Sunday Sundries, 212

1. AOTW: I going to give a group award today--to all those folks who (in coffee shop and health club) foul their space and leave it for others to clean up: coffee cups and plates and wrappers in the former, towels and open locker doors and clutter in the latter. Just because you can clutter doesn't mean that you should (so my mommy would have said).

2. I finished three books this week ...

     - One, via Kindle, was Past Tense, the latest Lee Child thriller about Jack Reacher, who, this time, is in remote New Hampshire, where he is checking out some family history. While there, he stumbles upon a high-end hunting club, folks who have paid big bucks to hunt (via bow and arrow) The Most Dangerous Game, in this case a Canadian couple, who actually turn out to be more resourceful than we initially believe they will be.

No real surprises here: Reacher is Reacher (not Tom Cruise), and people who deserve it get their butts whupped--and more.

Snack food of the highest order!

     - The second was American Dialogue: The Founders and Us, the most recent Joseph Ellis volume about American history In this one, Ellis (recently retired from Mount Holyoke) visits the Founders, examining what they did--and what they had to say--about some enduring conflicts in American life: race, equality, law, and international relations. He shows us some most complex men (yes, all men--it was the 18th century!) whose beliefs and principles often clashed with their daily behavior--viz., freedom for all--and slave-owning.

One thing I like about Ellis: He is no writer of memes; he has read all the letters and published works of his principals, and he does not (to the best of my knowledge) cherry-pick those sentences that support his biases (the way meme-writers often do). He sees the complexity in history, in people, in us, and he tries to figure out what the best aspects of them (and us) would have us do.

Very powerful in places. And most enlightening ...

     - The third was Transcription, the most recent novel by my most recent literary hero, Kate Atkinson, a writer who, I now believe, is among the very best writing in English today. I have now read (in order) all her literary novels (about a half-dozen); remaining are (about another half-dozen) mysteries/thrillers that she's written, and I will start my way through them very soon.

This one is about a young woman, Juliet Armstrong (who also narrates), who, during World War II, finds herself working for MI5 in London, transcribing secretly recorded conversations of Brits who are supporting the Nazis. (So now you know the source of the title!) Pieces of her transcriptions are distributed throughout the text.

Atkinson does not let time control her; she controls it. And so here--as in her earlier novels--she moves gracefully about through the lives of her characters, in this case from WW II to 1981.

And you'd better be paying attention, for what happens in each time period matters. And--even more essential--things (in Atkinson, in life) are not always what they appear to be. Truth--in Atkinson's world, in ours--has a history.

Another thing I enjoy about her novels (including this one): The texts are rich with literary allusion--sometimes identified, sometimes not. In Transcription, for example, there are references to (and quotations from) Richard II, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hard Times, Henry James, Much Ado about Nothing, "The Children's Hour,” Romeo and Juliet, The Mikado ... and on and on and on. This is pure nerd fun for a reader like me.

And one more thing--all the way through Juliet alludes (often obliquely) to some ... failure ... of hers. Some transgression. Our knowledge of it arrives hear the end in a stunning scene.

Nuff said. Her books are wonderful--can't urge you strongly enough to read her!

3. Looking for an excuse to eat popcorn, Joyce and I went to Aurora to see (on Christmas night!) the latest Will Ferrell film, Holmes & Watson; Ferrell plays the detective; John C. Reilly, Dr. Watson. I'm sort of a Holmes freak--have read all the stories, seen countless films and TV shows, read a lot about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle--so, you see, I had to go to see this, right?

Pure silliness and adolescent humor all the way through, and since I remain an adolescent in many ways, I laughed far more than my Better Self approved of.

We first see Sherlock as a bullied schoolboy (he takes care of his antagonists with alacrity), then as the world's most famous detective who's in his enduring competition with Prof. Moriarty (Ralph Fiennes).

Late in the film is a surprising musical number--one of the film's highlights.

Link to film trailer.

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

     - from the Oxford English Dictionary--the older I get, the more apt I find this word, though I'm not crazy about all that throw-him-off-the-bridge stuff!

down-man, n.   A sick or infirm man.

Etymology: < down adj. + man n.1, after classical Latin dēpontānus old man (aged sixty) who was supposedly thrown from a bridge (attested in an 8th-cent. epitome of 2nd-cent. grammarian); this may reflect a relic of ancient river worship, where victims were sacrificed to a river god, or may refer, according to the Roman scholar Varro, to the bridge over which voters passed, an old man of sixty being no longer eligible to vote.

Obsolete rare.

1670   W. Walker Idiomatologia Anglo-Latina 338   An old down-man [L. depontanus].