Sunday Sundries, 236 (Late Edition!)

1. AOTW--Okay, so this is maybe a day late--so maybe I'm the AOTW? Or, better, how about that woman who, yesterday, walked right in front of my (moving) car while she was texting and smiling and not noticing traffic at all? She was very nearly the DAOTW (Dead AOTW).

2. I finished one book last week:

     - A friend at the coffee shop gave me (uh, let me borrow) his (signed!) copy of Seth Borgen's 2019 story collection, If I Die in Ohio, a volume that won the New American Fiction Prize. Deservedly so. The stories are (mostly) brief, focused, intense, sometimes light, sometimes painful, sometimes both. There's one story--"I Used to Know This Place"--that takes place in a town very much like Hudson, Ohio (where, I believe, he grew up); it's a moving and wrenching tale of the self-destructiveness of teens; others deal with marriage (and failed marriage), about parenthood (and how some of us are just ill-equipped for such a role), about the young trying to figure out what they need to (must?) do.

Borgen now lives in Akron and teaches creative writing. His students should pay attention: He knows what he's doing.

3. I had my 57th high school reunion yesterday, but I think I'll do an entire post about it later this week, so ... hold your breath!

4. We realized last night that we had not finished streaming the recent film Deadwood on HBO. We'd been sort of picking away at it--10 minutes here, 15 there--and then had somehow forgotten all about it. So ... we recommenced last night and are nearing the end. So strange to see all these characters we'd once known so intimately (we'd been addicted to the HBO series fifteen years ago--is that possible?), characters now looking, well, fifteen years older--as we are though we, of course, have not aged a whit! (Link to some video.)

5. And we are now able to continue streaming the series Case Histories, based on the Jackson Brodie novels by Kate Atkinson--and why? Because Joyce just finished the fourth novel, Started Early, Took My Dog, and we did not want to watch the show based on it until she'd read the book. We both love Atkinson's novels (the Brodies and her "literary" novels) and are hoping the BBC will also film her new Brodie, Big Sky (2019). (I've read it; Joyce has just started it.)

6. On Saturday evening Joyce and I joined our son and his family for a birthday dinner to celebrate his 47th (on July 16) and Joyce's (... I forget ...) at Oak and Embers in Hudson, a place that specializes in smoked meat (duh), large crowds--and even larger servings. (I managed only half my "plate" [more like the size of a manhole cover].)

Still, great to see him, his wife (Melissa), our two "grand"sons (Logan, 14; Carson, 10). After the feast it was back to our place for cake and presents and regrets about eating too much.

It's impossible to believe that Logan will start high school in the fall!

7. Last Word--a word I liked recently from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers:

     - from dictionary.com

cosplay [kos-pley] noun

1. the art or practice of wearing costumes to portray characters from fiction, especially from manga, animation, and science fiction.

verb (used with object)

1. to portray (a fictional character) by dressing in costume.

QUOTES: Although cosplay isn’t a requirement at Comic-Con, many people participate, and they take it extremely seriously.

-- Michael Hardy, "The Best Costumes at Comic-Con 2018," Wired, July 23, 2018

ORIGIN: Cosplay is a blend of costume and play, but the combination is masking a much more complex performance. Japanese borrowed the English compound noun costume play (as in theater) and rendered it into its sound system as kosuch?mu-pur?, which was shortened by the 1980s to kosupure and narrowed to the more specific sense “the art or practice of wearing costumes to portray characters from fiction, especially from manga, animation, and science fiction” (as well as characters from video games). English borrowed back kosupure and refashioned it as cosplay by the 1990s. Japanese words like kosupure are considered pseudo-English Japanese coinages known as wasei-eigo. Other familiar examples adopted into English from Japanese include salaryman, anime, and Pokémon, the latter itself a popular subject of cosplay.