Chagrin (def.)

cha-grin', n. [Fr. chagrin, grief, sorrow, vexation, from chagrin, a kind of roughened leather used for rasping wood.] mortification, disappointment, humiliation, embarrassment, etc. caused by failure or discomfiture.

Syn.--vexation, mortification. --Vexation springs from a sense of loss, disappointment, etc., mortification from wounded pride; chagrin may spring from either, and is not usually as keen or lasting.

-- from Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, deluxe 2nd edition

Words at Ana Verse with "bra" in them

(Bla-bah-bra)
Algebra
library
brains
brainstorms
brass
Brad
brandy
vibrant
Celebrate
Rembrandt
embraced
bravely
branches
Brazilian
bracelet
braggy
brand
brainwashing
bras
Abraham
Brathwaite
Brady
cerebral
Brasil
algebraic

(rev. Nov. 26, 2008)

My Aunt Was a Physicist

My aunt, Frances Alsmiller, was a physicist married to another physicist, "Tut" Alsmiller. I've gotten over the surprise of learning of this in 2000 -- and had meant to assimilate it as personal biographical information -- and simply to refer to her (both are now deceased) -- as my aunt. Earlier in life I had been told that our aunt and uncle (my mother's siblings) were doctors. We never met them due to the fact that my mother was adopted as an infant in 1930 out of that family -- her mother died shortly after giving birth to her -- by her father's cousin, a woodcrafter, and his wife, Wisconsin dairy farmers. I now refer to my mother's original family as her "other family."

Our mother spoke once against "blood arguments," and this meant, among other things, that we were not to think of ourselves magically as "doctors" because her siblings were doctors. Now I am not to think of myself magically as a "physicist" since her sister was one -- born in 1929 or so -- or as psychiatrists because her brother was one -- and yet, I find it thrilling to realize that my aunt was a physicist, more thrilling than I found it to think of her as a "doctor," for whatever reason -- perhaps it seems even more daring, and perhaps math has to do with it. I, too, loved algebra and once worked at a mathematics library in Madison.

I learned in the course of my mother's "other family" coming to light that her original mother, Clara Swanson (b. 1900, and not, I think, related to May Swenson, who was born in Utah in 1919, and whose parents were also from Sweden) was a poet and teacher and that Frances Alsmiller wrote about physics and spirituality. I would find out where my aunt's papers are kept and whether any of my natural grandmother's poems are extant.

The family were "Spiritualists" -- perhaps they even knew Harry Houdini, another spiritualist, who came from nearby Appleton, Wisconsin. All of this is very interesting, at least to me. My mother is anything but a "spiritualist" (spiritualists used seances to bring people back from the dead), so I see that she has kept to her argument against "blood" certainties. My mother and I both graduated from UW-Madison, she in 1952 and I in 1984.

By way of coincidence, then, regarding "Tut": In 1998 I won a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant in "non-fiction," for excerpts from an unpublished mixed-genre ms. called Work on What Has Been Spoiled. I used the grant to complete work on a short story collection now called Institute of Tut: Short Stories. I had renamed the collection only months before I learned that we had an uncle-in-law who went by the name of Tut. He was still alive at that time and reportedly said that he would buy a book called Institute of Tut, whether or not he knew his niece had written it. Unfortunately, due to the fact that short stories are a hard sell, especially for a first book, and even with independent presses, I was not able to get it published in time for our uncle to be able to read it. I am beginning to seek publication for it again, after a six-year hiatus. I wrote the stories between 1985 and 1999, and most of them manage to carry, which in literary, if not market, terms is a good thing.

Genre markers

Return visitors to my weblog will notice that each of the entries is now labeled according to the following categories: autobio., bio., chapbook, creative nonfiction, fiction, folk poetry, inquiry (cult.), inquiry (lit.), list, nota., open letter, personal letter, poetry (line-), poetry (prose), short story, sound experiment, and still photo.

