More Words Gathered

A note on word gathering:

I am reading extensively the poetry of W.B. Yeats and commentary and analysis of his work, life and times. As I read I gather the words that I recognize but can't fully define (if there was a test) as well as words that are brand new to me. Or sometimes I pick words that are downright silly sounding or looking.

This is something that I used to teach my students to do as they read. Let's say that I demonstrated the technique to them. Whether or not they availed themselves of the strategy is up for grabs. Nevertheless, I became addicted to amping up my reading (and writing) in this way. What can I say, I used to read the "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" segments in the Reader's Digest when I visited my Grandma on the weekends. My college roommate and I used to read the dictionary on Friday nights. Living now with a non-native English speaker, I am attuned to the nuances of communication and the need for simplicity and clarity--yet I love the splendor of such things:

mawkish
Etymology: Middle English mawke maggot, probably from Old Norse mathkr -- more at MAGGOT
1 : having an insipid often unpleasant taste
2 : sickly or puerilely sentimental

syncretism
Etymology: New Latin syncretismus, from Greek synkrEtismos federation of Cretan cities, from syn- + KrEt-, KrEs Cretan
1 : the combination of different forms of belief or practice
2 : the fusion of two or more originally different inflectional forms

hieractic
Etymology: Latin hieraticus sacerdotal, from Greek hieratikos, from hierasthai to perform priestly functions, from hieros sacred; probably akin to Sanskrit isara vigorous
1 : constituting or belonging to a cursive form of ancient Egyptian writing simpler than the hieroglyphic
2 : SACERDOTAL
3 : highly stylized or formal

fissiparous
\fih-SIP-uh-rus\
tending to break up into parts : divisive
Example sentence: The reorganization of management can have a fissiparous effect on the rest of the company.

palimpsest
Etymology: Latin palimpsestus, from Greek palimpsEstos scraped again, from palin + psEn to rub, scrape; akin to Sanskrit psAti, babhasti he chews
1 : writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased
2 : something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface

manque
Etymology: French, from past participle of manquer to lack, fail, from Italian mancare, from manco lacking, left-handed, from Latin, having a crippled hand, probably from manus
: short of or frustrated in the fulfillment of one's aspirations or talents -- used postpositively

hypotaxis
Etymology: New Latin, from Greek, subjection, from hypotassein to arrange under, from hypo- + tassein to arrange
: syntactic subordination (as by a conjunction)

perspicious
Etymology: Latin perspicuus transparent, perspicuous, from perspicere
: plain to the understanding especially because of clarity and precision of presentation

Garrison Keillor: Ford Hall Forum Address on Cheefulness

Last night we attended the Ford Hall Forum lecture series at Northeastern University. As I learned last night, this series is a ninety-nine years long tradition providing free lectures and debates for the Boston public. We were there to hear Garrison Keillor.

Mr. Keillor is touring and touting his new book, Pontoon. He got that business out of the way right up front in a humorous self-deprecating way, never describing the contents of the book. You can be sure, however, that the work will cheer you up. After a delightful expose of aging and its farcical vicissitudes, Keillor explored how the proper response to such absurdities is cheerfulness. Keillor believes that art should uplift the soul, make us see the world or at least our experiences in a more flattering light, perhaps candlelight for those, like him, who have turned sixty-five this year. He lambastes modern poetry and literature for torturing high school readers with the likes of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", turning potential life-long readers into the opposite.

Keillor embraced the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Here was a man who advocated for literature and its relevance for the American way of life. He traveled the country and talked about this ideas. He sold cheerfulness and optimism as a way of life. He paved the way for writers and intellectuals. Keillor rued his most famous protege, Thoreau, who has been sold to young Americans at many graduations speeches as the valiant individualist who walked to the beat of his own drummer--as if it were a good thing to forsake community and the pleasures of society. As if being alone could substitute for the richness of friends and the vitality of life lived in touch with the living.

T.S. Eliot, Keillor noted, was miserable and packaged his agony for all to endure as Art. If only Eliot would have had sex much sooner, the course of modern art and literature in America would be far more virile than its sad state today. Sex, it seems, is good grounds to cause what we all need more of, cheerfulness. Children too seem an antidote to gloom. Keillor described episodes from his nine-year-old daughter's life that reveal how resilience doesn't have to develop thick-skin or cultivate fear and terror and its result, isolation. Children move on from each tragedy or indignity, ready for more experiences, more fun, more of the ever delightful same story read for the fiftieth time if it is read by someone who loves them.

There was a question-and-comment section at the end of the lecture with various accolades and entrapments (involving Keillor's pro-Bush's retirement stance and his personal religious faith stance), all of which Keillor handled with amiable aplomb.

As I left the hall, I overhead one woman, who was glowing, say that "it was like vitamins" for her spirit. I assume she is the kind of person who enjoys taking vitamins. After all, she was flush with cheerfulness.

Indeed, Keillor's comments made me think about my own novel-in-progress. The contents are not cheerful. Yet it makes me cheerful to right it. As I engage in the creative process I come alive in ways that the occasional yoga class, certainly laundry, even eating a fine meal can't rival. Maybe I do need to insert a comic break in my novel, well, just because. Keillor said at some point in the night, "When in doubt, write something funny." Alas, I wish I had the comic marrow-bones to do it. I can barely be funny in real life.

Writing my blog makes me cheerful. There, that is the best justification for blogging I have yet to develop.

