Sunday Sundries, 237

1. AOTW: Uh,oh. No one stood out this week, so ... by default ... the award this week goes to ... me. Apologies, then, to all whom I offended--on the road, in the coffee shop, at the health club, online, in my dreams ...

2. A busy week with the books--finished three this week ...

     - The first was vol. 4 in James Fenimore Cooper's five-volume Leatherstocking Tales, The Pioneers (1823). Actually, it was the first of the volumes he wrote about Natty Bumppo, who, in this book, is 70 and nearing his end. Later, Cooper would write the novels about the younger Natty, known, variously, as Deerslayer, Hawkeye, Pathfinder.

In this one, Natty is living near Otsego Lake (east-central NY), where he has been for a while--and he is very depressed about what's happening to the land around him--settlers moving in, trees falling, wildlife disappearing.

He gets in trouble for shooting a deer out of season--and then for resisting arrest. (Gets to spend some time in the stocks.) But he also saves the judge's daughter from a panther attack, so ...

This wordy novel also features (?) the death of his long-time friend, the Delaware warrior Chingachgook, who has had to endure some "civilization," too.

Near the end, Natty disappears, heading west with his hunting dogs. And thus the table is set for the final volume, The Prairie, 1827.

I know that Cooper is drifting (has drifted?) away from contemporary readers. For the most part, you have to want to read these novels, for they are alluring in no ways that 2019 encourages. I don't know if Cooper is taught anywhere these days-except in upper-level American lit classes? In grad school? Reading him takes patience, perseverance, a willingness to hack away at the wordy undergrowth of long paragraphs--not qualities I see flourishing around me these days. So it goes.

I'm hardly a saint. I read the comic-book versions of Cooper when I was young ...

     - The second was a play by Italian playwright Luigi Piarandello (1867-1936), Six Characters in Search of an Author (first performed in 1923). I've known about the play for nearly sixty years--first learning of it back at Hiram College. But I'd never gotten around to reading it--had never seen it.

But a week or so ago in the coffee shop a man was telling me how he'd seen it recently--and had been pretty baffled.

Okay. Time to read it. And so I did.

The play begins as a cast assembles on a fairly empty stage to begin rehearsing another Pirandello play, Mixing It Up. As they are getting organized, etc., six strangers arrive--a family--and they approach the director (called "Manager" here) and declare that they need someone to write their story. The Father says, "But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here. In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world" (Dover Thrift Edition, 10).

The Manager, of course, thinks they're nuts (as do the cast members), but as the thing goes on, the Manager gets intrigued and decides to pursue it ... and off we go.

Secrets tumble around on the stage, the family members are annoyed when the Manager wants to make changes, compress time ...

What is real? And is it even real at all until it appears in words?

     - The third was The Nickel Boys, 2019, the latest novel by the extraordinarily gifted Colson Whitehead, whose dazzling The Colossus of New York, 2003, got me started. Every one of his books has, in ways big and small, stunned me.

This one is about a boys' reform school in Florida, a place racially segregated, a place where corruption, violence, racism, and assorted other human (and inhuman and subhuman) corruptions thrive among the adults in charge. Nickel is the name of the school.

Whitehead tells the story (set in the early 1960s) through the experiences of a young black man, Elwood, a young man who has many intellectual interests (and talents)--who loves listening to Martin Luther King speak on records--but who is picked up in a stolen car: He'd hitched a ride, had had no idea the car was hot. Too bad. Off he goes to Nickel.

Where he endures a savage beating and numerous other indignities too numerous to count.

Whitehead reserves his Big Surprise for very near the end. (No more about that.)

This was not my favorite Whitehead book. Until the Big Surprise, in fact, I thought it seemed a bit ordinary (for him--which is extraordinary for most other writers).

Whitehead based his book on the case of Florida's Dozier School, where actual horrors have been uncovered--bones and remains, etc.

So ... worth reading? Oh, yes! But keep your expectations in check ...

3. Last night Joyce and I drove over the Cinemark in Macedonia to see a film we'd intended to see earlier this year--but never got around to it: Booksmart. It's a story of two scholarly (sort of) girls on the eve of their high school graduation. They have remained resolutely nerdy throughout high school and will be going to first-rate universities. They have eschewed parties and drugs and sex and whatever.

But then they learn that some of their partying classmates have also gotten into prestige universities, and they believe they have missed something(s). And so ... they resolve to descend upon a big student party that night.

Chaos ensues, of course.

I was disappointed. I'd read some good reviews of it, some of them even saying it really wasn't all that much like Superbad (2007). Uh, yes it was.

All the cliches are here: clueless adults (all were re fools--or corrupt--or both), getting high (there was an amusing scene when the two girls, on drugs (they'd not been aware it had happened), feel like dolls--and dolls are what we see!), sexual initiations, etc.

And, nerd that I am, I got to thinking about one (tacit?) lesson of the film is that being a nerd is no fun--that you can party hard and still get into Yale. Hmmmmmm ...  It seems to say that an intellectual life is, you know, a boring one. No, it isn't. What is boring is seeing yet another film that sees humor in self-destruction, that celebrates hedonism.

I'm sounding like a Grumpy Old Man. Oh well ...

Link to film trailer.

4. We finally finished streaming the recent Deadwood film on HBO. Although I loved it (as I did the original HBO series, 2004-06), I think you needed to have seen the series--and to have remembered it very well--to understand a lot of what was happening--not to mention knowing who these characters are (and were)! Still, I was moved at the end ...

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

     - from dictionary.com

abusage [uh-byoo-sij]

noun

1. improper use of words; unidiomatic or ungrammatical language.

QUOTES: As a presidential campaign approaches, great rhetorical and metaphoric strain is placed on the language. ... Lest this abusage corrupt the young, this department instituted (I started) the scrupulously bipartisan 1988 Hyperbolic and Metaphoric Watch.

-- William Safire, "The '88 Rhetorical Watch," New York Times, March 23, 1986

ORIGIN: The noun abusage, a derivative of the verb abuse, has been in English since the mid-16th century, and originally the noun had many of the original senses of the verb: “misuse, ill-use, abuse,” and the still stronger sense “corrupt practices, immoral behavior.” New Zealand-born British lexicographer Eric Partridge (1894–1979) is credited for giving abusage its current meaning “improper use of language” in his Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English (1942).