Loud Latin Laughing Literary musings, book log.

Age-otori (Japanese): To look worse after a haircut

Arigata-meiwaku (Japanese): An act someone does for you that you didn't want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favor, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude

Backpfeifengesicht (German): A face badly in need of a fist

Bakku-shan (Japanese): A beautiful girl... as long as she's being viewed from behind

Desenrascanco (Portuguese): "to disentangle" yourself out of a bad situation (To MacGyver it)

Duende (Spanish): a climactic show of spirit in a performance or work of art, which might be fulfilled in flamenco dancing, or bull-fighting, etc.

Forelsket (Norwegian): The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love

Gigil (pronounced Gheegle; Filipino): The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute

Guanxi (Mandarin): in traditional Chinese society, you would build up good guanxi by giving gifts to people, taking them to dinner, or doing them a favor, but you can also use up your gianxi by asking for a favor to be repaid

Ilunga (Tshiluba, Congo): A person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time

L'esprit de l'escalier (French): usually translated as "staircase wit," is the act of thinking of a clever comeback when it is too late to deliver it

Litost (Czech): a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery

Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan): A look between two people that suggests an unspoken, shared desire

Manja (Malay): "to pamper", it describes gooey, childlike and coquettish behavior by women designed to elicit sympathy or pampering by men. "His girlfriend is a damn manja. Hearing her speak can cause diabetes."

Meraki (pronounced may-rah-kee; Greek): Doing something with soul, creativity, or love. It's when you put something of yourself into what you're doing

Nunchi (Korean): the subtle art of listening and gauging another's mood. In Western culture, nunchi could be described as the concept of emotional intelligence. Knowing what to say or do, or what not to say or do, in a given situation. A socially clumsy person can be described as 'nunchi eoptta', meaning "absent of nunchi"

Pena ajena (Mexican Spanish): The embarrassment you feel watching someone else's humiliation

Pochemuchka (Russian): a person who asks a lot of questions

Schadenfreude (German): the pleasure derived from someone else's pain

Sgriob (Gaelic): The itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky

Taarradhin (Arabic): implies a happy solution for everyone, or "I win. You win." It's a way of reconciling without anyone losing face. Arabic has no word for "compromise," in the sense of reaching an arrangement via struggle and disagreement

Tatemae and Honne (Japanese): What you pretend to believe and what you actually believe, respectively

Tingo (Pascuense language of Easter Island): to borrow objects one by one from a neighbor's house until there is nothing left

Waldeinsamkeit (German): The feeling of being alone in the woods

Yoko meshi (Japanese): literally 'a meal eaten sideways,' referring to the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language

From sobadsogood

I fell in love with Walser when I read The Tanners, a wonderfully dreamy work about siblings' trials and tribulations. I was happy to be reminded of him again at the bookstore when I saw The Assistant, which I gobbled up over the past week, again dog-earring pages that capture the moody tranquility of the Swiss/German landscape through the passing seasons.

Joseph Marti arrives in the lake-side villa as the assistant to the inventor/engineer Tobler, taking up residence in the house but not collecting a salary since money was tight. His understatedness, taut and poised like a panther ready to pounce, his questioning of own abilities, his delight in household chores and the physical movement of labor. Money continues to be a problem; he meets his predecessor Wirsich who was fired for continued drunkenness, he travels back to the city and is told by an old friend that he never changes. He is fearless in swimming out to the middle of the lake in the autumn and bouncing around placing the storm windows on, but desperately fears his boss' anger. The townspeople gradually realize Tobler will not repay his debts, stop visiting him and begin to openly harass him and his family. Tobler begs for money from family, taking journeys by train to pass the hat around. In the end, Joseph walks away arm-in-arm with Wirsich, looking for real employment.

"How strangely she laughs," the subordinate mused and went on thinking: "one might, if one was set on it, take this way of laughing as the basis for a geographical study. This laugh precisely designates the region from which this woman comes. It is a handicapped laugh, it comes out of her mouth in a slightly unnatural way, as if it had always been held a little in check in early years by an all-too-strict upbringing. But it is a lovely feminine laugh, even a tiny bit frivolous."

Trash. I skimmed through this once I realized that BEE is not an amazing writer but had to figure out why people think he is. Christian Bale haunted me as I read, dapper psychotic dandy obsessed with details of men's fashion and killing people. It's what can happen to you when you are given everything, you must chase the dragon of edge over the top. Taking a job just to fit in, not because you need to. Doing minimal work at that job, but obsessing over certain accounts (the Fisher account holds a mysterious attraction for him). Not paying attention to his friends and their inattention to him as well, as he admits to wanting to smash people's faces with bricks, or decapitate things.

