Sunday Sundries, Number 170

1. AOTW: I feared I was not going to have a winner this week and was accordingly going to have to confer the Award, again, on me (since I earn the Damn Thing just about every day!). But--this morning!--a winner emerged, though Joyce and I barely escaped damage to enable ourselves to crow about it. We were emerging from the grocery store (the Acme in Hudson), and right by the shoppers' exit is a slow-down/stop area for cars. Only a woman on a cell phone, apparently not seeing us emerging from the store, accelerated. If we had not seen her and backed up, she would have hit us, full on. She accelerated even more as she headed out--but not fast enough to escape the faster-than-light AOTW Award!

2. I finished just one book this week, but it was a terrific one--Mrs. Osmond (2017) by John Banville, who has won about every major literary prize there is (not yet the Nobel, but I bet it's on the way). This is a sequel to Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady (1881), a novel I read decades ago and am now going to read again, thanks to Banville.

You do not have to have read Portrait to enjoy/admire this, and even if you read it years ago (as I did), Banville artfully "fills you in" as the text progresses. So ... you can enjoy it either as a stand-alone work or as a worthy sequel to The Master's novel.

Okay ... here. In Portrait, Isabel Archer, a young naive American woman, marries in Europe to Gilbert Osmond, not exactly Mr. Ideal--as she discovers. In Banville's sequel, she discovers some dark secrets about Osmond (some are very dark) and tries to figure out what to do. And does it. (I ain't gonna say no more about that.)

She is in London when the novel begins, attending the funeral of her cousin. Gilbert Osmond remains in Italy (where they were living). And things begin ...  The action moves from London to Paris to Italy (Rome, Florence). And all over the mind of Isabel.

As I read about these characters this time, it struck me (again? for the first time?) that all of these principals were Americans; some had moved to Europe long before and become ... European (darkly so, corrupt); others, like Isabel, are newbies.

Anyway, it's difficult to write "like" Henry James without declining into parody, but Banville does it--and masterfully so. (HJ would have smiled in approval, I think.)

How about this passage that opens Chapter XXV:

There is a universal truth which the young are all too infrequently surprised into acknowledging, and then with a sense of having been violently brought up short, which is that, as they are now, so too were the old once. We may figure it otherwise by proposing that every generation considers itself unique, and that each batch newly entered upon its adult estate believes itself to be enjoying or enduring experiences, discoveries and difficulties that are all novel, all singular, and all exclusive to them and their coevals. The world of the young is ever a brave new world populated by brave young people like themselves. They are prepared to entertain the possibility that their parents may once have lived and loved, have rejoiced and suffered, as they themselves do, although they would have done so in a paler, weaker way, of course, and by now would have forgotten most if not all of what it was they used to know; the children of these vague amnesiacs look upon them and smile or scowl, depending on the degree of cordiality that has survived the rigours of twenty or so years of intimate family life, and, like ushers in the interval of the play, helpfully point them in the direction of the exit (247).

The older I get, the more I enjoy passages like this! And, oh, it goes on for a bit more; I just got tired of typing!

3. We've started watching (via Netflix DVD) The Thin Man (1934), a disc I ordered, I think, because the screenplay is by the team that wrote the play The Diary of Anne Frank (Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich), a play I used to teach back at Harmon Middle School in my later years there. (Link to film trailer; the entire film is also available on YouTube.)

What struck us in the first half hour (all we've watched so far) is how prominent a role BOOZE plays in the lives of the principals, Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy). They are woozy and more in the opening scenes. And it's all so ... amusing! And sophisticated! And ... whatever!

By the way, I always liked Myrna Loy for a very boyish reason: I had a crush in sixth grade on a girl named Myrna ... Won't tell you her last name!

4. We're still streaming bits of several series each night: Longmire, Broadchurch, Line of Duty. Line is so tense that I can take only about ten minutes of it before I wimp out. My Younger Self is ashamed ... and incredulous.

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

    - from dictionary.com

apopemptic [ap-uh-pemp-tik]

adjective

1. pertaining to leave-taking or departing; valedictory.

Noun

Obsolete. a farewell address; valedictory.

QUOTES

Only to the fool who believes all truths debatable, who believes true virtue resides not in men but in eulogies, true sorrow not in partings but in apopemptic hymns, and true thought nowhere but in atramentaceous scrollery--only to him is elegant style, mere scent, good food.

-- John Gardner, Jason & Medeia, 1973

ORIGIN

The English apopemptic is a straightforward borrowing of the Greek adjective apopemptikós, “pertaining to dismissal, valedictory,” a derivative of the adverb and preposition apό- “off, away” and the verb pémpein “to send,” a verb with no clear etymology. The Greek noun pompḗ, a derivative of pémpein, means “escort, procession, parade, magnificence,” adopted into Latin as pompa (with the same meanings), used in Christian Latin to refer to the ostentations of the devil, especially in baptismal formulas, e.g., “Do you reject the devil and all his pomps?” Apopemptic entered English in the mid-18th century.