Word of the Day #2: geoggravation

geoggravation, n. the supposed response of a deity outraged by the weaknesses of believers, manifested specifically in geological phenomena: earthquakes, volcanic activity, sinkholes, mudslides, and so on. geoggravate, geoggravating, v. and v.t.

The term was coined by missionaries who operated throughout various Pacific islands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and documented many tribal customs based around the avoidance, amelioration, and supplication of potential and perceived geological restitution supposedly meted out by enraged deities.

One Doctor of Theology, a Dr. Eugene Planck from Potsdam, Germany, observed a group of 23 females from a group visiting Matua Island systematically sacrifice over 1,000 Common Ravens (Corvus corax) by drowning at the island's Eastern shore in an attempt to minimise the possible geoggravation caused by their inadvertently setting fire to a ceremonial woven-palm basket. Planck used the term in a letter to his English colleague, Albert Fleming:

"...and then they took the birds, poor things, and drowned them until the whole of the lagoon was verily adrift with bedraggled bodies. Alas, despite these efforts, Matua erupted the following morning and the entire party was forced to flee the results of their geoggravation; several boats capsized and three additional ceremonial baskets were lost in the melee..."

This brief excerpt suggests the term was in common use during the period.

Trends

Now I've seen it all.
That's right! #girlswhodontgivehead is a Twitter Trend.

Lock up the kiddies and take an axe to the computer: the devil's in the house! And/or a common denominator of fuckwits now officially rules the Internet.

Mind-blowing lines #21

More from Wolf Hall. This time, one for the ladies.

When a woman withdraws to give birth the sun may be shining but the shutters of her room are closed so she can make her own weather. She is kept in the dark so she can dream. Her dreams drift far away, from terra firma to a marshy tract of land, to a landing stage, to a river where a mist closes over the further bank, and earth and sky are inseparate; there she must embark toward life and death, a muffled figure in the stern directing the oars. In this vessel prayers are said that men never hear. Bargains are struck between a woman and her God. The river is tidal, and between one feather-stroke and the next, her tide may turn.

Word of the Day: pygoceria

Once upon a time, a friend and I started coming up with words that weren't but should have been. These were our Words of the Day. They were a lot of fun, and I thought you, dear reader, might enjoy them too. Let's consider it a new feature, shall we?

pygoceria n. a rare but arresting physical condition whereby an animal develops horny protrusions on its flanks. pygoceric, adj.

The word is derived from the Greek pygo, rump, and ceros, horn. It was first recorded in an apocryphal chapter of The Odyssey in which Odysseus has his journey halted by a pygoceric horse who threatens to impale him if he fails to correctly solve a riddle.

Similarly, in scenes omitted from The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy reaches a crumbling yellow brick bridge and, not knowing how to cross it safely, seeks assistance from a Dodo called Pamela who manifests pygoceric symptoms.

These fictional cases are underpinned by a small but convincing body of anthropological and medical evidence uncovered in a Chinese family history, circa 1212, which culminated in the death of Li, the only child from the last surviving branch of the Xiu family. Li's premature passing at the hands of furious villagers who had sought his advice, but disliked its repercussions, ended a centuries-long heritage of pygoceria within his family.

This anecdotal report further serves to support in fact fiction's ongoing association of pygoceria with a degree of oracular insight.

Doing the Phantom

Among the likes of Rico and Aces and I there is a saying: when someone leaves a gathering unnoticed, they Do the Phantom. Until now I've been one to Do the Big Finale: waving teary goodbyes, promising to write, giving small trinkets of my affection, etc. etc.

But no more. This time, I'm doing the Phantom.

An almost unnoticeable retraction of sentiment here. A no-show there. A general letting of ships sail everywhere. It all adds up, people. It adds up to the Phantom.

I wish I was as elusive and subtle as the Phantom. I frequently wish I could disappear at will—who doesn't?—and I don't mind either purple or masks. If I could save the day, believe me, I would. But I'm not elusive or subtle or a day-saver. What I am, is instead beginning the necessary preparations for my reconstitution elsewhere.

