1. AOTW: Ah, yes, this morning ... car in front of us at a stop sign. Turned right (no signal), soon turned left into grocery parking lot (no signal), parked in a slot so that the tires were also into the adjacent slot. In other words: Nothing much changes in AOTW Land.
2. I finished two books this week.
- The first was the latest from Colm Tóibín--House of Names--a re-telling of the stories of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, Iphigenia, Electra, et al. Tóibín tells us at the end that he played fast-and-loose with the details, adding, subtracting, modifying. He divides the tale into sections, each focused on a particular principal; some are in the first person (Clytemnestra, Electra); the Orestes sections are in the third person.
I loved how Tóibín handled the story--the narratives flow smoothly, arrestingly--from first sentence (Clytemnestra says, "I have been acquainted with the smell of death") to the last (about Orestes and his friend/ally Leander: "Almost afraid to look at each other, the two went back into the corridor [of the palace] and stood together without saying a word, listening to every sound") (3, 275).
And along the way we get a lot to think about. To what extent are the gods responsible for all? To what extent are we (for our determination to believe in gods?) What are the consequences of revenge? What does "family" even mean? And "friendship"? And on and on and on ...
- The second was a 2008 collection of nonfiction (Maps and Legends) by Michael Chabon, whose complete works I've been working through in the order of publication (skipping the ones I've already read).
These pieces--generally from the early 2000s--are some published essays and some texts of speeches he delivered here and there. The title piece is about how--as a boy--he became fascinated, even obsessed with maps, and felt himself become alive to "the power of maps" (30). And, later, he realized how writers are always working with "maps"--of this world, of the world(s) they've created--and other writers work in the blank space on those maps. Such a cool idea. The writer, he says, "goes where the action is, and the action is in the borders between things" (24).
He also writes about his early reading (he loved/loves Sherlock Holmes), of his fascination (which continues) with comics and graphic stories. He notes that writers "should tell stories that we would have liked as kids" (93).
There's also a review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, an essay in which he mentions that "there are story echoes of the Jack London-style adventure" (116), but he does not mention a book of London's that is post-apocalyptic, as well--The Scarlet Plague (1912)--a novel about survival in a dying world.
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| London's The Scarlet Plague (1912) |
But my favorite is his last--a modified version of a speech he gave in the mid-2000s, "Golems I Have Known." In it he talks about the borderland between nonfiction and fiction, memoir and fiction, truth and lies--and he does so by seducing his audience into thinking he is telling them a factual story from his boyhood. But it was fiction, he tells us at the end--"lies." It's a gorgeous piece about what he calls "the borderland between these two kingdoms, between the Empire of Lies and the Republic of Truth" (222).
3. We saw (via Netflix DVD) a Stephen Soederberg film, Haywire (2011). I've always loved Soederberg's work, and this title (when I saw it on the Netflix website) did not look familiar. So I ordered it. And it wasn't until, oh, about the last half-hour that I realized we had seen it before. Oh well. There are worse ways to spend your time than to be with Steven Soederberg for a couple of hours!
It's an adventure story about a woman warrior (played by Gina Carano). Here's the plot summary from IMDB:
Freelance covert operative Mallory Kane is hired out by her
handler to various global entities to perform jobs which governments can't
authorize and heads of state would rather not know about. After a mission to
rescue a hostage in Barcelona, Mallory is quickly dispatched on another mission
to Dublin. When the operation goes awry and Mallory finds she has been double
crossed, she needs to use all of her skills, tricks and abilities to escape an
international manhunt, make it back to the United States, protect her family,
and exact revenge on those that have betrayed her.
It was fun to watch again--if, that is, you're into the "action thriller'" genre (think: Jason Bourne movies). I don't recall seeing Carano perform before (she was in Dead Pool and Fast & Furious 6, neither of which I've seen), but she's apparently a martial arts expert, and she got to display those talents (some supplemented, of course, by CGI). She even kicks Channing Tatum's butt. And Michael Fassbender's, too! (Link to film trailer.)
4. We finally finished streaming the latest season of Bosch on AmazonPrime. I've read all of Michael Connelly's novels about LA detective Harry Bosch, so it's been fun to watch these--though Titus Welliver, who plays Bosch, is not what I pictured as I read. Still, he's good--once you get used to him.
The season ended on a cliffhanger--thus: hope for another season!
5. Final word--a word I especially liked from my various online word-of-the-day providers;
- from dictionary.com, with some help from Merriam-Webster
humblebrag noun [huhm-buh l-brag]
1. NOUN: a statement intended as a boast or brag but disguised by a
humble apology, complaint, etc.
2. VERB: to make such a disguised boast or brag: He's humblebragging
about how tired he is from his world travels.
QUOTES
The humblebrag—e.g. I'm
exhausted from Memorial Day weekend; it’s soooo hard to get out of
Nantucket—sits at the center of these competing needs. It is a boast in
sheepish clothing, kvelling dressed in kvetch. And, like nearly all forms of
multi-tasking, the drive to satisfy two goals at once typically results in double-failure.
-- Derek Thompson, "How to Brag," The Atlantic, May 26, 2015
ORIGIN
Humblebrag was first recorded
between 2005 and 2010. It’s a portmanteau combining the terms humble and brag.
Oh, and a portmanteau word
(def from Merriam-Webster): a word that is composed of parts of two words (such
as chortle from chuckle and snort), all
of one word and part of another (such as bookmobile
from book and automobile), or two entire words and that is characterized
invariably in the latter case and frequently in the two former cases by single
occurrence of one or more sounds or letters that appear in both the component
words (such as motel from motor hotel, camporee from camp and jamboree, aniseed from anise seed)
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