Synchronicity
synchronicity
Pronunciation: (sĭng'krə-nĭs'ĭ-tē, sĭn'-)
Function: noun
1. The state or fact of being synchronous or simultaneous; synchronism.
2. Coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related, conceived in Jungian theory as an explanatory principle on the same order as causality.
Okay, true story: Several years ago I was out with a guy I was dating at the time. For some reason, we began to have a discussion about the word "synchronicity." About an hour later, we heard the song "Synchronicity" by the Police being played. So, I guess you could call that a synchronicity synchronicity… But, seriously, this has always been one of my favorite words, perhaps because I experience this Jungian principle so damn often. I'm sure everyone has experienced it, too: maybe during one week you hear a word you've never heard a number of times. Or, you find that several people have recommended the same book to you. Here's a rule of thumb I've come up with: once you've had a three-time synchronicity, it's time to pay attention. But then, I don't happen to believe in coincidence…
Thanks to Constant Comment for today's WOTD entry
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Word of the Day
Bob's CCCW*, Chapter 3
See the previous Chapters here and here. And it's not too late to contribute for this week's chapter over at my place!
my plan b
to say, well, an egg only sticks around
for 12 to 24 hours
and we didn't fuck until 36 hours after
i felt the telltale cramps of ovulation
my plan b is to pretend that
a 30-minute bike ride, still tender-cunted
over jostling new orleans streets
in heady, heavy heat
to a shuttered planned parenthood is
just another saturday morning
my plan b is to fog out the memory
of the moment i relented
after the first condom came off
that wasn't replaced
my plan b is to pretend i wasn't on top,
that it wasn't my hand that guided you
my plan b is to blame myself
my plan b is to tell you to bring more condoms
my plan b is to put faith in pulling out
my plan b is to wonder how you seem to actually fuck my brains out
my plan b is to write this poem
my plan b was dispensed quietly
by a pharmacist named rhonda
she had soft brown eyes and soft brown hands
and i wanted her to take her hand and put it on mine
give it a gentle rub, and a maternal squeeze
instead she just told me it would be $47.95
i thanked her without looking her in the eye
Submitted by Cate Root
About the Author:
Cate Root is a sugar-tongued radical feminist word cunt, holding it down in 5th Ward New Orleans. She can be reached at nolariffic(at)gmail(dot)com or peep her out at www.myspace.com/pfunkem.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Word of the Day
Miasma
Pronunciation: \mī-ˈaz-mə, mē-\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural mi•as•mas also mi•as•ma•ta
Etymology: New Latin, from Greek, defilement, from miainein to pollute
Date: 1665
A poisonous vapor or mist believed to be made up of particles from decomposing material that could cause disease and could be identified by its foul smell. The miasma theory of disease originated in the Middle Ages and persisted for centuries. During the Great Plague of 1665, doctors wore masks filled with sweet-smelling flowers to keep out the poisonous miasmas. Because of the miasmas, they sanitized some buildings, required that night soil be removed from public proximity and had swamps drained to get rid of the bad smells. However, the miasmic approach only worked if something smelled bad. In the winter, sanitation was forgotten.
Miasmic reasoning prevented many doctors from adopting new practices like washing their hands between patients. Lethal agents traveled by air, they thought, not lodged beneath a doctor's fingernail. Although the miasma theory proved incorrect, it represented some recognition of the relation between dirtiness and disease. It encouraged cleanliness and paved the way for public health reform. The pioneer nurse Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) firmly believed in miasmas and became celebrated for her work in making hospitals clean, fresh and airy. The miasma theory also helped interest scientists in decaying matter and led eventually to the identification of microbes as agents of infectious disease.
To this day, the misinformed notion that dead bodies cause disease leads to millions of wasted dollars and energy in areas hit by disasters, attempting to quickly bury or disinfect the dead.
Common current usage includes: an influence or atmosphere that tends to deplete or corrupt also : an atmosphere that obscures (fog)
"The presidential campaign has already become a money miasma, a runaway race to break all fund-raising records. All manner of dodgy election initiatives have been concocted."
