Word-Wednesday for October 28, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, October 28, 2020, the 44th Wednesday of the year, the sixth Wednesday of fall, and the 302nd day of the year, with 64 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for October 28, 2020
It’s been a cold October.

[Thanks, Norris Camp!]

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.

Word-Wednesday October 28, 2020 Fall Recipe
Pumpkin Bread
Your neighbors will be able to smell this recipe cooking, even in downtown Wannaska.


Days without a living Wannaskan Almanac contributing author being nominated to the US Supreme Court: 26,880.


Earth/Moon Almanac for October 28, 2020
Sunrise: 8:05am; Sunset: 6:10pm; 3 minutes, 17 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 5:34pm; Moonset: 4:43am, waxing gibbous


Temperature Almanac for October 28, 2020
                Average            Record              Today
High             45                     70                     35
Low              28                      6                      15


October 28 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National First Responders Day
• National Internal Medicine Day
• National Chocolate Day

October 28 Word Riddle
Which of the following words don’t belong in the group and why?* 

CORSET, COSTER, SECTOR, ESCORT, COURTS


October 28 Pun
Other Halloween monsters don’t like to eat ghosts because they taste like sheet.


October 28 Roseau Times-Region Headline:
Backstage Zombie Looking for Brains Walks By Both Candidates at Recent Debate


October 28 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1726 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift is published.
• 1811 First known purchase of Jane Austen's novel Sense and Sensibility by the Prince Regent (later George IV), a fan.
• 1893 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky conducts first performance of his Symphony Number Six in B minor, Pathetique.
• 1918 Tomáš G. Massaryk claims independence for Czechoslovakia.
• 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded to Ernest Hemingway.

October 28 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1466 Desiderius Erasmus, Dutch humanist and theologian (The Praise of Folly), born in Rotterdam, Netherlands (d. 1536)
• 1901 Eileen Shanahan, Irish poet.
• 1903 Evelyn Waugh.
• 1914 Jonas Salk.
• 1925 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Scottish poet.
• 1979 ALF.

October 28 Word Fact
deeded is the only word that is made using only two different letters, each used three times.


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

• apophlegmatic: designed to facilitate discharges of phlegm or mucus from the mouth or nostrils.
• banjanxed: ruined, shattered; confounded.
• carnaptious: someone ill-tempered and grumpy; most likely on the warpath and looking for a fight for very little, if any reason.
• deeshy: tiny and insignificant.
• fankle: a tangle. Frequently in extended use: a confused or muddled state; a predicament.
• noodge: to pester, to nag at. Also intransitive: to whine, to complain persistently.
• obstropolos: having an obstreperous mouth (coined by James Joyce).
• peloothered: intoxicated (coined by James Joyce).
• quisquilious: composed of rubbish or bric-a-brac.
• taggeen: a small cup or glass of spirits.

October 28, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
The Art of Word Hunting

O wort, du wort, das mir fehlt!            [O word, thou word, that I lack!]

Aging authors often hunt for words in the same way they hunt for fleeting memories: "Why did I come into this room?" Memory lapses aside, all authors word-hunt, where word-hunting often means bending grammar and meaning to achieve an impact on the reader. Charles Simic questioned the value of the whole in poetic language and representation, proposing a kind of anomia (to be or to write without Name, without Law).  James Joyce, e.e. cummings, and Gertrude Stein intentionally created broken grammars to question the function of communication as a norm or as a social consensus. We recognize their work as art rather than gibberish because some meaning is intended, even where that meaning is based on creatively organized deviance.

Today Word-Wednesday explores the writer as devious aphasic. Yes, Charles Baudelaire famously wrote about his actual aphasia after suffering a stroke, and Samuel Beckett experienced temporary aphasia after a neurological illness, but most of today's featured artists know their words and understand how those words play hide and seek with our minds, our realities, and our reader's expectations.

Beckett begins his poem, What is the Word, about his experience using Dickinsonian dashes to represent the stuttering speech that accompanies word-hunting:
folie—                     [madness]
folie que de—        [madness for]
que de—                 [for to]
comment dire—    [what is the word]

For word-hunting writers not otherwise aphasic from head injury or old age, the aphasic experience can be likened to a search between two poles of expression: the metaphor and the metonym — substitution of a like thing or a like attribute. Do not discredit your memory when word-hunting for what you really mean. Take your time. Many memories [implicit biases, cultural practices] remain locked away in the unconscious. Consider the ways that Xiao Yue Shan expresses this process in his poem, Nation of Aphasia:
when a writer goes missing in china
we take the red and gold paper emblems
that display the character for luck
off of our doors and paste them
over our mouths. and we go back to
the old books to learn again
what we’ve learned for millennia,
that you can command armies or
recompose history or traverse
from xian to changsha to mount lu
or buy a dozen eggs and none of it
will mean that your life is a promise
your country makes to you.
hong kong is a dewdrop glittering
in mid-january. we close our eyes
to take its temperature, trying to find
just the right word. the rain
only a sweet-tasting silhouette against
the gleaming skyline. late-day light
spreads a white sheet over the windows
and no one can see in. no one can see out.
still, no one ever thinks this is the day
someone will knock on the door
asking you to identify your husband
by his handwriting. how is it that
we have made a culture out of
paying a heavy price. wearing out stones
with water. chasing the sun across
the eastern front with our poems
closing in behind us like lost birds.
the gardens we do not tend. the paper
boats we do not try in the yangtze.
imagine your life is the thing
that is trapped on the tip of your tongue,
the word that is almost realized,
but you can’t quite think of.

Harryette Mullen plays with metonymic word substitution in a playfully aphasic way to blend word-hunting and meaning-hunting in her poem, Whip that Smile Off Your Aphasia:
as horses as for
as purple as we go
as heartbeat as if
as silverware as it were
as onion as I can   
as cherries as feared
as combustion as want
as dog collar as expected
as oboes as anyone
as umbrella as catch can
as penmanship as it gets
as narcosis as could be
as hit parade as all that
as icebox as far as I know
as fax machine as one can imagine
as cyclones as hoped
as dictionary as you like
as shadow as promised
as drinking fountain as well
as grassfire as myself
as mirror as is
as never as this

In the final analysis, the word-hunting writer enters into a partnership of meaning with the reader. On the one extreme, an author like James Joyce lords his own entirely singular interpretation of correct word choice, often leaving his reader guessing. On the more generous extreme, here's a little poem by e.e.cummings showing how a writer can leave the meaning-hunting up to the reader.
2 little whos
(he and she)
under are this
wonderful tree

smiling stand
(all realms of where
and beyond)
now and here

(far from a grown
-up i&you-
ful world of known)
who and who

(2 little ams
and over them this
aflame with dreams
incredible is)


From A Year with Rilke, October 28 Entry
Valais, from Early Journals.

Now, the landscape of this region called Wannaska is indescribable. Why isn’t it named when people count up the wonders of the world? At first I did not really see it, because I was comparing it in my mind with the most meaningful of my memories: with Spain, with Provence (to which, in reality, thanks to the Rhone, it is a blood relative). But now that I have learned to behold it fully on its own terms, it reveals its true dimensions to me, and I come more and more to recognize the sweetness of its character and sense the most urgent of its messages….Perhaps that is reflected in a strange, inexpressible fear that I might die somewhere else before I have grasped this and taken it into myself.

Courtesy Chairman Joe

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.

 

*Courts. All of the others are anagrams of each other.