1. AOTW: A parking-lot AOTW this week. This morning. Grocery store, We were about to head home, slowly backing out. I saw a car parked behind us. Just sitting there. I was halfway out when the AOTW honked loudly, declaring that HE was going to leave first. I had to pull back into our slot and wait for the AOTW to drive off to AOTW Land.
2. I finished just one book this week--a 2009 collection of short poems, Sestets, by Charles Wright (1935-), who has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and served as our Poet Laureate in 2014-15. (Not bad.)
A sestet is a six-line poem--and it's a term I have most often associated with sonnets, the fourteen-line poems often divided into an "octave" and a "sestet." But as Wright shows us here, it can also mean a stand-alone six-liner.
So why did I buy this book?
On May 25, 2015, Wright's poem "It's Sweet to Be Remembered" was featured on Writer's Almanac. I liked it--memorized it.
It’s Sweet to Be Remembered
by Charles Wright
No one’s remembered much longer than
a rock
is remembered beside the road
If he’s lucky or
Some tune or harsh word
uttered in childhood or back in the
day.
Still how nice to imagine some kid
someday
picking that rock up and holding it
in his hand
Briefly before he chucks it
Deep in the woods in a sunny spot in
the tall grass.
I rehearse this one four times a week while I'm walking home from the coffee shop in the morning. But then, recently, I began to "lose" part of it. I had no copy. I knew I could easily find a copy online (as I just did, pasting it in above), but I decided I wanted to read more of Wright, so I ordered the book, Sestets, in which that poem originally appeared.
(BTW: the poem is a sestet--each line begins with a capital letter, so the lower-case lines belong with the previous capitalized line.)
And I took a while, reading the book in leisurely fashion. The poems--many of them--are "dark." Wright was just about my age in 2009 when he wrote them, and I can tell you that in your mid-seventies there is a lot more "darkness visible" than there is earlier on. ("Darkness visible," by the way, comes from Milton's Paradise Lost--part of his description of Hell--and later became the title of William Styron's 1989 volume--a wonderful book--about his own battles with clinical depression.)
So ... death, loss--these are common throughout. And I am not in the least surprised.
Think I'll buy some more Wright ...
3. On Friday we finished the 2nd (and apparently final) season of Fleabag on Amazon Prime. Wow. Written by (and starring) Phoebe Waller-Bridge (whom we first saw hosting SNL earlier this year), the stories feature a young, somewhat untethered woman. She's sexually active (to say the least!), has an up-and-down relationship with her sister; her father is getting re-married to a repellent woman; her best friend has died; her cafe is struggling. She meets a young, handsome priest, and ...
Watch the show. I've read online that Waller-Bridge has said there will not be a season 3. She feels the story is, in a sense, over.
I'm glad. And I'm not.
3. We didn't go to the movies this weekend, though we have tickets already for New Year's Eve: We're going to see Little Women.
We've both been interested in the Alcotts--have seen their home and graves in Concord, Mass. Have read a lot. Looking forward to it.
No, it's now, "I'll do a ..."
Not sure when/how that I'll-do-a started. But, Old Guy that I am, I don't like it!
5. Last Word: A word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers ...
- from wordsmith.org
amaxophobia (uh-mak-suh-FOH-bee-uh)
noun: The fear of riding in a
vehicle.
ETYMOLOGY: From Greek hamaxa
(wagon) + -phobia (fear).
USAGE: “The poor woman is scared to
death ... Anne must have seen the same thing in her rearview mirror. ‘Great,’
she said just loud enough for Mary Helen to hear, “not only are we driving Miss
Daisy, but we are driving Miss Daisy with amaxophobia.” Carol Anne
O’Marie; The Corporal Works of Murder; St Martin’s Press; 2003.
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