— NY Times, (8/7/08)
Thanks to Faith for today's WOTD entry
Bob's Creatively Created Creative Writing (Still Catching Y'all Up)
Chapter 2 in the ongoing story in which I weave reader submitted quotes into a somewhat coherent narrative (Chapter 1 here). Apologies to Garrison Keillor and the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson, but that's where the submitted comments led me that week, folks.
Remember, starting next Tuesday I'll be begging asking for snippets for the newest chapter, which I will be writing on the following Sunday. And, if you can't wait to play, you can visit my place and get a comment in for this week's chapter!!
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Word of the Day
Nulliparous
nul·lip·a·rous
Function: adjective
Etymology: New Latin, nullipara one who has never borne an offspring, from Latin nullus not any + -para -para
Date: 1859
of, relating to, or being a female that has not borne offspring
Some of my favorite nulliparous heroes are Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Child, Amelia Earhart, Katharine Hepburn, Ella Fitzgerald, Helen Mirren, Florence Nightingale, Annie Oakley, Dorothy Parker, and Diane Sawyer.
from www.nulliparous.org
Thanks to Faith for today's WOTD entry
Bob's Creative Writing - Creative Title Coming Soon!
Greetings, ShakesQuillians!
Bob here, from Phydeaux and Phriends. I've been allowed to invade y'all here with my weekly Creative Writing exercise.
Here's the deal. Each week I solicit comments from you readers - any little bit of action or snippet of description you want - and on Sunday I weave them all into a story. I've been doing this for a couple of months now over at my place, and it's a lot of fun. My original plan was to do a stand alone short short each week, but it's sort of turned into an ongoing story.
So, I figured that I'd introduce the story to you a chapter a day, and then next Tuesday (and each Tuesday thereafter) have a request post. If you can't wait to play, you can stop by my place and leave a comment for this week's entry.
Without further ado, here is Chapter 1 (reader submitted bits in bold):
Monday, July 28, 2008
Monday Mind Opener
First off, let me make it perfectly clear that I am not blatantly stealing this idea from the Web site The Books Stack. That would just be wrong. While I believe that The Books Stack is a very good Web site and would advise book lovers to give it a look, the idea that I would steal from The Books Stack is preposterous.
That said, let me now steal this idea from The Books Stack and alter it as I please - I will give you a list of words below, and you will pick from those words to create a book title, and then give the title a brief description (you only need to use the words from the list for the title). In creating the book title, you can use articles, prepositions, etc. The words given can be used in any order, and you can use as many, or as few of the words as you wish.
Here's an example:
Example Words: aardvark, frank, belligerent, taxi, moxie, night, barn, face ...
Example Book Title:
Frank the Aardvark and Barn Face the Belligerent Taxi: Two best friends share an adventure that take them from Milan to Minsk.
Sound good? And notice, I listed "frank" as an adjective, yet used it as a proper noun. A fine example of thinking outside the box, if you ask me. Feel free to make as many submissions as you like. Let's make The Books Stack proud. The words are below the Turn Page link.
Word of the Day
Stentorian
sten·to·ri·an
Pronunciation: stěn-tôr'ē-ən, -tōr'-
Function: adjective
Etymology: from Stentor, a Greek herald in the Trojan War. According to Homer's Iliad, his voice was as loud as that of fifty men combined.
Extremely loud.
"Then a stentorian voice blared an all-points bulletin: 'Calling the G-men! Calling all Americans to war on the underworld!'"
— Strobe Talbott, "Resisting the Gangbusters Option", Time, October 15, 1990
Thanks to Constant Comment for today's WOTD entry
ShakesQuill's Weekly Story No. 2
Welcome to ShakesQuill's Weekly Story, No. 2. We couldn't be more pleased with the efforts of ShakesQuillers on the first Weekly Story, which matured into a story titled " Aetherion."
