Monkeydo -- Nonfiction

Image from emery.edu

"Did you sleep well?" my husband asked.

"I did," I said. "After I put the cat out of the bedroom."

"You got us a bad cat," he said as he fished around under the cook stove for cat toys. Finding none, he wadded up a bit of aluminum foil and proceeded to play kick ball with Kočka. And fetch! Who ever heard of a cat playing fetch?

But that's not what I come here to talk about. (A corruption of a line from Arlo Guthrie's slightly more than 18 minute long song Alice's Restaurant. If you haven't heard it since you were a rebellious teen in the 60's click on the link, lean back, inhale, and enjoy. If you've never heard it, then you should. And if you think you don't have eighteen plus free minutes, you definitely should.)

What I did come here to talk about is words.

At 6:14 this a.m. my phone sounded, waking me to let me know I'd gotten a new email. Apparently I had been working on a writing problem while I slept, because I awoke with a much needed monkeydo. (You probably have the same bemused expression my husband had when I used that word to explain how successfully I'd slept. And by-the-bye, bemused pronounced bih-myoozd, is an adjective meaning bewildered or confused. It has nothing to do with the word amuse unless, of course you see it in a blog post exploring words as a means of entertainment.)

When you write, you need believable reasons for characters to say or do what the plot needs them to. That's a monkeydo. Or if you need them to be in a particular place or situation, getting them there is a monkeydo. Else you have a deus ex machina.

I don't know where the term monkeydo comes from, but I don't think I coined it myself. Which brings me to terminologicalinexactitudinarian. That's my favorite word. I googled it to use in this post. And Oh my god! this is what I found

Writers sometimes think about big words... - Claudia Weber Wagner ... 

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=427583950611349&story_fbid...

Writers sometimes think about big words -- and I don't mean terminologicalinexactitudinarian -- today I mean justice. Check out my latest blog post....

That's right. The ONLY thing Google brought up on that word was me. How many times have you googled something and it only brought up one? Much less that one being you. Talk about feeling important! I'm still smiling like the proverbial Cheshire Cat.

Now that wasn't my first reaction. My first reaction was that I must have misspelled it the exact same way I must have misspelled it in the said reference listed by Google. I thought it was a term coined by Winston Churchill, one of my favorite word-coiners. (Terminologicians?) So I connected it to his name and googled again. This time I got "about 4,050 results." Here's one:

terminological inexactitude - definition of terminological inexactitude in ... 

www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/.../terminological-inexactitud...

OxfordDictionaries.com

Definition of terminological inexactitude in English: Share this entry. email cite discuss ... Origin. First used by Winston Churchill in a Commons speech in 1906.

Now I must question my whole understanding of the word. I don't think I made it up, nor did I make up the story wrapped around the coining of the word. I'm sure I heard it somewhere -- The Dick Cavett Show, my humanities class at Central State, one of the Muppets on Sesame Street. And the context sounded so Churchill.

The story was that the politicians in Great Britain's House of Commons are not allowed to call each other 'liars' so . . . . Apparently the part of the story about using that word in Parliament is true. I googled it.

And one more thing, which has nothing to do with this post other than I got it when I googled "words images." Isn't the picture at the top of this blog beautiful?

Kingsolver – A Review (Rumination)

I thought to call this piece a review, but I have a daughter. And as any mother of a daughter knows, what we think doesn’t matter. She graciously pointed out to me that I’ve never written a “review.” Not a proper review. She likes what I write but, they’re not reviews.

Okay. I’ll call this a rumination – as I will all my reviews henceforward.

That same daughter introduced me to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, a marvelous novel written in first person. First person from five points of view. As a writer, I understand the difficulty of portraying a character’s unique point of view, then maintaining that identifiable point of view through the length of a novel. Kingsolver did it with five characters, a mother and her four daughters, the children ranging in age from five to fifteen at the beginning. She wrote each as an identifiable individual with particular peculiarities of thought and language. Five significant and singular points of view.

So when I was looking for a book of creative nonfiction Kingsolver’s name in the credits of Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, along with Amy Tan and David Sedaris, I was sold.

Creative nonfiction is new to me. At least the term. Having enjoyed David Sedaris and Bailey White and Baxter Black for years on NPR, Creative nonfiction in the short form is not new to me at all. Come to think of it, Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” would be considered creative nonfiction.

“But that’s not what I come here to talk about.”

I came here to talk about Barbara Kingsolver, the woman I met in her work “High Tide in Tucson,” a wonderful true story that begins with a displaced hermit crab and moves into her life.

Kingsolver doesn’t define herself as a high school English teacher would, giving us her date of birth and where she went to school and when she married and how many children she has and how many awards and commendations she’s received. Or, as too commonly with autobiographies and memoirs of people successful in their field, what celebrities she’s met and slept with and/or disapproved of.

She offers us her view of living. Not in florid and overblown language, but concretely as a true word smith should.

“It’s not such a wide gulf to cross,” she writes “from survival to poetry. We hold fast to the old passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore.” 

I've been there and am doing that. I bet you have and are, too.