Sunday Sundries, 196

1. AOTW: I can't believe it, but this is the second week in a row I can't name anyone--anyone other than myself, that is. So ... maybe I need to get out more? Be a little more intolerant? Something?!!

2. Last night Joyce and I drove over to the Cinemark in Macedonia to see Ant Man and the Wasp. (Link to film trailer.) We normally don't go to many superhero films (we didn't see the original Ant Man), but our grandsons had been to see this one, had liked it, and so ... Gotta be able to talk with the grandsons, right?

Anyway, we weren't really looking forward to it all that much (the popcorn was a principal allure), but--surprise! surprise!--we both liked it far more than we thought we would. For one thing--it didn't take itself too seriously (lots of playfulness); for another, there were surprises (over-sized Ant Man sort of pushing a truck along like a scooter). And I loved when Michael Peña--drugged up with a "truth serum"--tells stories about some of the characters, and we see those characters doing what he's talking about, but they're all talking like Michael Peña. Clever. I laughed a lot during that sequence--and others.

Also nice to see principal roles by Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Laurence Fishburne--actors I've liked for a long time.

Oh, and the car chases through the streets of San Francisco? How can you not think of Bullitt--which I'm sure the director was! Steve McQueen, 1968 ... ah, yes ...

And now? I'm going to have to go to Netflix and order the first of the films ... [pause]  Did it!

3. This Tuesday I will have the first of two surgeries for cataracts. Right eye on Tuesday. Left in a couple of weeks. Reading has become difficult--night driving, too. So ... time to cut the old eyeball, I guess. Cleveland Eye Clinic in Brecksville ...

4. I finished one book this week, a "reading memoir" by I writer I enjoy, admire, and learn from--Edmund White. (I really liked his novel about Stephen Crane, Hotel de Dream, 2007). And I'm reading right now his novel Fanny: A Fiction (2003), a novel about Fanny Wright written in the voice and style of Fanny Trollope (Wright's friend and also the mother of novelist Anthony Trollope). I know a bit about these two Fannys because both were involved with Mary Shelley ...

This newest book--The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading (2018)--is part of a larger movement:  writers writing memoirs about their reading lives. I've read some very good ones. This one has its moments, but, sigh, it's not one of White's stronger works.

For one thing, he spends a lot of time--and I mean a lot of time--telling us about writers most general readers (like me) have never heard of. And summarizing their works, sometimes for many pages. He does not seem concerned--at least in these segments--about making any of it all that interesting to us. It's just sort of here it is; I like/love this stuff. Not enough in a memoir. We've got to emerge from such sections thinking there it was; I think I wanna read some of that. But I didn't feel that way--not at all. So ... my problem? Or his? Let's blame him since I'm writing this!

Still, White is a gifted writer--bright, witty, amazingly well read--so there are moments and sentences here that are well worth hacking your way through the thicker foliage. A few goodies ...

• "If we are writers, we read to learn our craft" (1).
• "What bliss to see all my thousands of books" (13).
• "Memorializing someone has also been one of my inspirations ..." (73).
• "My books are in such disorder that often I have to buy a title twice because I can't find it on my shelves" (109).
• "Reading is a hobby that never grows stale--and an unpunished vice" (124).

And on and on he goes ...

5. We are nearing the end of season 8 of Vera. (They are currently shooting season 9.) Getting a little sad: We love that show ...

6. Last Word: a word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers.

     - from wordsmith.org

paragnosis (par-uh-GNO-sis)

noun: Knowledge that cannot be obtained by normal means.

From Greek para- (beyond) + gnosis (knowledge). Earliest documented use: 1933.

USAGE: “We have lived to the time of the village idiot, when we wisely heed the messages received from the fillings of our teeth. The method here, paragnosis. The voice on the wireless beam his? Whose?”

Michael Joyce; Of Two Minds; University of Michigan Press; 1996.