Sunday Sundries, 215

1. HBOTW [Human Being of the Week]: Again ... our neighbor who goes up and down both sides of our street with his snowblower, cleaning sidewalks and the aprons of driveways.

2. I finished one book this week, the second volume in Rachel Cusk's trilogy (Outline, Transit, Kudos). Transit (2016) is the one I just finished--and I've just ordered Kudos (2018). Similar in style to her Outline, Transit is a series of encounters. The narrator is a writer and sometime-teacher, and she is moving to London. But these events are not all that important; what is important are her encounters with various people--for it is their stories that she listens to (patiently, patiently), and as I was reading, I was thinking about how so many conversations are just people waiting to interrupt to tell their stories---sometimes in order to "one-up" us.

Example: You say, "We went to a French restaurant last week." And the other person says, "Oh, we lived in France for six months. No French restaurant here can approach what is there!"

Cusk tells us in the first sentence about an astrologer who wants to talk with her about an actual transit in the sky, but there are all sorts of transits in lives going on in the narrative.

Among the people we hear from: a builder who is remodeling a rundown place for her in London (he is not sanguine about the prospects), a hair-stylist named Dale (a guy), figures at a literary festival (and this is a howl of a satire on such events), a student named Jane who has some 300,000 words of notes for a book she wants to write, some very grumpy neighbors downstairs, the narrator's cousin Lawrence--and on and on.

And, of course, one of Cusk's themes: It is through our stories that we define ourselves, that we reveal some truths about ourselves--and not always the truths we think we are revealing.

Quite a talented writer. Waiting impatiently now for the 3rd volume to arrive.

3. We had lunch on Wednesday over at the old train depot in Kent (can't remember the name of the restaurant that's now occupying the space--used to be the Pufferbelly). And our companion? Eileen Kutinsky ("Mrs. K." to generations of Harmon students who adored her as a science teacher--among them: our son). I've known Eileen since I began my career at the middle school in the fall of 1966. She and some others took me under their wings and helped me--slowly, slowly--discover how to teach.

At 90, Eileen is still managing her farm down near Atwater--has about a dozen head of cattle, chickens (whose numbers a hungry fox regularly diminishes), etc.

She's a wonder.

4. We didn't see a movie this week--but stayed inside and streamed portions of "our" shows: Wire in the Blood, The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2nd time through), Vera (whose latest season is now available on BritBox). In the wings: the new season of True Detective on HBO.

5. Final Word--not a word-of-the-day but one I came across in the Kate Atkinson novel I'm reading right now--the second in her series about P.I. Jackson Brodie--One Good Turn: A Jolly Murder Mystery (2006). The word appears on p. 78: A character says: "They're all tossers."

Now, I knew that tossers was a term of opprobrium (in British English), but I wasn't sure of its exact meaning--or its derivation. So ... time for the OED:

b.  [Probably < sense to toss off 4 at Phrasal verbs [to masturbate] of the verb.] A term of contempt or abuse for a person; a ‘jerk’. Cf. bugger n.1 3a.slang.

1977   Zigzag Apr. 40/3   She came on in a big mac and flashed her legs like an old tosser before throwing it off.

1983   P. Inchbald Short Break in Venice xviii. 172   It's a right pig's job... Poor little tosser. As if he wasn't suffering enough already.

So ... it's similar to our jerk-off as a noun. And our more polite form: jerk.

Ain't this nice to know.

BTW: Here's a favorite sentence (so far) from Atkinson's novel:

Gloria often had the impression that her life was a series of rooms she walked into that everyone else had just left (80).