If it all sounds a bit dramatic, don't worry. What you see here is merely enthusiasm for trying a different approach this time: an enthusiasm for doing the Phantom.

This is living

The media is full of self-help blather. Everyone seems constantly to insinuate that we can and should improve ourselves—be more environmentally aware, get off our lazy, dismal arses and act on our inspirations, or just stop whingeing and thank Christ we're still alive.

To that end, here, briefly, are the self-help catch-cries I never want to hear again, and the reasons why:

• Declutter or minimalise your life.
  Alida thinks: dude, if my life was any more minimalist, I'd be killing the goat for dinner. No, seriously. I really need to get some food into this house. I haven't been shopping in months, or bought clothing in an actual store for years. If I declutter any less I'll be living in a freaking treehouse in rags ... oh, that's right: I AM.
  
  
• Live your dreams/"follow" your "bliss".
  Alida thinks: *gag*
  
  
• Get some exercise.
  Alida thinks: *yawn*
  
  
• Listen to your inner voice.
  Alida thinks: if you knew what my inner voice was saying, there's no way in hell you'd advocate my apprehending it. My inner voice is telling me to track you down and reward your sanctimonious bullshit with a rusty fork to the eyeball.
  
  
• You get what you give.
  Alida thinks: I can present you with approximately 8.8 million reasons (annually) why this is a palpable lie. And that's just for starters.
  
  
• Money is not the answer.
  Alida thinks: no, but it would help pay that enormous rates notice I just received.
  
  
• Breathe.
  Alida thinks: that's not advice; it's a biological imperative, fucker.
  

Think you should be "better"? Forget it. So you have a wooden leg, multiple personalities, and a blind cat. Don't sweat it: the guy next door thinks he was kidnapped by aliens last night and now he's too scared to get out of bed.

Take him that leftover fried rice that's in your fridge and ask if you can borrow his mower. Your action won't prevent WWIII, global warming, or people dying tragically and unnecessarily, but, my friend (or friends, if your multiple personalities prefer), this is living.

A reading-in-the-bath disaster

Last night I got Andorra wet in the bath. I'd just bought it, and the edition is basically all-white, so the water marks aren't helping anything.

I don't even know how it got wet -- it was still 30-something degrees when I got into the bath with my G&T and the book, so there was barely enough water to submerge me, let alone the book. Fuck. And before you go blaming the gin, forget it. I'm an old, old hand at reading in the bath. I know what I'm doing. Ordinarily.

Anyway, here's the plan. Dry it out, then re-flatten between my concrete floor and my dictionaries. Any tips? Hints? Suggestions? Should I forget it and just set the thing on fire? Should I iron the pages?

I'm so careful with the books, really I am. I don't have to deal with this kind of eventuality too often. Any help you can give would be appreciated.

1994

Over the weekend I was presented with an article I'd written for my then-local paper in 1994. It was around the same time that I had my first long-copy ad published, also in the then-local paper, while on work experience in a then-local ad agency. But that's now-irrelevant, really.

What's relevant is that my capacity for producing carefully phrased bullshit -- hype, if you prefer -- was strong even at that tender age. If you had something to say, no matter how dreary, it appears that, even then, I could help you say it in a way that sounded appealing. Even when I didn't believe it myself.

When you work with stories all the time -- you spend your days deciphering what people want to say, then making those people and things sound better than they are -- you tend to lose your grip on reality. You tend to want to believe your own hype -- a dangerous thing for a copywriter. Or a human being.

The alternative, of course, is to become inordinately cynical, which seems to have been the most recent turn in my path of unrighteous writing. What next? A vow of silence, I expect.

On City of Glass

In City of Glass, by Paul Auster, the main character, Quinn, comes to the end of himself.

This is how it's explained in the text. Whether you've read the book or not, those words will imply something to you. Without giving the game away (too much), let me sketch out what it meant for Quinn.

1. Quinn is something of a hermit: wrapped up in work, he has no friends and virtually no real need to connect with others.

