Out Damned Book. Back to your Shelves

Today is not a good day for me to write a review of the books that I have just read. I twisted my knee badly and have spent the last two days confined to my bed where the only sport available has been the reading of twenty books. My mood is such that if my hero President Bush walked in I would call him a flaming metrosexual and tell him and his entourage to go take a hike.

None-the-less, because you people count on me to post these reviews that no one reads I feel duty-driven to oblige so...

NEW WORDS; They still have that new word smell
Edited by Orin Hargraves 2004
On loan from Library, 320 pages.

In his introduction Hargrove writes...”The need for language to keep pace with changes and innovations in human activities is one of the main engines of neology ( that is, the coining of new words ) and in some degree the words appearing in this dictionary reflect the preoccupations of our times.”
And for that zippy comment, and for the inclusion of some right nifty new words in this 2,500 new word dictionary, I give this book Four Stars.

Excerpt

bashert (ba’shert) noun (in Jewish use) a person’s soulmate, especially when considered as a preordained marriage partner. I an a 24 year old teacher living in Florida who is looking for her bashert.
Origin: Yiddish, “fate, destiny”

ohnosecond (o’ no sekend) noun Computing, informal: a moment in which one realizes that one has made an error, typically by hitting the wrong key. You will very likely experience an ohnosecond supreme if in your haste to complete a thousand word report you hit [delete] instead of [enter] just before the screen goes blank.

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THE LANGUAGE REPORT: The ultimate record of what we’re saying and how we’re saying it
Susie Dent 2003
On loan from library, tiny book, 151 pages

When I was twenty I would have sooner drank pig swill that read a book by any chick named Suzie, but hey, this book is pretty good......not! Actually some of the new words included in Suzie’s little book are quite the “tick” ( sexually attractive ), so I’ll give Suzie’s little book Three Stars. But little Suzie just won’t keep her big mouth shut and opportunes every few pages to "dub" Dubya , which is New Urban Slang Talk for "bashing" Bush. Subtract Two of my pro-offered Three Stars.

Excerpts

“Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays.” - George Elliot

(Bust this (pay attention) Awaders, a pocket decoder of Rap. )

*To bag up = to have sex
*ballin’ = having it all
*bama = a person who dresses badly; a loser (short for Alabama, meaning someone from the country).
* to bone = to have sex with
*dope = good. janky = bad.
*mack = a sexually successful man; to’ mack on’ a woman is to flirt with her.
*Max = to have great fun
*nutt = good sex
*to turn it out = to have sex

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THE FAITH OF A WRITER: Life, Craft,Art
Joyce Carol Oats 2003
On loan from library

In the seventies I read a short story by Joyce Carrol Oats and found her writings beneath my needs as a reader. Maybe she's gotten better or I've gotten brighter, but anyway, I found this book a great book if you want to gain insight into the thought processes of some of the first tier writers of our time. Now I wonder what other talented artists I have denied the pleasure of entertaining me by my youthful assumptions. Four Bright Stars.

Excerpt

It is a fact that, to that other, nothing ever happens. I, a mortal woman, move through my life with the excited interest of a swimmer in uncharted waters-- my predilections are few, but intense--while she, the other, is a mere shadow, a blur, a figure glimpsed in the corner of the eye. Rumors of JCO come to me third-hand and usually unrecongnizable, arguing, absurdly, for her historical existence. But while writing exists, writers do not--as all writers know. It's true, I see her photographs--my "likeness"--yet it is rarely the same "likeness" from photograph to photograph, and the expression is usually one of faint bewilderment. I acknowledge that I share a name and a face with "JCO" this expression suggests, but this is a mere convenience. Please don't be decieved!

"JCO" is not a person, nor even a personality, but a process that has resulted in a sequence of texts. Some of the texts are retained in my (her) memory. but some have bleached out like pages of print left too long in the sun. Many of the texts have been translated into foreign languges, which is to say into texts at another remove from the primary--sometimes even the authors name, on the dust cover of one of these texts is unrecongnizable by the author. I, on the contrary am fated to be "real"--"physical"--"corporeal"--to "exist in Time". I continue to age year by year, if not hour by hour, while "JCO" the other, remains no fixed age--in spirtual essence, perhaps, forever poised between the fever of idealism and the chill of cynicism, a precocious eighteen years old. Yet, can a process be said to have an age?--an impulse, a strategy, an obsessive tracery, like planetary orbits to which planets, "real" planets, must conform?

No one wants to believe this obvious truth: the "artist" can inhabit any individual, for the individual is irrelevant to "art". (And what is "art"--a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.) "JCO" occasionally mines, and distorts, my personal history; but only because the history is so close at hand, and then only when some idiosyncrasy about it suits her design, or some curious element of the symbolic. If you, a friend of mine, should appear in her work, have no fear--you won't recongnize yourself, any more than I would recognize you.

It would be misleading to describe our relationship as hostile, in any emotional sense, for she, being bodiless, having no existence, has no emotions: we are more helpfully defined as diamagnetic, the one repulsing the other as magnetic poles repulse each other, so that "JCO" eclipses me, or, and this is less frequent, I eclipse "JCO", depending upon the strenght of my will.

If one or the other of us must be sacrificed, it has always been me.

And so my life continues through the decades...not connected in the slightest with that conspicious other with whom, by acccident, I share a name and likeness. The fact seems self-evident, that I was but the door through which she entered--"it" entered--but any door would have done as well. Does it matter which entrance you use, to enter a walled garden; Once you're inside, and have closed the door?


For once not she, but I, am writing these pages. Or so I believe.