Word of the Week

Wednesday Word of the Week from Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 4 Comments

Book Cover of Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation

Word of the Week 9: Midden

Welcome to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of  felicitous word choice selected from my current reading. Today’s word comes from a 2014 science fiction thriller, Jeff Vandermeer‘s Annihilation.

Unlike earlier Word-of-the-Week posts here, the choice of “midden” was easy. There was no challenge of elimination from among a host of superb choices as in Lawrence Durrel’s Justine, reviewed here in 2015. Indeed, a salient feature of the novel is its unadorned and direct language and syntax. How the author produced a story of such palpable unease, psychological depth, and lingering suspense without resorting to linguistic fireworks underscores the power of clear, concise writing.

The first volume of Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Annihilation follows an expedition of four nameless female scientists: a biologist (the narrator); a psychologist (the leader of the group); a surveyor; and an anthropologist as they venture into Area X, a pristine Edenic landscape cut off from civilization for decades. Ostensibly the twelfth such group, their mission is to observe their surroundings (and each others’ responses to them); map the terrain;  take samples; and … avoid contamination. Knowing that each expedition before theirs has met with calamity, a feeling of suspicious disquiet rather than camaraderie infuses the members.

I’ve often complained to my husband (a science fiction scholar and enthusiast) that one element of the genre that leaves me cold is its detached characterization. Because the best science fiction often deals with big ideas, world-building, and extrapolations on technology,  the characters that inhabit its highly imaginative scenarios seem less developed and engaging to me than those found, for example, in literary fiction. This book, however, left me pondering my bias.

As for setting, Area X is richly drawn, replete with a mysterious “tower” buried in the ground; an abandoned village; a lighthouse that shows signs of a terrible struggle; a moaning creature in the night; and a treacherous botanic force manifested in a living script on the walls of the tower. The biologist’s flashbacks provide further metaphorical elements: a neglected swimming pool taken over by nature; a tide pool; a vacant lot flush with forms of life; the mysterious and unspecified border. Throughout, the sense of an encroaching and indifferent Nature dispels any romantic notions about wild places that readers may bring with them.

Annihilation is not simply a weird adventure story, however. As hinted at above, a real strength lies in the author’s handling of psychological states—what one reviewer called “the strangeness within us.” No one can be trusted; the characters’ motivations are unclear; and even the sense of a shared humanity unravels as the environment relentlessly pursues its own mysterious transitions. The result? A “claustrophobic dread” that builds from the very first page.

As for today’s word (definition revealed below), as I have before I must admit to resorting to the dictionary. The lines refer to the biologist’s discovery of a hidden cache of  journals in the lighthouse.

No, what had me gasping for breath, what felt like a punch in the stomach as I dropped to my knees, was the huge mound that dominated the space, a kind of insane midden. I was looking at a pile of papers with hundreds of journals on top of it—just like the ones we had been issued to record our observations of Area X.

I highly recommend this book. Quick paced and lucid, it’s one that seduces you into reading more than you’ve intended in one sitting. You can read an excerpt of the first chapter HERE.

And as for “midden,” did you know this word? Here is the definition, which  could be easily guessed from the context of the paragraph.

Midden: dunghill; refuse heap; a small pile (as of seeds, bones, or leaves) as gathered by a rodent.

What words have you come across lately that have thrilled you? I’d love to know.

Wednesday Word of the Week 7

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 6 Comments

th

Word of the Week 7: Poltroonery

Welcome to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my friend, la belle sakura, for  this week’s selection from Lawrence Durrell’s monumentally literary and erudite modern novel, Justine (1957), a book that leaves me utterly abashed. The first novel in The Alexandria Quartet, it is now recognized as a hallmark achievement in modern English literature. Having eschewed much literary fiction of late, I felt my brain lit on fire with this book’s magnificent command of the language, its brilliant metaphors, its fiercely intelligent reflections on love and art and the travails of the human condition.

