OK

OK
ety. - Apparently < the initial letters of oll (or orl ) korrect , jocular alteration of ‘all correct’: see A. W. Read in Amer. Speech (1963) 38, (1964) 39, etc.

blue nights

In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. This period of the blue nights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about here and where the end of daylight is fast and lost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live. You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming--in fact not at all a warming--yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximately finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day "l'heure bleue." To the English it was "the gloaming." The very word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes--the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour--carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipped through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone. This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warming.

Joan Didion, Blue Nights

words

fillip
n. - A movement made by bending the last joint of a finger against the thumb and suddenly releasing it (so as to propel some small object, or merely as a gesture); a smart stroke or tap given by this means.--Something that serves to rouse, excite, or animate; a stimulus.

preterist
n. - Theol. A person who believes that the prophecies of the book of Revelation have already been fulfilled.--A person whose chief interest is in the past; a person who favours the past or past beliefs.

preterition
n. - Rhetoric. A figure in which attention is drawn to something by professing to omit it.--The act of passing over something without notice; omission, disregard.--Theol. Omission from God's elect; non-election to salvation.

apnea
n. - Pathol. Suspension of breathing; cessation of respiration.
ety. Greek ἄπνοια , < ἄπνοος breathless.

byssus
n. - An exceedingly fine and valuable textile fibre and fabric known to the ancients; apparently the word was used, or misused, of various substances, linen, cotton, and silk, but it denoted properly (as shown by recent microscopic examination of mummy-cloths, which according to Herodotus were made of βύσσος) a kind of flax, and hence is appropriately translated in the English Bible ‘fine linen’.--Zool. The tuft of fine silky filaments by which molluscs of the genus Pinna and various mussels attach themselves to the surface of rocks; it is secreted by the byssus-gland in the foot.
‘These filaments have been spun, and made into small articles of apparel‥Their colour is brilliant, and ranges from a beautiful golden yellow to a rich brown; they also are very durable‥The fabric is so thin that a pair of stockings may be put in an ordinary-sized snuff-box’ ( S. W. Beck Draper's Dict. 39).

pruritus (prurit)
n. - Itching of the skin or other surface. Also fig.: a strong desire or craving.

crapula
n. - The sickness or indisposition following upon a drunken or gluttonous debauch.
ety. Latin crāpula excessive drinking, inebriation, intoxication, < Greek κραιπάλη drunken headache or nausea, the result of a drunken debauch. In adopting the Greek word, the Romans seem to have put the cause for the result; both senses are found in the English derivatives.

suppurate
v. - trans. To cause (a sore, tumour, etc.) to form or secrete pus; to bring to a head. Also absol. to induce suppuration. Obs.--intr. To form or secrete pus, come to a head.

lanugo
n. - Fine soft hair or down, or a surface resembling this; spec. that covering the human fœtus.

night

He did not see the stars any more. Walking from Skinner's his eyes were on the ground. And when it was not too cold to open the skylight in the garret, the stars seemed always veiled by cloud or fog or mist. The sad truth was that the skylight commanded only that most dismal patch of night sky, the galactic coal-sack, which would naturally look like a dirty night to any observed in Murphy's condition, cold, tired, angry, impatient and out of conceit with a system that seemed the superfluous cartoon of his own.

Samuel Beckett, Murphy

words

austral
adj. - Belonging to the south, southern; also, influenced by the south wind, warm and moist.

eruct
v. - To void wind noisily from the stomach through the mouth.--To emit (fumes) by eructation.--Of a volcano.

fosse
n. - spec. A ditch constructed as a defensive barrier in front of or around a building, settlement, etc.; a moat encircling a fortified place.--A deep, wide-mouthed hollow or excavation; a hole, a pit. Also: a place of burial or sacrifice, a grave. rare and poet. or hist. in later use

civet
n. - A genus of carnivorous quadrupeds, yielding the secretion called by the same name. Specifically, the central African species, Viverra civetta, an animal ranking in size and appearance between the fox and the weasel. Often called more fully civet-cat.--A yellowish or brownish unctuous substance, having a strong musky smell, obtained from sacs or glands in the anal pouch of several animals of the Civet genus, especially of the African Civet-cat. It is used in perfumery.

