Everything And Nothing

The Writer in the Window Lives On

 

In 1984, hopelessly blocked on a novel, Georgelle Hirliman hit on the idea of setting up shop with her typewriter in a Santa Fe storefront. Beside her, she placed a sign:

Help Me Cure My Writer’s Block — Give Me a Topic.

In Manhattan she wrote in the windows of The Village Voice, Shakespeare & Co. on the Upper West Side and B. Dalton on Fifth Avenue, among other places, sitting daily for eight hours at a stretch.

Though Ms. Hirliman passed away in 2010, her inspiration lives on now through a New Yorker now living in Savannah, Lauren DeRosa. She occupies the window at Paris Market on Broughton St.

I talked to her briefly in the store. I didn't understand the history of her "project" at that time. It just intrigued me.

A writer in a window. Are you on display, like a zoo or a mannequin? Seeking to answer questions in an artsy store, are you part of the block or part of the writer? But there were beautiful words everywhere (whatever the answer).

She asked me if I had a question for her to answer, but, honestly, I saw so many pictures in my head...words escaped me.

How much is that writer in the window?  “I stopped answering that,” Ms. Hirliman told The Albuquerque Journal in 2000. “Nobody paid.”

The Noodle Effect

Does anyone else (besides me) get obsessed with a new word? Maybe it's the lack of pasta in my life lately, but I read about "spaghettification" on World Wide Words this morning and it's just intrigued me all day.

Michael Quinion writes:

 A story on the BBC website a few days ago introduced me to the scientific term SPAGHETTIFICATION. It has nothing to do with Italian cuisine but refers to what happens to an object that is caught in the gravitational field of a black hole. Some theories hold that it is stretched vertically and compressed horizontally until it looks like a length of spaghetti. The term has been around for at least a decade and is said to derive from a comment by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time that an astronaut passing through the event horizon of a black hole would be "stretched like spaghetti".

What word has intrigued you lately?

Write On

Ginger Software has created a new spell check program that will fix spelling errors in one click based on reading the entire sentence (instead of just one word at a time). As most of us have found out the hard way, spell check programs catch misspelled words, but sometimes the word is spelled correctly but still the wrong word.

Currently, the program focuses on mistakes made by dyslexics. To find out more or download the beta program, visit www.gingersoftware.com.

M's the word

Photo via Flickr/Miss Loading

To me, letters have always been a robust medium of sublimation. - We're in the midst of a bunch of letters, and if you're like me, you feel like a pig in mud. What a great word mud is. And muddle, and muffle, and mumble. - You know the expression "Mum's the word." The word mum is a representation of lips pressed together. - The great majority of languages start the word for "mother" with an m sound. The word mammal comes from the mammary gland. Which comes from baby talk: mama. To sound like a grownup, we refine mama into mother; the Romans made it mater, from which: matter. And matrix. Our word for the kind of animal we are, and our word for the stuff that everything is made of, and our word for a big cult movie all derive from baby talk.

What are we saying when we say mmmm? We are saying yummy. In the pronunciation of which we move our lips the way nursing babies move theirs. The fact that we can spell something that fundamental, and connect it however tenuously to mellifluous and manna and milk and me (see M), strikes me as marvelous.

~ Roy Blount, Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory

[ via The Writer's Almanac ]

Take me home, country roads

"Like many of the people I had read about, I set out on a long journey to find truth and beauty. As usual, the road led straight back to the beginning: home, country roads, the sun setting through the woods."
~Joyce Sutphen

Shadow vs. substance

"Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air."
~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Dreams

"I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind."
~ Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

Advancing inanity

"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."
~ Tom Robbins

Good for something

"Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."
~ Henry David Thoreau

(Happy Birthday, Henry!) ;)

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."