The book also presented a formidable challenge of elimination; so many superb words to choose from, many of which sent me plucking the pages of my dictionary: plaints; clouts; transpontine demotic; meretricious; ordure; anchorite. Some words both my Oxford American College Dictionary and Merriam Webster online app failed to recognize: mumchance; eikons; cafard. No doubt the author’s British colonial background had something to do with this extraordinary diversity of vocabulary, but it is also his conception of literature as a universe unto itself that more adroitly explains his feat. In a 1959 Paris Review interview he explains it thus:

. . . we’re all, as artists, attacking as a battalion on a very broad front. Individual and temperamental personalities are incidental to the general attack and what we as artists are trying to do is to sum up in a sort of metaphor the cosmology of a particular moment in which we are living.

And what a cosmology it is: the glittering, treacherously seductive city of Alexandria on the eve of the Second World War, in which the purblind characters chart their faltering journeys along the fault lines of passion and desire. There is the eponymous Justine, violated in youth, doomed to repeatedly deceive the men who love her; the love-struck narrator, drawn like a spider into the web of subterfuge and complicity; Justine’s husband Nessim, an Egyptian Gatsby held like a moth before the flame of her beauty and confounding contradictions, repaying her infidelities with luxury and sad solicitude; and the cast of expats and locals who trace their crisscrossing trajectories in the ‘dust-tormented, subtly anarchic city, in “light filtered through the essence of lemons.”

I pause breathless here, and can only recommend that you dive into this deep well of a book, and drink in its extraordinary language and story.

As for today’s word, I admit that I had to check the definition. The lines refer to the thoughts of the character Pursewarden, a respectably successful Anglo Saxon novelist flagging under the weight of a sullen, brooding self-assessment at odds with his swelling Reputation. He cannot reconcile his lonely suffering with his new-found fame, and will soon commit suicide.

“Underneath it all he has been steadily putting up with an almost insupportable consciousness of his own mental poltroonery.”

I could say so much more about the extraordinarily beautiful metaphors (“a squinting spring shower”; “his little cranium glowing like a minor sun; “the scampering of the sea”; her brain at night “ticking like a cheap alarm-clock”) but I’ll end with a simple recommendation: When you find yourself longing for a taste of writing at the pinnacle of craft and sensibility and form, pick up this novel and leave mediocrity trodden in the dust.

And if you’ve encountered this word in your reading, let me know. Or consider sharing the use of another word or phrase that has stopped you in your reading tracks this week.

Wednesday Word of the Week 6

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 4 Comments

Reading Lolita

Word of the Week 6: Screed

Welcome to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from a New York Times bestseller that Margaret Atwood described as “a literary life raft on Iran’s fundamentalist sea,” Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

I was inspired to return to this poignant and searing reflection on life under Iran’s Islamic regime by two dovetailing events, one personal and one that is playing out its cacophonous and dissonant notes on the global-political scale even as I write. I’ll get to the personal event presently, but that global political reference should be obvious to anyone following the breaking headlines: the so-called nuclear deal reached just yesterday with our long-time swathed and turbaned foe, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

So, now you rightly ask: What personal connection could Jeanne possibly have with Iran, that fervent hotbed of repression, that evil bullhorn spewing vociferous calls of “Death to America!” for the last four decades? Just this: my husband (aka the Professor) quite unexpectedly received, just two weeks ago, an invitation to teach a 3-day seminar in October to engineering  and social science students in Isfahan, Iran’s third largest city and home to several World Heritage sites. Naturally, the invitation includes the Professor’s wife and partner.

How this invitation came to be is fodder for a much longer post. Suffice it to say that the responses to this bit of news were uniformly ones of alarm. “Iran? You’d have to be crazy to go to Iran.” “Don’t go!” “What, you want to disappear into a dark cell for five years?” My brother went so far as to ask to be added to my will.

Yes, we need to move cautiously as we consider this invitation. As I like to explain to loved ones, we are practicing due diligence in researching the possibilities (including calls to the State Department). But for me, the thought of getting an unvarnished view of the people and culture of Iran, of practicing some citizen diplomacy at this historic moment, fills me with excitement.

