Free What Would Lynne Tillman Do? by Lynne Tillman

donut-like pastry whose center is filled with jam). During the 1970s, Americans sought words and expressions for new living arrangements. It is believed that jellyrollreversal was first used by a musician, who, in the late 1970s, upon noticing a man in an apron diapering his daughter, retorted, A jellyrollreversal.
    Liberal [lib-a-rul] adj. Cool; hip, able to chill; free and freedomloving; uninhibited and unrestricted, as in: The guy is a liberal dancer. Or, Yo, that’s liberal!
    Multitidian [mul-tah-tid-ien] adj. Many events or things that occur over and over, usually in a day. Regular repetitions that are accepted in a day, as in: I was used to the multitidian phone, but now there’s the cell.
    Plaintitude [plen-ti-tood], plaintitudious [plen-ti-tood-i-nus] n., adj. The sense of an action or act that, performed daily, is fulfilling to the actor in its regularity; a sense that ordinary routine is sufficient, as in: The plaintitude of breakfast consoles me.
    Protemporary [pro-tem-pur-ee], protemporaneous [pro-tem-po-ran-ee-us] n., adj. An advocate of the new and passing; a person who is not fixed in attitudes or habits; of a group who supports and extols the passing whims and fancies of its day; at its extreme, bordering on anarchy, as in: She follows no dictates that I can discern, her protemporaneous style is too fast for me. Not to be confused with contemporary, which emphasizes a blending into and with one’s time. Closer to atemporality, in flavor.
    Pseudoist [soo-doe-istl] n. One who supports falsehood and falsity in all things; one who is always false; a person incapable of telling the truth; one who believes in the superiority of lies, as in: Donald Rumsfeld’s portrait, like Dorian Gray’s, is hidden in a room, a wreck, since it is that of a mean, persistent pseudoist.
    Superreflection [soo-pa-re-flek-shun] n. The state of pondering a thought; a condition of introspection; the most intense kind ofthinking in which thought mirrors thought, as in: At times like these, Gwen insisted, her superreflection caused a kind of vertiginous insight.
    Supertidian [soo-pah-tid-ean] adj. An annoying excess of mostly unwanted events that occur daily, as in: It would be one thing if there were fewer of them, but supertidian right-wing talk show hosts infect my radio even when it’s not turned on.
    Unscriptive [un-skrip-tiv/ly] adj., adv. A description of behaviors, attitudes, and ideas that have a unique and independent cast; generous attitudes that appear to come from nowhere; unbiased thinking; a desire for openness and intelligent communication. Unscriptive acts were first noticed in the 1950s, in experiments with LSD. In current usage, unscriptive talk and acts are not related to drug-taking, as in: Bill Clinton, at his very best, discoursed unscriptively about history, reproductive rights and race relations. But George W. Bush is, to the country’s chagrin, never unscriptive.

A Conversation with Etel Adnan
    In the late 1980s, I was phoned by poet and critic Ammiel Alcalay, who urged me to hear Etel Adnan read the next night at the Graduate Center. He told me Adnan was an Arab-American poet, playwright and painter, born and raised in Lebanon. Since he had never urged me to attend an event before, I decided to go. The lecture hall was filled. I remember Edward Said and his wife were in the audience. Adnan took her seat behind a table at the front, and, from the moment she began reading, her passion, great intelligence and sensitivity to language and form felt palpable. It was a rapturous night, during which I said to myself, I’m so glad I came. Imagine if I’d missed this.
    Adnan writes about exile and place, women and men, war, nature, paying homage to the beauty, complexity, and even the horrors of our lives. She is a philosophical poet, whose range is extraordinary. She the author of, among others, the acclaimed novel Sitt Marie Rose , which was translated into ten languages, including Urdu and Bosnian, and the epic