1. AOTW: Well, no one acted especially egregiously this week--just a guy at the health club who decided he would leave his gym bag on the bench (where guys dress/undress--not a lot of room on one) while he was working out and showering. Didn't want to move it to the floor (and get punched out), so I worked around it--and decided I'd even give him an award for his behavior ... guess which one?
2. We've started streaming a new series (for us) on Acorn TV--Vera--a series about cops in Northumberland (Vera is the principal officer). Stars Brenda Blethyn in the title role. We've watched only about 1 1/2 episodes, but enjoying the journey thus far. (Link to some video.)
- The first was The Plays of William Godwin (2010), the first collection of the only four plays written by the father of Mary Shelley. Two of the plays reached the stage (one did so-so, the other bombed); two were never even published and have lived for decades in manuscript form in the Abinger Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford U.
While I was doing all my Mary Shelley research back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I read the two published plays (Antonio, 1800; Faulkener, 1807--both on microform), but it was not until this book appeared that I even could read the other two--without, of course, taking a trip to Oxford (which I'd done once--but cannot do again). But the book is expensive (more than $100), so I waited to buy it until I got a generous Amazon gift card for Christmas!
St Dunstan (1790) is the one I blogged about earlier. The one I finished this week was Abbas, King of Persia (1801), only three acts of which survive. It is another dark tale of a leader (Abbas! Duh!), who hears stories of a rebellion, hears that his beloved son, Sefi, may be involved. This--as you might guess--causes some anguish and hand-wringing (and death threats). Near the end of the surviving text, a tormented Abbas cries out ...
My boy! when first I saw his infant face,
I felt a motion here, no man, no woman,
No child e'er wak'd before: as he grew up,
How winning were his acts, how filial were
His thoughts! He cannot be a parricide:
No, no; he shall not die.
- I also finished another novel by Jennifer Egan (I've been working my way through her books), A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011.
In some ways the novel is a tour de force--with Egan showing her multiple talents in many ways: shifting points of view, shifting periods of time. Readers really need to be alert--all the way through this novel. In some ways it is a novel about the music industry (its changes and challenges); in others it is about relationships among musicians and those who promote and record them. And, of course, men and women ... parents and children ....
There is an amazing section in the novel--running from p. 176-251. Each page is basically a printed copy of a slide--a PowerPoint slide--that forms sort of the thoughts and conclusions and questions of Alison Blake, one of the characters. Here's one that deals with a walk she took with her father to see some solar panels.
4. Last night Joyce and I drove over to Kent to see The Post, the new Steven Spielberg film about the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg--all the things that were happening only a few years after Joyce and I married late in 1969. We both loved it. Such great performances from Meryl Streep (as publisher Katharine Graham) and Tom Hanks (as editor Ben Bradlee) and so many of the others in smaller roles. Lots of stuff about the interplay of Power and the Press, and in this case, at least, the Press stepped away from Power and stepped toward the Truth. Loved it. Made me proud about the tiny role I played in the journalism profession (I freelanced with the Plain Dealer for about twenty-five years: op-ed pieces and book reviews).
So much that is current pulsated through this film. as well: the roles of women, the independence of the press, the absolute critical need for us to protect the First Amendment and to have a free press. We all know that some of our press services are biased--some, deeply so (both right and left)--but we need these major newspapers and media outlets that are determined to get the story right. Otherwise ...? I don't want to think about it. (Link to film trailer.)
There was a lovely, wordless scene, by the way, as Streep emerges from the Supreme Court (which is hearing the case about banning the publication of the Pentagon Papers); she walks down the stairs past a number of young woman who stare at her with patent admiration. No one says a thing; the pictures say all. This old man had dewdrops in his eyes ...
5. Final Word--A word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers:
- from dictionary.com
paralipsis [par-uh-lip-sis]
noun
1. Rhetoric. the
suggestion, by deliberately concise treatment of a topic, that much of
significance is being omitted, as in “not to mention other faults.”
QUOTES
Paralipsis ... is a
Greek term that translates to “leave to the side.” It’s thought to be an ironic
way for a speaker to say two things at once. For example, say you wanted to
imply that your coworker takes too many coffee breaks without actually accusing
him wasting time at work. You might say something like, “I'm not saying that he
drinks more coffee than anyone else in the office, but every time I go to the
break room, he’s in there.”
-- Jennifer
Mercieca, "There’s an insidious strategy behind Donald Trump’s
retweets," The Conversation, March 8, 2016
ORIGIN
The rhetorical term paralipsis comes from Late Latin paralīpsis, which dates from the 3rd
century and is a direct borrowing of Greek paráleipsis,
a rhetorical term used and possibly coined by Aristotle in his Rhetoric to Alexander (also known by its Latin title Rhetorica ad Alexandrum). Preterition
and apophasis are equivalent terms. Paralipsis entered English in the 16th
century.
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