Sunday Sundries, 255

1. HBsOTW: I've got to say that the past few weeks it's been the check-out personnel at the two grocery stores we patronize in town--Acme and Heinen's. The patience and kindness these people have shown with customers (many of whom are solid contestants for the AOTW Award) during the twin mania of Thanksgiving and Christmas--oh, and throw in some Browns games for good measure. I wouldn't last five minutes in such a position.

2. Last night Joyce and I drove to the Hudson Regal Cinema to see Knives Out, the mystery film with Daniel Craig as a clever PI (with a Southern accent!) who likens his skill to what's described in Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow; both Craig's character and another say they know the book--but neither has read it! (Get in line ...)

In some ways, it's a conventional whodunit--rich family, a contested will, a murder (suicide?), innocent people who look guilty, guilty people who look innocent--a plot and situation out of Agatha Christie. Virtually all of the characters are humorous caricatures of annoying types of human beings--most of them sharing one trait: greed.

But ... some naughtiness mixed in, some heated family debates about Pres. Trump (unnamed but obvious), some thorough surprises (especially as we near the end), some good laughs.

Great cast: Craig, 90-yr-old Christopher Plummer, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Colette, and many others--notably, Ana de Armas, who plays the nurse attending Plummer's character.

Joyce and I both enjoyed it a lot--in a full theater auditorium.

Link to film trailer.

3. I finished one book this week, the newest novel by the prolific Joyce Carol Oates--My Life as a Rat (2019). (I did a post last week about Oates' career--and my long enjoyment of her--so I'll not repeat any of that here.)

Knowing Oates' work as I do, I would not have been surprised to read in the novel about an actual rodent--but, no, it's the story of a young girl near Niagara Falls, NY, a girl who discovers early on that she's got some ... problems ... in her life. Abusive older brothers ... a teacher who goes all Bill Cosby on some of his female students ... etc.

So what does she do with this knowledge? How to balance the very human desire to just "get along" with the ethical/moral dilemmas of doing what's right?

Oates tells the novel from the point-of-view of Violet Kerrigan, whom we follow from early girlhood to her mid-20s.

The men in the novel--virtually all of them--are (a) abusive, (b) intimidating, (c) threatening, (d) sexually intrusive, (e) violent), (f) unforgiving, (g) clueless about the lives of women, (h) all of the above. In fact, there's not a man we can even mildly admire until quite near the end of this 402-page novel.

I like how sly Oates--though the point-of-view remains constant--sometimes slips easily from 3rd to 2nd person to 1st person. "... at school, your friends have begun to avoid you" (52) "At school I tried to hide" (107). That sort of thing.

Anyway, another dazzler by Oates, whose works have, over the decades, entertained/shocked/informed/dazzled me.

4. We're still streaming bits of "our" shows for about an hour each evening before Lights Out. Right now, here's our list:

• Waking the Dead
• Shakespeare and Hathaway
• Upstart Crow
• Fleabag
• Jack Ryan (well, just me on this one; I watch bits of it while waiting for Joyce to join me. Just finished season 2 this week)
• a Netflix stand-up by Michelle Wolf
• I've also (see Jack Ryan) been re-watching The Ice Harvest, a 2005 thriller co-written by Richard Russo. (Link to film trailer.)  Starring John Cusak and Billy Bob Thornton. It's on HBO.

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

     - from dictionary.com

Brobdingnagian[ brob-ding-nag-ee-uh n ]

Adjective: of huge size; gigantic; tremendous.

Noun: an inhabitant of Brobdingnag (from Gulliver’s Travels)

a being of tremendous size; giant.