woobiquity

Mere mortals with apostrophes and markers

Someone is traveling across America on a quest to fix as many typos as they come across. They call themselves the Typo Eradication Advancement League (Teal). This raises several questions.

1. Is it really a typo if the person thinks it’s spelled correctly?

2. Wouldn’t painting the nation teal one sign at a time be more beauteous?

3. Tell the truth: faced with a bucket labeled ‘PASTIC SPOONS’, would you insert the L or add an S on at the front?

4. Why venture out for the task, when there’s so much bad spelling and grammar in here, on the internet?

5. Why is ignoring the rules of grammar and punctuation okay for poets while the rest of us are expected to slavishly conform?

I sat on a deck in North Carolina once under newly applied plastic lettering, a hurricane clean-up job that read R-E-S-T-U-R-A-N-T. By the following summer someone literate and willing to criticize (probably a northerner, or the proprietor’s old schoolteacher) had obviously passed through, because the missing A was there. Either way, those hush puppies smelled just as sweet.

Yay for words!

When friends are talking about the books their children like, should I be embarrassed to admit that "Oh, I've got that one too"? I don't know, but some children's books are so good that they're wasted on the young. Sparkle and Spin is such a book. It's from 1957, and a jolly time capsule too, with Ann Rand's words about words and Paul Rand's collage-style art.

Chronicle Books reissued it in 2006. I read about it a while ago on AceJet 170. Amazon made me wait, and it finally arrived recently, which is why I'm telling you about it now.

Melt the vote

What if there was an election where it was okay for all the candidates to be extremely cheesy? No, I'm not referring to the London mayoral elections. I'm referring to an election where cheesiness is a virtue because all the candidates are made of cheese. I'm referring to Melt the Vote.

Basically a bakery-cafe in Los Angeles (where else?) is holding a tongue-in-cheek election to choose America's next Commander in Cheese, the Highest Sandwich in the Land, the nation's top grilled cheese sandwich. Yes, it's cheesy in every possible sense, and a marketing ploy, but it's also kind of fun. We're bitter and we're clinging to cheese? Could be worse.

Pimento Cheese Grilled Cheese 08!

One way of looking at the dead

At a poetry reading at the Wellcome Collection last week, the poet and novelist Tobias Hill read his five-part poem, Five Ways of Looking at My Grandfather. Afterward he said that he had never considered writing about his grandfather while he was alive, and that he thinks of the person who took shape on the page not so much as his actual grandfather as a kind of character.

Blake Morrison said something similar when the movie version of ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’ came out last year. He said (possibly with a wink) that after watching the film take shape and seeing it on the big screen, the man he saw when he closed his eyes to picture his father was Jim Broadbent, the actor who played his father in the movie. And Broadbent was already only playing the character version of Arthur Morrison who Blake Morrison had constructed in his book.

So to keep alive the memory of a loved one by writing about them, the writer changes them. Or changes the memory anyway. Sharpens it, dulls it, whatever.

This can apply equally to the writing of strangers. After my great-grandmother died in February I found out she’d been featured in a book about women who ran boarding houses. Her chapter begins with a dramatic opener, in which we meet her creeping up the boarding house stairs in the middle of the night.

Night enveloped her, but the steel revolver she clutched gave her comfort. Rowdy talk came from the bedroom. She opened the door and leveled the gun at two people sitting on the bed.

“Get out of my house now,” she demanded.

“Don’t shoot,” yelled one as he scrambled over empty liquor bottles and dove under the bed.

“Steel Revolver!,” my mom exclaimed when I read the passage out over the phone. “Don’t shoot!” I wanted to reply. Though I’ll admit I’m territorial. And that there’s no denying that reading someone else’s construction of this woman whose stories I heard over and over again firsthand, changed her (and the stories -- is there a difference now?) a degree or two in my memory. I guess that’s what words can do.

Another cat poem

Another poem BY a cat, that is. I got back to my desk to find this one waiting like a turd in the middle of a sentence I'd been honing.

o p00000000000000000000000

Very funny, Guru.

April snows bring May roses?

Not that today's London snow can be blamed directly on global warming or anything (or the Chinese and their weather control program for that matter), but this seems as relevant a moment as any to note that our dearest seasonal cliches could lose all context within our lifetime.

Mind you, this one may never have been true to begin with. Don't you feel safer knowing that in this age of boundless content generation somebody has taken the time to abuse us of such a dangerous assumption? Whew.

Snow bed, Greenwich, this afternoon.

Tell an outrageous lie

Are you feeling stuck, stifled or just a bit, oh you know, flat? Do you crave a more creative existence but can't think how to make it so? Well, if you can hold on till May help is on the way. It's called Tell an Outrageous Lie: 188 Legal Stimulants Designed to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing, and it's by Mandy Wheeler, a true keeper and sharer of the creative torch.

Little-known fact: some of our most enduring literary works had their genesis in just this kind of creative prompt. Howard's End, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Okay, that was an outrageous lie, but the fact that it could be true is almost inspirational, isn't it? Besides, here's a poem that mentions a writing assignment in the title. And Simon Armitage's metaphoric bonanza Not the Furniture Game runs rings around a common creative prompt. Furthermore these writers' creative juices were undeniably flowing at the time that these works were made.

I'm digging a hole here. Somebody throw me a book.