Later that night we strolled down Newbury street after a fresh juice at the Trident. It was a fall night, air crisp and new scarves bound snugly against our throats. Suddenly, I came to a full stop and turned to face my husband. "Let's name him Garrison." (Here referring to our yet-to-be-born child.) He didn't think it resonated with either of our last names. But wouldn't that be a legacy worthy enough to pass on to American's new generation? Can you tell that I think Garrison Keillor is a jewel?

Among School Children by W.B. Yeats

I
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way -- the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy --
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t’other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age --
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler’s heritage --
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

IV
Her present image floats into the mind --
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once -- enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Soldier Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts -- O presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise --
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Reading and Analysis of poem by Helen Vendler at Harvard:

http://athome.harvard.edu/programs/vendler/index.html

Word Gathering (Again)

abjure
1 a: to renounce upon oath / b: to reject solemnly
2: to abstain from: avoid

adjure
1: to command solemnly under or as if under oath or penalty of a curse
2: to urge or advise earnestly

vitreous
2: of, relating to, derived from, or consisting of glass

priapic
Etymology: Latin priapus lecher, from Priapus
1: phallic
2: relating to or preoccupied with virility or male sexual excitement

apposite
: highly pertinent or appropriate : apt

plangent
1: having a loud reverberating sound
2: having an expressive and especially plaintive quality

vatic
: prophetic, oracular

apotropaic
: designed to avert evil

descant
2: discourse or comment on a theme

chthonic
of or relating to the undeworld

equanimity
Etymology: Latin aequanimitas, from aequo animo with even mind

Word Gathering

peignoir
a woman's loose negligee or dressing gown

epigone
an inferior imitator

jejune
1 : lacking nutritive value <jejune diets>
2 : devoid of significance or interest : DULL <jejune lectures>
3 : JUVENILE, PUERILE <jejune reflections on life and art>
synonym see INSIPID

instantiate
to represent (an abstraction) by a concrete instance instantiate ideals -- W. J. Bennett>

tautology
needless repetition of an idea, statement, or word

chimera
1 a capitalized : a fire-breathing she-monster in Greek mythology having a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail b : an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts
2 : an illusion or fabrication of the mind; especially : an unrealizable dream chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer -- John Donne>
3 : an individual, organ, or part consisting of tissues of diverse genetic constitution

Word Gathering

chrysalis
1 a : a pupa of a butterfly ; broadly : an insect pupa
b : the enclosing case or covering of a pupa
2 : a protecting covering : a sheltered state or stage of being or growth

Mobius strip
a one-sided surface that is constructed from a rectangle by holding one end fixed, rotating the opposite end through 180 degrees, and joining it to the first end

simulacrum
1 : IMAGE, REPRESENTATION
2 : an insubstantial form or semblance of something : TRACE

parturition
: the action or process of giving birth to offspring

benighted
1 : overtaken by darkness or night
2 : existing in a state of intellectual, moral, or social darkness : UNENLIGHTENED

kismet
fate

gyre
a circular or spiral motion or form; especially : a giant circular oceanic surface current

saturnalia
an unrestrained often licentious celebration : ORGY b : EXCESS, EXTRAVAGANCE

epigram
1 : a concise poem dealing pointedly and often satirically with a single thought or event and often ending with an ingenious turn of thought
2 : a terse, sage, or witty and often paradoxical saying

epigraph
1: an engraved inscription
2: a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions so suggest its theme

In Boxes

Cardboard is surely one of the least acclaimed inventions.

A home furnished and stocked with two bibliophiles’ flotsam and never-to-be-jettisoned accumulations needs less than twenty-four hours to be fully boxed by professional packers and loaded into one massive truck. The quick upload, however, has been a slow download in our new abode. A three-floor walk up seemed doable given location, central air, and tandem parking when I first saw the apartment. Watching four sweaty guys haul my medieval history, Romantic poetry, and feminist and liberation theology, not to mention just about all my scrupulous notes in thick binders from undergraduate studies, was painful to bear. I tipped them well. The movers have been gone a week now and we are dangerously close to accepting a few stacked boxes as functional end tables or practical lamp stands.

Back to cardboard. We swim in it. We heft our empties down three flights, then down a fourth flight and into the basement. Then with wild abandon we buy more cardboard boxes filled with ready-to-be-assembled bookshelves, a desk, that wedding china I finally need to round out our set, and yet more books from Amazon.com. Then we haul those fresh empties down four flights. The cardboard queues patiently for the once-a-week recycling pick up. It will take weeks to remove them all.

I once visited a company that manufactured cardboard boxes. I saw the sheets of ordinary brown cardboard perforated, printed, and cut into the strange shapes designed to transform them into useful containers to carry fried chicken or entire households as requested. I was impressed by the efficiency of the operation. I was also glad that it was not my job to turn paper into magic boxes. After making the move from the Midwest to the East Coast I know a few more things about life and cardboard:

1. Professional movers are worth every cent.

2. Cardboard is essential. I am thankful to the cardboard box makers.

3. GPS is essential--especially in Boston.

Really, I don’t know why I have broken my blogging silence with this utterly boring rumination about cardboard. I could write about our road trip with many firsts for me including a side trip to a gun show in Ohio , dinner with a Georger, a stroll beneath the Niagara Falls, a night in a Canadian B&B, and a trip to see Mass MoCa (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) in North Adams.

Or I could write about our last few days in South Bend, which were perfectly filled with friends. Sharon at the farmers market saved us a seat at her counter for our last Saturday trip to the diner. She even gave us a parting gift.

I could write about our new neighborhood. Or my new modern poetry class. Or progress on my novel. Or how we still don’t have a mail key. Yet:

O Cardboard filled with treasures packed! O life contained!

Cardboard is life these days. Soon to be recycled.