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Here's a charming moment from Genevieve (1953), dedicated to literary scalawag Jonathan Caws-Elwitt (who coins words in his sleep — and remembers them upon waking!): |
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A collaborative work between poets Gary Barwin and Hugh Thomas and featuring illustrations by Craig Conley, the book – as its title suggests – takes the paradoxical and absurd prose of the Czech literary giant as a point of departure for tangential musings on language, transformation and, of course, the nature of parable itself. The book’s authors summarized the impetus of the project early in the evening with the proclamation that “new writing is the imaginary future of past writing.” It is with this sense of creative lineage that Franzlations sets out to explore the labyrinthine corridors of Kafka’s work. ...
Against projections of Conley’s minimal, diagrammatic illustrations, Barwin and Thomas alternated rapidly between each other, juggling their book’s seemingly self-contained aphorisms and parables in a rhythm that highlighted the project’s overall cohesion.
A tribute to Kafka stripped of the element of narrative might easily risk being a fragmented experience, a mere collection of paradoxes and non-rational linguistic puzzles. Fortunately, Barwin and Thomas inject the word-play of Franzlations with exactly the kind of wit and dark humor often overlooked in Kafka’s own work. Rather than focus on the nightmarish quality of Kafka’s writing, Barwin and Thomas emphasize the playful irony of metamorphosis, the way in which things both are and are not what they appear to be. In one memorable riff on that infamous opening line, the authors recounted how “one morning Ovid woke to find himself a Czech insurance officer.” While Barwin and Thomas moved deftly between these registers Thursday night, between light-heartedness and cerebral absurdity, so many mirrors, inversions and mazes eventually sent this reviewer’s head spinning. Clearly, Franzlations is a book to be absorbed slowly and revisited. After all, as the authors themselves noted, “a road is a labyrinth unfurled.”
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Not a joke. I found this on the shelf in the bookstore when I was looking at other dictionaries. You can explore it online.
There’s not an awful lot to say about one-letter words, except that there are more than 1000 of them. Many have to do with Roman numerals, music and science, but a fair few have some surprising definitions.
By far the most interesting to me were these ghoulish definitions:
You know the expression, “branded a thief”? To the extent that I had ever thought about it, I’d assumed the phrase was metaphorical. It’s not. Until 1827 in America, thieves were, literally, branded on the thumb with the letter T.
And that is not all. Humans have a long history of shaming and harming each other with branded or incised letters, apparently.
In Colonial America, drunkards were forced to wear the letter D, made of red cloth and sewn onto a white ground, so A is not the only scarlet letter. Civil War deserters were branded with the letter D, as well, on the buttock, hip or cheek. The letter was made with a hot iron or a razor.
Until 1822, the letter F (for “fray-maker”) was branded on the cheeks of people who fought in church. Blasphemers were branded on the forehead with the letter B.
The ancient Romans branded false accusers with a K (for kalumnia, lie), and in England, R was used as a mark for rogues.
And on that cheerful note, I end my month of looking at dictionaries. Happy Halloween, everyone!
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And the song that you sing Will speak louder than you But always in a different language —Kurt Harlan of Information Society, " The Sky Away" |
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From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:
"The book gobbles us up immediately with its little fly-legs." —R aymond QueneauTherefore, a flyleaf:
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What a confetti that summer was, spent snipping invented words in Shakespeare. Occam's razor was at hand for painstakingly isolating those simplest inventions, the elegantly minimalist one-letter words. Hawthorne may have his scarlet letter, but Shakespeare's coinages are pure gold. The poet Geof Huth suggests that tiny expressions both surprise and justify, making ourselves vessels of concentration, inviting us to accept the mantle of makers of meaning. Thus attending to precision, "we become whom we are asked to become" (Geof Huth, " in tininess, we," June 22, 2009). The Shakespeare Papers dedicated an entire issue to one-letter words, and here's one of the pages we contributed. See our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.
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