Sunday Sundries, 175

1. AOTW: Not hard this week. Coffee shop. Ten feet away. A woman (!) having a full-voice Skype call with another woman; iPad volume on HIGH. About ten minutes. And the entire conversation could be summarized like this: "How are you?" "I am fine."  Perhaps I'm being ... insensitive. Okay. So it goes in an Old Man's dotage!

2. On Friday night, Joyce and I went over to the Kent Cinemas to see Hostiles, a film whose run around here is just about over. (The only Kent showing the entire evening was at 6:20.) I had read some good reviews of it--and, having seen it, I understand. Just the cinematography alone is gorgeous and it all had a special effect on me because, you see, I love the West, the vistas, the mountains, the deserts, etc. I've driven across it all quite a few times--and I grew up during the age of the Western on TV and at the movies.

The actors were fine. And the story is about a crusty, anti-Indian U. S. Army captain (played well by Christian Bale), who is ordered to return to the Cheyenne reservation in Montana an older (sick) warrior (played by Wes Studi) and his family (he's been in custody for some years).

As I said, I loved the vistas--the shots that were clearly a tribute to John Ford, et al.

I thought, though, that it was a little PC, especially for a Western. Some characters transformed along the way, and you could see it coming from Minute One. Others were resolutely hateful and you knew they were not going to change (they didn't).

SPOILER ALERT ... I also thought the ending--the little Cheyenne child ending up with the white woman (Comanche had killed her husband and children), who's taking a train, post-adventure (and post-trauma) , to Chicago--was a little ... much. Why do all the Cheyenne--women and children (except for one) and men have to get killed ...? And the kid end up with Rosamund Pike? On a train to Chicago?

SPOILER ALERT OVER. (Link to film trailer.)

3. Joyce and I finished streaming the HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge, based on the Elizabeth Strout novel and starring Frances McDormand (title role) and Richard Jenkins and, later, Bill Murray (!). Such a fine series. Both of us loved the book; both of us loved the series. Marriage. Parenthood. Friendships. All there. All the sorrow and the pain and disappointment that so many films avoid. (Link to series trailer.)

4. I finished two books since last I posted a "Sunday Sundries":

     - The first was the first book by Jennifer Egan, a collection of short stories called Emerald City, a 1996 volume that she first published in England in 1993. (I couldn't afford to buy one of those--a signed copy is going for about $500 today!).

I should explain that I'd never read Egan until I saw the fine reviews for her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach (which I have begun now to read). I decided to read my way through Egan's previous novels--and did--but when I'd finished them, I wanted more, so I went with the story collection before launching into MB.

The stories are like her novels: fine, complex, shifting points of view. They deal with coming of age, loss, pain (sound like fun yet?). And sentences like this one: "The relief of being one step closer to something inevitable. The pleasure of ceasing to resist, of giving up" (137).

     - And I also finished the final novel I'd not yet read by William Faulkner, a journey I've been enjoying for about a year: The Reivers, 1962, published on June 4, barely a month before he died on July 6, 1962.

I had read Faulkner's most celebrated novels (The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!)--and I'd enjoyed teaching As I Lay Dying, which, by the way, was the first Faulkner novel I'd ever read: Hiram College, Dr. Abe C. Ravitz, 1965-ish.

Anyway, I started reading all the unread ones--in order--reading other things in between. (After a Faulkner you need a few breaths!) And now ... all gone. Sigh.

I saw the film of The Reivers: A Reminiscence, 1969 (with Steve McQueen, music by pre-Star Wars John Williams), released on Christmas Day; Joyce and I had been married five days. It must have been one of the first movies we saw as a married couple. I've got it ordered on Netflix DVD and will post something here once I've seen it.

It's a more frisky story than we normally associate with Faulkner--a "caper" story set in 1905. It involves a young boy, a stolen horse, a missing car, some horse races to retrieve the car, social class and human races, relationships with women, and even a stolen false tooth. Fun to read.

Near the end, the grandfather of Lucius (the boy) tells him: "Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It is too valuable" (Lib of Amer edition, 968). Well, I'm not so sure about that--but nice idea!

5. And some really good news: The fact that I even posted today is amazing because I meet with our accountant tomorrow (Monday) re: IRS, etc. And I'm ready! (Or at least I think I am: He generally sends me back for more homework!)

6. Final Word: A word I liked recently from one of my online word-of-the-day providers:

     - from dictionary.com

flakelet [fleyk-lit] noun

1. a small flake, as of snow.

QUOTES

I am amazed before a little flakelet of snow, at its loveliness, at the strangeness of its geometry, its combination of angles, at the marvellous chemistry which brought these curious atoms together.

-- Theodore Parker, Lessons from the World of Matter and the World of Man, 1865

ORIGIN

Flakelet was first recorded in the 1880s.