from a variety of sources), a writer alert to the requirements of the Elizabethan stage--and its audiences. Kells also suggests that a key factor was his friendship with playwright Ben Jonson--who did have a massive library and who was one of those who put together the collection of the Bard's thirty-six plays, The First Folio, in 1623, seven years after the Bard's death. Did Jonson edit those plays as well as collect them? (There are significant differences between the Folio versions and the earlier, quarto (small--single-play) editions.)

Anyway, this book was so much fun to read--so enlightening. Kells is one of the first writers I know who has recognized that playwriting is almost never a Lone Genius with a Quill and a Candle but is a collaborative effort, with all sorts of people pitching in at various stages of the process.

     - I also finished The Pathfinder, 1840, the 3rd volume in James Fenimore Cooper's series of five novels, collectively called The Leatherstocking Tales. (Earlier posts here have dealt with The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans.) I'm reading the books not in the order that Cooper wrote them but in order of the age of Natty Bumppo, the hero known variously as Deerslayer, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, etc.

I'd never read Pathfinder before--except in its Classics Illustrated form when I was a kid (the same way I'd read all of The Leatherstocking Tales--until college and grad school, where I read the first two).

Here's the weird thing, though: Although I'd read that comic repeatedly, I remembered so little of it. I could have told you hardly a thing about the story. So I was surprised and moved in the actual novel

Natty is in his early 30s in this one--but still, as they say, at the top of his game--as is Chingachgook, his Delaware friend since boyhood. They are around Lake Ontario and are escorting some people back to the English fort--people including young (and beautiful) Mabel Dunham. (It's French and Indian War time--mid-18th century.)

Well, they encounter some Indians who want to kill them--some dangers on the lake--some fear of treachery among their own. And ... some LOVE. In fact, Mabel's father convinces Pathfinder to marry his daughter!

But there is also a young lake sailor with them, Jasper Western, who has Eyes for Mabel.

Hmmmm ... what will happen?

The climactic scenes are in a remote fortress, and, of course, Pathfinder and Chingachgook are able to Save the Day.

I was actually quite moved at the end of this one as the Love Story is resolved. Cooper's prose can be, as I've said, tangled and dense (and, well, racist), but he can also cut through it all and make your tear ducts drip blood.

4. We'd been streaming--just before Lights Out (ten minutes or so/night)--the Netflix puff-of-a-film Murder Mystery, with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. They're an American couple on Euro holiday (he's a cop; she, a hairdresser--which ends up being significant). Lots of Agatha Christie stuff going on (including an Orient-Express moment later on). Murder-comedy--who woulda thunk it? But I chortled a few times and liked some of the minor actors. Harmless fun, right? Link to film trailer.

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

     - from Oxford English Dictionary

pussivanting, adj. and n.

That fusses, intrudes, or causes a disturbance; interfering, meddling.

Forms:  18 poursuivanting,   18– pussivantin',   18– pussivanting,   19– puzzivantin'.

Origin: Apparently a variant or alteration of another lexical item. Etymons: pursuivant n., -ing suffix2.

Etymology:Apparently < a variant of pursuivant n. + -ing suffix2.

A. adj.

1880  M. A. Courtney W. Cornwall Words  in  M. A. Courtney  & T. Q. Couch Gloss. Words Cornwall  45/2 Pussivanting, part., fussing; meddling. In the latter part of the seventeenth century the Poursuivants came into the county to search out all those entitled to bear arms.

1915  J. Galsworthy Bit o' Love  i. 17 There's puzzivantin' folk as'll set an' gossip the feathers off an angel.

 B. n.

1888  ‘Q’ Astonishing Hist. Troy Town  xvii. 203 ‘This 'ere pussivantin' may be relievin' to the mind, but I'm darned ef et can be good for shoe-leather.’ (Note: in the Fifteenth Century, so high was the spirit of the Trojan sea-captains,..that King Edward IV sent poursuivant after poursuivant to threaten his displeasure. The messengers had their ears slit for their pains; and ‘poursuivanting’ or ‘pussivanting’ survives as a term for ineffective bustle.)

1993  K. C. Phillipps Gloss. Cornish Dial.  46 Pussivanting, ineffectively bustling.

*Boyle also directed Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary, etc.
**The King Arthur cycle keeps repeating itself throughout history--as you'll learn (if you didn't already know) in these pages.