Resolved

It started in college. My roommate and I would come back from lunch at the dining hall, each with a copy of the student newspaper. This was crossword time. And yes, we kept time--pencils (or overconfident pens) in hand, we'd check the clock and begin. First to finish would get bragging rights.

It was crosswords and only crosswords. We weren't smart enough for the convolutions of cryptic crosswords (I'm still not). Sudoku and Kenken were still a dream on the newsprint horizon.

Forty-some years later, it is no longer just crosswords. In the New York TImes, it's Connections and Wordle and Spelling Bee and, yes, Sudoku, not to mention Flashback: Your Weekly History Quiz and The News Quiz. Other publications have gotten into the act: New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal. I haven't looked, but I imagine there are hundreds of websites that encourage fellow puzzlers to dive into into puzzling wormholes. They are a big deal. I suspect more people can identify the puzzle editor of the New York Times than name the President of Mexico.

I know this, of course, because I have developed my own puzzling habit. Once upon a time, the morning began with a stroll to the front door to pick up whatever newspaper had been hurled onto our stoop. A glance at the front page would typically inspire a page-turn or two to check out a movie review or particular op-ed column. Then I’d turn to that strange checkerboard in the corner of the Arts section and try to figure out a ten letter word for “Scatterbrain" (SPACECADET).

Today, the “newspaper” is behind a little icon on a glass screen. On my iPad, it sits next to another icon--more colorful and tempting:  "Crossword."

So this is where my morning starts: the coffee brewed and poured, the yogurt dusted with granola and dotted with blueberries, the iPad tipped on its accordion stand to the proper angle. The headlines? Welllll. . . . I guess I feel like I know the headlines. I’ve heard them on the car radio the night before. Or perhaps stopping for a brief gander at CNN as I scrolled the cable channels.

Yes, I know that Democracy Dies in Darkness. And I’m glad that “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is at my fingertips. But we are saturated with The News these days: a half dozen 24-hour cable news channels, local stations programming 10-11-12-hours of news each day, and podcasts and—ahem—blogs offering the latest take on the latest issue.

Yes, these are harrowing times. And 2024 promises to be a harrowing year. I try to do my part: voting, volunteering, supporting those who are deep in the trenches. But in the new media environment, doomscrolling and the anxiety it promotes is almost second nature. With the help of Will Shortz, I resist. Every morning I take a deep breath, click that icon, and . . . ___________ a little longer (fritter or linger—answer below).

David V. Demon

“…there were never such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens's exultant imagination, and you can never quite forget them.”

—W. Somerset Maugham

One of my Big Reads this year was a double header: David Copperfield and Demon Copperhead: The 1850 novel by Charles Dickens and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Barbara Kingsolver.

Charles Dickens

As you might guess, the two are connected. Dickens’s novel—many consider it his finest—is a loosely autobiographical tale of a boy growing up in the hardscrabble world of 19th-century England, a world of vast income inequality, debtor prisons and class antagonism. There are a lot of road bumps on the way, but things more or less turn out ok for Dave, as it did for Dickens.

Kingsolver’s rewriting of the Copperfield story brings Dickens into the 21st century, adding the heft and gravity of the now. As Somerset Maugham wrote, Dickens's characters are indeed otherworldly, but his world is real--the poverty, the brutal struggle to survive, and the oft thwarted hope that, as Mr. Micawber says of his job prospects, “something will turn up.” Dickens's contemporaries certainly connected with the harrowing real conditions of his story. But reading it today, there's something about it that's so...well...Dickensian. It’s a stirring yarn, but ripe for a detached reaction allows one to wave away the social criticism: "It was all so long ago and we've come so far since then."

Barbara Kingsolver

In Demon the Appalachian version of the story is harrowingly real--ripped from the headlines as they say. Kingsolver’s cast is no less vivid--all the more so when Dickens original characters are still in your head.

