Made Up Words

This is what me and some friends (mostly me, Rachel, and Mariza) did at Quiet Storm in Bloomfield. We played real scrabble, but that wasn't nearly challenging enough. So we decided to become lexicographers of a sort and make up our own words in a cross word puzzle format. Below the picture are some of the definitions. Also, the blank tile is pronounced as a clicking sound.

• Laonukeleles: ukeleles from Laos that have a tendancy to explode.
• Metagon: a hexagon that defines itself.
• Shnyl: someone who is shy, but snobbily so.
• Banaliter: even more banal that a banality.
• Foremedios: the person you go to for a cure.
• Qvelt: someone who is Svelt, but in a more flamboyant way.
• Widgety: having the properties of a liquid nitrogen produced foam., also being fidgety do to an accumulation of this foam.

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This may seem silly, but it brings up an important issue. The power in naming things. When colonizers came to new lands, they imposed their names and made up their own names for things that already had names from the indigenous peoples. When God named things in the beginning in the Bible, they appeared (let there be light, and all that). The German author Jenny Erpenbeck writes somewhat on this topic in her new novel, Book of Words.
I had the opportunity to hear Jenny Erpenbeck and her translator, Susan Bernofsky last night at Chatham University. Here is a small excerpt from the new novel (Read a larger excerpt here):

Eyes, nose, mouth. How often my mother shut her eyes the instant before my
index finger hit its mark, how often my father opened his mouth to show me what
a mouth is and then closed it around my finger as if he were going to bite, but
he didn't bite. If you wanted to play ball with someone's head, only one thing
would get in the way: the nose. My father's teeth are very white, and when I
probe around inside his dark mouth with my finger, they feel damp and hard. I
see a tree and say tree, I smell the cake my mother bakes on Sunday and say
cake, I hear a bird twittering in the garden, and my mother says: That's right,
a bird. We put the cake into our mouths, it vanishes there, mouth, eyes and
nose: holes, the beginnings of paths, no one knows quite where they lead.
Stomach, my mother says, but I've never seen my stomach from the inside, at
least what I eat comes out again on the other end, but what about the things I
put into my eyes, where do they go, are all of them supposed to fit inside my
head, even if I were to stack them up the way our housekeeper stacks the
laundry, folding it and placing one piece atop the other, there still wouldn't
be room, I don't think, and therefore I keep saying all the things as I see them
so they'll change course inside my head and go out again through my mouth. Shit,
I say later when I see what has become of the cake. That's a filthy word, my
mother says, wiping my bottom. Don't say words like that, she says and flushes.
But it's something we even ate. That was before, my mother says, and we go back
to the other room. So the cake has gotten dirty on its way through my body. You
can't look at it that way, my father says, it doesn't have anything to do with
you, it's just a matter of the word. I'm not allowed to say it. No, my mother
says, words like that should never cross the lips of a young lady. Eyes. Nose.
Mouth. So it's precisely the things that are filthy that are supposed to be
stacked up and stored in my head and aren't allowed to change course and go out
again through my mouth. But, I say, if I see a foot that is dirty and say foot,
then that's a filthy word too, isn't it, but my mother says no, the word itself
is clean. Aha. It's only the word shit I'm not supposed to say, but now that's
really quite enough, my mother says.

Pigeons (Again?)

I was on my way to where I work downtown, was running a bit early, so I decided to pop up to the parklet above the parking garage on 6th Ave for a breath of smog-filled air and a time out. There is a fountain there, and lots of benches. When I arrived, there was a man feeding the pigeons. I sat nearby and watched the pigeons congregate and eat. When he noticed me there, he came over and asked me if I would like to feed the pigeons. I thought about it for a second: "Okay!" He let me disperse the honey roasted peanuts (not the pigeons' favorite, too sweet) and the pigeons seem to take to me. One the man called an albino pigeon, due to it's predominance of white coloring, landed on my hand. "Wow," he said, "That one has never approached me before. The albino ones are usually more scared of people." It sat on my hand for a while, then again on my arm, then landed on my hand again and let me transfer it to my leg, and even stroke under its neck with my index and middle fingers. Is it possible pigeons are my totem animal? Anyways, this guy's name is Jimmy, and he has a website, so be sure to check it out: http://into.mysite.com/

Later that weekend, I was buying a birthday present for a 3 yr old at Barnes & Noble. I wanted to get my favorite book for that age range, not one I grew up with, but one I learned about at a Beginning with Books training. I bought the first and one sequel. It wasn't until I got home that I realized the coincidental (or not?) main character of these stories was a pigeon. Don't Let the Pigeon Ride the Bus, and The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog, by Mo Willems.