I’ve met several Iranians, going back to my teaching days. I gaze now at the the lovely inlaid box an Iranian student gave me in the late 1990s and think of the rich aesthetic sensibility it represents. I reverently turn the pages of an exquisite illustrated volume of the classic Rubaiyat by the 13th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam, a gift to the Professor from an appreciative Iranian attendee at the recent conference we attended in Finland (a nice companion to the three volumes we already own of this work.) I remember my very first exposure to this exotic land when, during my freshman year in college, a couple of Iranian students invited me to their apartment for lunch. I had never eaten yogurt with meat before; it was a culinary epiphany of sorts.

Persian Box

Rubaiiyat

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And then I think of tyranny, of how I know nothing of what it means to experience a loss of my freedom. I think of Islamic morality squads and radical Islam’s war against women and the mysterious way our Iranian friend, a futurist and scholar, regularly disappears for days or weeks at a time from all social media. I think of fanatics and of crowds shouting “Death to America.” I wonder how much and how little I really know about the situation on the ground in that far-off land against which my country has waged a bitter ideological war  all of my adult life.

So, hovering in the space between safe consideration and final acceptance of the offer, imagining with equal parts trepidation and intrigue all the “what-could-be’s,” implicit in such a visit, I return to this week’s word and book. Re-reading select passages should serve as a necessary reminder of just how nefarious the regime under which I may soon place my fate has been. But I think it may just also fill me with an even greater desire to grab at this unprecedented and unique opportunity to visit Iran at this historic moment.

Dr. Nafisi is a professor of Western Literature and essayist who left Iran in 1997. In this braided memoir, she reflects on her pre-Revolutionary days as a student,  her increasingly repressive reality as an academic teaching English literature at the University of Tehran, and on the clandestine study group she led at her home in the final months before she left. Through her vivid descriptions of the eight women who joined her weekly, we witness both the terrible stress of authoritarian rule on young lives and the ultimate futility of such repression to quell the human spirit. In the following passage, one of the young women present explains her vicious jubilation upon hearing news of the death of one of the leaders of the Muslim Students’ Association.

“You don’t know him, Mojgan told me. Next to him Mr. Ghomi is an absolute angel. He was sick, sexually sick. You know, he got a friend expelled because he said the white patch of skin just barely visible under her scarf sexually provoked him. They were like hounds. Then Nassrin jumped in with a screed about one of the female guards. Her searches were like sexual assaults, she insisted. One day she squeezed and fondled Niloofar until she became hysterical. They expel us for laughing out loud, but you know what they did to this woman when she was discovered? She was reprimanded, expelled for a semester and then she was back at her job.”

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a sad and sparkling tale of transcendence over tyranny. It is also a reminder of the critical role that scholars and teachers play in the lives of a free citizenry. I will return to it again and again for Professor Nafisi’s inspiring critiques of the best-loved work in Western Literature, and thrill each time to the layers of thought she unveils.

That’s it for this week. If you’ve encountered ‘screed” in your reading recently (as I have just this morning in the New York Times), consider sharing your thoughts here.

Wednesday Word of the Week 5

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FullSizeRender

Word of the Week 5: Bray

Welcome to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week I am backtracking five months to revisit possibly the best book I have read in the last half decade: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed’s acclaimed and joltingly poignant memoir of confronting both an untamed land and her own wild heart.

At twenty-six, still mourning the untimely death of her counter-culture mother, and burdened with a series of wrong steps and bad decisions, the author embarks on a grueling journey of self-discovery and healing. Woefully unprepared, she sets out to hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest trail—alone—from the Mohave Desert in California, through Oregon, to the Colombia River Gorge in southern Washington.

It is an amazing adventure; but this is not simply an adventure story. Rather, through seamlessly integrated flashbacks, we witness nothing short of a catharsis, of redemption through pain, of transcendence through struggle.

At the heart of that struggle is not only the young woman’s ultimate acceptance  of the loss of her mother to cancer at the age of forty-six, but her forgiveness of the way her mother lived her life. It is in a final passage on this theme that, in a howl of futility and rage, the author lends to this week’s mundane word a new, searing power to move.

