Things I had to look up: poetaster

Poetaster: an inferior poet:

Turner gives us an informative sketch for a bildungsromanabout how (Henry) Miller re-made himself as a writer, transforming himself from poetaster to master brute.

-- from a review by Todd Gitlin on tnr.com
of Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of 'Tropic of Cancer,' by Frederick Turner

Things I had to look up: ludic

Once in a while I encounter a word that's new to me, and suddenly see it in more than one place, as if everyone had suddenly decided to start using it. Such was true of the word louche, which cropped up suddenly a few years ago and now I see it everywhere (and use it myself, because it's very useful). Now I encounter ludic:

The streak of sportiveness is there in Gosling's character, too, when he declares, "This is the big leagues. It's mean. When you make a mistake, you lose the right to play." Yet Myers is less ludic than his partners in the game, who've seen it all before; he behaves like someone seeing it for the first time, and his speech is larded with imperatives.

-- New Yorker review of "The Ideas of March"

In his Life: A User's Manual of 1978, [Georges] Perec showed how the contemporary novel might emulate the epic sweep of Ulysses, the nested stories of The Arabian Nights. Though never as ludic as Perec, Bolaño found, through the idea of multiple interviews in the middle section of The Savage Detectives, and through the twin foci or magnets of the Sonora Desert and the writer Benno Von Archimboldi in 2666, a means of licensing a similar kind of narrative proliferation.

-- Mark Ford, "Bolaño on the Edge of the Precipice," in the 13 Oct 2011 issue of the New York Review of Books

Ludic is said to simply mean "playful," but then why not just say "playful" in the above examples? What more does it mean? Is it significant, or just coincidence, that both examples use the word in the context of a comparison? Still hard to tell.

I'm still not sure what that last sentence means. "Licensing a kind of narrative proliferation"? What does it mean to license proliferation?

Things I had to look up: José Juan Tablada

Over a year ago, the New Yorker published a Roberto Bolaño story, "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura," which I really had a hard time reading. I kept the copy of the magazine on my bedside table for the day when I would finally have time to try reading it again, and I have finally got to it.

The story is narrated by a man whose mother was an actress in minor porn movies of, I guess, the 1980s, and is really about the oeuvre of the German filmmaker who wrote and directed the films, which are described in hallucinatory detail. Along the way, as was his habit, Bolaño makes a passing reference to an obscure poet:

For example, Oscar Guillermo Montes [one of the actors in the pornos] in a scene from a movie I've forgotten the rest of: he's naked from the waist down, his penis hangs flaccid and dripping. Behind the actor, a landscape unfolds: mountains, ravines, rivers, forests, towering clouds, a city, perhaps a volcano, a desert. Oscar Guillermo Montes perches on a high ridge, an icy breeze playing with a lock of his hair. That's all. It's like a poem by Tablada, isn't it? But you've never heard of Tablada.

Emphasis mine. Quite right, I had never heard of Tablada -- who was he?

A poet of the early 20th century, José Juan Tablada (1871-1945) is known as the poet who introduced haiku to the Spanish language. According to this article, he lived a fascinating life. Among other pursuits, he traveled to Japan several times and was honored by the emperor, lived in Paris for a time and consorted with the surrealists, ran a bookshop with his wife in New York City, and represented the Mexican government in Columbia and Venezuela.

That article (by Ty Hadman on his website Aha Poetry), which starts out a little amateurishly, is actually very well-informed and is worth reading in full. As for the Bolaño story, it's interesting, but you have to be in a mood to slow down and get into it.

In Tablada's honor, then:

Wandering, visiting, writing,
    Tablada wielded his pen and brush
        like a warrior with one master:
    poetry

More on copywriting

Last Wednesday I mocked an advertisement that promised big money in the copywriting game. But I didn't really know what it was talking about.

That same day the New York Observer ran this piece about the career of someone who made money in the way they may have been thinking of:

Bryne Hobart learned the vagaries of Google rankings while working at Blue Fountain Media, one of the biggest SEO shops in New York. The 24-year-old college dropout had hoped for a career finance, but the market implosion of 2008 nixed that idea. Instead, he scored an internship writing copy at Blue Fountain, eventually working his way up to managing director of marketing. ...

