- prívet
- clématis
- bígoted
- pólypany
- múltiple
- cátechism
- sólace
- péctoral
- Botocúdos
- málleable
- nastúrtium
The diacritical marks are his, made in case he ever had to pronounce these words in front of his students.
Davis’s essay in the new Paris Review, on translating Madame Bovary, is great. I read it on the train ride down to Brooklyn this morning. Right around the part where she is discussing the idea of equivalency in translation, a woman seated a few feet away offered me a Ritz cracker; she stared at me reading for the rest of the ride, after I declined.
This was fine though. I had thoughtful Davis to distract me.
Perhaps because I find the prose of women writers such as Jean Rhys, Anne Carson, Lydia Davis, Marguerite Duras, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, Octavia Butler, Eileen Myles, and their ilk often fiercer in form and effect than that of their male counterparts, from Ernest Hemingway to Raymond Carver, Western literary history’s habit of aligning men with tough rigor and women with a hazy “écriture féminine” (or, analogously, Western art history’s tradition of aligning men with the muscular decisiveness of line, and women with the spacey formlessness of color) has always struck me as odd: more of a prescription or fantasy than a description or observation.
-Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
K, my Seattleite best friend (who reads this! hi!), texted that to me today. I was confused at first, thinking she meant it for someone else, but she explained that she was referencing The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis—which I recently coerced her into buying. “I think perhaps maybe you wrote that page,” K said.
Page 32:
People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?
She knows me well.
I spent my day comparing a galley document to its final incarnation, to see what was omitted or added. Trick was: the omissions were made for particular political reasons. There’s a vast difference between “It would appear” and “It is”; between “definite distinction” and “probable difference.” There were multiple points where the final document went weak compared to the galley, because the galley’s wording would not have come off as “favorable” for the industry.
This, of course, got me thinking about the purposefulness of words and how my favorite writers manage to make each one matter. It’s hard not to be sloppy. It’s hard to make each word a decided choice in a work that piles 60,000+ of them on top of one another. But the best authors, my favorite authors, pick each word because it’s the exact word that needs to be in that exact place.
On top of that, these authors have pushed away those connectors between words that are so ingrained in everyone else. Fires don’t automatically flicker; wars aren’t waged; chills don’t snake up spines. Authors like Anne Carson, Gary Lutz, Herman Melville, Lydia Davis. And others, of course others.
Just check out this sentence in Moby-Dick (which I know I keep rambling about, but I’m rereading it and it’s so great to be rereading it, so I can’t help it):
Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play—this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair.
Oof.
Also, this great great (and completely relevant..!) drawing by Matt Kish, from his One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick project. This one is from Page 249.
But anyway.
Right now, my favorite words are “scaffolding” and “obsidian.” They’re both tall, solid, strong words, with a slight syllabic slip to them.
