1. AOTW: The feral cat in our neighborhood that is stalking our chickadees and their wee ones, who are occupying a birdhouse on our front porch. I know: It's just instinct. But I wish people who were feeding that cat would full-on adopt it and take it indoors.
2. I finished streaming the recent film Eighth Grade, 2018, about a lonely girl, Kayla, who struggles through her final days of (guess which grade!). (I especially enjoyed this because, as many of you know, I taught in a middle school for about thirty years.) There are some very painful scenes (one involving a predatory high-school boy), and the single father who's rearing Kayla is a saint beyond words. She mostly treats him as if he were irrelevant, boring, intrusive. Which he manifestly is not.
Some fine insights into that world (okay, and a few cliches and shortcuts, too). And I liked how they didn't really romanticize/idealize Kayla: She has complexion problems, among other things, though she also comes across as bright and clever. Available to stream on Amazon Prime. (Link to film trailer.)
3. I finished three books this week--two of which were on my bedside pile (I attack each of them about 10 min/night). I'll deal with those two first.
- One was A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), a novel by Welsh writer Robert Hughes and made into a film with Anthony Quinn, 1965. (Link to film trailer. As I watched the trailer, I had no memory of having seen the film.)
The novel tells the story of some children in Jamaica, where a hurricane destroys homes, etc. So they are being shipped back to England (whence they came). While aboard that ship, some pirates approach and take over, and the children go aboard the pirate ship.
And lots of things happen involving the kids--some violence, some hints of something more. They eventually end up back in England, but the law is very interested in what happened and tries to draw the stories from the children.
One Facebook friend told me that he'd been assigned the book in 10th grade, and another told me she'd loved it. Well, no one ever assigned it to me, and I can't say I loved it, though it was fun to read--and very surprising at times.
- The second I finished from my Night Pile was co-written by former Harmon School Jaguar and Aurora High Greenman (-person?) Cori McCarthy (now going by Cory), who's been writing YA novels for a number of years now. (Her new one is her sixth, I believe--and a yet another one is on the way, too.)
Her latest--Sword in the Stars (2020)--she co-wrote with her partner, Amy Rose Capetta, and is a sequel to Once and Future (2019--also co-written). Both are novels based on the King Arthur stories--and so much else (including Star Wars and Tolkien.)
One of the characters' goals is to end the cycle--to find lives that they can live together and not have to keep rebooting. Merlin is especially endangered: As he proceeds, recall, he grows younger, and here is actually a young boy for a while.
The authors also transform the characters over the ages--including gender and sexual orientation. I found this a liberating way to look at the story.
As I said, there are allusions to some famous tales from our time, and McCarthy/Capetta also slyly allude to their own. Near the end, Merlin is organizing a library on a planet--a library featuring Arthurian tales. And he mentions "a pair of twenty-first century authors"--and he describes the dust jacket for Once and Future (343).
And I loved this thought going on in Merlin's head: "... stories were never just a string of pretty words on a page or attractive strangers on a screen. They climbed inside your head, reordered things. Tore up parts of you by the roots and planted new ideas. / Magic, really" (344). Indeed.
- The 3rd book I finished this week was the first novel (first book, really) by Alice Adams (1926-99), whose complete stories I recently read. This novel--Careless Love (1966)--is about a woman in San Francisco, a woman with a number of failed relationships in her history, a woman struggling to find Love--and having a hard time doing so.
Much of the novel deals with her relationship with a man from Spain (a married man), who, of course, strings her along with promises of divorce. Things fall apart. But Daisy (our heroine) proves more resilient that we thought. Near the beginning, Adams writes, that Daisy "lived for love. She could imagine no other career" (13).
Very similar to Adams' short stories: the struggle of men and women, self-loathing, the intricacies of friendship, the various agonies of life.
The song "Careless Love," by the way, has been around since the 1920s. But I detected no direct references to it in the novel--though there probably were, and they slipped by me! (Link to song performed by Bessie Smith.)
4. Well, I've called our clock-repair guy to come out to pick up our antique cuckoo clock (which belonged to my great-grandfather) and an antique mantel clock we bought about 40 years ago. Can't wait to get them back--and hear the sounds!
5. Last Word: A word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers ...
- from Oxford English Dictionary--a word we ought to bring back? It's obsolete now.
† satisdiction, n. The action of saying enough.
Origin: A borrowing from Latin. Etymons: Latin satis, dictiōn-,
dictiō.
Etymology: < classical Latin satis
enough (see satisfy v.) + dictiōn-, dictiō saying (see diction
n.), after satisfaction n.
Obsolete. rare.
1647 N. Ward Simple Cobler
Aggawam 14 They desire not satisfaction,
but satisdiction, whereof themselves must be judges.
1662 S. Fisher Bishop busied
beside Businesse i. 69 We find little
that is much thank-worthy, and not so much as Satisdiction to our Satisfaction
there (be it where it will be).
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