I found a few optimistic bookish goodies to share with you at the dawn of Springtime…
…An eternal poem etched on the roads of a town, a novelist who took a 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail and lived to tell the tale, an NPR word nerdy piece that references my favorite book as a child (Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic children’s novel Little House in the Big Woods), and a podcast about the project that is attempting to preserve the world’s languages in a series of magical little glass balls that will be spread around the globe to be found, like Easter eggs, by our ancestors 10,000 years from now and beyond…Enjoy.
1. From the Blog of the Long Now: The Letters of Utrecht -
If you spelled out a poem in stone, at the rate of one letter – and one tile – a week, how many miles would your verse stretch across the earth in 12,012?
The Letters of Utrecht project hopes that in 10,000 years, someone will be able to answer that question.
Inspired by the Long Now Foundation and other organizations dedicated to long-term projects, The Letters of Utrecht is a very long-term poem, to be gradually written in stone in the streets of Utrecht, the Netherlands. The idea was developed by the Million Generations Foundation, a Dutch think tank devoted to developing knowledge for the good of the future, in collaboration with a local poet’s guild. The project evolved out of initial plans to build a stone clock and intends to be a kind of calendar, written in verse…
Click here for the complete post.
2. The Days of Yore interviews artists before they had money or fame. Cheryl Strayed is a novelist, memoirist, and essayist who ignited a huge fan base (and a line of merchandise) when she told a reader to “write like a motherfucker” in her beloved, anonymous advice column, “Dear Sugar” on The Rumpus. Here is her story. (It’s a good one!)
3. What’s In A Word? A ‘Dictionary’ Of Americanisms
by AMANDA KATZ
One of the joys of reading books set in another time or another place is the foreignness of the language, even if that language is English. Locutions unknown in your backyard wing through the pages like unfamiliar birds. If they look different than the words you know, it’s because they’ve evolved to fit another linguistic ecosystem: that’s how people there talk, with the words necessary to describe their lives.
Take Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic children’s novel Little House in the Big Woods…
For the complete article click here to go to NPR Books. For more on the Dictionary of American Regional English: NPR reviews, interviews and more.
4. Last, these are the magic 8 Balls of human language, from THE ROSETTA PROJECT -
“The vast majority of the world’s human languages are slated for extinction within a century. But the Long Now Foundation has devised a key for people living ten millennia in the future to rediscover them.” Listen to the podcast from Lingua Franca here.