True artists, perhaps the best artists, defy categorization. I, on the other hand, have given long contemplation to literary genre, mostly privately, and find that I do desire categorization, not only of my own writing but also of the types of writing -- especially the shorter forms of writing -- that there are: fruit, vegetable, herb, grass, tree.

Now that I have the mechanical ability to label items by genre and sub-genre based on my own determinations, I feel suddenly "forced" to examine the language I have used to refer to limited prose fiction and personal nonfiction. Some of the main terms are: genre, mixed-genre (hybrid genre, inter-genre), creative nonfiction, personal narrative, personal essay, auto-biography, memoir, creative writing, short story, short fiction, literary fiction, novel, novella, prose poetry, piece, entry, fragment, philosophical fiction (phi-fi), realism, surrealism, journal (diary) (notebook), letters (belle lettres) (open letter), notes (noting), design, style, gesture, attitude, structure, form, and voice.

"Short story," whether fictional or non-, is a form. Form means shape. It contains elements: plot, characters, setting, point-of-view, style, dialogue, conflict, and theme.

Short pieces (traces, fragments, entries) may be fictional or non- and not function or not yet function as a form.

How are essays arranged? What is an essay fragment? What is a personal essay fragment?

There is a conjunction between flash fiction and prose poem. Sometimes I call "fiction" friction.

Semi- or half-fiction is a blend, a percentage, estimable by the writer and sometimes by "characters," of what actually has taken place and what could have taken place. It begins to replace what in fact did take place. It is a semi-fictionalized account, the exact details inherent in point-of-view. The "character" assumes the life of a dramatic actor or model, similar to an artist's model, one who may or may not realize he or she is serving in that way.

"Creative nonfiction" is intensely cumbersome as the name of a literary genre, and yet it must be the best name for it so far. I am using "autobio." to mean that the factual basis in the work ought to be honored by the writer and the reader as true, real, or echt (authentic and factual) and "creative nonfiction" to mean the factual basis or sequence of life events -- not meaning "plot" in fiction -- matters less than the artistry or creative arrangements at play in the work. "Creative nonfiction" may advance mutable positions and boundaries.

"Autobio." refers to stories about my own life. "Inquiry" (polemic) refers to cultural commentary and to ways in which personal stories pertain to culture: economics, religion, education, healthcare, medicine, and feminism (old, new, post-, avant-). "Inquiry" includes definition, literary criticism, review, and self- and other-reflexive discourse on how literature is made.

I chose the word "inquiry" instead of other available words, such as "criticism" or "scholarship," if it is, and to echo Lyn Hejinian in her collection of essays called The Language of Inquiry. The opening essay in that volume is called "A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking." In her preface to the essay, she writes, "Prose is not a genre but a multitude of genres. [...]Intrinsic to the existence of boundless multitudes is the impossibility of comprehensiveness and therefore of comprehension." In the first of three passages included there, titled "Variations, a Return of Words," she writes, "Poetry shouldn't succumb to piety, even with regard to illogicality and nonsense." The Language of Inquiry includes 20 separate pieces and constitutes a re-issue of "A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking," first published as a chapbook in 1976. I see that she and I both think about clarinets and guitars.

I have hoped that my serious readers, and there are few of them, could guess properly at the grammar of my strategies. I have hoped my friends, the readers, could find reading it somehow gratifying.

In an article in The Guardian Robert McCrum writes that "literary fiction" as a designation, especially as put into practice in the United States, has outlived its happiest phase and is destined for decline (Sunday, August 5, 2001). Tough it is that these markers refer to literary mannerisms and mechanisms and not to what is non-literary, but they are also practical.

"Literary," as I might mean it, refers to creative or inventive styles in prose. These are non-market-based or non-commercial styles in creative writing, similar, taken by themselves, in their low profitability to poetry: Works that pretend or tend toward genius and high art as opposed to simpler, more entertainingly plotted works intended for a more general reading audience. McCrum argues that "literary fiction" has become its own market-based genre (like western or horror or mystery). McCrum points to creative writing programs and colonies for the answer: In the United States we are trained as creative writers and our biases dating back to school days are ingrained. Taste is the name for it, but it is a taste soon-inherited and not a cultivated, discerning form of it.