I was captivated by Fagles' translation of The Iliad, so I stuck with the master translator for the sequel, The Odyssey, which was an entirely different beast. The same rules apply of sacrificing to the gods = BBQ & drinking, but this story covers an immensely larger territory, dipping into the war over Troy (Trojan horse executed by Odysseus' cunning), covering O's journey back from Troy, blown off course, into the Lotus Eaters, Cyclops (O's trickery in naming himself "Nobody"), Aeolus master of the wind whose bag of winds is opened by O's crew when he is sleeping and blows them off course, cannibals of Laestrygonia destroy every ship but O's, Circe turns his crew into pigs and they stay for a year, then Calypso takes him husband/hostage for many years. Meanwhile, Penelope is guarding her marriage bed against the myriad of suitors who drink/eat O's food. Telemachus, son of O & P, goes on a brief journey to find word of his illustrious father. His return is after O has reached Ithaca safely, in the custody of the swineherd. O & T hatch a plan to sweep the suitors from his palace, which comes to fruition.

Notable:
* Telemachus' sneeze seals Penelope's prayer to the gods
* Bird signs are taken very seriously, winging to the right is good luck
* The swineherd's actions are introduced in a very loving second person, "You"

Raymond Carver is a master at telling creepy stories. This is the movie -> book collection, inspired by Altman's movie of the same name. Every collection of stories I've read by him includes a version of "Scotty", the story about the baker who crank-calls the couple who doesn't pick up their son's birthday cake because he's hit by a car, in the hospital, and dies. There's another disturbing story, So Much Water So Close to Home, where the husband is on a four day fishing/camping/drinking trip and they find a dead body on day 1 but choose to continue fishing/drinking/camping. The vitamin story shows up in this collection as well. And the dad who takes the family dog to get lost. Undercurrents of daily life held up for scrutiny and that make us all look strange, florescently- lit.

I was inducted into the cult this weekend, devouring this collection of essays, enjoying the tapdancing in my head, exhausting my dictionary. All those rabid fans are right-- Wallace is one of the greats. This collection includes extensions of work published in Harper's, Harvard Book Review, Premier, Esquire, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction. The topics cover: tennis in tornado conditions, the impact of television on culture, David Lynch, an Illinois state fair, deconstructionism, how pro tennis players differ from us, and a 7 day Caribbean cruise. It is hilarious, achingly well written, and mind-stretching. The work speaks for itself, I will not attempt my usual desultory summarization. Instead, I leave bread crumbs of words that I picked up from the 300+ pages. I am now interested in details like what Wallace circled in his dictionary. Rabbit hole, here I come.

A partial word list I learned or re-introduced myself to:

ectomorphic, melisma, strabismus, lacuna, senescence, thanatology, saprophytic, spume, gestalt, preterite, rictus, titivate, onanism, olla podrida, hermeneutic, ablate, crepuscular, anamorphic, pulchritude, weltschmerz, teleological, ad hominem, exergue, ostensive, otiose, commissure, promulgate, enfilade, plangent, soteriology, eidetic, solmization, coffle, solipsism, prurient, synecdoche, hebephrenia, saurian, glabrous, candent, miscegenation.

Some of my favorites from the above:

• lacuna: blank space or missing part


• spume: frothy matter on liquid (and called out as DFW's favorite word learned on the cruise)


• rictus: a gaping grin


• titivate: to spruce up


• ablate: to remove by cutting/evaporating; to vaporize


• weltschmerz: depression about state of world compared to ideal state


• otiose: futile


• plangent: having a loud reverberating sound


• solipsism: extreme egoism


• glabrous: smooth, hairless

When my dictionary failed me, I searched for definitions online (for plumeocide), which led me to other people's word-love with Wallace. I like this community.

Wallace seemed to prefer certain words, too. My unsophisticated noticing saw several uses of these in the book: miscegenation, plangent, sophist, instantiate, otiose, promulgate, weltschmerz.

My ratio of reading dead vs. living authors must be around 9:1. Why, then, do I have tears running down my face, why have I been sobbing, after reading the Kenyon College commencement speech DFW gave in 2005? Simply because the author committed suicide in 2008, during my own lifetime, cutting short his output of amazing work? I am confused by my own reaction to this death, four years after the fact. Before I read his work, I wasn't affected to the extent I am now. But today I am moping around, tragically struck as if one of my own family/friends were silenced. Perhaps if I had been extant in the 40s I would have had a similar reaction to VW's death? But perhaps it is the twice mentioned suicide within DFW's speech that sets a particular teary tone for me; he lays out his map (although in reality hanging vs. the mention of shooting) and then executes it three years later. Perhaps it is the reflection of his last line, knowing the context of his no longer being with us: "It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."