Sunday Sundries, 191

1. AOTW: This is kind of hard to believe ... but ... the AOTW this week, though a different individual from last week's winner, performed the same stunt in virtually the same place: We were driving down into the Valley, on our way to Szalay's (farm market), when a 4x4 pulled up right behind us--inches from our bumper--and tried to urge us with his dark presence to ... speed up (we were going 40 in a 35). When I did not speed up, he tried his bright lights--on, off, on again. I stayed firm. Then--seeing a driveway into one of the national park parking lots, I turned in and he roared by. I may have caught a flash of finger. (Guess which one?) Well, wherever he was going, only one thing is certain: At his destination the AOTW Award was awaiting him.

2. Last night, Joyce and I drove over to the Kent Cinema to see Solo, the latest in the Star Wars series. I was not all that crazy to see it--but went for two main reasons: (1) our grandsons love the films--want to be able to talk with them about it; (2) we took our own son to see the original Star Wars at the very same cinema in the summer of 1977, the summer he would turn five. He loved it--still loves it--has taught his kids to love it.

Anyway, it was much better than I feared (the reviews had not been kind; the audiences have not swarmed to see it), and we both enjoyed the relationships we saw developing (e.g., young Han and Chewie). Fun to see how he acquired the Millennium Falcon, too. As some reviewers have said, the young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) does not much resemble Harrison Ford (looks, mannerisms), but I forgot about that after a while and just enjoyed the leaps into hyper-space.

Sure, there were lots of boom-booms--lots of creatures dying (including some you didn't want to die)--but, as I said, much better than we'd expected/feared. (Link to film trailer.)

2. Odd coincidence: This week I streamed/finished the final John Wayne film, The Shootist, 1976, and saw a young Ron Howard playing the adolescent boy in the tale. Howard, of course, directed Solo.

3. We hadn't realized that Elementary had re-booted for another season, so, as soon as we learned, we streamed the first episode via the CBS app, which (in our case) is a lousy app. Anyone else have problems with it? (And, yes, I've done things to try to speed it up: clearing the cache, re-booting our Amazon Fire TV, etc.)

4. I finished two books this week ...

     - The first was the next in the Longmire series by Craig Johnson, a series I'm reading on Kindle (a few "pages" at night) (a) because I'd liked the TV series (though it little resembles the novels), (b) because I'm a psycho and have to read everything in a series once I begin. (As is my wont, I'm reading them in the order of publication.)

This latest was An Obvious Fact (2016), a novel that sends Walt, his deputy Vic (Victoria) (with whom he's ... "involved"), his lifelong friend, Henry Standing Bear, to South Dakota, where Henry is in a cycle contest--and where (surprise!) death and drugs and corruption and the Feds are involved in a variety of nasty goings-on.

Had fun reading it--getting to know these characters well--and Walt's literacy is a stunner: He knows, in some cases, some very arcane facts (convenient for the storyteller!). In this way he reminds me of Jack Taylor in the Ken Bruen novels (which I'm also psycho-reading).

     - The second was a "real" book--Matthew Pearl's latest, The Dante Chamber (2018), a sequel to the novel that launched him, The Dante Club (2003), a novel about a series of murders around Boston at the time that Longfellow and some friends (Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell among them) were working on Longfellow's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. The murders resemble in kind the torments Dante describes in Hell.

The Dante Chamber moves on to Purgatorio--and we are in London, where the Rossettis, Tennyson, and Robert Browning are involved in dealing with some Purgatorio-like deaths around London, 1870; soon joining them is Oliver Wendell Holmes.

A world of fun to read. I loved it when the writers would talk about their works, when their jealousies would emerge, when they struggled to figure out what was going on. And, as usual, Pearl did some prodigious research that underlies the story--and its solution.

I should add here that I've met Matthew Pearl. I was teaching American lit at Western Reserve Academy in the 2000s, and after I read The Dante Club, I knew it was perfect for the eleventh graders I was teaching: They'd read Inferno as sophomores, and they read Longfellow and Holmes with me. I knew that, reading the book, they'd feel like geniuses!

Pearl spent a day at the school on Thursday, April 8, 2004; he spoke with each of my three classes; he delivered a talk to the entire student body; he did a book-signing, etc. I took some kids with me to pick him up at Hopkins Airport (and to return him--different kids), and he was great with them--conversing intently with them the entire way. It was a thrill. Below ... some pix of him that day.

And, yes, he signed some books for me!

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

     - from dictionary.com

bacciferous [bak-sif-er-uhs] adjective

1. Botany. bearing or producing berries.

QUOTES: Bacciferous trees, are such as bear berries; as the juniper and yew-tree.

-- Charlotte Matilda Hunt, The Little World of Knowledge, 1826

ORIGIN:The English adjective bacciferous “bearing berries” comes from Latin bacca (also bāca) “fruit of a shrub or tree, nut,” a word of unknown origin. The Latin suffix -fer “carrying, bearing” is from a very widespread Proto-Indo-European root bher- “to carry,” source of Germanic (English) bear, Greek phérein “to carry, bear,” and Slavic (Polish) bierać “to carry.” Bacciferous entered English in the 17th century.