2. By chance, he gets pulled into a strange, unpredictable series of events. When I say by chance, I mean that they appear to have been intended for someone else. Yet he becomes hopelessly enmeshed. When I say events, I mean mundane physical events that have enormous psychological repercussions.

3. A crisis occurs.

4. His response to the crisis is his ultimate undoing.

5. By the end of the book, there is no more Quinn. Quinn is lost even to the author of the story; the reader begins to wonder if he was ever real.

I'm no literary scholar. I haven't even read much Auster. But I want to suggest that this plotline could perhaps represent the greatest fear of many people.

In some part of our being, we continually walk a tightrope between being here, and not. Between some semblance of control, and a wild, enormous infinity in which we are completely lost -- not just to ourselves, or lost in the world, but actually nonexistent.

To exist, and to not exist at the same time is a strange paradox. If you don't exist, then neither does anything you thought you had: your feelings, experiences, and beliefs are entirely mutable. That store of memories that charts your education in life, entertains you on a cold night, and lets you believe during difficult times that things can be better is revealed as mere fabrication.

Yet the voice inside says you do exist. It insists this is so. It wants to believe in the memories, no matter how fantastical they seem, because they happened.

Didn't they?

Perhaps it's this drive which keeps us going: the tension between the will to exist (not just to live, but to be), and the reality of nonexistence.

In City of Glass, that tension is overwhelmed in favour of nonexistence not by any one individual, or a given course of action, but by a range of evidence that's complex, ubiquitous, and unavoidable.

Ultimately, Quinn's nonexistence is evinced by his life. His being finally dismisses his own actuality, and that's the end of him.

Something about things

"Things" is one of the most generic, pointless, blithering nouns in the English language. The Pocket O begins its definition with the words "any possible object of thought". I didn't read on from there: I was too bored with it to bother.

What the fuck are "things"? If you don't know, stop writing until you've worked it out.

In trying to communicate with clarity, "thing" is not a word you should rely upon. I would go so far as to suggest—nay, demand (but then I'm a hard-arse, so you can selectively read "suggest" if you like)—that it is not a word that should be used in professional prose at all. It is a word to be avoided in all but the slimmest possible selection of cases.

A few golden rules, then:

• No headline should include this word.
• In prose, choose a more specific noun. Every single time.
  
• Yes, you can use "things" tongue in cheek, as part of an idiom ("First things first"), or colloquially, as in the title of this post. Alright then. But that's all.
  

I wasn't kidding about headlines. If I see one more article with a headline like "5 things you should know about cats", I'll scream.

Yes, there's sure to be a lot of screaming in the coming weeks.

Live the literature

I wanted to tell you about several fabulous holidays I've enjoyed as a result of books. It's topical: I'm planning another.

There was a visit to Vienna, to see the Big Wheel, the Mozart Cafe, and other places whence we saw the demise of Graham Greene's Harry Lime in The Third Man.

There was a trip to San Francisco, setting for A Crack in the Edge of the World. On the same adventure, I went to New York, to stare vacantly into the duck pond in Central Park where Holden met Phoebe in Catcher in the Rye, and pass the Plaza, where Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway drank champagne with Gastby and Daisy and lost Jordan, and stroll in Soho looking out for Patrick Bateman, the all-American Psycho.

And there was a trip to dark, mysterious Java, to visit Krakatau, Bogor, Anyer, Jakarta: crucial locations in The Day the World Exploded.

Where to next? Next is a long time off, I'm afraid, but it'll be Egypt -- inspired by Noel Coward's Middle East Diary of 1943 (as well as, oh, Death on the Nile, Tutankhamun, the Rosetta Stone, etc. etc.) -- and Spain, to follow in the dusty footsteps laid out in Rose Macaulay's Fabled Shore.

I can recommend this approach to travel: read a book, love it, and visit the place in which it was set. Look for the heros in their haunts, tread the pavements where the bad guys stalked, lie in fields in which hearts were lost, sit in the cafe where the heroine first appeared. Live the literature.

Hyphenated list items 101

Okay English speakers, buck up. Hyphenated items in a list? Piece of cake.

Consider the sentence, "I have short-term, medium-term, and long-term projects."