There's a great pleasure in seeing how Kingsolver transforms the world of Copperfield into her own time and place. The alcoholic Mr. Wickfield, the kindly lawyer swindled by evil Uriah Heep becomes Coach Winfield, who is driven to near death by U-Haul, who plies him with narcotics to keep him in a stupor. (Kingsolver’s nicknames are vivid variations on the Dickens original). David's cruel, fundamentalist stepfather becomes Stoner, a “player” with a love of motorcycles and beer. But Demon Copperhead is not merely a parlor game. Kingsolver’s rich imagination yields desperate truths.

In interviews, Kingsolver speaks with fiery indignation about America’s perception of the Appalachian poor and the Oxycontin epidemic that is destroying communities. She grew up in rural Kentucky and you sense the fondness she has for the spirited, striving characters that populate her novel. Whether or not you pair it with Dickens, it’s an important, illuminating book.  

Dungeons and Dragons

Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Chris Pine, and Michelle Rodriguez in Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

Move over Barbie. Well, okay, it ‘s hard to top Greta Gerwig’s candy-colored satire/homage to a girl’s best friend. But that blockbuster isn’t this year’s only example of a writer-director spinning gold out of marketing dross. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a creation of the Hasbro Corporation. It’s true to its D&D roots, which go back all the way to 1974, when the role-playing game hit the shelves. It should be obvious from the film’s byzantine storyline, which involves a quest to capture The Tablet of Reawakening, a charm that will help Darvis (Chris Pine) “reawaken” his wife who was killed by disciples of the Red Wizard. Darvis assembles your basic band of misfit seekers of justice—Holga the Barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez), Xenk the Wizard (Justice Smith), and Doric the Shapeshifter (Sophia Lillis)—and they’re off, escaping from Revel’s End Prison, encountering The Lord of Neverwinter and navigating The Helm of Disjunction. They finally join the High Sun Games and battle Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant), who has captured Darvis’s daughter.

Owlbear and the Red Wizard face off in D&D: Honor Among Thieves.

I know, I know. If you’ve seen one shapeshifter you’ve seen them all. But take heed all ye non-denizens of the role-playing universe. Directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, working from a script by Daley and Michael Gilio take the lingo just seriously enough to keep the story rolling along and, presumably, to satisfy the Hasbro Suits. Pine and Rodriguez play quick and loose with the wisecracks (there’s plenty of swash in their buckle), and everyone seems to be having a glorious time. Goldstein and company know just the right parts of the D&D universe bring to the fore. Ladies and gentleman, I give you Owlbear.

If, like me, you’re binging the “serious” movies on the 2023 Top Ten Lists, I offer this as a sort of palette cleanser. Have you just seen the 4-hour Frederick Wiseman documentary about a 3-star Michelin restaurant? Well, forget about the $5,000 bottles of wine and the veal sweetbreads with aubergine. Fire up D&D, break out the Jujubes and Diet Coke and have a good ol’ American time at the movies.

I Love Betsy

Remember that Broadway hit, Honeymoon in Vegas?! Yeah, neither do I. So thank goodness for John Pizzarelli’s new record, Stage & Screen, which brought me to “I Love Betsy,” a witty, finger-snap of a song that opens the “failed” 2013 musical. Written by the great American composer Jason Robert Brown, Honeymoon in Vegas closed after two months. But thanks to Pizzarelli, one of jazz’s great guitar-vocalists, I can relish some of the song’s devilish, Cole-Porter-style couplets.

Such as: “I like Shake Shake, I like MOMA/and New Jersey’s ripe aroma.”

Or: “Just like Jay-Z and Beyoncé, I will make her my fiancé.”

Listen and delight for yourself.

Happy New Year

In lieu of a resolution, I offer this poem by Jane Hirshfield.

Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured? 

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands. 

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.

Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.

Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question. 

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder. 

Today, I woke without answer.  

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend 

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet

didn’t it give you the asking

 
Have a good two weeks. The Friday Five will return on January 19th.

Oh, and as promised here’s the ten-letter word for “fritter or linger”: DILLYDALLY.