Sunday Sundries, 171

1. AOTW: 'Tis the season to be jolly, so ... no AOTW this week. Not that there were no deserving candidates! But ... in the Spirit of It All ... let's be generous and say that everyone this week was a saint. (Don't we wish?)

2. I finished a couple of books this week.

     - The first was (via Kindle) Any Other Name, 2013, a Longmire novel by Craig Johnson. Some of you know that I'm (slowly) reading my way through all of the Longmires, inspired to do so by the Netflix series, which we've been streaming and from which I learned about the Longmire books. Any Other Name, an allusion to that famous line from Romeo and Juliet (Juliet says it while she's anguishing about the knowledge that she and Romeo are from two families at war with the other): What’s in a name? that which we call a rose       

By any other name would smell as sweet (2.2)

Longmire is out of his jurisdiction for much of the book (makes no never-mind to him!), pursuing what turns out to be a case of the kidnapping and selling-for-sex of young women. 

I've said it here before, but there are enormous differences between the books and the TV series. So far, at least (and I do have a few books left), there is none of this crime-on-the -res, organized-crime stuff going on. Just ... cases that Longmire generally solves. His relationship with his woman deputy, Vic, is quite different, too (sexual in the books--not so much in the series). There are major characters in the series that are not in the books--and (as I've said before) Henry Standing Bear is a physical presence in the novels (a lot like the role and stature of Hawk in the Spenser novels); in the series, it's Lou Diamond Phillips, who, though a good actor, is not exactly an intimidating shape!

Anyway, I'm greatly enjoying the books and have come to look on the TV series as just something oddly similar ...

     - The second book I finished this week was Mary Beard's Women & Power: A Manifesto, a small volume that contains (lightly revised) versions of a couple of lectures she gave on the subject in 2014 and 2017.

I love Beard's work. She's a classical scholar (Greek and Latin) at the University of Cambridge and is often on TV, in print media, etc. in the U.K. (And here she has some grim accounts of some male viciousness about her on Twitter and other social media. There are some sick dudes out there!)  I've read her The Colosseum (co-authored in 2005), Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations (2013), and SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015).

In Women, of course, there is a more personal voice, and Beard comes off here not only as highly literate and eloquent but also ... for lack of a better word ... likable. She talks about the long, long, long history of men subjugating (and abusing) women--timely, even though she composed these talks before the current eruption of revelations about numerous celebrity men.

It's not a long book--about 100 small pages (with a good-sized font!)--so you can read it in a single sitting (okay, maybe two, as I did). Among other things, she talks about women's voices--how the booming of men seems (in men's views) to carry with it some significance beyond, well, volume. (It doesn't, as she notes.) Her solutions to all of this are not all that likely to happen, but I do agree with this: "I don't think patience is the answer ... we simply cannot afford to do without women's expertise" (82, 86).

Bright and right is this writer.

3. We didn't go to the movies this week--yet. We want to see the Star Wars episode and Downsizing and Ferdinand (a favorite book from both our childhoods), so we're planning to go to one tomorrow afternoon. Our son and his family will join us for Christmas Eve (dinner, gifts, mess), and tomorrow we will have each other. I don't know about Joyce, but I have never received a more wonderful gift than her presence in my life.

4. We're still streaming our way through several shows: Longmire, Broadchurch, Line of Duty. And Olive Kitteridge is coming up (now that Joyce has read Elizabeth Strout's book, we will watch it). 

5. Final Word: A word I liked this week from one of my word-of-the-day providers:

     - from wordsmith.org (BTW: the quotation is from Ezra Dyer--no relation, I don't think)

obdormition (ob-dor-MISH-uhn)

MEANING:

noun: Numbness in a limb, usually caused by pressure on a nerve. Also known as falling asleep.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin obdormire (to fall asleep), from dormire (to sleep). Earliest documented use: 1634.

NOTES:

There is a word even for what comes after obdormition: paresthesia. (also known as pins and needles).

USAGE:

“You end up driving with your foot on the floor beneath the clutch pedal, slowly losing the battle to obdormition.”

Ezra Dyer; A Priority of Cornering Over Horsepower; The New York Times; Aug 3, 2012.