A Farrago of Contradiction

I had to look that word up once upon a time--farrago ("a mixture"; it comes from  a Latin word meaning "mixed fodder for cattle"--thank you, Merriam-Webster; oh, and it kind of rhymes with Chicago).

Anyway, as I look at what I've done this past week, I feel, more than ever, that, when they coined the word, the Romans must have been thinking not of cattle food but of the Future Me. They could be prescient, those Romans--but not, of course, as the Empire began to implode. (Not that ours could ever implode, right? Cuz we're uh-MARE-uh-kuns!)

I find myself, even at my, uh, advanced age, ping-ponging back and forth between high and low culture--in what I stream, in what I read, in what I do. I think I understand more clearly now why my parents seemed, at times, to think of me as a Lost Cause.

Let's take the streaming first (since it's easiest to do). This week Joyce and I streamed a Globe production of The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's hopeless and hopeful play about human failure and human forgiveness, about our sometimes insidious minds, about the miracle of love.

As followers of this blog know, Joyce and I have seen all of the Bard's plays onstage--some of them many times (hey, you can always find Romeo and Juliet somewhere--or A Midsummer Night's Dream or Hamlet or Macbeth; some of the others, King John, Henry VIII, and, oh Henry VI, Part II, are a bit harder to find).

So ... watching The Winter's Tale (a play I love, by the way) is powerful evidence for my Intellectual Loftiness, right?

Well ...

The last couple of weeks I have also streamed (while waiting in the evening for Joyce to wrap up her work and join me in bed) both The Hangover and Hangover 2. And two nights ago I started The Change-Up, a raunchy 2011 comedy about Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman, two long-time but very different friends (Bateman has a family and is a rising lawyer; Reynolds is a disorganized hedonist who gets parts in porno films); the two, miraculously, change personalities (I won't get into how--okay, it involves urinating in a public fountain and wishing they could trade places). Link to some video.

I do not keep this secret from Joyce (she's far too clever for me), but I do stop it the second I hear her heading toward our bedroom.

All right--what about the reading I do?

Each night I read a bit from each book in my bedside pile (and on my Kindle). I try not to let the pile grow beyond seven: That way I can still see our clock and am less likely to knock the pile over in the night and am able to do a (pretty) good job of remembering what's going on in each of the seven books.

Among the seven are some very admirable titles. Right now, for example, I'm reading a late novel by Wilkie Collins ("I Say No") and Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, her conclusion to her wonderful trilogy about Henry VIII and advisor Thomas Cromwell (the other two were Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies).

Impressive, eh?

Among the others, I fear, are some titles a bit less ... weighty--violent mystery novels (Ken Bruen is a favorite) and some others I refuse to mention, for I don't want to lose every ounce of whatever respect you have (or had) for me.

Now, as for what I do (our third category). I spend most of my days--even before the lockdown--reading and writing and cooking and baking. All noble, eh?

I do write some ... serious ... things (as some of you know), but I also spend some energy every day writing, well, drivel (Merriam-Webster: a word that once meant "saliva trickling from the mouth" but now means "inarticulate or foolish utterance").

Pretty much ever day I write what I kindly call "doggerel," silly (okay, even stupid) "poems" about all sorts of things; some of it I post on Facebook; some I don't (some of my Friends do have standards!). Oh, and each morning I write and text to my son and his family a doggerel based on the word-of-the-day on the tear-off daily calendar I give them every year for Christmas.

Example: today's word was sotto voce, and here's what I came up with--and texted to all of them:

He spoke—but SOTTO VOCE—so

I wasn’t all that clear

If he was speaking softly due

To privacy—or fear.

Then I saw Mordred.

See what I mean?

You can talk about all of this--and me--but, please: do so sotto voce!