marasmus
n. - Originally: any wasting disorder. Now: severe loss of body weight, spec. (in Med.) that caused in children by protein-energy malnutrition.
cf. marasme - ety. French marasme consumption (1538 in Middle French)

clonic
adj. - Med. Designating or relating a type of movement in which there is alternating contraction and relaxation of one or more muscles occurring in rapid succession, as in some types of epileptic seizure and certain other disorders; opposed to tonic.
cf. clonus - Med. A spasm or series of spasms of alternate muscular contraction and relaxation.

tonic
adj. - Physiol. and Pathol. Pertaining to, consisting in, or producing tension: esp. in relation to the muscles.

oakum
n. - Originally: the coarse woody fibres (hurds or tow) separated from the finer fibres of flax or hemp; (also) †clippings, trimmings, shreds (obs.). Later (also): esp. loosely twisted fibres obtained chiefly by untwisting and picking old hemp rope; such fibres or the like, used as a caulking material for the seams of wooden ships, the joints of pipes, etc., and formerly sometimes in dressing wounds. Now chiefly hist.
The picking of old rope was a task formerly assigned to convicts and inmates of workhouses.

aposiopesis
n. - A rhetorical artifice, in which the speaker comes to a sudden halt, as if unable or unwilling to proceed.

bijou
n. - A jewel, a trinket; a ‘gem’ among works of art. Also attrib. Loosely as adj.: small and elegant, luxurious (applied esp. to houses).

photographs

It is often said that it was the painters who invented Photography (by bequeathing it their framing, the Albertian perspective, and the optic of the camera obscura). I say: no, it was the chemists. For the noeme ‘That-has-been’ was possible only on the day when a scientific circumstance (the discovery that silver halogens were sensitive to light) made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

words

hebetude
n. - The condition or state of being blunt or dull; dullness, bluntness, obtuseness, lethargy

eidolon
n. - An unsubstantial image, spectre, phantom

fulguration
n. - The action of lightning or flashing like lightning; chiefly in pl. flashes of lightning. Now rare in literal sense.--Med. The destruction of tissues, esp. tumours, by means of electric sparks.
fulgur - Lightning, a flash of lightning (ety. Latin, < fulgēre to lighten.)
fulgor | fulgour - A brilliant or flashing light; dazzling brightness, splendour. (ety. Latin fulgor , < fulgēre to shine.)

anamnesis
n. - The recalling of things past; recollection, reminiscence.--Liturg. That part of the Eucharistic canon in which the sacrifice of Christ is recalled and pleaded.

words

aeruginous | eruginous
adj. - Of the nature or colour of verdigris; containing or characterized by basic copper carbonate; bluish-green. Also: ferruginous, rusty.

ruelle
n. - The passage or space between a bed and the wall; (hence also) the side or part of a bed next to the wall.--This space, or the area around the bed generally, where a distinguished person received favoured guests while in bed, esp. where (in 17th and 18th cent. France) a lady of fashion held morning receptions.

maieutic
adj. - Relating to or designating the Socratic process, or other similar method, of assisting a person to become fully conscious of ideas previously latent in the mind.

auscultation
n. - The action of listening or hearkening.--Med. The action of listening, with ear or stethoscope, to the sound of the movement of heart, lungs, or other organs, in order to judge their condition of health or disease.

sublation
n. - The middle part of a liquid that has thrown its sediment. Obs.--The act of taking away, removal.

sublate
v. - Logic. To deny, contradict, disaffirm: opposed to posit.

conarium
n. - The pineal gland of the brain (held by Descartes to be the seat of the soul).
ety. modern Latin < Greek κωνάριον , diminutive of κῶνος pine-cone.

counterpane
n. - The outer covering of a bed, generally more or less ornamental, being woven in a raised pattern, quilted, made of patch-work, etc.; a coverlet, a quilt.

caecum
n. - Physiol. The blind-gut; the first part of the large intestine, so called because it is prolonged behind the opening of the ilium into a cul-de-sac. It is present in man, most mammals and birds, and in many reptiles. With pl. cæca: Any blind tube, or tube with one end closed.