The rules are simple - I will write a couple of paragraphs, and ShakesQuillers will go from there, adding a paragraph or three or four (whatever) to the story until we publish it in all its glory. Submit as much as you like, and we'll see if we can keep this ball rolling.
Below the "Turn Page" button below are the opening few paragraphs. We're excited to see where our second reader-driven story takes us.
Weekly Story No. 1 - Aetherion
We proudly present our first-ever ShakesQuill reader-created story, "Aetherion." While unfinished, we're truly impressed with the work of JoAskura, wisewebwoman, Wizard_of_Odd and MikeEss, who have helped piece together a story that could still yet go in so many directions (feel free to add more if interested).
She stood up and the pain ripped through her body in the form of an ache in every muscle she had and a couple muscles that had spontaneously formed - their soul reason for existence being to ache. "This is ... , " she questioned aloud as she looked for the first time around her surroundings, " ... San Diego." She slowly started to piece together the events that had led her there. Then, her perception made itself known and she noticed the cops running toward her in all directions. Doing that patented "I've got my gun trained on you yet I am still running toward you" skip-waddle. And shouting. She dedicated herself to start piecing together things faster.
There were several things she noted as the local cops approached her, firing off in her back-brain in no particular order.
1) They looked like penguins.
2) While she had vague timeline of the events of the last 72 hours, she had no idea who *she* was.
State of the ShakesQuill
As we enter the third week of its existence, ShakesQuill has grown daily, and we're already up to 3-5 new posts daily. It has truly been a team effort here at ShakesQuill, and we're thrilled with the reaction from the writers as well as the readers.
So what's new this week? Well, glad you asked. This week we welcome two more "ShakesScribes" to the team, as Kenneth and David K. from the Practical Press have joined the squad. We plan on doing quite a bit with the Practical Press over the coming months, and are excited at the quality and quantity of the work done by the impressive writers at their site. Take a look at the Practical Press here.
Aside from that, this week will feature the second installment of the Weekly Story (yeah, yeah, we missed a week. But .500 is great in baseball, right?) the Monday Mind Opener and a full supply of stories, poems and more from the ShakesQuillers as well as our numerous Guest Writers.
As for additions this week, we will be adding a blogroll that will both link to our writers, as well as to other story sites and writing help sites. If you have any sites you love that you believe should be included in our blogroll, please let me know.
It has been a great opening two weeks here at ShakesQuill, and the ball is just getting rolling. So thank you again for your help and interest as we continue this literary voyage.
Bill
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Rhetoric on the Weekend
Rhetorical figures are the ways in which our language and our thinking fly free of the literal. They are the metaphorical, colorful, artful uses of words that suggest meanings beyond what appears at first glance. Some overly grouchy people out there tend to think that rhetorical figures are a bad thing; language, in the view of these sourpusses, is supposed to be literal, and anything metaphorical is an abuse. Yet, recent linguistic and cognitive studies show that figurative speech and thought are central to our capacity to reason and to communicate -- and they're always central to our writing.
For example, notice how in the first sentence of that paragraph I said that language and thinking "fly free"? No they don't, a literal sourpuss might say, not really. But, a rhetorical person would reply, saying that they fly tells you something about language and thought that you couldn't express so easily if you were being literal and sour. The figures make us better writers, and make our thinking more colorful and more precise.
We'll be exploring figurative language in all sorts of ways in the coming weeks; if this stuff is unfamiliar to you, I hope it's interesting and fun; if you know all of it already, feel free to go get a sandwich or something -- or, you could stick around for the fun of getting back to basics. Let's start this week with a couple of easy figures that we may remember (or not) from high school: metonymy and synecdoche (pronounced "meh-TAH-nah-mee" and "sih-NEK-da-kee"). We use these every day without thinking about them, so they seem a good place to set out.
They're not difficult to understand: in metonymy, we substitute some descriptive attribute of a person or thing for the person or thing itself; in synecdoche, we substitute some relevant part of a person or a thing for the person or thing itself. These two figures have a lot of overlap, but it's still possible to tell them apart most of the time. For example:
LITERAL SENTENCE: All the sailors rushed onto the deck.
