hiatus n. a pause or gap in a sequence, series, or process.
Unfortunately there is not enough time in the day to do everything that you set out to do in life. No one knows this better than we here at The Grange. There are just not enough people, not enough contributors and not enough moments to spare for us to continue with this endeavor right now. With any luck, perhaps this will change, but for now, we’re going to have to shutter our doors and focus on other endeavors. It’s a total bummer but sometimes we have to accept our limits. In the meantime, please feel free to have a look around and check out some of the great pieces like Nerdcore, Disconnect, Girdle, Sleep, Divorce, and Geography… that were contributed by so many talented writers.
Hopefully we can start again soon… Until then come visit us over here.
Categories: Word
revolution n. a dramatic and wide-reaching change in the way something works or is organized or in people’s ideas about it.
The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through text-books – they spread like epidemics through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied form of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.
There are slow spreading epidemics, like polio, and others that strike swiftly, like the plague. The Darwinian revolution struck like lightning, the Marxian took three quarters of a century to hatch. But the Copernican revolution, which so decisively affected the fate of man, spread in a slower and more devious manner than all. The reason for this was not religious persecution or the fear of martyrdom. It was the fact that Copernicus feared ridicule – because he was torn by doubt regarding his system, and knew that he could neither prove it to the ignorant nor defend it against criticism by the experts. Hence, his flight into secretiveness, and the reluctant, piecemeal yielding of his system to the public.
Categories: Word
Tagged: ideas
belligerent adj. hostile and aggressive
A soupcon of Genghis Kahn is as vital to a wacky chick as a good pair of heels. A dab of truculence gives her the wherewithal to deal with the challenging situations and people that come with the wacky territory. It’s healthy too: belligerence allows a wacky chick to divest herself of frustrations and aggressions that, if left to fester internally, might turn nasty inside her, like old yogurt. Externalizing the occasional hostility is nothing new: men have been doing it for centuries – that’s why they’re less neurotic than women!
Categories: Word
Tagged: rotten yogurt, Simon Doonan, Wacky Chicks
Off adv. away from the place in question
Dearest people,
How can I thank you. This is the day I have been waiting for all my life. I am off.
Off to Paris to follow my dreams. Be brave, Ida and Morris. We will meet again in that starry-eyed city. You know I have always lived by my dreams. And now they have come true.
Roots and wings. Roots and wings. I’ve got to go, Daddy-o.
So long. farewell. Good-bye.
Ha!
Categories: Word
Tagged: Chinese proverbs, Maira Kalman, Max
splendid adj. magnificent; very impressive
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion -flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near,”
And the white rose weeps, “She is late,”
The larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear,”
And the lily whispers, “I wait.”
Categories: Word
Tagged: Julia Cameron, Tennyson
tradition n. the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation,or the fact of being passed on in this way
Heywood Broun: What are your plans now?
F.Scott Fitzgerald: I’ll be darned if I know. The scope and the depth and breadth of my writings lie in the laps of the gods. If knowledge comes naturally, through interest, as Shaw learned his political economy or as Wells devoured modern science – why, that’ll be slick. On study itself – that is, in ‘reading you’ a subject – I haven’t anthill moving faith. Knowledge must cry out to be known – cry out that only I can know it, and then I’ll swim in to satiety.
Heywood Broun: Do you expect to be part of the great literary tradition?
F. Scott Fitzgerald: There’s no great literary tradition. There’s only the tradition of the eventual death of every literary tradition.
Categories: Word
Tagged: death, Fitzgerald
friend n. A person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.
Vincent has a wife named Helena. She is Greek with blond hair. It’s dyed. I was going to be polite and not mention that it was dyed, but I really don’t think she cares if anyone knows. In fact, I think she is going for the dyed look, with the roots showing. What if she and I were close friends? What if I borrowed her clothes and she said, That looks better on you, you should keep it. What if she called me in tears, and I had to come over and soothe her in the kitchen, and Vincent tried to come into the kitchen and we said, Stay out, this is girl talk! I saw something like that happen on TV: these two women were talking about some stolen underwear and a man came in and they said, Stay out this is girl talk! One reason Helena and I would never be close friends is that I am about half as tall as she. People tend to stick to their own size group because it’s easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you.
