Hi Everyone! This month feels extra exciting because we are defining . . . definition.

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 10th word is: definition.

Milan Kundera: The novel’s meditative texture is supported by the armature of a few abstract terms. If I hope to avoid falling into the slough where everyone thinks he understands everything without understanding anything, not only must I select those terms with utter precision, but I must define and redefine them. (See: BETRAYAL, BORDER, FATE, LIGHTNESS, LYRICISM.) A novel is often, it seems to me, nothing but a long quest for some elusive definitions.

Ronnie Scott: The first time that the word is used.

Hilary Plum: How things relate to their representations. Do I mean: how clearly? The signifier is indistinct, or the sign. The word may be duplicitous. (Cleave. Sanction. Shall I go on?) Mechanisms have improved, and now anyone, holding his palm above a book in a language he can’t read, can capture the image of a page, and from that image words can be scanned and recognized, and from a database of translated definitions translated, so that as he turns his palm back toward his face to examine it the page beneath has become legible. Do I mean: legible to some degree. Imperfectly. In a mediated sense, or via mediation. Our postmodern fingers point at the in-betweenness, pull at the threads that tie one meaning to the next, each word to its lover, its enemy, its fellow red T-shirt in the red T-shirt section. Look, a thread, we say, pinching the fingernails together and imagining how the ends are frayed.

Aaron Shulman: An enriching, necessary, and futile exercise in which we are reminded of the inescapably slippery and always shifting nature of everything, including ourselves.

Caren Beilin: A definition must contend with not a thing but its nature, the zone around the thing which is full of evocation. To contend to know a thing, itself, is an impossibility, and an ego, that the reader quietly and gravely hears from us. To define: to feel, to utter an approach. To define: to love privacy and disclosure as they meet in something’s nature.

Kristen Gleason: Coils vote on sleep: a thousand agree that heat is day and cold is night, though to say so marks the end of use, the end of lids, the stare of no end and endless exchange.

Trey Sager: the meaning of a word, as defined by other words. Like stars describing light, we are too far under the spell of language to truly understand it. I remember the Buddha said something like: “How can I teach people what ‘wet’ is when they are already standing in the water?” We don’t ever see the things we say. And yet we can communicate. Like stars, we constellate. We are also infinitely reducible — characters, living ideograms. Between each of us is a footbridge made of words that we agree to use. When I don’t understand something, you take me by the hand and help me get across. Definitions are these invisible collaborations made in perpetuity. Maybe, in time, there will be no footbridge, no space between us, and somehow we will not drown.

CAConrad: Melan.collie.  Melancholia every singing out of things.  Bi-booster.  A.tang.  sMalling smalling it all.  Vienna.  Beijing.  Anchorage.  Smaller worlds come to deliberate words.  fearing no defining, is, the, poet.  Salt.  Water.  Bone.  Large words come to debilitate worlds.  Smell.ing.salt.of.poet.salt.smell.poet.e.ed.  a sad vantage.  Caps.  This.  Many.  Places.  At.  Once.  Sad looks to a long real.  Gophers of San Diego zoo see African zebras zoo delight.  World.  To.  See us.  Hearing is off.

Thanks for joining us for word 8!

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 8th word in Kundera’s dictionary is: Comic.

Milan Kundera: By providing us with the lovely illusion of human greatness, the tragic brings us consolation. The comic is crueler: it brutally reveals the meaninglessness of everything. I suppose all things human have their comic aspect, which in certain cases is recognized, acknowledged, utilized, and in others is veiled. The real geniuses of the comic are not those who make us laugh hardest but those who reveal some unknown realm of the comic. History has always been considered an exclusively serious territory. But there is the undiscovered comic side to history. Just as there is the (hard-to-take) comic side to sexuality.