Taste hardwired into one when one is most aspiring as a writer, while one is living at a distance from family and early friends and while one is forgoing other livings, even writing as a living, is difficult to divest. It is hard for those writers, who less and less are readers, to adapt their skills or to admit to the circumscribed range of their interests. They are mostly all mannerists who conform to small new developments five to ten years after someone more innovative than they has invented a new or an original way -- in style or method -- then perhaps taken heat for it.

"Provincial miniaturist," McCrum suggests, is one meaning of what the "literary fiction" writer might really be, and, for my safety boat, I accept the gibe gladly. Unlike most artists who reject labeling, I seek it to make my work a little easier, my heart a little lighter, my path a little wiser. "Provincial miniaturist" describes me.

Approaches, styles, and forms in poetry are "open" and "closed." At innovative audiences Adam Fieled writes:

"Post-avant" is a tag I first heard used by Anne Waldman a few years ago. I think it fits the bill as well as anything else -- it's like saying "New New Poetry," being both "post-something" and involved with "avant" as well. In the UK, it's "innovative," though I believe "post-avant" has gained some ground there, too. Ultimately, I think that these kinds of tags are like government -- a necessary evil. They're reductive and don't do justice to real work, but we need shorthand when we want to talk about groups of poets or artists. "Experimental" and "innovative" both sound rather tame, so I suppose "post-avant" is the best "necessarily evil" tag we have right now.

Animals in Reverse

Francis would have liked an orderly biography; Lucy did not want one. I know because when I started to write the story of her life, called Lucy's Story, about her recovery from catnip, it was not the real story. In the fake story, she took the subway to AA. In reality, she lost interest in the catnip, because it had gotten stale -- one day she turned her nose up at it and walked away. She was still alive when I started work on her story. She lived a remarkable life, for a cat -- even if she had not been a cat -- in a series of wonderful apartment buildings and in five cities. About this book of her life, she sat in my lap and pointed her ears back while I typed, not back flat, but enough back so that I could tell she wasn't a fan of histories herself, even though hers is a good one, with few details too embarrassing to mention, or, if embarrassing in someone else -- not in her -- and for us instructive. In fact, Lucy preferred art, and before she died, she had learned to sculpt using her favorite red yarn -- favorite since early cathood -- in large cursive letters: G, L, J, and the symbol for pi. Lucy Rain Cat, I called her, and Lucy Bourgeoise.

In the 3-part story of Francis' demise, called "Animals, part 1," "Animals, part 2," and "Animals, part 3," the time element is misleading. I wrote all three passages on or about December 29, but the record (that follows) shows December 29 for the first two parts and December 27 for the third part. Technically, the third part was written last, not first, as the line-up suggests. Left in reverse order as I wrote the parts, with most recent near the top, next recent next, and so forth, the story read out of order, so I reordered them. Rather than delete the place for December 27, I reused it. Today is January 1, 2007.

Animals, part 1

Fiction International is "the only literary journal in the United States emphasizing formal innovation and progressive politics. [Its] thematic issues feature controversial fiction, nonfiction, indeterminate prose, and visuals by leading writers and artists from around the world."

Fiction International is sponsoring its next theme issue on animals. The deadline for submissions was December 15. Even though I had written nothing about animals that I could send to the journal, the idea gives me the spur to write about my cats and their life experiences.

Francis was a good, gray, wool cat whose father was likely Himalayan, which accounts for the way he strutted the barriers of the yard, walking on fences and edges, as if he had read the deed. Fran died on March 31, 2005 at the age of nearly 16. His birthday was May 8, 1989. We still miss him and end up lavishing too much motherly attention on his successor, Walter (Wally), whom we picked at the Humane Society on January 22, 2006, almost one year ago. Wally's papers indicate that he was 8 months at the time of adoption, placing his birthday some time in May 2005.