WordWacky

I can’t say enough good things about 20×200, a project begun and expertly curated by Jen Bekman. Every Tuesday and Wednesday a new, limited edition print goes up for sale online. Prices start at $20 for one of 200 8″x10″ prints. The prints are beautiful, and the price is entry-level enough that even unemployed schlubs like me can afford the occasional art splurge. For those of us with gainful employment, there are larger, even more limited edition prints, too.

I couldn’t help but love today’s offering by Lauren Dicioccio: Vogue JUL07:pg145 (Ripeness is All). From the artist’s blurb:

“Fashion magazines are the source materials for my series color codification dot drawings. I make each piece on a sheet of frosted mylar laid over a magazine page. After assigning a color to every letter in the alphabet (numbers are in grayscale, 0=white and 9=black), I apply tiny dots of paint over every character on the page. Each drawing I make has a different color codification, and therefore a different palette.”

Read more about 20×200. Or just go buy the print before it sells out (only 56 of the small ones left at this writing).

Rarely am I treated to a new idea in the world of words. There’s something reminiscent of the refrigerator poetry that was so popular a decade ago, but somehow this is way cooler.

Here’s the latest in the series of Newspaper Blackout Poems by Austin Kleon:

There’s also a book coming out, so go preorder it. (Via @splintergen)

Want to read with me? I just joined the Infinite Summer initiative: a group of readers tackling Infinite Jest, the 1,079-page, heavily annotated tome by the late David Foster Wallace. (I think this book warrants the use of the word tome—if ever there was a valid Kindle argument…) There’s a daily post at the blog by one of several writers. I have had to abstain from reading them because I’m behind. I didn’t get my book until this week, so I’m on page 50, when I should be somewhere between 150 and 225.

As I’ve mentioned before, my mother read to me every night until I could read myself. It was the highlight of my day—I was the child of a single parent, so one-on-one time was rare and precious. Add what was to become my lifelong addiction, story, to the mix, and you have one happy—if sleepy—preschooler.

Then there was school. Once everyone was able to read, we all would read the same stories and talk about them together. I was (am?) often the slacker, behind in my (school) reading, but I would still benefit from the social aspect of the reading, the discussion and analysis.

I’ve never joined or started a book club, though I’ve often thought about it. Post college, many of us are starved for some debate, a more in-depth reading of a book, or even just the fuzzy feeling of knowing someone else liked something, too. I’m pretty good about keeping up my Goodreads account, and while I often find good things to read there, it lacks the real-time interactivity that a classroom or a book club have.

So I don’t know if Infinite Summer will fulfill my need for social reading. As a social tool the Internet has its benefits (reach, specificity) and its shortfalls (anonymity, creepy people who profile well). And blogs tend to be less interactive—call them Web 1.5, perhaps. But I am following Infinite Summer on Twitter, so who knows. Maybe once I’m caught up and not concerned about spoilers I will really feel like part of the party.

As a child I wanted nothing more than to escape the world with a thick, long-lasting book. And now I want that same low-tech device to connect me to the world.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain….

So begins the first poem in Poets & Writers’ National Poetry Month celebration, which could also be called “A Dead Poet a Day.” This first one is by T. S. Eliot (who, if you believe the story told in the movie Tom and Viv, wasn’t such a nice guy), “The Burial of the Dead.”

Writer’s Digest blogger Robert Lee Brewer is holding a Poem-A-Day Challenge: write a poem every day in April using his daily prompt, post it in the comments section, and you’ll earn a badge for your blog or website and a certificate. There’s also some other prizes, which I’m unclear on because I didn’t read the myriad rules & blah blah blah.

For me poetry can be painful (if you don’t believe me, try reading all of the first day’s entries on Brewer’s site). Not just other people’s poetry, either. My own is perhaps the most painful, since not only do I have to read it, but I bear some responsibility for it, too. And I’ve done nothing but failed at these NaWhateverMo challenges so far. So maybe I will or maybe I won’t participate, but I can almost guarantee that all 30 of my poems (or however many I do manage to write) will not be available for public consumption.

Other poetry month activities include Poem in Your Pocket Day, which not only seems a little silly to me, but also invites that tried, tired joke, “Is that a poem in your pocket….” On the Academy of American Poets’ website, I learned that they’ve trademarked the whole poetry month business (not cool), and made a celebratory poster (pretty cool).

I guess when everyone thinks poetry, they think T. S. Eliot, who, though he might have been a cruel month himself, was in fact a darn fine poet.

In a month there is time… to write 30 poems.

Not since the Vagina Monologues has such a comprehensive list of words for the female parts been assembled. It showed up on my Twitter stream, via The Blogess.

See the whole list at the Vagina Lady.

It’s an old trick, the dictionary hack. Hook up a server login page with a dictionary file and run all the words as passwords until you hit something. In this case, the program got to “H” for happiness, before the server opened up and all of the Twitter goodies fell out.

It’s not that impressive to me that the perpetrator was 18. Who else has all that time to spend, just to misspell Bill O’Reilly’s name on the FOX Twitter stream and let us all know he’s gay. What is impressive to me is that the security was so lax at Twitter that this was able to happen.

Via Twittown:

The details of the rudimentary hack reveal a startling lack of essential security within Twitter’s halls, and raises eyebrows about the potential for Twitter to be marketed as an internal collaboration tool for business use. The so called dictionary-hack has been a mainstay of hackers for decades, and the servers should have been configured to recognize the repeated login attempts. A lack of strong password enforcement (ensuring that passwords are complex) and a failure to “lock out” accounts after multiple failed attempts are a breeding ground for would be hackers and crackers - with a situation like that, it was only a matter of time.

