Kundera devotees, our 14th word is Excitation. [. . . ! . . . ]

Here’s a brief description of our project:

Here, our purpose is to use 63 months on the Big Lucks website to define, for ourselves, for our novels and our lives, Kundera’s words. We will define one word each month, on the 15th, without having read the definitions of each other or Kundera. We invite you to join us these 63 months, with your own comments, definitions, or your introspection, meditation.

The 14th word is: Excitation.

Milan Kundera: Not pleasure or climax or emotion or passion. Excitation is the basis of eroticism, its deepest enigma, its key term.

Hilary Plum: I desire it but I do not trust it. I tell myself and I believe: these days, as age earns that name, I want instead desire’s slower clarity: to hold death off but not to deny it. Not the mindless swift pulse and panic, the jabbering body. “If today and today I am calling aloud,” the poem begins, Peter Gizzi’s “A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me,” and I am described. Excitation has no place in the novel (I tell myself and I believe). I wake up too scared to write; I wake up in the well-known anxiety, lost for minutes or hours before I may begin. Holding the pen: excitation, fear, desire, all the old stuff of suffering. On the page: desire and mourning, I say. The body, its blood, its wonderful emotions—not to be trusted, any more than ourselves.

Aaron Shulman: The point where the writer’s experience meets that of his/her reader’s: that exactly-right simile, an unforgettable image, the perfect line of dialogue, an unbeatable rhythm, those shivers of recognition, airtight restraint and impeccable excess, that shot-to-the-gut moment at once unexpected and inevitable. Why people read, why people write.

Caren Beilin: The idea of slicing something open. “I didn’t like it, I was excited by it.” — The Black Eyes. I didn’t like it, I was slicing it. I didn’t slice it, I was excited to slice it, excitation the slicing of bursting– no, the idea of Doing.

Kristen Gleason: I won’t make her for the monkeys or for wild union, or for the final round atop the arid swell, but for waking in the dark, spearing her own sandwich, showing up in the hospital without companion or address.

Trey Sager: When we read something like “ice water blood” or “silken skin,” the sensory-based part of our brain gets triggered. Even excitation can be reduced to a chemical response. Writers order words for an experience of meaning. Many years ago in karate class they told me the fastest way to the brain is through the eyes. A friend of mine often walks around repeating, “That’s exciting! I’m excited!” Sex and death are consistent players, of course. The sky, the ocean, animals, certain people. Love, love, love…

Kundera-adorers, hello! Post-holidays and more, we are on to elitism.

Here’s a brief description of our project:

Here, our purpose is to use 63 months on the Big Lucks website to define, for ourselves, for our novels and our lives, Kundera’s words. We will define one word each month, on the 15th, without having read the definitions of each other or Kundera. We invite you to join us these 63 months, with your own comments, definitions, or your introspection, meditation.

The 12th word is: Elitism.

Milan Kundera: The word “elitism” only appeared in France in 1967, the word “elitist” not until 1968. For the first time in history, the very language threw a glare of negativity, even of mistrust, on the notion of elite.

Official propaganda in the Communist countries began to pummel elitism and elitists at that same time. It used the terms to designate not captains of industry or famous athletes or politicians but only the cultural elite: philosophers, writers, professors, historians, figures in film and the theater.

An amazing synchronism. It seems that in the whole of Europe the cultural elite is yielding to other elites. Over there, to the elite of the police apparatus. Here, to the elite of the mass media apparatus. No one will ever accuse these new elites of elitism. thus the word “elitism” will soon be forgotten. (See: Europe.)

Caren Beilin: The feeling of being a man. Even when you’re a woman, or a girl, or a boy. Elitism is connected to entitlement, and cocks.

Trey Sager: Imagine you are a Siamese twin. Your other half is an excellent volleyball player, whereas you got the brains. One day your father gets you both in the car for a drive to Big Sur. You’re driving, as is your twin, obviously, but your father keeps a hand on the wheel, “just in case.” About an hour into the drive, you near the edge of a cliff. Your father says, “Maybe we should crank the wheel.” Unfortunately, your volleyball half agrees that this is a good idea. You protest, but they laugh and call you an elitist. You are outnumbered. After they turn the wheel, they begin to debate whether it’s better to explode or to drown. They agree that it’s better to drown. Alas.

Hilary Plum: A line from Nigel Nicolson’s preface to the second volume (1912–1922) of Virginia Woolf’s collected letters always occurs to me: “Virginia, I protest, was not a snob. She was an elitist.” The distinction as he goes on to discuss it has more to do with British class than is relevant here, today; it is the line itself that I remember. I suspect that—perhaps because I often compare writing to sports, sometimes superficially, but sometimes seriously enough—I am more sympathetic to what might be called elitism than is popular.

