Sunday Sundries, 279

1. HBOTW: The two winners this week were both students I had back in the 1970s--one at Harmon School in Aurora, the other at Western Reserve Academy (during my brief stint there, 1979-81). The latter, Reza Rais, wrote some very kind paragraphs about me on Facebook. And the former, Diane Novak Herbert, having read some of my posts about missing my daily sojourns in Open Door Coffee Co., assembled some mementos of the place for me, including the wonderful--what? montage?--that you see pictured below. I've put it on our coffee table so I can glance at it while I'm reading. Both Reza and Diane switched on the lights for me in a world that seems ever more dark.

2. I remained stunned by how many people I see around who are not wearing masks--especially, yesterday, hordes of youngsters who were out riding bikes, hanging out in close groups. (We saw them on our way to the grocery store to pick up our order--and on the way back.)

3. I finished one book this week--Christopher Moore's new one, Shakespeare for Squirrels (2020), a sequel to his Fool (2009) and The Serpent of Venice (2014). (I will finish the former this week, and I've ordered the latter.)

Like the others, this is narrated by Pocket (the fool in Shakespeare's King Lear) and concerns the involvement of Pocket (and his dim--and huge--apprentice, Drool) in the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream. (And, like Fool, it's divided into five acts--as all the Bard's plays are.)

The two of them have been adrift at sea for more than a week, when they land in Greece, wander into the woods, meet the mechanicals (who are rehearsing Pyramus and Thisbe), and away we go.

Pocket is a horny little fellow, and there is a bit of romping in the novel (as there is in Fool, by the way), and he and Drool do a pretty good job of messing up the Bard's plot. Some characters die. They decide not to do Pyramus but another play. The fairies are squirrels during the daylight. And on and on.

At the end there's a big confrontation, which I will not tell you about.

Moore is playful with the text--inserting lines from other Bard plays (he does this in Fool, as well)--e.g., "past is prologue" (107, from The Tempest), "the play's the thing" (196, from Hamlet), and from Midsummer itself "the course of true love never did run smooth" (142), and numerous others.

He's also quite, uh, inventive with curses and crude language (as the Bard himself could be, of course). How about this one? "Death was a darkling dollop of dog wank" (29)?

The novel is fun on a variety of levels--the silliness of the plot and the narrator, the plot surprises, the allusions to Shakespeare's other plays, the, uh, naughtiness. I'm enjoying Fool right now--many of the same things will I say about it next Sunday!

4. Speaking of the Bard, Joyce and I finished streaming the wonderful Globe production of The Winter's Tale via YouTube this week. (Our son had told us about it.) Although I toured the Globe back in the 1990s when it was about ready to open, I've not seen a production there--and, sadly, probably never will. Our son and his family, though, were in London last summer and saw part of The Comedy of Errors before the heavens opened (Steve, et al. were among the groundlings--and the Globe is open to the sky, so ...).

Anyway, I love that play (and, of course, it has the most famous stage direction in the history of theater, I think: Exit, pursued by a bear). It is the story of Leontes, the jealous King of Sicily, a king who comes to believe that his wife, Hermione, has been having an affair with his long-time best friend, Polixenes, the King of Bohemia, who is there at the beginning for a friendly visit. Leontes will not listen to reason, and does some things that nearly destroy his life--and the lives of others. (Some of these destructions are not "nearly.")

Well, the story winds on, and his newborn baby daughter (Leontes believes she is the product of his wife's affair), abandoned by his decree in the wilderness, does not die there, and ...

Ain't tellin'.

We just loved the performances, the actors (the minor characters played multiple parts), the vast capacity of the Globe stage to accommodate so much.

Joyce and I have seen the play several times before--but those productions were not even close to this one.

It was free on YouTube through this weekend. Don't know what's up with it now.

5. We finished streaming the final episode of the most recent season of Death in Paradise, a formulaic Caribbean whodunit that we both still enjoy--in fact, its adherence to its predictable format is one of the reasons we like it so much. Hard to tell if the whole thing is over now--there were some hints in the final few episodes. I hope not. 

(I just checked online: There will be a new season, but with some changes ... ain't sayin'.)

We're now also streaming, via Acorn, season 2 of Blood, a tense story about a death in the family. Did the father murder his wife, the mother of three of the other characters? We're still not certain.

6. I finished streaming another Robert Altman film, California Split (1974), with Elliot Gould and George Segal. We saw it back in 1974--and I don't think I've seen it since. But it was a pleasure to watch. Younger Gould ... such a talent. It was fun to see him--in a scene I remembered--get involved in a pickup basketball game and take some arrogant kids for all the money they have on them.

And the story has a gentle arc--so natural you think that it wasn't even scripted (Altman did improvise a bit, I've read--and allowed the actors lots of freedom). It's about a couple of gambling addicts who go to Reno to see if they can score big-time.

The story of a friendship, too, and how the demands upon one can crush it.

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

     - from wordsmith.org (I didn't know this word--but figured it out from the roots)

heterography (het-uh-ROG-ruh-fee)

noun:

1. A spelling different from the one in current use.

2. Use of the same letter(s) to convey different sounds, for example, gh in rough and ghost.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Greek hetero- (different) + -graphy (writing). Earliest documented use: 1783.

NOTES:

The idea of heterography is a recent phenomenon, relatively speaking. Earlier, when English was mainly a spoken language, it was a free-for-all, spelling-wise. Any spelling was fine as long as you could make yourself understood. Each writer spelled words in his own way, trying to spell them phonetically. Shakespeare spelled his own name in various ways (Shaxspear, Shakespear, and so on).

If you read old manuscripts, you can find different spellings of a word on the same page, and sometimes even in the same sentence. Spelling wasn’t something sacrosanct: if a line was too long to fit, a typesetter might simply squeeze or expand the word by altering the spelling.

If the idea of to-each-one’s-own spelling for the same word sounds bizarre, consider how we practice it even today, in the only place we can: in our names. Look around you and you might find a Christina and a Cristina and a Kristina and many other permutations and combinations.

With the advent of printing in the 15th century, spelling began to become standardized. By the 19th century, most words had a single “official” spelling, as a consensus, not by the diktat of a committee.

Today if you write “definately” and someone points out that you’ve misspelled the word, just tell them you’re a practitioner of heterography.

USAGE: “Rather than a note on orthography, this might better be characterized as an explanation of unavoidable heterography. ... Where alternate spellings might be more familiar to some readers, I have listed them in parentheses.” Carolyn J Dean; A Culture of Stone; Duke University Press; 2010.