1. AOTW: I decided to count them up this week: How many people would turn out in front of me in such a way that I had to brake (sometimes hard) to avoid hitting them? The answer? Twelve. From Monday-Saturday. I had a teaching colleague my first few years (Judy Thornton) who used to tell her classes, "Patience is a virtue." Yes, it is. And impatience--especially in a car--is a mortal sin. And will earn you the AOTW Award, Big Time.
2. I finished a couple of books this week ...
- I've been reading slowly through Paul Auster's recent collection of essays from throughout his career, Talking to Strangers: Selected Essays, Prefaces, and Other Writings--1967-2017.
I've been an Auster-fan for quite a while. The guy can do about anything--fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry, translation, screenplays and films (check him out on IMDB). And he can deal out surprise with the best of them: He wrote a couple of memoirs in the second person! (Try Winter Journal, 2012.) And his fiction, though often "experimental," can also be quite moving.
Anyway, the pieces here were all, of course, good (how could they be otherwise?), but not all of them (also of course) interested me equally. A lot of the early ones--when he was "into" literary theory, etc.--required my long, deep affection for me to finish.
But as they went on, the voice grew more personal--and thus, for me, more interesting. In a fine piece about his typewriter (yes, typewriter) he writes: "Letter by letter, I have watched it write these words" (170).
And writing about the writers he has admired, now ghosts, he says, "[N]ot a day goes by when I don't open the door of my room and invite them in ..." (346).
There's a brief 9/11 piece (he lives in Brooklyn), and in the final text of a speech he gave, he says, "I don't know why I do what I do. ... You have no choice. ... It is the only job I've ever wanted" (383, 386).
I've read all of Auster's works--have greatly enjoyed most of them. This one took some patience, but Old Guys have lots of that, don't they?
- The second book I finished was Rick Moody's new memoir, The Long Accomplishment: A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony.
Moody is another writer whose complete works I've read--fiction and non-fiction. I think I got interested in him when I saw that 1997 Ang Lee film The Ice Storm, based on Moody's 1994 novel (same title). Link to film trailer.
This new memoir is painful to read in a lot of ways. For one, Moody confesses his long history of serial infidelity to his first wife, his violation of about every sexual norm. (He gets over it.) Then we hear about his second marriage, a relationship that has transformed him (he doesn't say this; we see it).
Dominating the second half of the text is their determined attempt to have a child--the many medical specialists they see, the wrenching disappointments. (Won't tell you what they are--or how it ends!)
There's also a painful account of two home break-ins (same perps) and the loss of so many things (like her family jewels) that had meant so much to them both. (He lost four guitars!)
A couple of personal coincidences: Moody proposed to his second wife in Cannon Beach, Oregon, where my parents had retired. And he and his wife have a rural home in Duchess County, NY, where Joyce often went as a girl to visit a dear aunt and uncle.
And this: "A marriage is a sequence of stories you tell about yourselves, to yourselves sometimes, in order to encourage the marriage to signify, to stand for something" (211)--just like the rest of our lives, of course.
3. We're really enjoying streaming (as I think I mentioned last week) the Cinemax series based on the detective novels of Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling)--CB Strike.
Thanks to my friend Chris, I started reading the novels recently (am now into the last one--not yet filmed), so I'm enjoying watching what the filmmakers have done with the texts. And they have done well.
Joyce loves it, too, and, somehow, we cannot seem to turn it off--though I don't like to binge a series: I like to save and savor it.
4. Last Word: A word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers ...
- from wordsmith.org (for you Odyssey fans)
nestorize (NES-tuh-ryz)
MEANING: verb tr.: To fill someone with the idea of being very wise.
ETYMOLOGY: After Nestor, king of Pylos, who was the oldest and wisest
of the Greeks and served as a counselor in the Trojan War. Earliest documented
use: 1612.
USAGE: “I must stop this sort of Nestorizing to myself and save it for
the lecture platform and the press.”
Gore Vidal; 1876; Random House; 1976.
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