field notes; week of august 13, 2018
this week’s field notes are going to look a little different, because the only field notes i recorded were a couple lines of dialogue from mad men, and i think you deserve better than that from this e-mail experience. that’s what happens when i binge mad men incessantly instead of reading things, i guess.
anyway, i have another running file of beautiful words that i encounter in the wild, and they will comprise this week’s field notes. enjoy.
aegis: the protection, backing, or support of a particular person or organization
under don draper’s aegis, peggy olson ascended from secretarial drudgery to tremendous success as a copywriter.
agita: anxiety, stress, or aggravation
pete campbell’s shitty, punchable face wracks my stomach with agita.
anodyne: inoffensive
ted chaough’s anodyne pitch to heinz rather bored the representatives of the company.
baleful: threatening harm, menacing
betty draper aimed the pellet gun at the pigeons, her teeth clenching balefully around a cigarette.
caprice: a sudden and unaccountable change of mood or behaviour
rather than consider betty’s reasons for barring him from the family home, don regarded her decision as mere caprice.
carom: to strike and rebound
in the wake of his separation from betty, don would carom from woman to woman in a desperate search for meaning and validation.
catafalque: a wooden framework supporting a coffin during a funeral
after miss blankenship died suddenly at her desk, the employees of sterling cooper were forced to improvise a flimsy catafalque to carry her from the office.
cajeta: a thickened syrup made of sweetened, caramelized goat’s milk
with no latino employees to speak of, sterling cooper draper pryce struggled to devise a compelling marketing campaign for cajeta.
cant: hypocritical and sanctimonious talk
everything that comes out of pete campbell’s shitty, punchable mouth is cant.
catechumen: a convert under instruction before baptism
pete regarded himself as don’s catachumen, but don regarded pete only as shitty and punchable.
crapulous: sick from excessive indulgence in liquor
after downing a dozen oysters and half a dozen whiskeys at lunch, roger sterling spewed crapulous vomit all over the floor of his office.
cozen: trick or deceive, obtain by deception
that one episode of mad men where don cozens ted chaough out of the honda account was fucking dope, dude.
diffident: modest or shy due to a lack of self-confidence
on her first day of employ, joan holloway took a diffident peggy under her wing.
diurnal: during the day
betty had little awareness of her husband’s diurnal activities, but then, she had little awareness of her husband’s nocturnal activities, too.
escritoire: a small writing desk
at the end of a long, distressing night, don sat down at his escritoire to sketch out a storyboard for the samsonite campaign.
fatuous: silly and pointless
everything pete campbell does, besides getting his ass beaten by lane, is fatuous.
gnomic: expressed in short, pithy maxims or aphorisms
the copywriters embraced a gnomic strategy to peddle children’s cereal.
insouciance: casual lack of concern
don found roger’s insouciance around the health risks of LSD to be distressing.
mandoline: a kitchen utensil consisting of a flat frame with adjustable cutting blades
as she retreated to the kitchen to chop vegetables with her mandoline, betty withered under the weight of suburban ennui.
Manichean: characterized by dualistic contrast or conflict between opposites
mad men eschews simplistic, Manichean conflict in favor of more complex storytelling.
parsimonious: unwilling to spend money or use resources
lane pryce’s parsimonious approach to management was met with no small amount of resistance from sterling cooper’s american employees.
paterfamilias: the male head of a family
don seemed far more committed to sterling cooper than to his duties as paterfamilias.
peripatetic: traveling from place to place, especially working in various places for short periods
don maintained a non-committal, peripatetic approach to his relationships with women.
phalanx: a body of troops or police officers, standing or moving in close formation
a phalanx of secretaries strode into the boardroom to test out belle jolie’s new line of lipsticks.
priapic: relating to or resembling a phallus
pete’s shitty, punchable nose is rather priapic, don’t you think?
poiesis: an activity in which someone brings into being something which did not exist before
don and peggy’s frantic night of brainstorming became the poiesis of a brilliant campaign for samsonite.
procuress: a woman who obtains a woman as a prostitute for another person
when don refused to have sex with any of the women in the brothel, the procuress suggested that the gay brothel around the corner might be more to his liking.
putti: a representation of a naked child, especially a cherub or cupid in Renaissance art
okay, i’m not going to do better than edward st. aubyn did when i first encountered this word in the second patrick melrose novel: “he stared at a baroque escritoire cascading with crapulous putti.”
saeculum: a period of time spanning from a given moment to the deaths of all the people who lived through that moment
after dick whitman assumed don draper’s identity, he became the sole survivor of the saeculum that spanned their time together in combat.
sublunary: belonging to this world, instead of a better or more spiritual one
the last time we saw each other, you didn’t want to talk to me, and i didn’t want to talk to you. it was a shame, really. everything we ever had was borne of talking. as with any two people who spend any significant amount of time together, we’d improvised a language that belonged only to us. it had become warped, though, over time, by the attrition of never saying what we really meant to say. so i left you in silence, slipping down a dark side-street. my eyes welled with rare water as i looked up at the moon, shining down on this sad, sublunary ending, and i thought, fuck.
sybarite: a person who is self-indulgent in their fondness for sensuous luxury
don and betty were pretty sybaritic on their fabulous vacation to italy, and that outfit betty wore to dinner in the plaza is possibly the greatest outfit ever worn by a human being.
unstinting: giving without restraint
desperate to advance in her career, and wary of the limits placed on women in the advertising profession, peggy became unstinting in her commitment to sterling cooper draper pryce.
vocative: a case of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives used to address or invoke a person or thing
don issued a vocative shout to his secretary before retreating into his office to get hammered at 9:00 in the morning.