Sunday Sundries, 260

1. HBOTW [Human Beings of the Week]: The women who check me in at Seidman Cancer Center when I'm there for one of my all-too-frequent visits. They are kind, friendly (they remember me!), encouraging, patient, funny, understanding, empathetic--all the qualities, in other words, that I wish would flourish more pervasively than they do in this contentious time.

2. Had an adventure at the gas station this morning. It was so cold (about 18) that once I got the hose hooked up to our car, I got back in while Joyce, who could see the pump, told me how much had gone in. I was expecting about seven gallons (our Prius is never all that thirsty). Joyce told me eight had gone in, so I got out and checked: The eighth gallon--and maybe more--was on the pavement, and gasoline was bubbling merrily out of our car. I stopped it, went inside and told the attendant that a pump had malfunctioned. He took care of it, while I drove away smelling of gasoline.

3. I finished four books this week--two of which were from my read-a-little-in-each-pile beside our bed. I'll deal with those two first.

     - The first was a book I've been reading on my Kindle at night--Val McDermid's The Last Temptation, 2002, the third in her series about Tony Hill (a psychological profiler) and Carol Jordan (a cop), a series I became aware of when we began streaming Wire in the Blood, a Brit show based on the novels--a show I learned about from our good friend Chris.

Anyway, once the series was over (a series we really enjoyed, BTW), I began reading the books in the order that McDermid wrote them. So: three down and 100,000 to go.

This one has Carol Jordan going undercover to entrap a major mobster, whose late GF looked a lot like Jordan. Tony is helping out--and pursuing another case, as well (someone has been murdering psychologists). Things get tangled; things get violent; things get bloody; things get ... you know.

There is a lot of sexual electricity between Hill and Jordan, and it really flared in this volume. BUT ... considering what happened near the end, I'll have to see if the sparks are still there in the next book--which I'm delaying a bit because, first, I have got to finish the (relatively) new Lee Child novel about Jack Reacher.

     - The 2nd book I've been slowly reading through is the most recent collection of poems by Sharon Olds, whose work I have always greatly admired. This one--Arias, 2019--is, I fear, very uneven, at least according to my taste.

She seems to have abandoned (in many of the poems) her narrative clarity that I felt had always been her great strength--the power of story and all that. She has become more allusive, even secretive, in these poems, and they just didn't "get" me the way so much of her work has over the years. (I've loved her poems so much I've memorized a half-dozen or so.)

There are some poems here I loved, don't get me wrong. But many I had to force myself to complete.

I met Olds back on April 19, 2006, when she spent the day at Western Reserve Academy--doing a reading, a book-signing (yes, I did), meeting with students, visiting classes, etc. Liked her a lot.

     - I have not yet read Zadie Smith's celebrated novel, White Teeth, which is having its twentieth anniversary. But when Joyce recently bought (and read) her new story collection, Grand Union, I decided to read it, too.

And I found much to admire in these pieces--though it is far from uniformly good, I fear. There's a clever story about a corset shop, a sad story about a druggie who can't get his job back at a library, another about a young man who, for the first time, feels the presence of death, etc.

And there are some lines I liked: "ALL THE WORLD IS TEXT" (199); "Being wrong is a lifelong occupation" (219); "In the suffering person, suffering is solely suffering" (231).

So ... look for the gold among the glitter. It's there.

     - Finally, I've always bought more Ian McEwan than I've read (I've got a full shelf), but, lately, I decided I'd better get to it--time's winged chariot, and all that. I first read all the ones on the shelf, and now I'm going back to read the novels from early in his career. And I started the the first one, The Cement Garden, 1978, a grim, even macabre story about a family.

The first sentence sets the tone (our narrator is Jack, who's fourteen at the time he speaks of): "I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way" (13). Okay ...

Jack has three siblings--a younger brother (Tom), two sisters (Julie, the oldest; and Sue). They're each kind of ... messed up. In a way, Jack is a typical sullen adolescent with eruptive skin (and behavior).

Mom tries to deal with it. Then ... she dies.

There are no friends or relatives, so the kids decide just to stay in the house and, you know, bury Mom in the basement.

Julie gets a BF--Derek, a guy who hustles games of snooker--and who gets very curious about that odor in their basement.

And on we go. Don't want to give away any more of it--but let's just say that some ... unusual ... things go on in that house ....

3. As I've written here before, we are streaming a series we really like--Upstart Crow--a comedy based on the early career of Shakespeare. It's filmed in front of a live audience, and the sets are generally simple; the language and behavior are at times (and always amusingly so) anachronistic.

We see a Shakespeare who gets ideas for his plays from everywhere and everyone--from his sullen teen daughter, his nasty father, his servant Bottom (!), from Kate (another--very bright--servant). And this, of course, is actually far more realistic than the idea of the Bard sitting up in some dark, cold room dreaming up every single thing in his plays and poems.

Anyway, we just saw the Christmas episode (he's working on Twelfth Night), and it was incredibly good; Joyce thinks we ought to watch it every Christmas Eve the rest of our lives!

I'll not say more ... don't wanna spoil it. It's on Amazon Prime--though for some weird reason we had to pay $1.99 for the Christmas episode?!!? (Some Amazon Scrooge-ian policy?)

4. Final Word--a word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers.

     - from dictionary.com

mythomane [mith-uh-meyn ]

noun: a person with a strong or irresistible propensity for fantasizing, lying, or exaggerating.

The noun and adjective mythomane is a relatively recent word, dating from only the 1950s, and is a synonym for the noun and adjective mythomaniac, which is almost a century older (1857). Mythomaniac originally meant someone passionate about or obsessed with myths, its etymological meaning. By the early 1920s mythomaniac had acquired its current sense “someone with a strong or irresistible propensity for fantasizing, lying, or exaggerating.” The Greek noun mŷthos means “word, discourse, conversation, story, tale, saga, myth”; it does not mean “lie.” The curious thing is that the source word mythomania “lying or exaggerating to an abnormal degree” dates from only 1909.

Lawrence himself was a mythomane and, after the first world war, took particular pains to project an image of himself to the public that was as much a construct as anything worked up by the PR team of a film star or celebrity of today. WILLIAM BOYD, "LAWRENCE OF ARABIA: A MAN IN FLIGHT FROM HIMSELF," THE GUARDIAN, APRIL 29, 2016

… he is a flat-out mythomane, dedicated to the Sublime, the Enormous and the Ultra-German; a marvelous artist at his best and at his worst a Black Forest ham. ROBERT HUGHES, "MOCKER OF ALL STYLES," TIME, MAY 27, 1999