John
Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good
and Evil, visits modern-day Venice, where he finds a rich cast of
characters and tries to unravel the mystery behind a 1996 fire that wiped out
the city's last opera house in the book "The City of Falling
Angels." Read an interview with
Scott Simon and read an excerpt from the book at https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4951348
Author John Berendt (born
1939) grew up in Syracuse, New York,
where both of his parents were writers.
As an English major at Harvard University,
he worked on the staff of the Harvard Lampoon. He graduated in 1961 and moved to New York
City to pursue a journalism career. He was an associate editor of Esquire from
1961 to 1969, editor of New York magazine from 1977 to 1979
and a columnist for Esquire from 1982 to 1994. Berendt published Midnight in the
Garden of Good and Evil in 1994 and became an overnight success; the
book spent a record-breaking 216 weeks on the New York Times bestseller
list-—still, to this day, the longest standing best seller of the Times. The story, unsettling and real, broke down
the idea of the quintessential phenomenon of a true American city—only to
reveal its quirks: its man walking an
invisible dog; its voice of the drag queen; a high-society man in its elite
community—all that somehow, unravels a murder mystery. Virtually seeming like a novel and reading
like a tale, the non-fictional story is about the real-life events surrounding
the murder trial of Jim Williams in Savannah, Georgia. Berendt acknowledged
that he fabricated some scenes and changed the sequence of some events. Midnight was
adapted into a 1997
film directed by Clint Eastwood. John Cusack plays a character loosely
based on Berendt. Berendt's second
book, The City of
Falling Angels, was published in September 2005. It
chronicles interwoven lives in Venice in the aftermath of the fire that
destroyed the La Fenice opera
house. According to Kirkus Reviews, "Berendt does great
justice to an exalted city that has rightly fascinated the likes of Henry James, Robert Browning, and many filmmakers
throughout the world." (August 1, 2005) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berendt
April 26, 2012 Garrison Keillor commented on a sign in an
Op-Ed column in the New York Times a couple of years ago. He wrote:
“My heart was gladdened by an official-looking sign in the Milwaukee airport,
just beyond the security checkpoint, hanging over where you put your shoes and
coat back on and stuff your laptop back in the case: The sign said, ‘Recombobulation Area.’ The English language gains a new word. Recombobulate, America. Pull yourself together, tie your shoelaces,
and if your pilot is wearing a button that says ‘To hell with the F.A.A.,’ wait
for the next flight.” The airport put up
its sign in 2008, but “recombobulate” and “recombobulation” were in the air
long before that. Margaret Bennett used
the verb in her book How To Ski Just a Little
Bit (1970): “If you
find this happening, put your weight on your outside ski and ride that until
you’re recombobulated and back on course.”
And Amanda Cross (aka Carolyn Heilbrun) used the noun in her
mystery Poetic Justice (1970):
“ ‘To return,’ Reed said, ‘to the
conversation of last night, why has misrule and horseplay brought you to such a
state of discombobulation? Or, since it
has, may I offer my help in recombobulation?’ ”
In case anyone is wondering, “discombobulate” isn’t a negative version
of “combobulate.” In our
earlier posting, we note that “discombobulate” is a joke word formed in
19th-century America. Patricia T.
O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/04/recombobulate.html
Hello is a salutation or greeting in the English language. Hello, with that spelling, was
used in publications in the US as early as the 18 October 1826 edition of the Norwich Courier of Norwich,
Connecticut. Another early use was an 1833 American book
called The Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West
Tennessee, which was
reprinted that same year in The London Literary Gazette. The
word was extensively used in literature by the 1860s. According to the Oxford
English Dictionary, hello is an alteration
of hallo, hollo, which
came from Old High German "halâ, holâ,
emphatic imperative of halôn, holôn to fetch, used
especially in hailing a ferryman." It also connects the development
of hello to the influence of an earlier form, holla,
whose origin is in the French holà (roughly, 'whoa there!',
from French là 'there'). As in addition to hello, halloo, hallo, hollo, hullo and
(rarely) hillo also exist as variants or related words, the
word can be spelt using any of all five vowels.
