1. AOTW: I didn't have a good candidate until about an hour ago--in the grocery-story parking lot. We rolled out of the Acme with our cart of goodies-and-necessaries, but when we got to our parking spot, we saw that the AOTW, in a huge SUV, had pulled up so closely behind us that we could not open our lift-back. That was bad enough; this is worse: He was sitting in his car looking at us! Didn't make a move to remedy the situation--thus, earning AOTW immortality.
2. We have an Acorn TV app on our Amazon Fire TV, and it misbehaved a bit last week. I got on the phone with Amazon, who then transferred me to an Acorn rep. About a half-hour later, after multiple hassles (and many mumbled curses on my end), it worked! And so last night we could resume streaming the latest season of Line of Duty, a British copper show about a unit that specializes in dealing with police corruption. I think it's the fifth season, and we've enjoyed them all--though they do get tense at times.
3. Back in the Old Days (pre-retirement) we had a Friday night routine, Joyce and I: We'd do our grocery shopping, have supper, I'd grade vocab quizzes, then we'd head out to a bookstore to spend some money we didn't have. As bookshops have slowly faded into the sunset, we have done this less and less, but last night we decided to head out to the Books-a-Million near Chapel Hill Mall, and we actually had a pretty good time.
We bought the late Tony Horwitz’s new book (Spying on the South)--he died on May 27 this year while on a book tour for the volume! He was in Washington, DC. He was only 60. (Link to NYT obituary.)
I bought one other book, too--a copy of Lord of the Flies to donate to the Akron City Schools for summer reading/English classes. I told the clerk the story of how William Golding (Flies was his first book) was teaching at the time he wrote the novel, and he used to put his students to work at their seats--worksheets and such--and he would work on his Flies manuscript up at his desk!
4. I finished just one book this week--but it was a long one--and, for me, a significant one: James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie (1827), which concludes his five-volume set of novels about Natty Bumppo (a.k.a. Deerslayer, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, Leatherstocking).
Cooper did not write the novels in the order of Natty's age, but that's how I read them. In this one, Natty is in his late 80s and has moved west, out into the prairies (!), because the advance of "civilization" back in the East has depressed him--the cutting of forests, the slaughter of animals for the fun of it.
He gets involved with quite a cluster of characters in this one--a beekeeper, a pompous intellectual (!), a family of self-absorbed bullies (they come around a bit), a young Pawnee warrior (whom he befriends), and a bunch of "bad" Sioux, who sort of become the Plains version of the "bad" Huron Indians back in the East (where they are contrasted to the "good" Delaware and Mohican tribes).
Well, there are battles with the Sioux--capture by the Sioux (who plan to torture and kill their adversaries)--some heroics by ... Guess Who? ... some sad moments of departure.
In boyhood I had read the story many times in its Classics Illustrated format--but, as I've discovered with the other four novels (which I'd also read in comic-book form), I didn't remember a lot. Just one thing in this one: a buffalo stampede. And, of course, the death of Natty very near the end. He doesn't want to be buried in a cemetery. "Let me sleep where I have lived," he says, "beyond the din of the settlements" (1315, Lib of Amer edition). And so he does.
I'm planning to do a detailed post about all five of the novels, somewhere down the road (soon, soon), but just want to leave you with this. When I was a student at Hiram College (1962-66), I (think I) recall that The Last of the Mohicans was included in our standard Intro to American Lit anthology (Norton). Could this still be true? Having hacked my way through the tall prairie grass of all five of these novels, I wonder: Could undergraduates today read Cooper?
Maybe some of my college-teaching friends could let me know ...
5. We didn't go to the movies this week ... nothing appealed ...
6. Last Word--a word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers ...
- from wordsmith.org
satyagraha (suh-TYAH-gruh-uh, sut-YAH-gru-ha)
noun: The policy of passive nonviolent resistance
as a protest against injustice.
ETYMOLOGY: Coined by Mahatma Gandhi
(1869-1948) in India’s freedom struggle, from Sanskrit satyagraha, from satyam
(truth) + agraha (determination, insistence), ultimately from the
Indo-European root ghrebh- (to seize or reach), which also gave us grasp
and grab. Earliest documented use: 1920.
USAGE: “Colin Kaepernick is an NFL pariah. His
stand for social justice by taking a knee during the national anthem last
season as a member of the San Francisco 49ers has left him sitting on his couch
as NFL training camps commence this week. “His sideline satyagraha,
designed to bring attention to civil rights violations and disparities in
treatment from law enforcement in this country, makes him unemployable in a
league that frowns upon individuality, and values compliance and conformity
from its players.”
-Christopher L. Gasper; Kaepernick Saga Cuts
Against the Grain; Boston Globe (Massachusetts); Jul 23, 2017.
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