On the Nightstand

Well, I don't have a nightstand, but if I did I'm sure the books I'm reading at present would be on it at night. I had 4 books on hold at various times the past couple months thru Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (excellent service, this requesting of books on the Internet to pick up at whichever branch one desires). They came up at different times, so there are three separate due dates for four separate books, which would be a bit of a hassle except that the Library also offers an e-mail reminder service for due dates (good thing or I'd be paying a lot more late fees). In any case, the four books I got from the Library, of which I am really only reading 3 at a time, but give me some time and I might get all four going are as follows, with my initial impressions. In order that I received the books:

• Book of Blues, by Jack Kerouac: I am alternatately awestruck and stupefied. At times I find the writing brilliant and full of such clarity and true vision. At other times I am not sure what I'm supposed to be getting out of it. Sometimes I am struck by the accuracy of the unexpected metaphors and imagery, other times I am baffled. I guess that's Kerouac until reading more Kerouac hopefully trains me in how to read Kerouac. This is my first real forray into Kerouac's poetry outside of anthologized material. My favorites so far are the 27th chorus in "San Francisco Blues" (the city as muttering bum), the 38th, and the first half of the 30th chorus in the same:
  

  Old Age is an Indian
  With gray hair
  And a cane
  In and old coat
  Tapping along
  The rainy street
  To see the pretty oranges
  ... (p. 31)

• White Teeth, by Zadie Smith: I was just rereading the jacket of this book to try to give you a more concise summary of it than trying to recount everything I've read so far. I'm a little annoyed that Zadie Smith was 24 when she wrote this. I guess I should be happy that she's so brilliant at 24. Anyways, this is a very compelling book so far. It does, as the jacket states, take on "the big themes-- faith, race, gender, history, and culture-- and triumphs" The stories and characters are strong. There is some jumping back in forth through time, but it's structured so that it's manageable. My only issue with it has been the voice of this omnicient narrator who isn't always there jumping in from time to time. At first it pulled me a bit out of the flow of the story, but then I started liking the humor and cynicism it brought to parts of the story that might otherwise have come off as cliche or overdramatic. I am not sure WHO this all-knowing-eye is, perhaps the writer herself, but it helps keep perspective. Current status: p. 201/448pp.
  
• Bushido: The Way of the Samurai, based on The Hagakure by Tsunetomo Yamamoto, edited by Justin F. Stone, original translation by Minoru Tanaka: I was first turned on to The Hagakure by watching the movie Ghost Dog, mentioned in the previous post. In this movie, Forrest Whittaker plays a modern day Samurai, and the movie is interrpted with quotes from The Hagakure, some of which I found quite intriguing. I put this one on hold a while back, but there's apparently only one copy and others had it for a while before it got to me. I'm now on page 30 of 98. Some of the words strike me as very apt and wise. Others strike me as being the ideal, but hard to achieve. Yet others are too superficial for my liking, and at tension in my mind with the more philosophical and intrinsic entries in the same book. I have greatly devoured the sections thus far on thinking and self-discipline and achievement and perception of oneself. However, the portions on not yawning, on not doing arts and crafts, on how to behave at parties strike me as less useful. I suppose how others perceive you does have an effect on an outcome you may be trying to achieve, but I hate playing a game.
  
• Disappearing Acts, by Terry McMillan: This is a book that is on Rhoda Mills Sommer's list of suggested reading (as was White Teeth). I have not started on it yet, so I'll quote her blurb here:
  

  "This is one of her first three books. These were more substantive than the books that followed afterwards. She beautifully captures men who don't follow
  through" ~ Rhoda Mills Sommer

Well, that's a long enough break from the reading. I want to be finished with all four by the time my Fall university classes start!

~S