I was going through a pile of old New Yorker magazines last week; I had a dual purpose and I attacked this task with gleeful ferocity. I accidentally discovered this cache (read hoard) in a drawer where my dear husband had been stashing New Yorkers that he hadn’t finished reading yet!
I reminded him of the deal I thought we struck in good faith a few years ago – if you subscribe to this magazine which seems to over-populate an apartment quicker than a rabbit, then you have to keep the number of copies hanging around to a minimum-say, no more than 3 or 4. Weeelllllll, someone was not keeping his end of the bargain because there were New Yorker magazines in that drawer from 2007!.
Right then and there, I passed the death sentence on the pile and just before I was about to toss them all, I thought I would thumb through and look for cartoons that dealt with real estate. Actually that also was part of the deal, to give me any real estate cartoon. As I flipped through them I started noticing several cartoons that I knew Peter would appreciate because they held some relevance to him. IDEA! What a great birthday gift; I ripped out lots of cartoons, phrases and pictures with the idea to put them in an album to give to him. So I did – I think another post, not this one, will have to feature some of the cartoons – I think it turned out really good!
But of course I have totally digressed…the segué is this – in a 2008 issue an article caught my eye; Say It All IN SIX WORDS. There is was! Right in front of me in The New Yorker!!! “Brevity; a good thing in writing. Exploited by texters, gossip columnists, haikuists. …Life expectancies rise; attention spans shrink. Six words can tell a story.
That’s a new book’s premise, anyway; Not Quite What I Was Planning. A compilation of teeny, tiny memoirs. The forebear, it’s assumed, is Hemingway…..”
The article is quite long and I hope to insert more of it from time to time. The Six Word Project started with a contest for readers of the Smith Magazine online. The web site was ” flooded with entries. Five hundred plus submissions per day. That’s two, three words a minute. “We almost crashed”. an editor said”.
I’m only look for ten or twenty, I don’t want to crash or be greedy for that matter!! Here are this week’s reader submissions: PS did you notice the length of most of those sentences?
An entire day – still not enough time – Trish
Winter carnivals, let’s celebrate the season! – Susan Celtic Lady
Accepted into Grad school – decision time – Weez
Sauna: must find one down here – Susan in the Grove
Should have never checked the scale 😦 – Me
"The Book"
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Bill Ding and his band of clowns are the security patrol for this blog site. He is a favorite toy from the 50*s. By the way sometimes a blog is just an ego-maniacal stream of conscience.
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