Sunday Sundries, 284

1. AOTW: On Friday night, Joyce and I were driving down to Szalay's Farm and Market, and after I had to brake hard a few times to avoid the many AOTWs out on the road, she commented: "I think people have forgotten how to drive during the pandemic." I'll second that. Here's just one of the events. We were only about two blocks from our house, heading south on Ohio 91, when an impatient AOTW on a side street on our left roared out onto 91, forcing both the northbound driver and me to slam them on. Sometimes it would be nice to have a howitzer on the roof of the car, you know?

2. Okay, so I'm streaming DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story again. Sue me (I think Joyce is about ready to!). (I do not watch it when she's in the room: I value our marriage too highly.) I can't help it: The film makes me laugh--and hard.

3. The other night, trying desperately to sleep, I could not get out my head that old Mickey D's commercial (1975) about the Big Mac: "Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame-seed bun." Here's a video link for those of you who have not had the pleasure.

4. I finished two books this week

     - The first was the most recent novel by Gail Godwin, Old Lovegood Girls (2020). I've been reading her books since the 1970s, and Joyce and I actually got to meet her, a half-century ago, when we were visiting my older brother, who was teaching at the University of Iowa at the time. Godwin was also there and had just published her first novel, The Perfectionists (1970), and was beginning her rise in the American literary world. She was kind to us when we popped, unannounced, into her office at Iowa. Wish I could remember what we talked about.

This new novel focuses on two young women (Merry and Feron), who meet as frosh at Lovegood College, a (fictitious) junior college for women in North Carolina. And we proceed to follow them through their lives. They do not see each other all that often--or even communicate that often--but they remain in each other's thoughts.

Both, initially, have ambitions to write, but Merry has to leave college early to be with her family (they are in the tobacco business), gets caught up in that business, and ends up writing very little. Feron does become a writer, a fairly successful one.

The book is wonderfully written--insightful, painful, complex, moving--and Godwin shifts the point of view throughout.

There are secrets, of course--one involving Feron and a stranger on a bus. But I'll say no more.

     - The second I finished was Wilkie Collins' late novel (1885), "I Say No," a novel that begins in a girls' school (coincidence! see Gail Godwin's novel!). We focus on a young woman named Emily--and her art teacher, who soon realizes he's in love with her.

The story becomes more complicated when Emily learns that the death of her father, whom she'd loved deeply, was not an accident, not ill health--but something quite different. With the help of her teacher (who remains "professional") she investigates (Collins loves investigations in his fiction)--and discovers some alarming things.

There's also some rivalry for Emily's affections ...

I like these quotations (among many others):

A buoyant temperament is of all moral qualities the most precious, in this respect; it is the one force in us—when virtuous resolution proves insufficient—which resists by instinct the stealthy approaches of despair (81-2 in Pocket Classics edition you see in the pic).

If he [the art teacher] had been less absorbed in his own interests, he might have remembered that mere gossip is not always to be despised. It has worked fatal mischief in its time (112).

I've mentioned here several times (maybe more than several!) that I've been reading my way through all of the novels by Wilkie Collins (1824-89), generally in the order that he wrote them (though I first read The Woman in White, 1860, and The Moonstone, 1868, before I was totally hooked). I've begun his antepenultimate novel, The Evil Genius, 1886, and then will have only two remaining.

Then what?

5. Joyce and I have finished the 2nd episode of the new HBO series Perry Mason--a series that takes us back to the years before Mason was an esteemed trial lawyer and was sort of a low-life P.I. We weren't all that crazy about the first episode--perhaps because both of us, when we were, uh, much younger, had watched that old (and very conventional) TV show Perry Mason with Raymond Burr (1957-66)--okay, I wasn't that young (I graduated from college in 1966). (Link to some video of the old show. There are full episodes on YouTube.)

But the second episode, which we streamed last week, engaged us a lot more. Looking forward to #3, which we can start streaming tonight, I believe.

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

     - from wordsmith.org (I love that the example quotation is from Arthur Phillips' novel The Egyptologist, a book I recently read and really admired)

onymous (AHN-uh-muhs)

adjective: Bearing the author’s name; named.

ETYMOLOGY: Back-formation from Latin anonymus, from Greek anonymus, from an- (not) + onyma (name). Earliest documented use: 1775. Anonymous is from 1601.

USAGE: “And there, on a raised and ornate table ... the king’s writings, undeniably onymous at last.”

Arthur Phillips; The Egyptologist; Random House; 2004.