— 1998
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gall—a sore or chafe caused by abrasion gambrel—butcher’s frame for hanging animals by the legs gastine—?? ghost?? geta—wooden-sole shoe worn by Japanese gewgaw—decorative trinket or bauble gibbet—gallows gimp—narrow flat braid used for trimming; like fringe? glair—a sizing or glaze made of egg whites glissade—gliding step in ballet gloze—minimize or underplay…“gloze” the embarrassing part glyph—crude drawing that communicates nonverbally; like sign w/pedestrian crossing means pedestrians crossing gomphosis—immovable attachment Gongorism—florid, ornate literary style w/elaborate puns and conceits (after Luis de Góngora) gorget—ornamental collar; piece of armor protecting the throat Grand Guignol—cinema that emphasizes horrifying or macabre (vs. “Gothic Horror”) grandiloquent—pompous or bom-bastic of speech grapnel—small anchor with three flukes gravid—pregnant, especially in fish gravlax—appetizer w/smoked salmon and dill seasoning gravure—kind of intaglio printing greaves—unmelted residue left after animal fat has been rendered griot—storyteller grunion—small California fish gueridon—small round table guidon—small flag for military unit; the soldier who carries the unit’s flag guttate (adj.) — resembling droplets or spattered by droplets hallux—big toe hanuman—monkey with eerie humanish face and Amish-looking hair on face haploid—having the same # of chromosomes as a germ = half as many as a somatic organism hard-bitten—toughened by experience harridan—querulous old woman (check?) helotry—condition of serfdom hematite—chief ore of iron (water w/hematitic taste) histoplasmosis—flulike disease caused by inhaling spores of certain fungus, His toplasma capsulatum hob (n.) — shelf or projection at back or side of fireplace used for keeping food or utensils warm; a tool used for cutting the teeth of machine parts, e.g., gears homologues—two things having similar structure and origin though not necessarily purpose… e.g., flippers of seal and hands of human hortatory—marked by strong exhortation or urging; (n.) hor Cing purpostation hoyden—rowdy, high-spirited girl hustings—places or activities associated with political campaigning hyperemia—grossly increased blood flow to a body part hypolimnion—dense cold dead water at bottom of lake hyponasty—upward tilt of leaves in trees, shrubs (poplar) hypoplasia—incomplete development of organ; (adj.) hypoplastic (penis, e.g.) iatrogenic—caused or exacerbated by the supposed treatment; “mental illness is an iatrogenic disease, sometimes” ilex—holly; any trees or shrubs of the holly genus illiquid—not easily converted into cash imbricate—having edges overlap like shingles or fish scales imbrue—to saturate or stain imperium—absolute power, empire ingress—means or place of entering intervale—New England term for low-lying land along a river isobar—a line on a weather map connecting points of equal atmospheric pressure; two atoms having the same mass but different atomic numbers
THE NATURE OF THE FUN
THE BEST METAPHOR I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (i.e., dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer’s trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebrospinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.
The damaged-infant trope is perfect because it captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for something he’s working on. The fiction always comes out so horrifically defective, so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it — a cruel and repellent caricature of the perfection of its conception — yes, understand: grotesque because imperfect. And yet it’s yours, the infant is, it’s you, and you love it and dandle it and wipe the cerebrospinal fluid off its slack chin with the cuff of the only clean shirt you have left because you haven’t done laundry in like three weeks because finally this one chapter or character seems like it’s finally trembling on the edge of coming together and working and you’re terrified to spend any time on anything other than working on it because if you look away for a second you’ll lose it, dooming the whole infant to continued hideousness. And but so you love the damaged infant and pity it and care for it; but also you hate it—hate it — because it’s deformed, repellent, because something grotesque has happened to it in the parturition from head to page; hate it because its deformity is your deformity (since if you were a better fiction writer your infant would of course look like one of those babies in catalogue ads for infantwear, perfect and pink and cerebrospinally continent) and its every hideous incontinent breath is a devastating indictment of you, on all levels… and so you want it dead, even as you dote and love and wipe it and dandle it and sometimes even apply CPR when it seems like its own grotesqueness has blocked its breath and it might die altogether.
The whole thing’s all very messed up and sad, but simultaneously it’s also tender and moving and noble and cool — it’s a genuine relationship, of a sort — and even at the height of its hideousness the damaged infant somehow touches and awakens what you suspect are some of the very best parts of you: maternal parts, dark ones. You love your infant very much. And you want others to love it, too, when the time finally comes for the damaged infant to go out and face the world.
So you’re in a bit of a dicey position: you love the infant and want others to love it, but that means you hope others won’t see it correctly. You want to sort of fool people: you want them to see as perfect what you in your heart know is a betrayal of all perfection.
Or else you don’t want to fool these people; what you want is you want them to see and love a lovely, miraculous, perfect, ad-ready infant and to be right, correct, in what they see and feel. You want to be terribly wrong: you want the damaged infant’s hideousness to turn out to have been nothing but your own weird delusion or hallucination. But that’d mean you were crazy: you have seen, been stalked by, and recoiled from hideous deformities that in fact (others persuade you) aren’t there at all. Meaning you’re at least a couple fries short of a Happy Meal, surely. But worse: it’d also mean you see and despise hideousness in a thing you made (and love), in your spawn, and in certain ways you. And this last, best hope — this’d represent something way worse than just very bad parenting; it’d be a terrible kind of self-assault, almost self-torture. But that’s still what you most want: to be completely, insanely, suicidally wrong.