"I think, at the risk of sounding overly dramatic or emo, I feel truer to myself while reading than I do experiencing the world through my body — so any chance to read is ideal for me. I think I feel often alien to the world and its variegated interfaces, whereas through the linear dependability of the sentence, I know exactly where I am, where I am standing...."
Says Ocean Vuong, in "Ocean Vuong Brings Books to Lunch Dates, 'Just in Case'" (NYT).
That was published last April. I'm reading it today because I got interested in the word "alterity."
I read 'Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft' at the recommendation of friends and teachers when I first started writing fiction. The result was weeks of depression. At one point, I opened a chapter that had an upside down 'check mark,' which was supposed to represent the shape of effective plot structure — and something in me just wilted. At the time, I didn’t know any better and just felt so wrong and stupid for thinking, in my gut, that there must be another way that was less manipulative, less contrived. It took months before I realized that something so prescriptive could be challenged, and that, as a poet, I’d already been trained and steeped in the practice of alterity. The quest for other forms, other meters, voices and mediums was already familiar to me. Variegation, I learned, is a principal pleasure in making any art....
How I got interested in the word "alterity" is a whole other story. I saw it in the title of an article — "Dorothea Veit's 'Florentin' and the Early Romantic Model of Alterity" — that I found after A&L Daily sent me to "The first Romantics/How a close group of brilliant friends, in a tiny German university town, laid the foundations of modern consciousness" and I read this paragraph that triggered my fact-checking instinct:
The Schlegels were not the only ones who had come to such an unusual arrangement. The Humboldts also had an open marriage and Caroline von Humboldt’s lover moved in with the couple; Goethe lived with his mistress; meanwhile, Friedrich Schlegel outraged the literary establishment and polite society by taking readers into his bedroom to watch him and Dorothea Veit make love. Schlegel had intended to shock, and succeeded. ‘I want there to be a real revolution in my writing,’ he told Caroline.
Schlegel and Veit got together in 1802.
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Ocean attends a lot of MMA fights, does he? And takes a poetry book with him? Yeah, of course...
I'm imagining Ocean Vuong the reader invited into the bedchamber to witness Schlegel and Veit, bringing his book of lyric poetry to read between breaks in the lovemaking action.
Alterity seems to me to be an unnecessary word. Its utility arises exclusively from (1) its highfalutin connotation associated with academic communication, and (2) the fact that most people only have a vague sense of the word's meaning, grasping only that it gestures toward some sort of odd alternativeness that the word's user seems to understand better than the person who hears or reads the word "alterity". It's a word created to place its user on a spurious pedestal built from the recondite and ambiguous nature of the word.
"I'm imagining Ocean Vuong the reader invited into the bedchamber to witness Schlegel and Veit, bringing his book of lyric poetry to read between breaks in the lovemaking action."
My thoughts exactly. Yes, there are always lulls. Languors. Even for the participants. But with a book, you need never feel bored.
"Alterity seems to me to be an unnecessary word. Its utility arises exclusively from (1) its highfalutin connotation associated with academic communication, and (2) the fact that most people only have a vague sense of the word's meaning, grasping only that it gestures toward some sort of odd alternativeness that the word's user seems to understand better than the person who hears or reads the word "alterity". It's a word created to place its user on a spurious pedestal built from the recondite and ambiguous nature of the word."
Does "alterity" have alterity?
And did you notice that within the short interview, Vuong used the verb "to variegate" twice — "variegated" and "variegation"? Why not "varied" and "variety"? It must be important and not because he's into variegation, because he used the same odd word twice. I wouldn't have noticed if he'd said "varied" and then "variety."
I always thought that the word was “outré.”
Unless I'm very mistaken, the word 'alterity' is used in a passage by Congreve(?) that Handel set to music in the 1740s.
It may be high-falutin but it ain't new.
Yep. OED has uses in English prose in the 17th C., and cites Coleridge too.
Dick Cavett found John Wayne on set backstage reading poetry. Cavett said you tend to forget he's not a cowboy. He's an actor.
I hadn't noticed the use of variegated. But its use unrelated to color seems to show either either playfulness or passive aggression.
Variegated, when it's not used as pompous substitute for "varied", is a reference to varied colors -- from the Oxford Dictionary -- "exhibiting different colors, especially as irregular patches or streaks".
According to etymonline.com, the etymology is "...from Late Latin variegatus "made of various sorts or colors," past participle of variegare "diversify with different colors," from varius "spotted, changing, varying" (see vary) + root of agere "to do, perform" (from PIE root *ag- "to drive, draw out or forth, move"). The meaning "mark with different colors" is from 1660s (implied in variegated)"
Variegate is a texture.
"-gate" makes it feel like a scandal.
Ampersand @ 1:44: "Alterity seems to me to be an unnecessary word. Its utility arises exclusively from (1) its highfalutin connotation associated with academic communication, and (2) the fact that most people only have a vague sense of the word's meaning, grasping only that it gestures toward some sort of odd alternativeness that the word's user seems to understand better than the person who hears or reads the word "alterity". It's a word created to place its user on a spurious pedestal built from the recondite and ambiguous nature of the word."
