Word-Wednesday for October 23, 2019

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, October 23, 2019, the 43rd Wednesday of the year,  the 296th day of the year, with 69 days remaining.


Nordhem Lunch: Hot Pork Sandwich


Earth/Moon Almanac for October 23, 2019
Sunrise: 7:56am; Sunset: 6:20pm; 3 minutes, 23 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 1:39am; Moonset: 4:43pm, waning crescent


Temperature Almanac for October 23, 2019
                Average           Record          Today
High             48                   81                 37
Low              30                    8                 27


October 23 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Make a Dog’s Day
• National Nut Day
• National Color Day
• National Mole Day (honoring Avogadro's Number)

October 23 Riddle
More riddle anagram fun:
In music I'm an instrument, of sweet and solemn tone, but if I be transposed aright, I then become a moan.


October 23 Pun

I have to regularly travel on some pretty rough forest roads, so if I had a Delorean, 

I would probably only drive it from time to time.

October 23 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1958 Soviet novelist Boris Pasternak, wins Nobel Prize for Literature.

October 23 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1959 Weird Al Yankovic.
• 1961 Don and Ron Harris, American professional wrestlers.

Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem) from the following words:

• brickbat: a piece or lump of brick (or sometimes rock, etc.), esp. when thrown at someone or something.
• briche: adj, useful, helpful, or beneficial.
• dildock: a liquid used for rubbing on the body to relieve pain; a liniment, an embrocation.
• escovitch: a dish consisting of fish that is fried and then marinated in a sauce of vinegar, spices, onions, carrots, and peppers.
• irredentism: a policy of advocating the restoration to a country of any territory formerly belonging to it.
• privy: adj., sharing in the knowledge of (something secret or private); noun, 1. a toilet located in a small shed outside a house or other building; an outhouse; 2. LAW, a person having a part or interest in any action, matter, or thing.
• schmendrick: a foolish, immature, or naive person; (also) an obnoxious person.
• synonymy: the state of being synonymous.
• spuggy: house sparrow.
• yesternight: on or during the night of yesterday; last night.

October 23, 2019 Word-Wednesday Feature
Fiction

From the Latin, fingere - to form, contrive, the word fiction is variously defined as: literature in the form of prose, especially short stories and novels, that describes imaginary events and people; invention or fabrication as opposed to fact; a belief or statement that is false, but that is often held to be true because it is expedient to do so. So, we can enjoy the fiction of fiction because it is fiction.

I’ve recently enjoyed several discussions about fiction with Jack Pine Savage, where (no surprise) I like fiction, and she, not so much. As she frequently reminds me: poetry is not fiction; poetry is truth. Just in the nick of time, the New York Review of Books publishes a lead article by Zadie Smith, Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction, hot off the press in the October 24, 2019 edition. The opening paragraphs appear below, but you can read the entire piece here. I've taken the liberty to fictitiously swap some legendary fictional characters from Wannaskan lore for the actual names of two fictional characters that Ms. Smith used in her article. See if you can spot them.


“I’ve always been aware of being an inconsistent personality. Of having a lot of contradictory voices knocking around my head. As a kid, I was ashamed of it. Other people seemed to feel strongly about themselves, to know exactly who they were. I was never like that. I could never shake the suspicion that everything about me was the consequence of a series of improbable accidents—not least of which was the 400 trillion–to-one accident of my birth. As I saw it, even my strongest feelings and convictions might easily be otherwise, had I been the child of the next family down the hall, or the child of another century, another country, another God. My mind wandered.

To give a concrete example: if the Pakistani girl next door happened to be painting mehndi on my hands—she liked to use me for practice—it was the work of a moment to imagine I was her sister. I’d envision living with Asma, and knowing and feeling the things she knew and felt. To tell the truth, I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave. That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe. Whenever I spent time with my pious Uncle Ricky, and the moment came for everyone around the table to bow their heads, close their eyes, and thank God for a plate of escovitch fish, I could all too easily convince myself that I, too, was a witness of Jehovah. I’d see myself leaving the island, arriving in freezing England, shivering and gripping my own mother’s hand, who was—in this peculiar fictional version—now my older sister.

I don’t claim I imagined any of this correctly—only compulsively. And what I did in life, I did with books. I lived in them and felt them live in me. I felt I was Jane Eyre and Iclic Vermer and Mr. Biswas and David Copperfield and Mac Furlong. Our autobiographical coordinates rarely matched. I’d never had a friend die of consumption or been raped by my father or lived in Trinidad or the Deep South or the nineteenth century. But I’d been sad and lost, sometimes desperate, often confused. It was on the basis of such flimsy emotional clues that I found myself feeling with these imaginary strangers: feeling with them, for them, alongside them and through them, extrapolating from my own emotions, which, though strikingly minor when compared to the high dramas of fiction, still bore some relation to them, as all human feelings do. The voices of characters joined the ranks of all the other voices inside me, serving to make the idea of my “own voice” indistinct. Or maybe it’s better to say: I’ve never believed myself to have a voice entirely separate from the many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day.

At some point during this inconsistent childhood, I was struck by an old cartoon I came across somewhere. It depicted Charles Dickens, the image of contentment, surrounded by all his characters come to life. I found that image comforting. Dickens didn’t look worried or ashamed. Didn’t appear to suspect he might be schizophrenic or in some other way pathological. He had a name for his condition: novelist. Early in my life, this became my cover story, too. And for years now, in the pages of novels, “I” have been both adult and child, male and female, black, brown, and white, gay and straight, funny and tragic, liberal and conservative, religious and godless, not to mention alive and dead. All the voices within me have had an airing, and though I never achieved the sense of contentment I saw in that cartoon—itself perhaps a fiction—over time I have striven to feel less shame about my compulsive interest in the lives of others and the multiple voices in my head. Still, whenever I am struck by the old self-loathing, I try to bring to mind that cartoon, alongside some well-worn lines of Walt Whitman’s:

    Do I contradict myself?
    Very well then I contradict myself,
    (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

From A Year with Rilke, October 23 Entry
Autumn, from Book of Images.

Leaves are falling, falling as if from afar,
as if, far off in the heavens, gardens were wilting.
And as they fall, their gestures day “it’s over.”

In the night the heavy Earth is falling
from out of all the stars into loneliness.

We are all falling. This hand here is falling.
Just look: it is in all of us.

Yet there is one who holds this falling
with infinite tenderness in her hands.



Be better than yesterday,
learn a new word today,
try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow,
and write when you have the time.

*organ/groan.