In March, Mr. Hobart and Mr. Pierce formed their own company on the side, Digital Due Diligence. His first post, on Demand Media, drew tens of thousands of readers and was passed around internally at the content farm. Mr. Hobart began monitoring other companies that were relying on some of the shadier SEO strategies, and posting these findings online. The idea behind the business was to help hedge funds and venture capital firms assess the risk of investing in companies that relied heavily on search traffic.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Hobart's double game -- practicing SEO by day, exposing it by night -- soon proved unsustainable.

Then fun was had all around. This all just makes me realize I don't really understand SEO (search engine optimization, one of the dark, or at best grey, arts of the internet) and should read up on it. Dang, though, it's getting harder and harder to keep up.

Awesomeness of Wikipedia strikes again

While looking up the spelling of the phrase en deshabille, I ran across this page on Wikipedia: List of French words used by English speakers. (Curiously, it does not list en deshabille at all.) The best thing about it is the section Only found in English, which lists ostensibly French words and expressions not actually used by the French, including demimonde, pièce de résistance, and double entendre.

Previously: Things I had to look up: en petit comité

technorati: words, Wikipedia

Things I had to look up: Anagnorisis

I was enjoying this satirical chart of "42 Essential 3rd Act Twists" (courtesy The Rumpus) when I was stopped dead by the unfamiliar term "anagnorisis."

Anagnorisis -- a moment of sudden recognition by the main character in a drama or story of the true nature of things. For example, in "Chinatown" when Evelyn Mulwray's confession "She's my sister and my daughter" makes Jake Gittes realize the depth of Noah Cross's evil. (Screenplay.)

technorati: Chinatown, drama

Things I had to look up: en petit comité

From Bolaño's The Savage Detectives:

... we ended up getting used to those fucking shrooms and that's what we usually ordered, shrooms from Oaxaca, shrooms from Tamaulipas, shrooms from La Huasteca in Veracruz or Potosí, or wherever they were from. Shrooms to do at our parties or in petit comité.

En petit comité -- in a small group, or as this dictionary of colloquial French has it, "in a group of a few intimate friends."

This page asks, "¿Qué significa "petit-comité"?" The response: Se dice que se requiere hacer una cosa "en petit comité" para referirse a una situación donde es necesario o se desea hacer algo "en familia". Mm-hmm.

Strangely, most results on Google are uses of the phrase in the context of Spanish.

Things I had to look up: feuilleton

In a piece on Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, Paul Berman makes a comparison to:

A few years ago, Mario Vargas Llosa published an op-ed newspaper column about how he had given up smoking thanks to some useful tips from Gabriel García Márquez, and I came away thinking that I and 1 million other newspaper readers might very well have gone on following Vargas Llosa's nicotine narrative through another 300 feuilleton installments, if only he had chosen to natter on. It was because of that same confident mix of self-assured relaxation and electric high alert.

WTF? Some sort of 19th century... what? Turns out that it is:

1. The part of a European newspaper devoted to light literature, criticism, and the like; also something printed in this section.
2. A novel published in installments.
3. A short literary piece.

Here's part of the example they give: "Finally, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung offers tongue-in-cheek reading of the situation on the front page of its feuilleton section..."

I see. So the NYT Book Review, or the Insight section of the Chronicle's Sunday paper, are feuilletons (pronounced (FOI-i-ton).

Berman goes on:

In other parts of the world, in regions distant from Latin America—or so my wanton theorizing leads me to suppose—the pitiable champions of literature dwell under oppressive clouds of relentless doubt and irony, and are nervously stimulated by a bleak suspicion that anything they write must surely be a lie, and their own work is merely a game, and their avid readers don't really give a damn, and literature's last remaining purpose is to arch an eyebrow. But not in Latin America. The Latin Americans compose their narratives with a cheerful élan akin to that of the Victorian novelists. They do not think that literature is a lie. They are madly in love with their own inexhaustibly lush and wealthy literary tradition, and they feel a duty to push their tradition forward into the experimental future in the name of every decent hope of mankind and of Latin America; and their piety toward the past and zeal for the future fill their voices with the lovely and seductive vibrato of supreme self-confidence. I don't vouch for the universal explanatory power of my own theory, and yet something like this does seem to account for The Savage Detectives.

What a depressing paragraph that is -- self-hating and hopeless, it embodies the "oppressive clouds of relentless self-doubt" that the writer speaks of. So then I had to look up the writer, Berman. His Wikipedia article makes him sound sort of like Joan Didion, only he seems never to have published any novels.