Ronnie Scott: I’m not what you’d call a pronouncer; I use “enn-you-aye” for ennui, and for a month, I called my Prime Minister “Julia Jillard”. As an undergrad, my portfolio-selected Bachelor of Fine Arts cohort opposed itself to the general-entry Bachelor of Creative Industries, with whom we shared classes and assessable things. Knowing the history of touchiness between the two degree programs, I often treaded gently around the BCI students: “How are you going? What’s your writing like? That’s so nice to hear.” The fear kept me from ever pronouncing “elitism”, a topic around which our classes often danced. Was it ellatism, or eleetism? Which one was the more affected? In pronouncing which would I embody the word? Eventually, I dated a guy from the BCI program. “Do you write poetry?” I said. He often did. “You should probably not,” I offered, “be pronouncing that ‘t’.” I offen worried how I might come off when I was speaking. It’s still concerning. It so offen is.

Aaron Shulman: Cultural noise associated with capital-L Literature notwithstanding—pretension, the New York scene and others, academia, dismissals of chick-lit, Franzen vs. Oprah, and so on—I maintain that the act of writing is (or should be) about as far from elitism as you can get.

Kristen Gleason: Click Here.

Kunderites! This month, the very important definition of . . . Destiny, with quite a long and extravagant one by Kundera.

Here’s a brief description of our project:

Here, our purpose is to use 63 months on the Big Lucks website to define, for ourselves, for our novels and our lives, Kundera’s words. We will define one word each month, on the 15th, without having read the definitions of each other or Kundera. We invite you to join us these 63 months, with your own comments, definitions, or your introspection, meditation.

The 11th word is: destiny.

Milan Kundera: There comes a moment when the image of our life parts company with the life itself, stands free, and, little by little, begins to rule us. Already in The Joke: “I came to realize that there was no power capable of changing the image of my person lodged somewhere in the supreme court of human destinies; that this image (even though it bore no resemblance to me) was much more real than my actual self; that I was its shadow and not it mine; that I had no right to accuse it of bearing no resemblance to me, but rather that it was i who was guilty of the nonresemblance; and that the nonresemblance was my cross, which I could not unload on anyone else, which was mine alone to bear.”

And in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “Destiny has no intention of lifting a finger for Mirek (for his happiness, his security, his good spirits, his health), whereas Mirek is ready to do everything for his destiny (for its grandeur, its clarity, its beauty, its style, its intelligible meaning). He felt responsible for his destiny, but his destiny did not feel responsible for him.”

Conversely to Mirek, the hedonistic man in his forties in Life Is Elsewhere clings to “the idyll of his non-destiny.” (See: IDYLL.) Indeed, a hedonist resists the transformation of his life into a destiny. Destiny vampirizes us, it weighs us down, it is like a ball and chain locked to our ankles. (The man in his forties, be it said in passing, is of all my characters the one closest to me.)

Caren Beilin: What already has happened– requiring only gestural explication.

Ronnie Scott: In the X-Men comics, Destiny – Irene Adler – is an aged Austrian lesbian who is prone to fits of prophecy about the various futures of mutantkind. She, or her writings, are occasionally called into service when the writers need to send the X-Men on some urgent quest: to learn the contents of her prophecies, or to prevent those contents from falling into the hands of dubious others. Either way, Ms Adler’s prophecies have never been lastingly consequential, since commercial viability sort of depends on surprise. Destiny, then, is best seen as something with hidden utility. Use it sneakily, keep your eyes on the prize.

Aaron Shulman: Destiny is one of those loaded words I’m not very fond of. Among other things, it’s the airy-fairy determinism I hear sing through it, never mind all its syrupy enabling. I prefer fate, since to me it sounds more like something you bring down on yourself, rather than walking into the design of some higher architect. The way I look at things, as writers its our jobs to give our characters the successes and failures they earn on their own; we’re their medium, not their engineer. The design of what I’m working on is something I like to discover only when I’m already deep, deep into the first draft.

CAConrad: The average mince.  Or.ders itself without knowing.  Karma the jockstrap the rich hold us in.  Foretell by bank account.  Nu.M.Ber.S.  A.Re.  Telling a story back to front.  Mind waters-down in drink.  Drink less.  Fight More.  What ameliorates a pain of taxation.  Guns filed for divorce.  Taxation needs question?  Mark?s?  Pressure of freedom.  Awaits.  A roller case rolling.  My miniaturized thoughts of you reconstitute with lime and tonic and spirits.  And moreover.  A.  Plan for.  A plan for liftoff.

Hilary Plum: 1. If the creators of Skynet are killed before Skynet is created, then either the nuclear holocaust will not occur, or it will simply occur by other means. (Fate or no fate?) Did the creators of Skynet ever truly create the technology needed to build Skynet, or was this technology always delivered to them by future Skynet robots traveling back in time to protect and nurture an embryonic Skynet?
2. Two lovers time-travel back separately on separate missions to the same time and place, and are ecstatic to discover one another and resume their romance in the past—until they discover that they are from different versions of the future, and so they do not share the same memories of their relationship. Do you remember when we…? one of them asks. That wasn’t me, the other replies. Ad infinitum.