The use of hello as a telephone greeting has been credited
to Thomas Edison;
according to one source, he expressed his surprise with a misheard Hullo.
Alexander Graham
Bell initially used Ahoy (as used on ships) as a
telephone greeting. However, in 1877,
Edison wrote to T. B. A. David, president of the Central District and Printing
Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh: Friend David, I do not think we shall need a
call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What you think? Edison - P.S. first cost of sender &
receiver to manufacture is only $7.00. Fowler's has it that
"hallo" is first recorded "as a shout to call attention" in
1864. It is used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner written in
1798. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello
Gretel
Ehrlich, a writer of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, born in Santa Barbara,
California, January 21, 1946, writes about such diverse places as Wyoming,
China, and Greenland. Her unique point
of view on humans and the environment has earned Ehrlich a place among the best
nature writers of our time. The
collection contains correspondence between Ehrlich and some of these important
authors, including Barry Lopez, Ted Hoagland, William Kittredge, and Terry
Tempest Williams. In addition to her
writing, Ehrlich is also known for her work in film editing and producing,
beginning with her studies in film at UCLA and culminating in several
productions as well as a 1976 PBS grant, which led to a documentary about sheep
herding in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has twice recognized the
importance of Ehrlich’s work in both a creative writing fellowship award and a
humanities grant. Besides her books and
film work, Ehrlich has also published poems, screen plays, and numerous
magazine articles. Find a list of her
publications and films at https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/taro/tturb/00268/trb-00268p1.html Gretel Ehrlich: An Inventory of Her Papers, 1923-2005 and
undated, at the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library See also https://www.nationalgeographic.org/find-explorers/gretel-ehrlich
Older things/older houses/books/memory/your
mind/cameras/particle accelerators are the closest things we have to time
machines. Various sources
The Time Machine is a 2002 film about an inventor from New
York City (late 1800's) who travels far into the future to prove that time
travel is possible. He finds himself in
a strange future where mankind has evolved into two very different races. Directed
by Simon
Wells, great-grandson
of H.
G. Wells. Screenplay
by David
Duncan and John Logan; Based
on the novel by H.
G. Wells.
Larry Tesler, an icon of
early computing, has died at the age of 74.
Mr Tesler started working in Silicon Valley in the early 1960s, at a
time when computers were inaccessible to the vast majority of people. It was thanks to his innovations--which
included the "cut", "copy" and "paste" commands--that
the personal computer became simple to learn and use. Xerox, where Mr Tesler spent part of his
career, paid tribute to him. "The
inventor of cut/copy & paste, find & replace, and more, was former
Xerox researcher Larry Tesler," the company tweeted. "Your workday is easier thanks to his
revolutionary ideas." Mr Tesler was
born in the Bronx, New York, in 1945, and studied at Stanford University in
California. After graduating, he specialised in user interface design--that is,
making computer systems more user-friendly.
Possibly Mr Tesler's most famous innovation, the cut and paste
command, was reportedly based on the old method of editing in which people
would physically cut portions of printed text and glue them elsewhere. The command was incorporated in Apple's
software on the Lisa computer in 1983, and the original Macintosh that was
released the following year. One of Mr
Tesler's firmest beliefs was that computer systems should stop using
"modes", which were common in software design at the time. Modes allow users to switch between functions
on software and apps but make computers both time-consuming and complicated. So strong was this belief that Mr Tesler's
website was called "nomodes.com", his Twitter handle was
"@nomodes", and even his car's registration plate was "No
Modes". Silicon Valley's Computer
History Museum said Mr Tesler "combined computer science training with a
counterculture vision that computers should be for everyone". https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51567695 Larry Tesler died February 17, 2020.
WORD
OF THE DAY matrilingual adjective
Pertaining to one's mother tongue. February 21 is International Mother Language Day,
which is recognized by the United
Nations to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism. Wiktionary
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2228
February 21, 2020
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