1. HBOTW [Human Being of the Week]: A nurse at Seidman Cancer Center this week--a nurse who is the mother of a student I taught in 8th grade years ago--a nurse who treated me with supreme kindness as she (1) injected me with Trelstar (an anti-cancer med), (2) answered countless questions from both Joyce and me. Nothing perfunctory that day: She cares.
2. Coincidence Time: Yesterday, I posted here about Jim Croce (and Don McLean), pop singers from the 70s, and I used the image of telephones--from hand-crank to iPhone. And then, later, after the post, I remembered one of Croce's hits--"Operator," 1972--a song based on a telephone technology that seems a century ago now. (Link to the song.) (I just played the song and had to stop it halfway through: I was getting ... emotional. Geez!)
3. I finished three books this week ...
- The first, which I've been reading in small pieces at night on my Kindle, was the most recent novel by Craig Johnson about contemporary Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire--Land of Wolves--a complicated novel about the death of a shepherd up in the mountains, a shepherd who, post-mortem, shows signs of having been munched on by a wolf.
The story quickly gets complicated (perhaps too much so?), and Longmire (once again!) ends up in the mountains in danger as we approach the denouement.
Oh, and, yes, the wolf is a factor throughout ...
BTW: The TV series based on the Longmire novels varies greatly from the texts. The characters are the same; the events, different (and crazier in the TV version). (Link to series info.)
- The second was another of the books I've been reading portions of at night--Wilkie Collins' 1881 novel, The Black Robe. (I'm reading all of Collins' novels, in the order that he wrote them--only a few to go!)
This one tells the story of an attempt by the Roman Catholic church to persuade a wealthy Englishman to convert--but what they're really interested in is the re-acquisition of an abbey that they'd lost centuries before when Henry VIII decided the country would be Protestant and that all Roman Catholic lands and properties would belong to the Crown.
Complicating the plot: The wealthy young man is marrying. So the Bad Priest also works hard (and slyly) to break the marriage.
Obviously, this is not a plot designed to appeal to Roman Catholics! And it was quite uncomfortable to read in 2019-20.
Not that we today are without our own religious preferences and paranoia. (My Facebook page sometimes shows bizarrely biased memes, etc., posted by my FB Friends--especially against Muslims.)
So ... read this one, if you will, for its literary merits (and there are many)--not for its thematic ugliness.
BTW: One of Collins' most well-known novels is The Moonstone (1868), one of the first published detective novels (Poe, of course, who died in 1849, had published three detective stories earlier on)--and lots of fun to read. In The Black Robe, Collins re-introduces, briefly, one of the characters from The Moonstone and even uses a letter from that character to provide a key bit of information near the end.
- The third book I finished this week was a new collection of short fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, whose fine novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) I greatly enjoyed teaching at Western Reserve Academy in 2007-08 when we English teachers decided to require it for all juniors that year.
There are no new stories in the collection, but they have been freshly edited, checked against the originals, etc. The title is Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020), and, coincidentally, the New York Times Book Review this week included a glowing review of the book. (Link to NYTBR review.)
I admired many of the stories and was even dazzled at times by what she was doing back in the 1920s (when these stories appeared in various periodicals). But not always. There were times I felt she was kind of ... going through the motions? Especially in some pieces she wrote that used a Biblical format (diction, even verse numbers). I knew what she was going, but I just could not get interested. (My bad?)
She almost always writes about ordinary people who are confronting sometimes extraordinary events/problems in their lives.
My favorite was a story published posthumously--appropriately titled "Black Death." It's a story that takes place in Eatonville, Fla. (where she grew up; Joyce and I spent a day there in June 2003). It's a story about a lying man (!) and a vulnerable young woman, whom, of course, he betrays. Then ... some magic and revenge and death ... Very moving and imaginative.
4. We're starting to get a little sad as the final episode of the wonderful series Upstart Crow grows ever near. Just watched a great episode about the writing of Hamlet and Love's Labour's Lost. We started an episode last night--and he's at work on The Merchant of Venice. So funny--clever--knowledgeable--imaginative--relevant.
But ... Vera is back, and we'll start streaming that series once the crow has winged away!
5. Last Word--a word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers:
- from Oxford English Dictionary (actually, this one was in December ... oh well)
spit take, n. An act
of suddenly spitting out the liquid one is drinking as a reaction to something
surprising or funny, esp. as a technique in comedic acting.
Origin: Formed within
English, by compounding. Etymons: spit n.2, take n.1
Etymology: < spit n.2 + take n.1 (compare
sense 10 at that entry), probably after double-take n.
1971 Esquire Feb. 91 Students are practicing the ‘spit
take’ made so famous by Danny Thomas on Make Room for Daddy.
1991 Vogue Sept. 380/1 After sixty-nine years,
forty-five of them spent in Hollywood, he still finds spit takes and
trouser-zipper jokes hilarious.
2006 N.Y. Times Mag. 21 May 54/2 I sat at the bar. And then I
practically did a spit-take when I saw that the entire Gyllenhaal family was
sitting just a few feet away from me.
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