Kristen Gleason: No pillows in town, everywhere sold-out. Even the galleries along the seaside walkway – sold-out. Internationally, apparently, there were pillows for sale. So started the series of flights. But everywhere landed was sold-out too. Some nights in the attic, some routine clicking, and an order placed. A pillow arrived in a box shaped like a pillow, and the box advertised: “Remembers, even, your hugs.” Proudly placed on the bed. Funny how only the nighttime brought the beating, prompted a peering-in, revealed the feathers still attached and all the fluff alive but slowly dying.

CAConrad: Andy Kaufman tied his shoe one last time, and so will you.  Ebbing from, fr, om, flow, bar nacle cleave s the sw,i,n,g, ing out of the tide.  Ten laughing at one is where it all began.  Twine.  Donkey.  To p o s t.  go in.  hear a.  alright making an alright making a better feeling ca,n k,ee,p us a l i v e.  down at, down there, we tell ing our way stop .  stoning stop lore of mischief weeded from town.  A lonely one and a lonelier one met then.  At a laugh away haul themselves between a nursery soon forgiven.

Trey Sager: In high school my English teacher enchanted me with stories of her and her husband driving across country and reading Franny + Zooey at night by the campfire. Once, she invited me to her house, though I didn’t realize it was to clean and prepare her private clay tennis court. Her husband died five or six years ago and at the time I’d been reading Chris Middleton: “Who can they have been, in that red car, going by, so fast…” Her husband was my history teacher and looked like the diet version of Robert Duvall. He showed us solemn, black and white movies about the Holocaust. I much preferred my English class, even though we were taught that the only difference between comedy and tragedy was whether someone died.

Caren Beilin: There is nothing funny ever in anything I’ve written. The comic is autistic, is that I can’t see a character’s pain– what made them so uncomfortable at their wedding– because I was looking at a pattern. I was eating. I was looking at their pattern. Their pattern wasn’t their pain. I was a comic because I didn’t see them. Knowing someone is a joke. Knowing someone is joking.

Ronnie Scott: Comic is a form of funny, and who knows what funny is, but in The System of Comics, the French semiotician Thierry Groensteen writes that definitions of comics – comics: singular, medial; something like “cinema” or “narrative” or “text” or “art” or “film” – can be sorted into two piles: those that participate in an essentialist approach and look to lock up some synthetic form of the “essence” of comics (I’m basically quoting him, but he’s talking in the plural, so – participates for participate, and so on); and those “that are longer and more articulated, better conforming to the definition of a definition” (imagine an italic at the end there, his). He doesn’t like either; both types are “normative and self-interested, each made to measure in order to support an arbitrary slice of history”; besides which, their very proliferation kind of works to discredit them individually. This matters because I love how Kundera’s definitions are if not normative, then self-interested; and I equally love how what the League has been assigned here is in many ways nothing but proliferation. It is about membership, which is better than inclusion (because it holds exclusion much more distantly). And taken as a whole – both comics’ components, and the normative definitional enormity – Groensteen does something like a great boiling-off of the mossy shit that grows on definitions. He says, “Whatever its successes on the plane of art, one must recognise that any comic:
is necessarily (constitutionally) a sophisticated structure
only actualises certain potentialities of the medium, to the detriment of others that are reduced or excluded”
If competing in a spelling bee, he would pause and say: “Comic”, and the crowd would go wild at it, or it wouldn’t.

Hilary Plum: 1. Something unexpected. Walking across the room your legs give way. You grab on, perhaps, absurdly, to a drawer, which slides open. Or, falling in the bathroom, you clutch for the counter and instead get only a toothbrush. 2. In the evenings Kafka reads his latest aloud to his friends, who howl with laughter. 3. In the evenings Beckett’s wife hosts again, and again he says nothing the whole night.

Aaron Shulman: Laughter—one of the most important things in both life and literature—is great, always, but tastes even richer when we recognize what it’s up against: tragedy. You can write a novel that makes people laugh, and you can write a novel that breaks people’s hearts. If you can do both of these things at once, I don’t see how it gets much better than that.