Things I had to look up: Boethius

After I sent this article on Buddhist-Christian contacts during the 8th century to a friend, she replied, "like boethius, they were busy and a' thinkin' during them there dark ages!!"

Due to my lack of a comprehensive liberal arts education, however, I had no idea who Boethius was. In this case the Wikipedia article was helpful enough for the likes of me. Known to the Roman Catholic Church as St. Severinus Boethius, the 6th century scholar and administrator was dedicated to preserving concepts of classical philosophy; he is credited with developing a three-layered classification of music as well as the Wheel of Fortune. (Cue music from Carmina Burana.)

Things I had to look up: fraught

Cris asked, "Is 'fraught' the past tense of the verb 'freight'?"

Huh, good question. Dictionary.com says the words are related. Fraught comes from a Middle Low German word meaning "freight money," which I take to mean the same thing we meant when we ask, "What's the freight on that?" -- that is, the shipping charge, however metaphorical.

Things I had to look up: Enarch (n.)

From David Brooks' column in the NYT:

Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life -- that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution. ... And yet as much as I want to resent these overeducated Achievatrons (not to mention the incursion of a French-style government dominated by highly trained Enarchs), I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition.

What the hell? It sounds like some kind of weird science fiction term. But I found this:

"Enarchy" derives from the acronym ENA, "Ecole Nationale d'Administration", which selects the 25 years old. students who will take the top chief executive jobs in high civil services. Graduate of this school are called "enarchs."

Not sure how you count that in dollars; I suppose Brooks means "Ivy Leaguers and their ilk."

technorati: words, columnists, David Brooks

Things I had to look up: coterie, clique, claque, shill

I wanted to use the word coterie to mean "a small group of like-minded people with a shared interest or goal," but I wasn't sure that was exactly what it meant, so I looked it up. It sort of means that, but it is also a synonym for clique.

Hmm, come to think of it, what is the difference? Clique has more of a sense of exclusivity; the members come together with a sense that non-members are actively excluded. A coterie is less exclusive and more informal, I think.

Then I looked up one of my favorite words, claque. The members of a claque are paid to applaud or cheer; being paid seems an important element. But I thought that's what shill meant. Not quite; a shill is "a decoy who acts as an enthusiastic customer in order to stimulate the participation of others," as in the person who, secretly in league with a three card monte dealer, is allowed to "win" in order to draw others into the game. The word is also used by stage magicians and comedians to refer to confederates planted in the audience.

I'm not sure if there's a better word than coterie for the group of like-minded people who share an interest. We use phrases like "affinity group," but they have a stale, business-consulting taste.

I guess I'll stick with coterie which, by the way, I have been mispronouncing for decades. I thought it was pronounced co-TER-ee-ay as if it were French, but it's just CO-ter-ee.

Things I had to look up: soigné

Soigné -- well-groomed, sleek, elegantly maintained. I was looking for a word the other night, some French word that would capture an attitude of, sort of, luxuriating insouciance. I thought of soigné but that's not right. I thought it was like èlan and had more to do with attitude. Still looking.

Things I had to look up: bien pensant

bien pensant -- A French term meaning "right-minded" or "right-thinking," it is used as a literary term in English to refer to those who adopt the orthodoxy of others to substitute for their own thoughts and opinions.

Context: In a long profile of V.S. Naipaul in the Guardian/Observer:

By 1971, the year in which he won the Booker Prize for In A Free State, Naipaul's literary self was fully at large in the world and would fuel three decades in which he travelled a long way from the comedy of his early fiction to the more sinister images of A Bend in the River, his masterpiece, and the later, more personal fictions, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World. His journalism and incessant travelling took him into the muslim world of Among the Believers and Beyond Belief and made him enemies among bien pensant western liberals as well as muslims. Today, he exudes the satisfaction of one who has been proved substantially right about Islam. He says he does not like some of the controversy he has aroused, but affects insouciance. 'When I read those things, I am immensely amused. They don't wound me at all.'

I was not aware of this phrase's origins, so when I see it baldly translated and used without irony as an adjective -- as in this sentence from an editorial today about the suppression of demonstrations in Tibet:

The current protests in Tibet and the response of the Chinese authorities have attracted the attention of every right-thinking man or woman with access to the free media, and the vast majority of the people are sympathetic toward the Tibetans

One has to wonder if people who use the phrase without irony are aware that it's supposed to be used ironically. Or is it possible that using the French version carries irony that the English cannot?