1. HBOTW: Our son and his family down in Green, Ohio. Last week--out of the blue--son Steve arrived at our door with all sorts of hand-wipes and disinfectant, things he'd bought for us, knowing that we're still pretty wary about trips to stores. No finer Human Being of the Week!
2. I finished three books this week ...
- The first was the most recent novel by Joyce Carol Oates--Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars, (2020). Nearly 800 pages long, the novel is ominously prescient, beginning, as it does, with some local cops who are abusing a motorist at the roadside. Need I say he is darker skinned (though we learn he is from India and is an M.D.)? Driving by is an older (white) man, a former mayor of the town, who pulls over to stop what's going on--and he too is tased to the ground, where he suffers a stroke.
And so the story begins. We become intimate with the former mayor's wife and older children (each of whom has major "issues") and watch how each copes with the case--a case which darkens when the father dies in the hospital.
One son launches a lawsuit, another (a latter-day hippie) seems withdrawn and more interested in his art; one daughter (a Ph.D. who is head of a local high school), seems to be losing her mind and ends up in therapy; another daughter, who the family thinks is working toward an M.D. (she isn't), is involved with her boss at the lab where she works. And Mom? Deeply devastated, she nearly falls apart, then meets an artist--not "white"--and hooks up with him, to the alarm of the "children."
On and on the stories twist and turn (Oates deftly moves from one to the other), and by the end we have all kinds of insights on America and race, on families, on art, on education--geez, on just about everything! Loved it. Learned from it.
I did a longer post here about Oates a couple (few?) weeks ago, and this novel did nothing but increase the admiration I have for her work. She's a wonder ...
BTW: I remarked (here? Facebook?) that the title sounds as if it belongs to a Stephen King novel--then, reading the epigraph, learned it's from a (very brief) Walt Whitman poem, "A Clear Midnight" (link to it).
- The second was a tightly focused book about Emily Dickinson, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson (2020) by Martha Ackmann, who for years taught a seminar on ED for Mount Holyoke, a class that met in the Dickinson home in Amherst, Mass.
The days will be familiar to ED fans: the publication of her first poem, her meeting with Thomas Wentworth Higginson (her mentor), with Helen Hunt Jackson, and so on. But Ackmann fills us in on the before-and-after for each encounter, and so we learn a lot along the way.
And we can all be grateful that Dickinson's family ignored her instructions to burn all her poems upon her death; the vast majority had never been published.
We see ED as a writer who did not write quickly--who wanted to get it right--which sometimes took a long, long time.
- The third was My Lover's Lover, 2002, the 2nd novel by Maggie O'Farrell, with whose work I immediately fell in love when I read her new novel, Hamnet (2020), about the life and death of Shakespeare's son (he died at 11; we know virtually nothing about him).
This novel--like the two others I've read--is a dazzler of organization. We never know where we're going next, but, having gone there, we see. We understand. The story involves two young women--Lily and Sinead--both of whom tell their stories about their involvement with a young hustler named Marcus, an obsessive, lying lover.
It takes us a while to learn what has happened--why Marcus did X and Y. Oh, and both young women are friends with Aidan, a young man who is temporarily sharing a flat with Marcus--and (not at the same time) the two young women.
A grand coincidence in Australia answers the questions--and raises a host of more as we turn the final page.
I've already ordered her third novel--and Joyce, having read (and loved Hamnet), has finished the first of O'Farrell's novels and is (patiently, patiently) waiting for me to finish this post so she can dive into #2.
3. We have started streaming an odd series (PBS) that Joyce read a review of somewhere--Professor T--a Belgian crime show about an OCD (extremely so!) professor who gets involved with solving various ... situations. We've seen only about 15 minutes of the first episode--but we are hooked.
Link to some video
4. I'm troubled that so many young people on the sidewalks in town are in groups and unmasked--teens and a little older. Believing you are immune and invulnerable and immortal does not make you so.
5. As a nation we have faced fewer moral questions of greater gravity than this one--and I am not kidding: Should we re-open the schools?
6. Last Word: A word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers ...
- from dictionary.com
verecund [VER-i-kuhnd ]
adjective (Archaic): bashful; modest.
ORIGIN: The uncommon adjective verecund, “bashful, modest,”
comes straight from Latin verēcundus “restrained by or sensitive to
scruples or feelings of modesty, shame, or self-respect.” Verēcundus is
a compound of the verb verērī “to fear, show reverence for, be in awe
of” and the adjective suffix –cundus, which indicates inclination or
capacity. Verērī is the root in the very common verb revere (and
its derivatives reverent, reverend, and reverence). Verecund
entered English in the second half of the 16th century.
USAGE:
Our politics is speckled with men who are so diffident and verecund they never say a word about themselves or their achievements. "WHO'S WHO—AND WHY," SATURDAY EVENING POST , FEBRUARY 10, 1912
If there is any pereptible shift between early and later Dickens, then
that transition seems to be one where the verecund persona gives way to
a performance imbued with Pancksian relish in the double face of wonder and
monstrosity. JULIAN WOLFREYS, WRITING LONDON: THE TRACE OF THE URBAN TEXT
FROM BLAKE TO DICKENS, 1998
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