Sunday Sundries, 266

1. HBOTW [Human Being of the Week]: Mike, one of the mail carriers in Hudson, who often takes a quick break in the coffee shop around noon when I am there. So friendly and considerate--and the father of a new baby boy!

2. I finished two books this week.

     - One was a brief play, Hamnet (2017), about Shakespeare's son, who died at age 11 in August, 1596. All we have is the register of his death--no cause is identified. Lots of speculation.

The script was a group effort by Dead Centre, a theater group in England, and it features only two characters--Hamnet and his father. (There are also some tricky special effects and some audience participation.)

The boy is curious about his father (who was spending most of his time in London, not at home) and clearly does not understand that he is dead: He just wonders why he's not getting older. Throughout are scattered lines from Hamlet, including "Who's there?"--the opening line in both plays. (And some lines from other plays, too.) And some humor: "You look like you've seen a ghost," Shakespeare says when he first appears. Shakespeare expresses some guilt for being an absentee father: "You needed me, and I did nothing" (35).

And Hamnet ends the show with some of the final lines from Hamlet, the lines when the dying Hamlet tells his friend Horatio to "tell my story" (44).

I ordered this play because we had been streaming Upstart Crow (a wonderful--funny--moving series about the Bard and his friends and family), and the episodes about Hamnet's death had a powerful effect on Joyce and me.

And I'd also read about a new novel about the boy--a novel soon to be released (and soon to be read by Yours Truly).

A fine brief play--I'd love to see it.

     - The second book I finished was the 1990 novel by Ian McEwan, The Innocent. (I'm reading my way through the novels I've not previously read by him--such a talent.)

The story is set in post-War Berlin, where a British man, Leonard Marhnam, has been brought in to work on some of the technical aspects of a complicated spying-on-the-Soviets plan that involves a tunnel and some listening devices.

He is "the innocent"--at least for a while. He gets romantically/sexually involved with a young German woman (is she a spy?), and they plan to marry. Exciting him the most is this: She's the first woman he's ever had such a relationship with.

Then one day her violent ex- turns up, and the novel pivots drastically. I don't want to say what happens because that would spoil the book for you. I'll say just this: It ain't what I expected. And a sort of gentle spy/romance novel transforms into something quite different.

The final chapter takes place about forty years later, and we learn some things we had not known before.

'Nuff said.

I've got only about 3-4 of his novels left to read (I read his later novels as they came out--beginning with Atonement, 2001).

3. We didn't see a film this week, though I did stream one of my favorites--one I've seen a number of times: Nobody's Fool (1994), based on the eponymous Richard Russo novel (1993), the novel and film that propelled him into celebrity.

Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Jessica Tandy (in her final film appearance), and young Philip Seymour Hoffman as a doofus cop (the first time I'd seen him on screen, I think).

I ended up reading all of Russo's novels (there's a sequel now, Everybody's Fool, 2016)--and seeing this film, oh, a dozen times or so over the years!

4. We're nearing the end of the current season of Vera--and getting sad about it.

5. I had a PSA test this week (monthly--to check the "progress" of my prostate cancer), and my score continues to inch upward--nothing dramatic, just steady, I fear.

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

     - from The Oxford English Dictionary

swinehood, n.

Etymology: <  swine n. + -hood suffix.

 Compare earlier swinery n.

 1. Pigs collectively. Also figurative: coarse, degraded, or uncivilized people considered collectively; cf. swine n. 2b.

1797 Pennyworth Politics  6 Indeed 'twere rude To ask an answer to the multitude, That aggregate of swine-hood, that vile grunting brute.

1866 Leeds Mercury  29 Sept. 4/6 Let us have manhood suffrage, womanhood suffrage, childhood suffrage, horsehood suffrage, but do let us for the present be saved from swinehood suffrage.

1908 Aldersgate Primitive Methodist Mag.  Dec. 960/2 I always know my mind; a crowd never does... It is a mass of senseless, blear-eyed, hateful swinehood.

2005 Ethics & Environment  10 28 We are not on the highest ladder of evolution having absorbed the capacities of other animals, and therefore master of both ‘swinehood’ and humanity, but are our own creatures.

 2. The condition of being a pig. Also figurative: the condition of being coarse, degraded, uncivilized, or (more generally) objectionable.

1822  C. Lamb in London Mag.  Sept. 247/1 The grossness and indocility which too often accompany maturer swinehood.

1886  M. Burt Browning's Women(1887) 164 Elvire..sees only the swinehood that hath no remedy.

1971 Encounter  Aug. 70/2 Moly is..the magical herb with a milk-white flower which Hermes gave to Odysseus and with which he changed himself back from swinehood.