As far as hacks go, this one was relatively harmless (though the Twitter execs trying to monetize the service may disagree with me on that point). Nobody’s bank account was drained. Nobody really believed O’Reilly was being outed by FOX News.

What’s interesting to me is how we use words as code. When we type them over and over into a server to get access to a website, they lose their meaning. Do you think that whoever set the “happiness” password felt happy every day while he or she typed it in? Devoid of context, words become little more than letter patterns, in this case motor commands from the brain. If there is any meaning, it’s “let me in, already.”

Say a word again and again, until the syllables run together, and you have a group of circular phonemes, not a word at all. (What the hell does “Om mani padme hum” mean, anyway?)

Names have a similar sort of meaning transfer. When I took the name Ruby, I thought a lot about its meaning. Now I rarely think about it, and I’m sure when my wife hears the word Ruby, she thinks of me before she thinks about a red stone with the hardness of nine mohs.

I am a word addict, but of all the qualities of words, the one I like best is that they mean something. They are the most basic metaphor of our human lives.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s don’t use common words as passwords. I would argue further that we should not use anything with meaning as a password. Let’s keep those meanings sacred, shall we? After all, 8-letter/number/symbol patterns are infinite. The number of words in any dictionary, on the other hand, is decidedly finite.

[Picture via MAKE:Blog]

My love affair with crosswords began in high school. See, when you’re cutting classes, it helps to have something to do to pass the time. I would do the Daily News or New York Times crossword, sometimes with my friend Denise. She would put two letters in a box to fit words that she wanted to place. It was infuriating.

That love affair revived a couple of years ago, and I dragged my wife in for a threesome. We’d trade the crossword back and forth when we were stuck, and sometimes — but not always — we’d get it all done.

It is my ambition to one day complete (solo, sorry honey) a Saturday New York Times crossword. Everyone thinks Sundays are the hardest, but that’s not true. It’s just the largest. From the Amazon listing for the Saturday book:

The Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle is the most challenging puzzle of the week, which is why it has gained such an eager following. The most serious solvers know that actually finishing the puzzle is no small feat.

No small feat, indeed. When I get any of the words in that puzzle, it’s a triumph. A girl can dream….

What’s NaNoWriMo? It’s National Novel Writing Month, the 30-day writing extravaganza, in which thousands of people around the world try to write a novel in the month of November. No, it doesn’t have to be a full, complete, edited novel, it just has to be 50,000 words by midnight on November 30. That comes out to 1,667 words per day, in case you’re counting.

Want to sign up? NaNoWriMo is the link.

So far it’s not going too well for me. My wife and I were planning to start at midnight, but she wasn’t feeling well, so we let it go. Not behind yet, but rest assured, I will be soon enough.

Starting… now!

I have often spoken about the gap between my taste as a reader and my ability as a writer. When you’re starting out in the arts (or, in my case, when you’ve been starting out for 20 years), you know good stuff when you read it, but there’s a painful lack of ability to reach that bar when you sit down to create. It can be career-killing, that gap.

Here’s Ira Glass, undeniably successful in his writing and his work, speaking about the gap and how to overcome it: [via Centrum]

Now whatever your creative pursuit, set some goals and get through it. I will be doing so, myself.

The word poverty originates comes from the Latin, paupertatem, via Old French, poverte. It is first recorded in Old English around 1225, as mentioned in a book published in 1868, Old English Homilies.

We use the word poverty, and its cousin, poor, casually, meaning broke, perhaps, or cash deficient. Yet we know true poverty when we see it, don’t we? In people who are homeless. Or people who debate between heating their houses in the winter and eating.

Growing up, I thought we were poor, my single mother and I, but she worked steadily, at the same job throughout my childhood, a good job by many standards — a job with the City that had good benefits. I didn’t have the same clothes or sneakers as some of my classmates, or a piano, and my mother slept in the living room of our one bedroom apartment in the Bronx. But in reality, by the definitions set out for us by the U.S. Government, we were not “poor.”

According to the U.S. Health and Human Services Poverty Guidelines for 2008, a family of two, like ours, would have to be making less than $14,000 a year in the contiguous U.S. to be below the poverty line. We lived in New York City. It is unfathomable to me to think someone could live on that amount of money and still eat, get clothing, and use transportation to and from a job on that income in New York.

Apparently it is also unfathomable to the human services providers, too, because you qualify for food stamps at 130% of the federal poverty limit, for WIC at 185%, and often for Medicaid (depends on the state) at 200%. According to Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty, “Research suggests that, on average, families need an income of about twice the federal poverty level to meet their most basic needs.”  So if the guideline doesn’t even determine what we consider poor, why set it at falsely low levels? Seems to me there can only be one reason: to deny people benefits. (But I’m a cynic. If you can think of another, please speak up.)

I’m taking three steps against poverty, starting today. I urge you to find three things you can do to stop poverty, however you or the government defines it. Here’s what I’m going to do:

1. Donate. I’m going to take Brian from Copyblogger up on his generous offer to match 250% of my $10 donation to Save the Children! Unheard of, really, people. You should donate ten bucks, too.
2. Educate myself. In addition to the research I did for this post, I’m going to read a book that’s been on my to-read list for too long: Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich.
3. Vote. You heard it here first. And I’m not a non-profit, so I can say vote for That One, please. If you don’t, please don’t tell me about it.