“And then I wailed. No tears came, just a series of loud brays that coursed through my body so hard I couldn’t stand up. I had to bend over keening, while bracing my hands on my knees, my pack so heavy on top of me, my ski pole clanging out behind me in the dirt, the whole stupid life I’d had coming out my throat.”

Wild is one of the most heart-wrenching, skillfully constructed, lyrical, honest, and successfully realized memoirs I’ve come across in years. If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear how it affected you.

And, if you’ve encountered a use of a word or phrase that has stopped you in your reading tracks this week, consider sharing it here.

Wednesday Word of the Week 4

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Into Thin Air

Word of the Week 4: Laggard(ly)

Welcome back to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from Jon Krakauer’s harrowing and controversial account of the disastrous 1996 ascent of Mount Everest, Into Thin Air.

Contracted by Outside magazine to join and write an article about a guided ascent of Mount Everest in May of that year, Krakauer got much more than he bargained for when a wicked convergence of circumstances—human error, poor judgment, and damnably bad luck with the weather—conspired to bring about the worst mountaineering disaster on record. By the time he descended to Base Camp, nine climbers from four expeditions had perished, three more would succumb shortly, and at least two were left severely maimed from frostbite.

What makes Krakauer’s account so grippingly enjoyable is not only his insider’s informed take on alpine climbing, but his Valkyrian (another great word employed in this book) command of the language. Here, in a passage describing a second attempt to reach Camp Three, is this week’s example:

“A thousand feet up the immense slant of the Lhotse Face, I ascended a faded nylon rope that seemed to go on forever, and the higher I got, the more laggardly I moved.”

Having pulled this book off my shelf for a quick study in grabbing the reader’s attention from the first paragraph, filling in historical and personal detail without bogging down into an “information dump,” and crafting dynamic and memorable characters, my earlier hunch that this was a book to be savored once a decade was reaffirmed.

I invite other examples of a particularly adept use of “laggard” or “laggardly,” or other words like it. Comment here if you are not feeling too laggardly yourself.

Wednesday Word of the Week 3

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TheMidwichCuckoos

Word of the Week 3: Nugatory

Welcome to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading. (And note that I am not providing the definitions here in the hopes that 1) readers may already recognize the word, or 2) readers will be stimulated to look it up after attempting first to identify the meaning from context.)

This week I am reminded of the literature I read in my teens and early twenties, what academics refer to as the “canon”: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, George Elliot, Anthony Trollope, the Romantic poets. How I thrilled to the language, the phrasings, the settings (moors and heaths and bowling-greens; manors, coach houses and lodges). Later I pilgrimaged even farther back to Milton and Pope, William Blake and John Donne, all those illustrious pillars over which towers the greatest of them all—Shakespeare.

Twentieth-century British literature later offered equally satisfying linguistic gems, not to mention psychological insights. I won’t tally them here but as a quick example take the wicked wit of Evelyn Waugh or the randy, cutting humor of Kingsley Amos. Brilliant story-tellers all, but for me, not the least of the pleasure derived from reading British literature has been the “smashing” command of the mother tongue, the rich complex phrasings, and the delightful and unexpected variety of word choice.

Which brings me to this week’s book, from 1957, The Midwich Cuckoos by John Beynon Harris, written under the pseudonym of John Wyndham. Readers may be familiar with the film version of this classic science fiction tale, Village of the Damned. (This is not the place to decry Hollywood’s maddening habit of substituting strategically coined book titles with sensationalistic schlock; still it must be noted that the infiltrating habits of the cuckoo birds provide an important analogy.)

On an ordinary fall day in the sleepy postwar English village of Midwich, a mysterious phenomenon renders the entire population unconscious for one day. Aerial surveillance reveals a cigar-shaped silvery craft situated smack in the center of the zone affected, which disappears as the effects wear off. Shortly thereafter, all the women of child-bearing age discover themselves pregnant. When the children born of this presumed xenogenesis exhibit frightening shared traits, central citizens of the town must confront the terrifying possibility of an alien invasion designed to destroy Western civilization from within.