METONYMY: All the old salts rushed onto the deck.
SYNECDOCHE: All hands rushed onto the deck.
LITERAL SENTENCE: I stared at the television for hours.
METONYMY: I stared at the idiot box for hours.
SYNECDOCHE: I stared at the screen for hours.
Notice how the figurative sentences are more descriptive and precise than the literal ones? In the first example, the metonymy "old salts" tells you something about who the sailors are, what kind of impression they make, how they are part of a whole set of images connected to legends about the sea, while the synecdoche "hands" tells you what their function is on the ship, emphasizing the work they do. In the second example, the metonymy "idiot box" tells you what sort of thing was on the television while the writer was watching it, what sort of attitude the writer has toward it, how the writer felt while passing the time, while the synecdoche "screen" suggests the level of the writer's attention (shallow) and the superficiality of the activity of watching.
Notice, also, that these figures are not exactly the same as metaphor. In metaphor, one thing is substituted for a separate but similar thing. For example:
LITERAL SENTENCE: All the sailors rushed onto the deck.
METAPHOR: All the worker bees rushed onto the deck.
Not very good, but you get the idea. Metonymy and synecdoche substitute aspects and parts for the whole, while metaphor substitutes a different whole.
There are lots of other rhetorical tools in the box, but these two will give us enough to think about for now. Have fun spotting them in what you read for the next little while (I know I will, alas).
Friday, July 25, 2008
Word of the Day
Misunderbutton
misunderbutton
Function: verb
Year: 2008
1. to button one’s clothing so as to leave one buttonhole at the top empty and one button at the bottom unbuttoned, or vice versa. That is, a failure to fully complete the buttoning process.
2. to fail to complete a simple task.
Ok, I’ll admit it: I made it up.
But it’s a sound word, with a real meaning and etymology.
Remember George Bush? Yeah, I thought you did. He coined that word that hasn’t (yet) made it into Merriam-Webster’s or the OED (I checked), misunderestimate. 
It all fits neatly together in my head, at least.
Thanks to Bitty for today's WOTD entry
Richy Will Never Be a Pirate
Richard knew that he wouldn't make it home to change in time for the performance, so he put his tux on before setting out for the hospital. He needn't worry about his trombone; it was already in the concert hall.
He set off down the street, walking very deliberately. The world titled a little with every step. He stopped. It still tilted. Oh well, he thought to himself, I guess it's going to do that either way, I might as well keep going. He began walking again.
He'd been off kilter for a few days, really off kilter, the universe in constant, personal, motion. On Tuesday he'd had a granola bar for breakfast, and ever since then, everything he'd tried to eat had burned his tongue. Between that and the sore throat, he hadn't had more than water and some applesauce all day. This morning – Wednesday – his vision had gone a little blurry, which made classes hard. Particularly the theory course. Professor Brown's tiny, cramped musical notation had become impossible to read, even from the front row of the lecture hall, and that was the last straw.
The Dance
It began with ritual shouts and taunts of the sort that are often exchanged by people in thrall with their own power, or people who want to create a screen of false bravado in the hopes of distracting others from their actual weakness. This escalated to the immediate precursors of physical contact.
The participants intruded closer and closer into each other's personal space, the volume of taunts increased, facial expressions became more extreme, motions of arms and legs became more pronounced and threatening. The sound and spectacle generated a magnetic field, drawing an audience who started to mentally tally the worth of each participant, as well as the credibility of their threats, verbal and physical. (Wherever things can be measured - objectively or not - judgments and predictions inevitably follow...)
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Writer spotlight: Jon Goode
In keeping with the concept that a big part of our existence is to be a site where writers can be inspired, occasionally here at ShakesQuill I will post a story from another source about an inspiring artist or intriguing new works. Obviously, the other contributors are invited to post these types of stories, and other contributors and ShakesQuillers are encouraged to send me any stories they think should be featured.
