Sunday Sundries, 203

1. AOTW: Well, our "winner" a week ago has to be the guy who ran through a four-way stop, hit us broadside, destroyed our car, banged me up a bit (Joyce, fortunately, was on the other side of the car). So ... his AOTWness was so egregious that I'm going to give him the award two weeks later, for, you see, I still have the bruises (physical and psychological) that accompany such an episode.

2. Last weekend Joyce and I went to the Kent Plaza Theater(s) to see A Star Is Born, a film we both enjoyed a lot more than we thought we would. (We were mostly interested in a "night out" + popcorn.)

I was really impressed with Lady Gaga--as an actor & a singer. She, to me, was absolutely believable in the role--the only exception: when Bradley Cooper called her out onto the stage for the first time, and she just soared off into song (no warm-up?). And I've always liked B. Cooper--all the way back to Wedding Crashers, which is the first time (I think) I saw him. Here--as you know--he starred, directed, wrote, et al.

The title of the film, of course, tells you all you need to know (also: the earlier versions of the film), so Surprise was not really a character in the film. But I have to say: I got swept up in it ... wept a few times ... soggy Old Man!

Link to film trailer.


3. I finished three books since last I posted a Sundries, so I'll say a little about them here, in reverse order of how I finished them.

     - I'd read (the Times?) about The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London (2018) by Christopher Skaife.

Skaife is a genial, unpretentious narrator and mixes in info about ravens and corvids in general with the seven birds now under his care at the Tower. He also gives us a bit of us own life (he'd been in the military more than twenty years), but mostly it's the story of the birds. We learn how the Tower acquired them, how they behave, what his bird-caring philosophy is (let them be ravens!); he also tells numerous stories about their lives--and their deaths.

And, yes, he mentions Edgar Poe, but notes he has not taught any of the Tower birds to say "Nevermore."

He has made himself an unofficial authority on the birds--reading everything (fiction and non-), talking with ornithologists, etc.

It was a book fun to read--easy to navigate--rewarding in lots of ways.

     - I don't know how on earth I got through nearly 74 years of life without reading Kate Atkinson, a writer, of whom (as I've noted here before) I'd never heard until reading a bit about her in the Times a couple of months ago. I'm reading her novels now in the order that she wrote them, and I have to say that her second one, Human Croquet (1997), absolutely blew me away--style, language, etc. She has it all.

Narrated mostly by Isobel, a young woman with a fabulous imagination (she finds herself time-traveling, imagining other worlds that seem gloriously real to her (and to us)), the story gradually explains the title. (In case you don't "get it," she has an illustration of the game at the end.) People collide in life--and sometimes they miss their hoops ...

Shakespeare pops up now and then--specifically and allusively. (There's an actual local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.)  "The play's the thing," she says--as Hamlet once said (76)--and sentences like this pop up throughout. Allusions like this, as well, to Yeats and Tolstoy and numerous others.

There is a family murder (or is there?) and all kinds of collisions and conundrums and contradictions and revelations.

As I said, I was dazzled--and have already begun her next book, Emotionally Weird (2000). I've read about 50 pp and am, once again, besotted.

     - A couple of weeks ago I finished Stephen Markley's dark 2018 novel, Ohio, about a small rust-belt town and some former high-school classmates who, each without the knowledge of any of the others, is arriving back in town--for various reasons. We learn the histories of these folks, and not too much is good: drugs, alcohol, imploded dreams and hopes, sex, betrayal, death ... you name it. (He devotes an entire section to each of the characters.)

The lives of our principals intersect in various ways--sometimes in surprising ones--and by the end everything has become so dark that you're hoping for a ray of sunlight with some Disney characters dancing merrily around, singing about how wonderful life can be. But, of course, instead there's a storm ...

As a former teacher, by the way, I see the dire (!) results of the failures of public education--our failure to sufficiently invest in it, our allowing so many to graduate with so little hope of discovering, a dozen years later, that it was all worth it--that it has led to something besides despair, even a precipice.


4. Final Word--a word I liked recently from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers:

     = from Oxford English Dictionary

perduellion, n.  high treason. \ˌpərd(y)üˈelyən\

Forms:  15 perduellioun,   16– perduellion.

Origin: A borrowing from Latin. Etymons: Latin perduelliōn-, perduelliō.

Etymology: <  classical Latin perduelliōn-, perduelliō treason <  perduellis perduell n. + -iō -ion suffix1. Compare Italian perduellione (a1556).

 Roman Law and Sc. Law. Now hist.

1533  J. Bellenden tr. Livy Hist. Rome(1901) I. 60 This law of perduellioun was of maist horribil cryme.

1667  in  W. G. Scott-Moncrieff Rec. Proc. Justiciary Court Edinb.(1905) I. 193 Secundum jus commune which knows no other treason but perduellion and lese-majestie such as rising in feir of weir against the King.

1693 Apol. Clergy Scotl.  61 On the 13th of October 1582, the Assembly of the Church at Edenburg, did by an Act approve of that perduellion [sc. the Capture of the King].

1704  D. Lindsay Tryal & Condemnation David Lindsay  7 All Crimes of Perduellion, Rebellion, Treason, concealing of Treason, [etc.].

1774  S. Hallifax Anal. Rom. Law(1795) 130 The punishment of Perduellion was 1. Ultimum Supplicium, or Natural Death of the Criminal.

1818  Scott Heart of Mid-Lothian  xi, in Tales of my Landlord  2nd Ser. I. 309 I am of opinion..that this rising..to take away the life of a reprieved man, will prove little better than perduellion.

1897  A. Drucker tr. R. von Ihering Evol. of Aryan  ii. 53 In the oldest execution upon record, in the Perduellion suit of Horatius, the execution contemplated was by flogging.

1990  D. M. Walker Legal Hist. of Scotl.  II. 531 Mackenzie..distinguished perduellion, or high treason, or a rising in arms against the King.