Sunday Sundries, 189

1. AOTW: I think we may be nearing a Lifetime Achievement Award for those drivers who insist that when their lane is closing, they still have the right-of-way.  Dealt with such AOTWs several times this week in several different places. Each time I said several different bad words.

2. I finished a couple of books this week ...

     - The first was the next in the series of novels about Jack Taylor, a former Irish cop who lost his job for alcohol-related reasons. (He appeared for a while, did Jack, in a TV series we streamed; we'd like to see him back.) I've been reading Ken Bruen's novels about him, reading them in the order that Bruen published them. This most recent--Cross (2007)--involves Jack in a couple of cases, the principal one about a death by crucifixion of a young man in Galway (where Bruen sets his novels). Jack is winning his battle with alcoholism in this installment (but he will be sure to fall), and life has battered him and bruised him. But ... into the case he dives, and eventually he ... ain't tellin'.

Next in the series ... Sanctuary, which I've ordered. (For some reason it's not on Kindle, which is how I've read the others.)

     - The second I finished was Barracoon, the recently published early work by Zora Neale Hurston, whose Their Eyes Were Watching God I taught at Western Reserve Academy back in the day. Hurston was studying anthropology (with Franz Boaz) at Columbia Univ., and she latched onto this story of a last surviving slave. With Boaz' encouragement, she went to Alabama late in 1927 to interview Oulale Kossala (now called Cudjo Lewis); she got to know him well; interviewed him multiple times, and this book--for which Hurston could not find a publisher--tells both his story and hers.

His story is a grim one. Captured by other Africans from another tribe and sold, Lewis endured the terror and humiliation of it all; spent some foul time in the Barracoon (barracks) waiting to be shipped out; the trans-Atlantic voyage; the humiliations and horrors of slave labor here. Liberation in the Civil War. The struggle to survive in the South, where he and other freed slaves were hardly welcomed into the fellowship of humanity.

Near the end, Hurston writes: "I am sure that he does not fear death. ... But he is full of trembling awe before the altar of his past" (94).

There's a brief Foreword by Alice Walker (who helped return Hurston to public prominence years ago)--and much other scholarly front- and back-matter.

Informative to read--and wonderful to see Hurston first beginning to spread her writing wings.

3. Joyce and I finished watching (in several installments, via Netflix DVD) the 1971 film The Last Picture Show, based on the eponymous novel by Larry McMurtry (who also co-wrote the screenplay). We had been  married only two years when we first saw it, and I don't think I've seen it since.

Link to film trailer.

But it is something. Astonishing cinematography showing the dying small Texas town, the vast Texas terrain. And the performances were amazing, too--Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cloris Leachman, Ben Johnson, Clu Gulager, Randy Quaid, Cybill Shepherd, Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan ... so many others.

Director Peter Bogdanavich burst onto the scene with this--and never really (as I recall) matched the power of what he did here. (He filmed the 1990 sequel, also based on a McMurtry novel--Texasville (1987)--but it didn't match the power of the earlier story, though it featured many of the same performers.)

I hadn't remembered the emphasis on the sex lives of the characters--but it is a principal focus. (Hey, the picture show's closing ... what else is there to do?) And the desperation of so many lives ...

4. We finished the latest available streaming season of Death in Paradise, a series we've enjoyed. They did something unusual this year: They phased out their principal detective and phased in a New Guy. We not so sure we like the New Guy so much (shown in the foreground below), but will give him a chance when the current season is available to stream.

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

     - from wordsmith.org

Cervantic  (suhr-VAN-tik)

adjective: Of or relating to Miguel de Cervantes, especially his satirizing of the chivalric romances.

ETYMOLOGY: After the Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), best known for Don Quixote. Earliest documented use: 1760. Many of Cervantes’s characters have also become eponyms.

USAGE: “The novel’s strong vein of comic dissent is summed up in the figure of Yorick, Shakespearean joker and memento mori, whose Cervantic tilting at windmills has a serious edge.”

Carol Watts; Rereadings; The Guardian (London, UK); Aug 23, 2003.