Sunday Sundries, 176

1. AOTW: No one particularly stands out this week--oh, there were some folks who turned left right tn my face (sans signal), but this has become so commonplace that I can hardly dignify it with the AOTW Award, can I?

2. Some of you know that I've been reading aloud to Joyce (most nights) the complete poems of A. E. Housman. Until you read them all in a row, by the way, you have no real clue about how dark they are: youth dying, war, the loss of this and that ... Anyway, the other night, I read a stanza whose final word ended the reading. The reason? I had no idea what it meant. Here is the quatrain in question:

Their arms the rust hath eaten,
   Their statues none regard:
Arabia shall not sweeten
   Their dust, with all her nard.

Nard? WTH?

So, I grabbed my phone, checked Merriam-Webster, found this:

spike·nard noun \ˈspīkˌnärd, -ˌnȧd, -nə(r)d\

called also nard

1 a :  a costly ointment with a musky odor valued as a perfume in ancient times —

b :  an East Indian aromatic plant (Nardostachys jatamansi) of the family Valerianaceae from the dried roots and young stems of which the ointment spikenard is believed to have been derived

I will not say (because it's kind of gross) that it takes some nads to use nard in a rhyming slot in a poem.

This poem, by the way, is number III in Houseman's posthumous collection cleverly called More Poems (1936--the year he died).

3. This week (last night!) I finally finished Wilkie Collins' 1866 novel, Armadale, which I really loved. It's got some great characters, the most memorable of whom is a "Miss Gwylt," a scheming, angry, vengeful young woman (also very attractive--which matters here) who sets into motion a plot to murder Alan Armadale and take over his (considerable) property. The last thirty pages are about as exciting as any I've read in a Victorian novel.

But this is also a novel about friendship, about seduction (Miss Gwylt has no problem getting men to do things they shouldn't be doing--including a foolish old lawyer named Mr. Bashwood, who thinks he has a chance with her; he doesn't), about the transfer of property, about courtship, and a whole lot more.

I liked this sentence I read last night (in the Penguin Classics edition pictured above): It's in a letter written by an attorney (not Mr. Bashwood!) to his son: "We live, Augustus, in an age eminently favourable to the growth of all roguery which is careful enough to keep up appearances" (673).

I'm slowly making my way through all of Collins' novels. Next is Man and Wife (1870). It's on my nightstand right now!

4. We "enjoyed" streaming (Netflix) the new stand-up special by Chris Rock, Tambourine. I put enjoyed in quotation marks because a lot of it was painful--esp. the second half when he talked about his drug use, infidelity, divorce, child custody, etc. We have known Rock since he, a nervous very young man, first appeared on SNL a long, long time ago, and it was kind of tough to see him looking a bit worn from his life, a bit bitter, and sometimes even making generalizations about men and women that--in my experience, anyhow--just didn't ring true. But a talent--no question. (Link to trailer for the special.)

5. We're about to finish streaming (Acorn) Season 3 of Line of Duty, which grows ever more intense. I've come to care very much for some of the characters, and when they get in trouble, well, my heart goes pitter-patter!

6. Last Word: A word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers:

    - from wordsmith.org--a word with horrible relevance this week ...

molochize (MOL-uh-kyz)

verb tr.: To sacrifice.

ETYMOLOGY:

After Moloch, a Canaanite god of the Bible, associated with the practice of child sacrifice. Earliest documented use: 1825.

USAGE:

“Look to the skies, then to the river, strike

Their hearts, and hold their babies up to it.

I think that they would Molochize them too,

To have the heavens clear.”

Alfred Tennyson; Harold; 1876.