Sunday Sundries, 198

I know; I know. It's Monday. Couldn't post yesterday. So ... deal with it!

1. AOTW: This one is easy! Even the trees on the street where it happened cast their votes--unanimously. Okay, we were heading east out of Hudson on Aurora Street; until you leave the village limits, the speed limit in 25 mph. I was going 29 (cruise control!). A car with a couple of young men pulled up behind me, "right on my bumper" (as the saying goes). I resolutely stuck to 29. In the mirror I saw a young man's hand out of the passenger-side window. He was showing me three fingers, then five; three fingers, then five. (I considered showing him one ... but didn't.) They seemed to think the limit was 35 (it's not), but when we reached the village limits and I zoomed up to 39 (in a 35), they seemed ... happy (insofar as any tailgater can ever be happy!). Fortunately, they soon turned off, but the votes were in: Unanimous this week.

2. On Saturday night, Joyce and I drove over to the Kent Cinemas to see The Spy Who Dumped Me. There were more respectable things to see (the film about Christopher Robin, which we will see), but we were both in the mood for some silliness ... and some popcorn ... and we got both.

We both have long enjoyed Kate McKinnon on SNL, and we wanted to see how she'd do in a more extensive role. She did fine. As did Mila Kunis. The film, though, could easily have shed, oh, a half-hour without anyone's really noticing. And some of it was a bit too predictable. And lots of folks died (in a comedy!). But ... have to say ... I had some guilty pleasures, always savory ... (Link to film trailer.)

3. I finished one book this week--Fanny: A Fiction, 2003, by the talented Edmund White. It's supposedly a "lost' manuscript by Fanny Trollope (1779-1863)--writer, novelist, and mother of a more celebrated son, Anthony, whose 47 novels I read over a ten-year period a while back. This "manuscript" is about Fanny's friendship (its ebbs and flows) with another Fanny--Frances "Fanny" Wright (1795-1852)--a very liberal woman born in Scotland, a woman who came to America and saw much hope, a woman who developed a plan in the mid-1820s to end slavery in the U.S. (a plan that obviously failed), a plan that involved a small settlement she established near Memphis, TN--Nashoba (Choctaw for "wolf"; the Wolf River runs near the settlement site), a settlement where Wright proposed to train slaves she had purchased, train them for careers, etc. so that they would be "ready" when she liberated them.

Whew! That's complicated.

I'd become interested in both Fannys during my Mary Shelley research because both of them knew Mary, had met her; both had tried to convince her to go with them to Nashoba. She declined. Joyce and I actually drove to the Nashoba site of July 28, 2001, saw the historical marker, walked along the Wolf, endured the fierce Tennessee heat that day ...

Anyway, I bought White's book some years ago but forgot I had it until I began working more seriously on Frankenstein Sundae, getting it ready to upload to Kindle Direct (soon, soon, soon). And I realized I'd not read it.

Oops.

So I read it last week, wondering what White had to say about Mary Shelley (not much--a couple of allusions to her). But, oh, did I enjoy myself! He perfectly captures the slicing tone of Trollope in her first book, about her American visit, a book that propelled her into celebrity in England, into notoriety here (she was not impressed with most of the Americans she met): Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832).

Here's a few zingers that White/Trollope delivers in Fanny--should give you a taste of the salty text:

• about poet Robert Browning: "His conversation is like his poetry, but comprehensible" (69).
• "American men are bluff, gruff creatures who turn to women only for actual breeding and otherwise prefer one another's company ..." (85).
• about the slaves of Thomas Jefferson: "many of whom bore a curious resemblance to Jefferson himself" (93).
• aboard ship to America: "the belching, wind-passing, vomiting, mewling mass of our fellow passengers" (127)

I was laughing aloud as I read a lot of this stuff--some genuine LOL.

White has Trollope do some things she never did (like having sex with a former slave, whom she adores). But I had so much fun reading it.

4. Tomorrow morning (Tuesday) I go back to the Cleveland Eye Clinic in Brecksville to have cataract surgery on my left eye (right eye was two weeks ago). Right eye is doing very well, so I'm hopeful for the left. I am a lot less anxious this time: I know what to expect (always a plus!).

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

     - from wordsmith.org

bathophobia (bath-uh-FO-bee-uh)

noun: A fear of depths or of falling from a height.

ETYMOLOGY: From Greek bathos (depth) + -phobia (fear). Earliest documented use: 1903. A related term is acrophobia. The p-headed word is pathophobia (an irrational fear of disease).

USAGE: “The self-accusing mind’s bottomless well, bathophobia. Falling and falling and falling.”

Tom LeClair; Well-Founded Fear; Olin Frederick; 2000.