(Yes, a serial comma. But focus. Hyphens, okay?)

If you wanted to avoid repetition in this sentence, you'd write it as follows:

"I have short-, medium-, and long-term projects."

No kidding. The hyphens, you see, tie the modifiers (short, medium, long) to the common noun (term). This is how the sentence makes sense. Consider the same sentence sans hyphens:

"I have short, medium, and long-term projects."

That sentence literally says, I have short projects, I have medium projects, and I have long-term projects. Which is not the same as our sample sentence, where we're talking about when the projects take place, rather than how long they take. And: what in hell is a medium project?

Without the hyphens, short and medium could be substituted with any damn noun:

"I have love, peas, and long-term projects."

The hyphens are needed. They are not weird. If you have any questions, I will happily address them with due immovability on this matter in the comments.

Reports from the Real World

When the nation faces a federal election, the papers turn poorly. All the text is tit-for-tat one-up-manship, feuds and fallouts. All the photographs seem mere caricatures. Nothing's real: it's all hot air. And it's worse than the soaps.

On the other hand, when the political state is at least consistent, the press indulges us with all kinds of interesting developments -- Reports, if you will, from the Real World:


To summarise, key points of interest in today's news include:

• A plane engine exploded while the plane was in the sky. And: people lived!
  
• The oldest stone axe in the world has been found in Arnhem Land at a rock art site which, incidentally, was only discovered three years ago.
  
• A man was killed by a pride of lions in Zimbabwe (sidebar: another man died after a hyena attack in the same country).
• The oldest woman in the world died; she was born in 1896 and lived, by the way, in Curacao. Yes, like the drink.
  

That, friend, is news. These are news items. These are the kinds of tepid-off-the-presses non-scoops I live for: things that let us reflect upon the world as we know it.

Thoughts precipitated by such stories include, but are not limited to the following. Curacao is made with orange skins. She was 114. The oldest sharp edge in the world. The deeply happy Jawoyn people. Hyena attack. And: it's not often you see the phrase "a pride of lions" in print.

Good times, people. Good times.

The big enn oh

Every time I receive a rejection for something I've written, I think of John Kennedy Toole, who wrote the hilarious A Confederacy of Dunces, had it rejected once to often, and topped himself.

John's mother kept hawking the book, which was eventually sold and won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.

Oh, John, I think, remembering fondly Burma Jones, my favourite character from the novel, and promising myself for the zillionth time I'll name my first-born after him. If only you'd hung in there.

My ongoing skirmishes with copy approvals, publishers, and readers have proven to me that there is no right in writing, pun intended (other than correct grammar and spelling, of course).

Creativity is like beauty in a lot of ways, but primarily, for this discussion, the similarity is that they're both subjective. What one loves, another will loathe. We can argue the merits of creative talent all rainy afternoon long, but in the end, we'll still have our innate preferences for certain creative outputs over others.

Some writers employ their rejection slips as office wallpaper, set fire to them, and/or use them as metaphorical fuel for more output. Seeing as all my rejections come via email -- or silence, as is the go now with book publishers -- my walls remain unfettered by physical evidence of loathing.

Each time a rejection comes, there is a brief moment of disappointment. And that's it.

There are rejections in life that we can rightly take to heart, question, pore over, and use to drive ourselves crazy if we wish. But rejection by a corporation manufacturing products is not one of them.

Mind-blowing lines #20

The proliferation of mind-blowing lines in Wolf Hall makes it virtually impossible to single one out. I have restricted my selection to two. For now.

In the first, Thomas Cromwell is remembering a brief youth spent at the hands of his violent father:

"One fear creates a dereliction, the offence brings on a greater fear, and there comes a point where the fear is too great and the human spirit just gives up and a child wanders off numb and directionless and ends up following a crowd and watching a killing."

The second is a comment from King Henry about Anne Boleyn:

"I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood."

A king and a smith's son, both wholly bewildered. Cromwell has the benefit of hindsight, though: you can't blame Henry for being blindsided later in life. For being silly, perhaps, but not for being human.