Villa Gillet Sponsors Walls and Bridges in New York City

Villa Gillet, which edited the recently published The Novelist’s Lexicon: Writers on the Words That Define Their Work are sponsoring Walls and Bridges, an exciting cultural series that includes writers, artists, and thinkers from around the world. Participants for this portion (there will three 10-day series in the Winter, Spring, and Fall of 2011) include Philip Gourevitch, Mark Greif, Maira Kalman, Laura Kipnis, Wayne Koestenbaum, Jonathan Lear, Rick Moody, Shirin Neshat, Avital Ronell, and Mackenzie Wark.

One of the more intriguing events will be held at Greenlight Bookstore that brings together Rob Spillman (editor and co-founder of Tin House), Pierre Cassou-Noguès (philosopher and novelist), Rick Moody (novelist and musician), Avital Ronell (philosopher), and Benjamen Walker (radio journalist). In their panel entitled “From Fiction to Philosophy.”

Given that Rick Moody is on this panel and was a contributor to The Novelist’s Lexicon, we thought we would post his “keyword” from the book:

Adumbrated

Adjective, a partial and incomplete definition herewith because a complete definition would be going too far and giving too much away; adumbrated, suggestive, allusive, as in a chalk mark around a fallen body, a body at a crime scene; the precise demarcation of the interrelation between crime and criminal, at the time, impossible to render; adumbrated, containing umbra, from the Latin for shadow, pertaining to all things shadowy; a spectacularly good word, shadow, which in turn incompletely summons the Greek skotos, darkness, such that adumbrated alludes to, contains, surfeits, intimates concealment in darkness, and though what is written is written so as to cast a light, to make lucid or radiant, the nature of this scripted, sketched-out beginning is often such that what is revealed is also left in half-light, in penumbra; shadow, a colorless cell or empty membrane, a toneless tonality, unless the tonality is of darkness, which has no tone; adumbrated, containing also umbrage, a state of annoyance, so that penumbra, especially in the thick, shady branches of a tree, is next door to annoyance, and even obsolescence; if literature gives light, part of its brief, its mission, is also annoyance, 
annoyance with oversimplifications, annoyance with excesses of light, with the false dependability of what is, without failing to suggest, though insubstantially and partially, what is not.