vagitus
n. - A cry or wail; spec. that of a new-born child.

naevus | nevus
n. - Med. Any congenital, usually pigmented, flat or raised lesion on the skin, consisting of a local proliferation of melanocytes or blood vessels; a mole or birthmark.

asthenia
n. - Lack of strength, diminution of vital power, weakness, debility

wantum
n. - nonce-wd. Deficiency or desire, considered as something quantifiable.

one night

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

on his father

My father appeared to me to have recovered all his old force and zest during his several months in Florida, and he looked wonderfully rejuvenated. Some years back, as a result of surgery, he’d lost the musculature in his midsection and developed a stomach, but otherwise he was, for his age, a most fit-looking man of medium height whose spontaneous, unassuming virility and spirited decency had made him instantaneously appealing to the widows around. He had been impressively strong through the arms and the chest when he was young, and a little of that solidity was still discernible in his upper torso, particularly so with this resurgence of vitality. Though he could be bluntly outspoken and dominate a conversation with his boiling anti-Republican diatribes, he happened to be an agreeable-looking person as well, and the mundane forthrightness his appearance exuded registered on all sorts of people as real charm. If he’d had the leisure for it, or the instinct, or the need, he might even have been handsome in an anonymous sort of way, but ’handsome’ was no asset where he’d fought his battles, and long ago he had settled upon looks people trusted rather than envied or praised. Now, of course, his hair was thin and had only a touch of brown left in it; and his face, though unlined, had slackened along the jaw-line into the pronounced family dewlap; and his ears seemed somehow to have been tugged a bit, like taffy, and lengthened. Only his eyes, really, remained ‘beautiful,’ and you never would have known that unless you happened to be nearby when he slipped off his glasses for a moment. Then you would have seen how much gray there was in those eyes, and that there was even some green there—up close you would have seen how gentle and untroubled those eyes were, as though they alone had existed since 1901 beyond the reverberations of that crude, imperfect, homemade dynamo whose stubborn output had driven him through the obstacle course just about everything had been.

Philip Roth, Patrimony

ave

ave

ave [also HAVE, possibly a Punic word.
Note: this word is treated as though from
a verb aveo, hence the forms (h)aveto;
(h)avete; (h)avere] (formal expression
of greeting) Be well! Fare well! Be
happy! (only in salutations); (on
sepulchral monuments) now it is night.

Anne Carson, Nox

the air, deeply

In the last days of my father's life
I tried to name his smell--like yeast,
ochre catalyst feeding in liquid,
eating malt, excreting mash--
sour ferment, intoxicant, exaltant, the
strong drink of my father's sweat,
I bent down over the hospital bed
and smelled it. It smelled like wet cement,
a sidewalk of crushed granite, quartz
and Jurassic shale, or the sour odor
of the hammered copper humidor
full of moist, bent, blackish
shreds of pipe tobacco; or the smelling-salts
tang of chlorine on the concrete floor of the
changing room at the pool in summer;
or the faint mold from the rug in his house
or the clouded pungence of the mouth and sputum
of a drinking man. And it was also the socket
of a man's leather shoe, acid with
polish and basic with stale socks--
always, in his smell, the sense
of stain and the attraction of the stain,
the harmony of oil and metal,
as if the life of manufacture and
industry were using his body
as a gland for their sweat. On the first day,
it rose on his forehead, a compound disc
of sweat, I brought it off on my lips.
After his last breath, he lay there
tilted on his side, not moving,
not breathing, making no sound,
but he smelled the same, that fresh tainted
industrial domestic male smell,
dark, reflecting points of light.
I had thought the last thing between us
would be a word, a look, a pressure
of touch, not that he would be dead
and I would be bending over him
smelling him, breathing him in
as you would breathe the air, deeply, before going into exile.

Sharon Olds, "His Smell"

like a guilty thing

7
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that an be clasp'd no more -
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here: but far away
The noise of life begins again.
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "from In Memoriam A. H. H."

the garden

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

Ulysses

a grey sweet mother

Woodshadows floated silently by though the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

Ulysses