Bingo. I've heard Vuong at our local poetry hoedown and, while my memory is not what it used to be, I can't summon to mind one word of his work. Meh. Maybe worse than meh, precious. I don't think he's obscure in a cynical way --bullshitting us all with his private vocabulary-- but I don't think this "alterity" business takes us very far. Yes, poetry is a complex fusion of voices and stances, of ekphrastic steps outside of convention or expectation --we want and need that disquiet and resolution, where the music and mood open us to something deeply moving and new. But invoking words like "alterity" or "variegation" doesn't much illuminate the process. One might as easily ask Mozart "How do you do that?"
I'm familiar with variegated leaves (which are often rather ugly, e.g., on hostas), but outside of that description of pattern, it seems as though you ought to have those leaves in mind as a metaphor, especially if you're going to *reuse* the word. It's not a common word, so it sticks out. This is like the problem we noticed some years ago with Jeb Bush saying "garner" instead of one of the common words like "get."
"Alterity" and "variegated" are to honest colloquial speech as reading lyric poems is to attending MMA fights.
Deliberate incongruity. Otherness. Forces us to examine not the content but the vessel: Look at me and my choice of words, I mean by the choice to convey something meta. I'm really talking about something else, and it's up to you to guess or intuit or tune in to it. Catch me if you can.
Sometimes that's constructive or merely playful. Sometimes it's defensive or lazy.
A Creamery near my house when I was growing up sold Variegated Chocolate and Variegated Peanut Butter ice cream. Variegated Chocolate was just Fudge Ripple.
Jeb Bush saying "garner" instead of one of the common words like "get."
Garner is not a simple get. It's a get with some kind of work to achieve it.
Alteritians were hipsters before it was cool.
"It's a get with some kind of work to achieve it."
It wasn't used in a context where that sort of nuance had any meaning worth reaching for. He was talking about getting *votes* and he kept saying "garner votes." That's just stupid politics. It's not a way to get or garner votes. It's a way to put people off.
It's like saying "Let's procure food" instead of "Let's get something to eat."
I do some of my best reading on the seat of ease, leaving, sometimes, a variegated dump.
A magician might procure food. Or Jesus feeding the masses.
Garnering votes might be backroom work, or consultations with pollsters.
These comments are en fuego.
Ann Althouse said...
It's like saying "Let's procure food" instead of "Let's get something to eat."
Never use a big word when a diminutive word will suffice.
So alterity is a new way of pretending you are different or original.
If you are actually different or original you wont have to label yourself.
This is like giving yourself a nickname.
It doesn't work that way.
Ann @ 3:45: "It's a way to put people off." Agree. I think the subliminal message is something like "I want you to trust and respect me because, look, I know English and can use big words just like those experts, and I use them so awkwardly and pretentiously that you can't escape the feeling that I want to sell you my fake smile for a six-figure autograph of my picture, and the further feeling that I am just too stupid to know this isn't working. So with all that in mind, vote for me, you know I'll care about you and do a great job."
Incredibly tone-deaf.
Kindle is pretty good for improving your vocabulary. All those words of whose meanings you have just a vague understanding, you can define with just a finger tap. Defenestrate is a useful word to know especially when reading Russian history, but it's the kind of word you might pass over when encountering it in a book.....He names a whole bunch of writers that I never heard of. I guess it starts with music and then your cluelessness extends to literature.... I heard of Thomas Merton. He's one of those writers that people have heard of and someday hope to read but never do. Perhaps Donald Trump would be a better person if he set some time aside and read Thomas Merton.
""I’ve even read at M.M.A. fights, which is a perfect place to read lyric poems, where you can read one or two whole poems in between rounds.""
Blech! He is so urbane he could read Homer while getting a BJ.
"Kindle is pretty good for improving your vocabulary."
I don't need to improve my vocabulary, I took the SAT 45 years ago. Now it is just for me, and what I want.
""I’ve even read at M.M.A. fights, which is a perfect place to read lyric poems, where you can read one or two whole poems in between rounds.""
Blech! He is so urbane he could read Homer while getting a BJ.
I don't have to imagine Vuong attending the lovemakeing. Woody Allen covered that in 1971 when he had Howard Cosell do play-by-play at bedside in "Bananas".
Achilles says it's like giving yourself a nickname.
I'd rather give myself a nickname (in fact, I did) before someone else does it.
I always bring multiple books to lunch. Everywhere else too.
I probably have 50-100 books and another 50-100 book samples on my Samsung phone at any time.
Ditto my Samsung tablet but I don't always carry my tablet.
Unless the book is illustrated or has charts, tables or the I don't really have a strong preference for either. I read with equal enjoyment on both.
John Henry
Good memory, Fred D.!
Narr said...
Achilles says it's like giving yourself a nickname.
I'd rather give myself a nickname (in fact, I did) before someone else does it.
It only works if other people play along.
Kinda like that transgender thing.
My real name is Nick.
Nick Naim.
“It's like saying "Let's procure food" instead of "Let's get something to eat."””
That’s pretty funny coming from a law professor. Anyway, a little variegation is a good thing:
PIED BEAUTY
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
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