ETA SIGMA PHI Apple With Bookworm

This past weekend, my son attended the ETA SIGMA PHI classics convention at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and donated an extra program for collage fodder.

Reading:

I finished The Misfits by by Lisa Yee which is a fun middle grade novel about a group of, well, misfits who form an elite crime fighting team.

Hoping to start the epic Books of Jacob today. Since Tokarczuk's book is something like 900 pages I like to parallel read something shorter. So I will also be dipping into Phil Klay's short story collection Redeployment from time to time.

Watching:

My wife, daughter, and I watched the first half of The Straight Story on Disney plus last night. A remarkable picture that I recommend. Here is part of Roger Ebert's review:

Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is a 73-year-old man from in Laurens, Iowa, who learns that his brother is dying and wants to see him one last time. His eyes are too bad to allow him to drive. He lives with his daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek), who is somewhat mentally challenged and no good behind the wheel. Nor do they have a car. But they have a tractor-style lawn mower, and the moment Alvin's eyes light on it, he knows how he can drive the 300 miles to Mt. Zion, Wis. The first mower konks out, but he gets another one, a John Deere, hitches a little trailer to it, and stubbornly sets off down the road.

Along the way we will learn a lot about Alvin, including a painful secret he has kept ever since the war. He is not a sophisticated man, but when he speaks, the words come out like the bricks of a wall built to last. Like Hemingway's dialogue, the screenplay by John Roach and Mary Sweeney finds poetry and truth in the exact choice of the right everyday words. Richard Farnsworth, who was 79 when he made the film, speaks the lines with perfect repose and conviction.

Because the film was directed by David Lynch, who usually deals in the bizarre ("Wild at Heart," "Twin Peaks"), we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop--for Alvin's odyssey to intersect with the Twilight Zone. But it never does. Even when he encounters a potential weirdo, like the distraught woman whose car has killed 14 deer in one week on the same stretch of highway (". . . and I HAVE to take this road!"), she's not a sideshow exhibit and we think, yeah, you can hit a lot of deer on those country roads.

Alvin's journey to his brother is a journey into his past. He remembers when they were young and filled with wonder. He tells a stranger, "I want to sit with him and look up at the stars, like we used to, so long ago." He remembers his courtship and marriage. His Army service as a sniper whose aim, one day, was too good. And about years lost to drinking and nastiness. He has emerged from the forge of his imperfections as a better man, purified, simple, and people along the way seem to sense that.