1. Well, this was certainly a week. For those who are just joining us, last weekend I moved cross-country, from Michigan to Arizona to take up a teaching post. It was three days’ driving, and a chance to see more of the country than I yet have. The route took us, among other things, right past the St. Louis arch (bigger and more impressive than you might think, and it’s a bit of a jolt when you first notice it coming through the Illinois hills on approach to the river, when it’s the only sign that St. Louis is just ahead), across the Texas panhandle (which is so flat that it’s like being at sea: you look around and there is just nothing interrupting your view), through New Mexico, with its bright pink mesas and outcroppings like enormous locomotives turned to stone, and finally down the breathtaking Arizona mountains, where you go from high desert to pine forests to rock-and-sand desert mountains. Like passing through three or four ecosystems in as many hours.

2. There was some drama after I arrived, where there was several hours’ delay before I could take possession of the apartment, meaning we had to take my brother to the airport before he could help me move in (he came to help drive, but had to be back for work the next day). But it did give us some family time playing cards while we waited. Anyway, long story short, I am now in my new apartment. The bulk of my worldly possessions, however, will not arrive until tomorrow, meaning I’ve been camping out here for the better part of a week.

3. It’s strange: not having my familiar furniture, my desk, chair, pictures, and so on around me makes it hard to really feel at home (the fact that I stayed for so long at the previous apartment contributes to that as well). I’m not quite settled in or comfortable with the place yet. But, I’m hoping, once I get my things in and start putting them in place and putting my own work on the apartment, that will start to change.

4. Let’s see, what else happened this week? Oh, yes; history. My family and I were having dinner in Amarillo, TX when the waitress asked us if “y’all heard about Trump?” To be perfectly honest, my immediate reaction to hearing that someone had taken a shot at him was “I’m surprised no one’s done this before now, all things considered.” It seems a sure mark of providence that he survived the attempt (though to what end of course remains to be seen), and in any case appears to be an historic pivot point, probably in more ways than one.

If God continues to be more merciful to us than we deserve, it’ll mean the political temperature cools as people wake up to the possibility that their rhetoric can get people killed. If not, then welcome back to the days of the late ’60s…and the 1890s…and, well, another age of political violence. Only this time with much less in the way of common morality to rein it in.

5. On the way we listened to Oliver Twist, my first time with the novel. Honestly, I thought it was one of the lesser Dickens that I’ve read. The titular character himself is kind of a non-entity who is mostly just shuffled back and forth by circumstances and almost drops out of the story entirely toward the end, the supporting cast has some good characters, but is overall less stuffed with human oddities than most Dickens books and has a higher proportion of dull ‘too pure for this sinful earth’ types (most of whom end up rightly being cut from adaptations). Characters like the Artful Dodger and especially Fagin are much less interesting than they would become in adaptations, being essentially just purely villainous characters with few if any nuances or redeeming traits (heck, Sikes is a more nuanced character than Fagin in the book).

That said, it’s still Dickens and so an amazing tour-de-force of literary genius and wordsmithery, and Nancy and Sikes in particular are fantastic characters who ring very true to life. Definitely glad to have read it, though I’ll be revisiting Bleak House or Nicholas Nickelby or especially Great Expectations before I go another round with Oliver.

6. I have a lot else on my mind, but it’s all probably gonna need more than a Flotsam post.

7. To wrap up, I’ve never heard of the film, but this is a pretty cool clip I’ve found: