Obscure Words

 I have never used any of these words. Have you?

agroof: face downward

amphoric: resembling the sound produced by blowing into a bottle

benedict: an apparently confirmed bachelor who marries

bort: the fragments removed from diamonds in cutting

callipygian: having shapely buttocks

charette: a period of intense group work to meet a deadline

clishmaclaver: gossip

Read many more: Futility Closet

The Centre Cannot Hold….

In recent days I find my mind turning to this poem. I finally understand what Yeats was talking about.

THE SECOND COMING - William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Octavia Butler - Parable Of The Talents

 

Sleep - an excerpt

The girls were sleeping—they had fought so hard over whose turn it was to take the top bunk that in the end they were both in the bottom, sleeping head to foot. Margaret went in to check on them. Helen was turtled under the blankets. Jo was the opposite—legs bare, her arms thrown one way and her hair the other.

She had spent half an hour tidying the apartment; it was so small it never took much longer. She could disinfect the whole place with half a packet of Clorox wipes if she wanted to and sometimes did. There were two small white bedrooms with airshaft views and a sunny living room with five feet of kitchen against one wall and a couch against the other. Between them was a pinkish rug with a pattern so faded it was only a rumor, darker patches that could as well have been stains or shadows as design.

The apartment had been renovated for roommates in their twenties, not mothers and children. So there was no hall closet for a vacuum cleaner, no bathtub, and a stove so doll-size it was basically decorative.

The rooms did not reward close inspection. Gaps under the windowsills and behind the radiators bulged creamily with the insulation she’d sprayed from a can to keep out the drafts and the mice. But she liked living with the girls in those white boxes, how snug it felt. Shipshape, she sometimes let herself think.

What was it about watching her children sleep that made Margaret feel so safe? It was like she was both the mother keeping watch and a third girl in the bed, like she was standing guard over herself too. Helen shifted under the covers. She had brought Margaret running with the cry of “Mommy!” but it was only a dream. She was murmuring now. Margaret couldn’t make out the words, just the cadence of a complaint. When the girls were sleeping at their father’s, did they know to call out “Daddy” in the night? No, Margaret knew they didn’t, knew it was always Margaret they first shouted for, whether she was there to answer or not. She battened down the pain, watched until the child settled back to quiet.

She had to get some work done. She dimmed the hallway light to the agreed-upon dimness, took her laptop back to the couch, and began reading. Dear editor, please consider. Dear editor, the time has come to. Dear Margaret, I never wanted to have to tell this story. Dear sirs.

Someone shrieked. Outside the open window Thursday night went past, the sound like blue buffetings of fresh air. She wished she could be out there too, going somewhere, with the night air lifting up her skirt. She felt antsy in a way that was almost hormonal, a teenage itch. She couldn’t make out what people were saying, but it didn’t matter, she got the gist. Someone was slagging someone else, someone was telling an outraged story, someone was discussing the logistics of the night. Distance abstracted the language from the units of its content, turned it into tone and meter and nothing else. She was surprised how much she could understand without understanding a word.

Once, she’d heard a man speaking, his voice abnormally deep and loud—stentorian, she thought. It was an Elizabeth kind of word, and she could hear her mother’s voice in her head for a moment, clearer than the man outside. He wasn’t talking to anyone else, you could tell. She thought, at first, a madman. Each phrase seemed to draw up the next, a dissonance that built and built and hung there, suspended, until he spoke again, answering. That was when she realized, no—an actor. He was reciting. She’d been folding laundry; she stopped and listened. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—” she wished. “To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance—” Nope, she couldn’t make it out. Yet she was moved by the voice without knowing what it said.

She submitted to her inbox, opened another email, read the pitch: “I decided I finally had to share what happened to me because what ensued was a textbook case of the everyday violence women experience in places like offices and literary events. It speaks to the traumatizing effects of toxic male power . . .” She skimmed the submission. Lord, it was long; it just kept going. She skipped to the end, to the call to action: We can no longer, the cost of silence, the head in the sand, the blind eye. “We must not continue to be complicit in the violence lest we let the perpetrators win.”

It had been a few months since the Harvey Weinstein news had broken. She was the only senior editor on staff who was also a woman, so as long as the news cycle lasted, it was her job to tell all the variations on the story, to find new ones in ever more nuanced and disturbing iterations. She edited essays about predators at school, at work, on sidewalks and subways, at concerts and grocery stores, reassessments of desire, reassessments of consent. She believed, of course, in the importance of telling these stories. But she didn’t experience the full shock and outrage that others seemed to feel. She wasn’t surprised—that was the trouble. If anything, she was relieved.

Of course the men were wrong. But they were wrong in a tidy way. These were not the kinds of transgressions that proved that underneath the guise of human love and caregiving was a roiling pit of filthy horror. That other people were so shocked—it comforted her. The hidden truth was coming out, and one thing it revealed was that the world was not as sick as Margaret had feared, that in fact it was full of still-innocent people. The bad news had broken, and it was not quite as bad as she had always thought it would be.

*

She didn’t want Jo and Helen to know about Harvey Weinstein. Not yet. But if she was going to have to pick an introductory predator, a sort of textbook example, he was a good choice. In a perverted way, she liked to look at pictures of him. He was so big and lumpy, with that bulbous nose and medievally pitted skin. What had he had, the pox? It was reassuring how much he looked like an actual monster, an A-list demon. His awfulness was so predictable, so easy to imagine, it didn’t frighten her. How could she prepare her children for the awfulness that couldn’t be imagined? How could she prepare them without ruining their lives? Ezra, their father, wouldn’t help. He had no experience of such things; she was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

She knew she couldn’t tell anyone about this sense of relief. Recently, in her cubicle, she had turned to the young editorial assistant next to her and said that it was just not possible for her to read the word survivor without hearing that song by Destiny’s Child. The woman had covered her mouth and said, “Oh my god. Margaret.”

Or maybe she was just tired. The stories that she edited seemed too neatly packaged. And that was her fault, of course. She was the one who made sure they had all the right components, that they were different enough to keep readers interested but not so different that they weren’t recognizably the same thing. It made her think of the cardboard and clear-plastic containers the girls’ toys came in—Happy Hour Predatory Ken Doll, with fashions and accessories. If the story departed too far from the standard, it wouldn’t be relevant. It might not even be believable.

Above all the stories had to have a villain, and it had to be obvious that everyone would be better off if they were revealed and punished. But in real life it wasn’t always like that. Sometimes the right thing to do was not to make a fuss—if you could be certain that they wouldn’t do it again, if you could be certain that you’d been the only one damaged.

She looked back at the submission. Was this a new angle on the story? Did it make her see things differently? Was she interested in this person’s trauma? No—she wasn’t. And there was that awful phrase: lest we let. By speaking up we, by telling our stories we, never again will we. How did one become part of it, speak on behalf of it—that confident plural voice? “I’m really sorry to say we’re going to pass on this essay, but thank you

so much for giving us the chance to consider it,” she typed out. She copied the rejection and sent it back to all the day’s Dear Margarets. The apartment in the light of the one last lamp was no longer white but blue with shadow. Outside the crowds went by, the words Where to? Where to? like the song of some small darting bird. But now she didn’t want to join them—she liked that they were out there and she was in here and no one else could get inside.

In the morning, the street noise would be different. In the morning, it was always children shouting, and they always sounded just like Helen and Jo. The girls would be sitting at the table, eating breakfast or coloring, and at the same time they would be crying out for Margaret on the sidewalk. You would think you knew your child’s voice, that you could never mistake some stranger for that sound. But that wasn’t how it was. Every crying child sounded just like her own. She would have to stare hard at the girls, she would have to touch them or ask them something so they would lift their heads and look at her, to keep herself from running to the window. When they were with their father, it was so much worse. All day she heard them and could not go to them.

On Saturday she would see Duncan, the man she’d been dating. On Sunday she would take the children to the Natural History Museum with Ezra. But first one more day of work and camp. She had signed up the girls for the cheapest option in the neighborhood, which still cost many thousands of dollars, and as a result they were spending the summer in T-shirts that came down to their knees in a stuffy classroom at the nearby Catholic high school, throwing water balloons at the playground for an hour each afternoon. Was it better or worse than her own childhood summers, lying on the lawn? Better. It was better than that.

Read More: Literary Hub

In Praise of Craziness, of a Certain Kind

In Praise of Craziness, of a Certain Kind

By Mary Oliver


On cold evenings
my grandmother,
with ownership of half her mind-
the other half having flown back to Bohemia-

spread newspapers over the porch floor
so, she said, the garden ants could crawl beneath,
as under a blanket, and keep warm,

and what shall I wish for, for myself,
but, being so struck by the lightning of years,
to be like her with what is left, that loving.

-from New and Selected Poems: Volume Two

The Rembrandt by Edith Wharton

“You’re so artistic,” my cousin Eleanor Copt began.

Of all Eleanor’s exordiums it is the one I most dread. When she tells me I’m so clever I know this is merely the preamble to inviting me to meet the last literary obscurity of the moment: a trial to be evaded or endured, as circumstances dictate; whereas her calling me artistic fatally connotes the request to visit, in her company, some distressed gentlewoman whose future hangs on my valuation of her old Saxe or of her grandfather’s Marc Antonios. Time was when I attempted to resist these compulsions of Eleanor’s; but I soon learned that, short of actual flight, there was no refuge from her beneficent despotism. It is not always easy for the curator of a museum to abandon his post on the plea of escaping a pretty cousin’s importunities; and Eleanor, aware of my predicament, is none too magnanimous to take advantage of it. Magnanimity is, in fact, not in Eleanor’s line. The virtues, she once explained to me, are like bonnets: the very ones that look best on other people may not happen to suit one’s own particular style; and she added, with a slight deflection of metaphor, that none of the ready-made virtues ever had fitted her: they all pinched somewhere, and she’d given up trying to wear them.

Therefore when she said to me, “You’re so artistic.” emphasizing the conjunction with a tap of her dripping umbrella (Eleanor is out in all weathers: the elements are as powerless against her as man), I merely stipulated, “It’s not old Saxe again?”

She shook her head reassuringly. “A picture–a Rembrandt!” 

“Good Lord! Why not a Leonardo?”  

“Well”–she smiled–“that, of course, depends on you.”

Read More

Via Things Magazine

Three Days In June -Anne Tyler

I am always eager to read a new Anne Tyler novel and luckily for me she produces one every few years. She has an unerring sense of character, place and family that draws the reader in. Her often eccentric characters encounter crises that are the same bumps that many of us encounter on the rocky road of life. Marriages are often uneasy and sometimes dissolve but the partners are good people.

At just 176 pages “Three Days In June” is a short novel about Gail Baines, a woman who is getting ready for the marriage of her only daughter, Debbie. She has suddenly been thrown off balance. Her daughter’s in-laws-to-be are paying for the wedding and Gail is feeling left out of the loop. She is a teacher and receives the news that the promotion she was next in line for would be going to another candidate and she is told that she lacks the necessary people skills for the position. Her ex-husband, Max, arrives at her door expecting to stay with her for a few days - and he brings a stray cat with him! Gail’s day is not going well. The marriage stirs up uncomfortable memories for Gail and Max and when Debbie shares a secret they’d rather not hear it is the icing on the cake. 

Tyler has been writing for six decades and her critics say her novels are all similar. They are and that’s because she writes about what she knows and what we know. “Three Days In June” is a touchingly human story that has a familiar feel that I find very comfortable. 

Breaking And Entering - Joy Williams

'The houses on Crab Key were owned by people so wealthy that they were hardly ever there.'

Years ago I read Joy Williams’ book, The Florida Keys: A History & Guide because I wanted to visit the Keys. It was a unique travel guide, witty and charming. I never made it to the Keys but when I saw a recommendation for Breaking and Entering, Williams’ 3rd novel written in 1988, I remembered the guidebook and decided to give this one a go. It’s about Liberty and Willie, a young, unemployed couple, who break into Florida Keys properties when the owners are away. They have a home of their own but enjoy the superior amenities of these properties for awhile and leave before the owners return. Liberty is unable to have children of her own but has a big white rescue dog and two neglected neighbourhood children that she has befriended. She is depressed. Liberty and Willie have been together since they were teenagers but lately she finds him drifting away.

This is a story about America’s dark side. There is a black cloud hanging over it. Will they get caught breaking and entering? Will they be victims of the gun violence that is pervasive in Florida? This is not a feelgood book - it starts on a whimsical note and gets much bleaker - but it is well written and captures a world that I hope I never have to live in. 

Los Angeles, Indiana | Jesse Barron

“When he died last year, Gary Indiana was writing a novel called Remission. The title could refer to the cancer Gary was suffering from as he composed it, but as with most things Gary wrote, the word had multiple meanings and echoes. Gary intended Remission to be similar, on the surface, to the books in his great ‘American crime’ trilogy, at least in the sense that the story would revolve around a real, high-profile case.

The case had started in 2017. That summer, a man died of a meth overdose at an apartment in West Hollywood. The tenant of the apartment, Ed Buck, was a retired businessman turned political activist. The man who died, Gemmel Moore, was a twenty-six-year-old doing sex work. Buck was white, Moore black. The coroner ruled Moore’s death an accident, but a year later, a second man died of an overdose in Buck’s living room, and nine months after that, a third man called the police from a gas station on Santa Monica Boulevard, saying Buck had just given him a too-high shot of meth. Finally, the police arrested Buck, charging him with the two prior deaths, and a judge gave him thirty years. For obvious reasons, this received significant coverage in the media.”

Read more: Granta

A Day's Work

Memorable passages from the pulp detective stories of Robert Leslie Bellem (1902-1968):

• “There were tears brimming on her azure peepers, and tremulous grief twisted her kisser.” (“Forgery’s Foil”)
• “She wrapped her arms around my neck; glued her crimson kisser to my lips. She fed me an osculation that sent seven thousand volts of electricity past my tonsils.” (“Design for Dying”)
• “And then, from the doorway, a gun barked: ‘Chow-chow!’ and I went drifting to dreamland.” (“Design for Dying”)
• “The rod sneezed: ‘Chow! Ka-Chow!’ and pushed two pills through Reggie’s left thigh.” (“Murder Has Four Letters”)

Read More  Futility Closet

On publishing Charlotte Brontë’s miniature book of poems for the first time.

 

“As Patti Smith writes in her introduction to the first-ever publication of A Book of Ryhmes, the poet, a thirteen-year-old Charlotte Brontë, must have transcribed her ‘ryhmes’ (the misspelling is on her title page) into the tiny handmade book while sitting at the kitchen table in Haworth Parsonage. The 1829 winter was severe, Barbara Heritage tells us, and we all know something of the circumstances of the Brontë family at this time whether or not we realize that many of the myths have been reconsidered by researchers. Charlotte’s adolescent poetry may be rather derivative, but it was very accomplished for a child of her age and circumstances, and it was obviously heartfelt. Charlotte aspired to being a serious poet, while at the same time she imagined her verse to be written by the characters who populated the imaginary worlds she shared with her siblings.”

Read more: Literary Hub

Good Bones

How much should you tell your children?

Good Bones

By Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

 

Copyright Credit:

Maggie Smith, "Good Bones" from Waxwing.  Copyright © 2016 by Maggie Smith.  Reprinted by permission of Waxwing magazine

viaThe Poetry Foundation

Influencer Emily Dickinson’s Morning Routine

 

4:00 a.m. – Lie completely still and compose six hauntingly perfect quatrains in your mind. Refuse to scribble them down. Let them ferment in the silence like forbidden knowledge.

6:47 a.m. – Brew tea. Steep it precisely thirty-two seconds while murmuring a sonnet to the leaves. The tea listens. The tea understands.

8:00 a.m. – Receive a letter from Death. Decline his invitation; you cannot stop for him. Reseal the letter with wax and hide it under your pillow.

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How Hunter S. Thompson's Perceived Persona Overshadowed His Real Self

The narrator talks about Thompson’s difficult childhood, his brief criminal stints in high school, his first journalism job, and embedding with the Hell’s Angels, a project that came to a violent yet prosperous end.

(Laughing Squid)

Architect’s Watercolor by Arthur Sze

Architect’s Watercolor

An architect draws a watercolor

depicting two people about to

enter a meeting room, while

someone

on the stairway gazes through windows

at a park, river, skyscrapers

beyond; he does not want to be

locked

like a carbon atom in a benzene

ring but needs to rotate, lift off,

veer along wharves and

shoreline. In the acoustics of

this space,

he catches a needle bounce

off a black granite floor, wanders

from a main walkway, encounters

prickly pear burned purple in wind.

In the ocean gusts before dawn,

he yearns for a Mediterranean spray

where sunlight tingles eyelashes,

where sand releases heat

under the stars. In the atrium,

two violinists launch fireworks

of sound that arc, explode, dissolve

into threads of melodic charm.

Here slate near a pool of water

absorbs sunlight, releases ripples

into the evening; and in this space,

each minute is encounter:

he steps out and makes

footprints on a sidewalk dusted with snow.

Via Literary Hub