American SF writer Damon Knight excoriated the book for its “layers of polite restraint, sentimentality . . . and women’s-magazine masochism,” but for me, these elements paint a rich portrait of English village life on the threshold of obsolescence. Altogether, they present a reading experience that is refreshingly un-PC and add a bit of “jolly good fun” to the chilling plot.

It’s just one of those chauvinistic elements that gives us today’s example.

The Reverend Leebody, determined that the radio program he is listening to on the “Pre-Sophoclean Conception of the Oedipus Complex” should not be drowned out by the “piffle” of his wife Dora’s telephone conversation, advances the volume knob another five degrees.

“He could not be blamed for failing to guess that what now struck him as a particularly nugatory exchange of feminine concerns would subsequently prove to be of importance.”

Thanks to my husband, aka The Professor, for suggesting yet another great novel from his always-evolving List of Best Science Fiction Novels.

I invite other examples of a particularly adept use of “nugatory.” Perhaps I could think of one employing it in an observation of my male relatives’ propensity for endless ESPN viewing.

 

Wednesday Word of the Week 2

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WhenTheAirHitsYourBrain

Word of the Week 2: Pummel

Welcome to my second post of Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery by Frank Vertosick, Jr., M.D, a captivating yet shockingly funny account of the author’s neurosurgical residency.

Dr. Vertosick may belong to the rarest breed of doctors, but with his blue-color background, the story he tells is one of an everyman confronted with extraordinary challenges: the deaf, mute, obese, nicotine-addicted “trisomy 21” (i.e. Down Syndrome) patient; the stunningly beautiful, pregnant, fundamentalist Christian with a brain tumor who refuses chemotherapy to save her baby; the young female car-accident victim with both a fractured skull and a perforated heart; the infant with water on the brain.

It is in describing one of these patients, a young Nigerian foreign exchange student with a dramatic case of MS, that Dr. Vertosick wins his place in this post. After recounting how the young man’s arms and legs become uncontrollable, “flailing about like octopus tentacles,” he conjures up a powerful image of the effects of this terrible disease by using a word commonly employed in a very different context.

“His face was swollen from attempts to brush his teeth, attempts which resulted only in a self-inflicted pummeling.”

I am not sure what I expected when I delved into the genre of medical memoir, but it was hardly the brilliant metaphors, surpassingly poignant reflections on life, illness and death, and skillfully rendered characters that make When the Air Hits Your Brain a page turner to the last period. And while the book makes one glad for dedicated physicians like Dr. Vertosick, it also provokes some regret that the doctor is not a full-time author.

How might you use the word “pummel” in a context unrelated to fighting? Can you think of a similar example of a word used in a wildly different context from the one in which it is usually employed? What’s your word of the week? Feel free to share your thoughts here.

Wednesday Word of the Week 1

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 2 Comments

Word of the Week 1: Yokelry

Welcome to my debut post of Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from Bring the Jubilee, Ward Moore’s 1953 alternative history in which the Confederacy won the “War of Southron Independence” after the surrender of the United States of America in 1864.

The year is 1940. Barbara, a brilliant beautiful physicist, cold-hearted cynic, and emotionally volatile polyandrist, has Hodge, the country rube of a protagonist and budding historian, in her grip. When Hodge questions the viability of Barbara’s scheme to translate matter-energy into terms of space-time, thus making time travel possible, Barbara strikes back with a typically brittle and demeaning observation:

“Thank you. It’s always nice to know one has amused the yokelry.”

Ouch! Kudos to the author, Ward Moore. I had not read him before but reveled in the power of his  Dickension vision of a defeated and impoverished United States in mid-twentieth century.

I invite other examples of a particularly adept use of “yokel” or “yokelry,” or other words like it. Have you encountered a use of a word or phrase that has stopped you in your reading tracks this week? If so, consider sharing it here.