Word-Wednesday for November 18, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, November 18, 2020, the 47th Wednesday of the year, the ninth Wednesday of fall, and the 323rd day of the year, with 43 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for November 18, 2020
Watch for the Leonid meteor shower in the next few days.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.

Earth/Moon Almanac for November 18, 2020
Sunrise: 7:38am; Sunset: 4:40pm; 2 minutes, 33 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 11:45am; Moonset: 7:48pm, waxing crescent, 17% illuminated


Temperature Almanac for November 18, 2020
                Average            Record              Today
High             32                     51                     42
Low              17                    -20                    29


November 18 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Princess Day
• National Vichyssoise Day
• National Educational Support Professionals Day
• Married To A Scorpio Support Day

November 18 Word Riddle
Everyone keeps me on hand,
I've ever to labor bent;
but twist me about,
and then I'm only an ornament.

Rearrange the same six letters to find the two items described in this riddle.*

November 18 Pun
I wanted to be a monk, but I never got the chants.


November 18 Roseau Times-Region Headline:
Gatzke Cat Survives Brush With Curiosity


November 18 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1307 William Tell reputedly shoots apple off his son's head.
• 1477 First English dated printed book, Dictes & Sayengis of the Phylosopher, by William Caxton.
• 1718 Voltaire's Oedipe premieres in Paris.
• 1805 Thirty women meet at Mrs Silas Lee's home in Wiscasset, Maine, organizes Female Charitable Society, first woman's club in America.
• 1865 Mark Twain publishes Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.
• 1872 Suffragette Susan B. Anthony is arrested by a U.S. Deputy Marshal and charged with illegally voting.
• 1902 Brooklyn toymaker Morris Michton names the teddy bear after US President Teddy Roosevelt.
• 1905 George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara premieres in London.
• 1920 Apollo Theater opens at 221 West 42nd Street in New York City.
• 1926 George Bernard Shaw accepts the Nobel Prize for Literature but refuses the prize money, saying "I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."
• 1928 Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie released, first Mickey Mouse sound cartoon.
• 1942 Thornton Wilder's Skin of our Teeth premieres.

November 18 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1797 Sojourner Truth [Isabella Baumfree], African-American abolitionist and feminist.
• 1928 Mickey Mouse.
• 1934 Vassilis Vassilikos.
• 1939 Margaret Atwood.
• 1945 Wilma Mankiller.
  

November 18 Word Fact
Lewd-Sounding Town Names in Each State

November 18, 2020 Song of Myself, Verse 3 of 52

3
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.

To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so.

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.

I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing;
As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread,
Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?


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

• aspinonse: without a spine.
• brewstered: wealthy, rich, very well off.
• callidity: craftiness, cunning; shrewdness. Also: an act characterized by this.
• faitour: a charlatan, imposter, or fake.
• gaslighting: manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.
• Karen: a pejorative term for someone perceived as entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is appropriate or necessary. A common stereotype is that of a white woman who uses her privilege to demand her own way at the expense of others.
• mnemotechny: the study and practice of improving one's memory.
• neanimorphic: appearing younger than one’s actual age.
• peripeteia: a sudden turn of events or unexpected reversal; sudden change in fortune.
• spiritato: a person considered to exhibit excessive religious fervour; a religious zealot or fanatic.

November 18, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Beginning Words
Whether writing poetry or prose, fiction or nonfiction, how much time do you spend on the words in the first line of your work? Of all the time spent editing a body of work, how much times (how many times) do you typically revise the words in that first line? Today Word-Wednesday examines classic beginnings, having curated a series of well-known, time-honored first words according to themes and other characteristics. The Word-Wednesday team hopes that these first words will update your pandemic reading list with any titles you have not already read, and these examples inspire you to work your own first words good and hard. Your first words deserve your attention; your readers deserve your attention to those first words.

First, the short and the sweet:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1

Call me Ishmael.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851.

I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1944.

All this happened, more or less.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969.

It was a pleasure to burn.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 1953.

It was love at first sight.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961.

They shoot the white girl first.
Toni Morrison, Paradise, 1998.

124 was spiteful.
Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987.

Elmer Gantry was drunk.
Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry, 1927.

Mother died today.
Albert Camus, The Stranger, 1942.

For a long time, I went to bed early.
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, 1913.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Samuel Beckett, Murphy, 1938.

I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, 1864.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1955.

You better not never tell nobody but God.
Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982.

The moment one learns English, complications set in.
Felipe Alfau, Chromos, 1990.

And the longer beginnings of various themes:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, 1830.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, 1850.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951.
 

Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. 1967.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885.

In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I hereunto append the result.
Mark Twain, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, 1867.

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
Franz Kafka, The Trial, 1925.

One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 1966.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1925.

If she had known that she would see Jake Hanson in the elevator this morning on her way to work, she would have taken the stairs.                                                                                                                        Kim Hruba, Elevator Girl, 2014                                                                                                               

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
Louise Erdrich, Tracks, 1988.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups, 2001.

Deep in the womb I begin the long dark swim/across a shimmering border from here/to where I will begin again/I am a fast, black ship striking fiercely/traversing a fog-gray sea/from who I was to who I soon will be                                                                                                                                                            Catherine Stenzel, The One, 1999.

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 1904.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, 1963.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome, 1911.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, 1952.

It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.
William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 1948.

They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966.

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, 1895.

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair, 1951.

Please let us know if we forgot your favorite.


From A Year with Rilke, November 18 Entry
Lament, from Book of Images

How far from us everything is,
and long gone.
I think the star whose light
reaches me now
has been dead for thousands of years.

I think I heard
in the boat that went by
something anxious being said.

In a house, a clock
has struck the hour…
In which house?
I would like to go out from my heart
and stand under the great sky.
I would like to pray.
One of all those stars
must surely be alive.

I think I used to know
which star may haee kept on shinning—
which one, like a white city,
rises still at the far end of its light.

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.

*finger - fringe.