Sunday Sundries, 194

Just a wee reminder: I've not been posting here often because I'm trying to finish Frankenstein Sundae (my memoir about chasing Mary Shelley around for a couple of decades). I think I'm now editing the final draft. I say I think because, well, I thought the previous draft was the final one! Anyway, if all goes well, I should be ready to upload it to Kindle Direct in a couple of weeks, and then I can get back to annoying you almost every day on this site.

Also--I've been trying to keep Sunday Sundries going each week, but last week, I felt yucky and ended up taking an afternoon-long nap instead!

1.AOTW: This week, this one was easy! Joyce and I were going down an entrance ramp onto Rt. 8 in Stow when, from behind us, the AOTW decided that she (that's right: she) could not wait another second to pass us. So ... though the entrance ramp there is short, she roared by us just as we were about to merge; other cars were zooming along Rt. 8, and it was only through some serious braking and cursing (and honking ... and, uh, gesturing) that we were able to avoid a crash. The AOTW soared on, heading, I suppose, to her AOTW Awards Banquet.

2. I finished a couple of books recently ...

     - The first was Nella Larsen's Passing, a novel from 1929 (when my mom was 10!), recently reprinted by Penguin Classics. It is the story of an African American woman who is "passing" as white, a woman married to a white racist who is unaware of his wife's background. One thing I really liked: The story travels to us through the eyes of this young woman's (Clara's) friend, Irene, who fails some very fundamental friendship tests as we arrive at the inevitable climax of this depressing tale.

Very well written, emotional. The author--Nella Larsen (1891-1964)--had a mixed racial heritage herself, and here's a link to a very clear story about her in the New York Times. She was a participant in the Harlem Renaissance.

Nella Larsen

     - The second I finished was Tyrant, 2018, a short disquisition by Shakespeare authority Stephen Greenblatt about the tyrants whom Shakespeare depicts in his plays--with focus on Henry VI (and the populist character Jack Cade), Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, Coriolanus, Caesar.

Greenblatt (who teaches at Harvard and has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award) waits until his Acknowledgements to declare what is patent throughout: He was alarmed by the 2016 election--and by what has ensued--and so he looked to Shakespeare for understanding and for remedy.

In his Coda to this short, focused book he says this--a note of some hope: "But Shakespeare believed that the tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely extinguished. The best chance for the recovery of collective decency lay, he thought, in the political action of ordinary citizens" (189).

Hope in the ideas and lines of the Bard, 1564-1616.

3. We saw the new documentary about Fred Rogers--Won't You Be My Neighbor?--up at the Chagrin Cinema a week ago and pretty much enjoyed it all the way through--though, for me, there were a couple of ... issues. For one: No one said anything too critical about Mr. Rogers. (He came across as a Saint ... and, who knows? Maybe he was.) For another, there was not the slightest reference to his big competition, Sesame Street.  When our son was growing up, he much preferred SS to MR, but what I always liked about Rogers is his lack of interest in high-tech stuff--just the plain, the simple, the effective. He was not all that good at doing things (except, as you'll see in the film, playing the piano!), and that was another way, I think, that he "bonded" with children--and their parents. Not intimating, that's for sure.

Now, there's one scene in the film when I almost completely lost it, almost became nothing but a puddle of tears. If you see the film, you'll know exactly which scene I mean; I will not say more--don't want to spoil it for you. I'll just add: I almost broke out sobbing aloud!

Link to film trailer.

4. We were uncomfortable in a very different way while watching the recent film (via Netflix DVD) The Birth of a Nation (2016), a film directed by and starring Nate Parker, a film that tells the story of Nat Turner, who led a brief slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, killing a number of whites in retaliation for you-know-what. There was unease from the very beginning--watching the brutal treatment of slaves by their owners (beatings, rapes, degradation of all sorts), and, of course, the retaliation was hard to watch, too.

Nat Turner (captured and hanged) has been controversial for a long time (as has, say, John Brown, who also killed--and was also hanged--in his efforts to end slavery). But in the moral balance, here, there is no question, is there? People dragged across the ocean, chained, brutalized, forced to work in severe heat, live in squalor, separated from their families, endure beatings and rapes, etc. ... and we condemn a man who tried to fight back the only way he could?

The only real complaint I had about the film? At times it seemed a bit ... romantic? With and without a capital R. I know, I know: Love is Hope ...

But, oh, was it powerful! And so hard to watch. That voice in my head: Oh, what we humans will do to one another!

Link to film trailer.

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

     - from The Oxford English Dictionary ... a word that was very fitting last week ...

mafted, adj.    In predicative use: oppressed or stifled, esp. by the heat; exhausted from heat, crowds, or exertion.

Forms:  18– mafted,   18 mefted.

Origin: Of uncertain origin. Perhaps formed within English, by derivation. Etymons: maft v., -ed suffix1.

Etymology:Origin uncertain. Perhaps <  maft v. + -ed suffix1, although the verb is first attested much later, and is itself of unknown origin.

 Eng. regional (north-eastern, esp. Yorkshire).

a1800  S. Pegge Suppl. Grose's Provinc. Gloss.(1814) Mafted, overpowered by heat. York.

1898 Belgravia  Apr. 529 It's that warm in here, I'm fair mafted.

a1921  R. W. S. Bishop My Moorland Patients(1922) i. 7 He was very ‘mafted and moidered’ with such a sudden plunge into city dissipation, and only too thankful to return safe and sound to his moorland eyrie.

1973  F. Horner Dunnington  x. 69 It wor her weddin day: T'oose wor that full o' kelter an fooaks Ah wor arrished an mafted, an all.

2010  @lucyinglis 24 Feb. in twitter.com(O.E.D. Archive) Dear Lord—a fur coat on the Bakerloo line, she must have been mafted.