While our main focus will remain our own work, reading about someone making their mark can be something that encourages us all. Which is why I chose to share this CNN story on poet Jon Goode:
Originally from Richmond, Virginia, Goode studied economics and finance at James Madison University in Virginia. His Southern-laced vernacular alludes to a rural upbringing. His bookish style -- starched short-sleeve button up with tie, wire-rimmed glasses and a straw boater hat -- is straight out of a Harper Lee novel.
Friends liken him to "a civil rights leader that listens to rap music." Goode's spoken word performances are drawn from a collection of personal stories, most of which are true, he says.
The seasoned wordsmith rose through the ranks to deliver his rhymes to the spoken word mainstream. He's done writing stints and made appearances for Nike, Nickelodeon and CNN's "Black in America."
But it was after an appearance on HBO's "Def Jam Poetry" that Goode really started to get noticed.
Goode says the trek to renown was not easy. For several years, he sent the same demo tape to HBO, hoping to get picked up on Def Poetry Jam. They told him he needed to be more animated, theatrical.
Read the full story at CNN.com.
Find out more about Jon Goode at Laymen Lyric Production.
Word of the Day
Bilious
Pronunciation: \ˈbil-yəs\
Function: adjective
The adjective for bile, bilious has five meanings, two being exclusively medical and three related to the "humors" of the body. The word "bilious" goes back to the old belief that there were four bodily humors (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood) and these four humors determined a person's temperament. "Bilious" was the personality type associated with an excess of yellow bile. The word "bilious" derives from the French "bilieux," which in turn came from "bilis," the Latin term for "bile." The five meanings are:
1) of or relating to bile.
2) suffering from liver dysfunction (and especially excessive secretion of bile).
3) indicative of a peevish ill-natured disposition.
4) sickeningly unpleasant
5) resembling bile, especially in color (yellowish-green)
"The bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for The Saturday Evening Post don't know anything more about real battle than they do about fornicating."
— Patton, 1970
Thanks to Faith for today's WOTD entry
Love's End
Ellie had once loved Richard for many reasons, but as their marriage finally came to its long-deferred end, none of those reasons seemed real anymore. She hadn't forgotten them; she could vividly recall, if only in fact of thought and devoid of associated feeling, the joy at seeing him enter a room once upon a time, or hearing his voice at the other end of a phone line. A memory of him--lying on their bed on a Saturday morning before they were wed, with the sun streaming in through the window and falling across his golden skin, lighting up the hairs on his forearm like tiny little flames--was still there, still easily accessible. She still found him beautiful, as he had always been, but his beauty was distant now, something only to be admired, but not loved. The reasons she loved him had slipped away from her, and had she tried to reach for them, her fingertips would have found nothing but a gossamer mist merely hinting at something long having lost its substance.
They lived like two ghosts in the same flat, even as the paperwork became final. It was a lovely flat, which neither of them wanted to leave, but neither could afford on their own. So Richard moved into the guest room, and they went about their separate lives, often going days without speaking, then sharing a dinner together, as if it were a perfectly natural thing to do.
Ellie decided to tell Richard that she was in love this other man. It was a practical concern, in part; they would need to sell the flat. But it was also just something that Richard needed to know. She told him, hesitantly but candidly. He feigned happiness for her, even as his insides churned with jealousy. It wasn't that he wanted her, he told himself, but that he wanted what she had.
He wasn't sure it was true, but then again, Richard wasn't completely certain that he had ever cared for her in equal measure, either.
The week came when they were to leave the flat. Ellie's new partner, John, came to the home they were abandoning to a younger couple, and Richard met him, even though he didn't have to; he could have found countless excuses to be gone for the evening, any one of which Ellie would have gladly accepted. But his curiosity outweighed his impetus for self-protection, and any sense of propriety.
The three of them spoke, haltingly, inelegantly, over a bottle of wine, and Richard couldn't avoid the realization that the awkwardness was his responsibility. He was, at turns, too jovial, then too solemn. He persistently expected to catch Ellie and John shooting each other exasperated or pitying looks, but they did not, and he found himself having to resist an unreasonable agitation at their failure to indulge his suspicions.
