Sunday Sundries, 166

1. AOTW: I actually thought I would get through the week without having a winner. Then ... a gift from ... from wherever. Yesterday (Saturday), driving home from the health club (north on Ohio 91), I was approaching a side street (with a stop sign) on my right. I saw a car approaching its stop sign. But the car did not stop but pulled out right in front of me. Brakes. Bad words. I didn't recognize the driver at first--and then I did! It was the AOTW!

2. Joyce and I finished streaming the recent Netflix documentary about Joan Didion (Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold)--and we both loved it (although some of the reviews have been less than flattering). A writer's life--right there for you to look at. One thing I really enjoyed (and which really touched me): Didion's very active use of her hands and arms as she talks--almost as if she trying to grab her words from the air. (Link to film trailer.)

3. Last night I went to Kent to see Daddy's Home 2 (I know, I know)--principally because of a popcorn-craving. (If you eat it in the dark, as everyone knows, there are no calories.) I was surprised, on a lousy rainy night, how crowded the lines were, and even my theater was pretty much full (not to mention the enormous lines for the new superhero movies). Anyway, the film was absolutely As Expected. More of the same. (Now, an unkind comment: Isn't Will Ferrell getting a bit long in the tooth to play the daddy role?) (Link to film trailer.) And as for Mel Gibson ... can't stand him anymore.

4. I finished two books this week ...

     - The first was one I've been reading at my in-bed pace of 10 pp/night--Robert Sapolsky's Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017). There are nearly 700 pages of principal text (not counting Appendix, notes, etc.) ... so you can figure out how long it took me to read it!

But I loved it. Learned something new on just about every page (and, of course, promptly forgot most of it ... still). Sapolsky--a MacArthur Fellow and a prof at Stanford--is an excellent writer, mixing the dense with the light (like a good bartender!). He's interested in explaining why we are like we are--why do we demonize others? Why are we capable of such despicable--and praiseworthy--behavior? And here's  a little nugget from p. 602: "The biology of the behaviors that interest us is, in all cases, multifunctional--that is the thesis of this book." In other words, no simple, one-cause thinking about behavior is allowed! Not in these wonderful pages ...

I might read this one again. I enjoyed it that much.

     - The second was the second novel by Jennifer Egan (I'm reading her novels in the order that she wrote them). I'd known about Egan for a long time but had not read anything by her, until I saw the reviews for her new one (Manhattan Beach, 2017--link to New York Times review), I figured it was about time--no, past time. (Besides, she won a Pulitzer a few years ago, 2011, for A Visit from the Goon Squad.) So, off I galloped!

Look at Me is a very prescient novel. Written in 2001, it forecasts the incredible extent of the Internet--of social media. Charlotte (often, not always, our narrator here) is a fashion model (a very successful one), and the novel begins with a car crash, with the damage to her face, damage that surgeons repair, and she looks good, but not as she used to. Her career crumbles. Later on, an Internet guy convinces her (as her funds are running out) to let him tell her story on a new website he's setting up, and near the end of the book we return to the crash site to re-enact it for video cameras so that it can appear with her story. (It becomes--surprise! surprise!--wildly popular.)

In between all of this, we get the story of Charlotte's youth, of her niece (also Charlotte), of her involvement with all sorts of people--including a mysterious guy named Z., who seems to be some kind of foreign agent--including a private eye. Some of the connections did not dawn on me until near the end when I realized (duh) that Charlotte 1 and 2 were not the exact same story. (Stories within stories ...)

The model and her niece--two young women who want to be noticed (see the title) and who sacrifice much to see that this happens.

A dark look at us.

5. Decided this week that it was time to learn Hamlet's little speech to the skull of Yorick. And now ... I've got it!

(from Arden edition)

HAMLET : Let me see.

Takes the skull

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath

bore me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your

gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one

to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let

her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.

6. Final word: A word I liked this week from my various online word-of-the-day providers:

      - from dictionary.com--one of those words that seem as if they ought to mean something else--something to do, in this case, with pasta!

macaronic [mak-uh-ron-ik] adjective

1. composed of a mixture of languages.

2. composed of or characterized by Latin words mixed with vernacular words or non-Latin words given Latin endings.

QUOTES

His wife and daughters understood only English but together they rocked in unison on the settle and sang macaronic songs in a mixture of both languages.

-- Benedict Kiely, "The Heroes in the Dark House," A Journey to the Seven Streams and Other Stories, 1963

ORIGIN

Macaronic verse—it can scarcely be called poetry—is associated especially with medieval universities, in which the various “nations” of students, e.g., English, Welsh, Scots, Picards, Normans, Paduans, Milanese, etc., all listened to lectures delivered in Latin and asked and answered questions in Latin. Such bilingualism, more or less fluent, invites bilingual puns and, sad to say, scurrilous verse. Perhaps the most popular macaronic verse in the contemporary United States is the Carmina Burana, a collection of 254 mostly bawdy and irreverent poems dating from the 11th or 12th century, from Benediktbeuern in Bavaria. The carmina were written in Medieval Latin, Middle High German, Old French, or a mélange of Latin and the vernacular languages. The German composer and conductor Carl Orff (1895–1982), who was born in Munich, about 45 miles away from Benediktbeuern, set 24 of the carmina to music in 1936. Macaronic entered English in the early 17th century.