Ellie and John were, unbeknownst to either, both proud of the other for deftly handling the uneasiness Richard wore on his sleeve. Secretly, quietly, admiring each other, they failed to notice much of his discomfited emotional fidgeting, which, in the end, made navigating it that much easier.
In spite of the simmering tumult, Richard liked John. He watched, more obviously than he should have, John and Ellie interacting, his hand on the small of her back, leaning in to listen to her with an intent expression of interest Richard couldn't recall having ever offered. They were, together, precisely as his eavesdropping had led him to expect they would be.
When John left that evening, Richard approached Ellie with an uncharacteristic candidness. He told her that John was a good man, that John would be able to love her in a way that he never could.
Ellie gave him a half-smile, and nodded. And with that, they were both free.
In Memoriam: "I Love My Life!"
When I looked at the calendar today, it wasn't immediately apparent why it seemed like there was something about the significance of the date that kept gently nagging at me. And then I remembered…ah, yes, that was it. A year ago today he died. A week after that, he came to me in a dream, the memory of which I recorded in my journal at the time: I was in the living room and heard a knock on the door. Before I could answer it, I saw him in the entryway or—to be more exact—I saw through him. In that lucid-dream moment, there was no mistaking that he was dead. He appeared not as a ghost, exactly, but not as someone of this dimension, either. He strode purposefully across the room, making his way from one end of the house to the other. He spoke no words, but turned toward me in slow motion, acknowledging my presence with only a nod and continuing on until he was out of my sight. He carried a briefcase, which is a puzzling detail because, although we had been work colleagues, I don't ever recall seeing him with a briefcase at the office…
He had been diagnosed with brain cancer that January and had been given only three to six months to live, managing to almost make it to his 37th birthday last summer. Although his time on earth was tragically short, I personally can think of no one who even came close to cramming as many experiences and as much joy into that brief a lifetime. Perhaps, some of us even speculated, it was almost as if he had known on some unconscious level that there was a reason he needed to live his life at warp speed.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Word of the Day
Leitmotif
Pronunciation: \LYT-moh-teef\
Function: noun
1. In music drama, a marked melodic phrase or short passage which always accompanies the reappearance of a certain person, situation, abstract idea, or allusion in the course of the play; a sort of musical label.
2. A dominant and recurring theme.
"As is so often the case in a crazy household . . . guilt becomes a leitmotif."
— Frederick Busch, "My Brother, Myself", New York Times, February 9, 1997
Thanks to Constant Comment for today's WOTD entry
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Word of the Day
Infix
Before we get to today's word, let's review. In elementary school, we learned all about prefixes and suffixes. At least, I hope we did:
Prefixes are those little add-ons that go at the beginnings of words. (These are called "roots" by most of us, although to linguists it's a little more complicated – prefixes actually attach to morphemes, not words, but since I'm not a linguist, I'll back away from getting myself in any deeper. For purposes of this discussion, let's stay with the elementary school definition.) A prefix modifies the meaning of the word:
clear — unclear
cancerous — precancerous
decisive — indecisive
Prefix itself is a word with a prefix:
fix — prefix
Then, there's the add-on that goes on the end of a word and also modifies its meaning, the suffix:
guile — guileless
energy — energize
However, in many languages other than English, a common modifier is the infix – an add-on that goes in the midst of a word.
Here's an official definition from the American Heritage Dictionary, via Dictionary.com, although most of the definitions I found – including this one – would not be all that helpful without further information. Here is the definition of the word as both noun and verb:
in•fix (ĭn-fĭks')
tr.v. in•fixed, in•fix•ing, in•fix•es
1. To fix in the mind; instill.
2. Linguistics To insert (a morphological element) into the body of a word.
n. Linguistics (ĭn'fĭks')
An inflectional or derivational element appearing in the body of a word. For example, in Tagalog, the active verb sulat "write" can be converted to a passive, "written," by inserting the infix -in-, yielding sinulat.
[Back-formation from Middle English infixed, stuck in, from Latin īnfīxus, past participle of īnfīgere, to fasten in : in-, in; see in-2 + fīgere, to fasten; see dhīgw- in Indo-European roots.]
And while in English the infix is less common, it seems to be gaining some ground, coming to us through what is seen (again, not by linguists) as non-standard language.
Hip-hop employs the occasional infix. The best known have been popularized by Snoop Dogg: "izz" and "izzle" have made their way into at least some of our vocabularies.
But I offer all of this is to get us to this one point: Hip-hop notwithstanding, infixes are rare in English. However, there is one beloved to many English speakers, which we use as an intensifier: fuckin. (Even the more refined of us will often use its more modest fraternal twin, freakin.)
We absofuckinlutely love it.
We find it fanfuckintastic.
It is unfuckinbelievable how much we love it.
Like so much else about grammar, English speakers who use this infix don't have to stop to think about the formal rules regarding the infix, or how rare it is – they just use it, with enthusiasm.
Thanks to Bitty for today's WOTD entry
A Hint of Sandalwood
I found the tapes at the bottom of my closet, which was strange, since I had long ago upgraded to DVD some time ago. Four clean black boxes with white labels, each of them addressed to a different person. One was addressed to a well-known movie director; when I opened the box for this one, the director's home address, phone number and e-mail address were printed on the inside of the cover in very pretty handwriting that clearly wasn't mine. One was addressed to a man I had never heard of, but apparently he was a doctor of some sort, based in Boston. One was addressed "to my mother"; I opened the box to find a label with an address to a woman in San Francisco affixed to the inside cover.
The last box was blank on the outside. I opened the box to find a tape with no markings, but the inside of the box said only three words: "For my love."
I went out to the garage and hunted around in the stack of old electronic boxes that I kept for no apparent reason. For some reason, long ago I decided that tinkering with gadgets was what I was good at, so I always kept a small supply of old devices around to cannibalize and slap together into interesting configurations. I was reasonably certain that I had an old VCR among the old game systems and broken record players, and soon enough I found a small box that I had purchased cheaply from the local big box store. Finding the necessary cables to connect to the flat-screen TV in my living room, I returned to the house and hooked up the box.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Word of the Day
Amanuensis
Pronunciation: uh-man-yoo-en-sis
Plural: Amanuenses
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin, from a, ab + manus hand
Date: 1610
A person whose employment is to write what another dictates, or to copy what another has written.
"If she is telling me the truth then I am her biographer. Otherwise, I am just an amanuensis."
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Thanks to Constant Comment for today's WOTD entry
The Indian Queen, Chapter 1
Title: The Indian Queen
Author: baltimoreandme
Type: historical fiction/fantasy novel
~a novel of manners~
Prologue
Near evening, a crew of fishermen worked on a sternwheeler several miles from shore, shouting over the roar of machinery as the net-wheels creaked and groaned. The sea was bright and flat and the wheeler cast a long black shadow on the water. Slowly, the bulging net emerged from the water, ropes dripping. Steam-powered machinery moved it over the deck, where it obscured the reddening sun for a moment, and then the operator loosened the claw, the net dropped and swung in the air and the catch slithered into the hold. Miles away across the water, thunder rumbled. No one looked up.
Beyond the stretch of calm, a towering mass of clouds hung above the water. It extended from north to south as far as could be wheeled, from where the sea was solid ice down to where, from the older maps, the Europers knew a vast continent diminished to a point. Nearest the water there was rain. Sheets of water whipped and billowed out like sails over the ocean, gray and then suddenly white-gold, too bright to look at as the sun penetrated some unknown grove deep in the storm. The wind dragged the water, shrieking and howling, into whorls and icy ribbons that tore up and down the Atlantic. Higher up, lightening snapped and flickered. Bolts of electricity left caverns in the air and the air rolled booming back into the hollows.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