Categories: Word
Tagged: bad dye-jobs, giraffes, Greeks, Miranda July
shuffle v. move (people or things) around so as to occupy different positions or to be in a different order 
Obama is the nation’s first shuffle president. He’s telling lots of stories at once, and in no particular order. His agenda is fully downloadable. If what you care most about is health care, then you can jump right into that. If global warming gets you going, then click over there. It’s not especially realistic to imagine that politics could cling to a linear way of rendering stories while the rest of American culture adapts to a more customized form of consumption. Obama’s ethos may disconcert the older guard in Washington, but it’s probably comforting to a lot of younger voters who could never be expected to listen to successive tracks, in the same order, over and over again.
Categories: Word
Tagged: Digital Age, Multitasking, New York Times, Obama, story telling
flag n. a piece of cloth or similar material used as the symbol or emblem of a country or institution.
Because a flag is a flat object, it may signify flatness or the relative lack of depth in much modernist painting. The flag may of course function as an emblem of the United States and may in turn connote American art, Senator Joseph McCarthy, or the Vietnam War, depending on the date of Johns’ use of the image, the date of the viewer’s experience of it, or the nationality of the viewer. Or the flag may connote none of these things. In other words, the meaning of the flag in Johns’ art suggests the extent to which the “meaning” of this subject matter may be fluid and open to continual reinterpretation.
Categories: Word
Tagged: Flags, Fourth of July, Jasper Johns
shaman n. a person regarded as having access to, and influence in, the world of good and evil spirits.
Whenever people sense the presence of a puzzling and momentous force, they want to believe there is a way to comprehend it. If you can convince them that you’re the key to comprehension, you can reach great stature. This fact has deeply shaped the evolution of religion, and it seems to have done so since very near the beginning. Once there was belief in the supernatural, there was a demand for people who claimed to fathom it.
Categories: Word
Tagged: Cher, Evolution of God, gypsies, Robert Wright, tramps and thieves
gone adj. no longer in existence 
If, in the immediate aftermath of Homo sapiens petrolerus, the tanks and towers of the Texas petrochemical patch all detonated together in one spectacular roar, after the oily smoke cleared, there would remain melted roads, twisted pipe, crumpled sheathing, and crumbled concrete. White hot incandescence would have jump-started the corrosion of scrap metals in the salt air, and the polymer chains in hydrocarbon residues would likewise have cracked into smaller, more digestible lengths, hastening biodegradation. Despite the expelled toxins, the soils would also be enriched with burnt carbon, and after a year of rains switchgrass would be growing. A few hardy wildflowers would appear. Gradually, life would resume.
Categories: Word
Tagged: Alan Weisman, Homo Sapiens, The World Without Us
Shocking adj. causing a feeling of surprise. 
Three weeks after Britain and France declared war on Germany, Coco Chanel had closed her atelier and without notice fired her entire staff, leaving only her perfume boutique open. On June 4, 1940, the outskirts of Paris were bombed. Chanel quickly packed up her apartment at the Hotel Ritz and, along with thousands of other Parisians, fled the city for the south of France. But at the end of August, she was back in Paris. By this time, the Ritz, like other luxury hotels, had been requisitioned by the Nazis. It was hung with a huge flag bearing swastika and no one without a special pass was permitted to enter. Chanel talked her way in, found that her apartment had been taken over by Nazis, and accepted the small room she was offered on the rue Cambon side of the hotel, where other well-connected French people also lived. Nazi officials lived on the other side of the hotel.
Shortly thereafter, she was joined at the Ritz by a German, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a somewhat mysterious figure nicknamed Spatz who had lived in Paris as a diplomat since 1928. The two become involved after Chanel sought his help on behalf of her nephew who had been interned by the Germans. Chanel and Spatz then lived together in the Ritz during the entire war. When they met, she was fifty-eight and still an attractive figure to the younger man who was thirteen years her junior. Although her friends warned her about consorting with an enemy diplomat, Coco had a ready if completely inadequate answer: “He isn’t German,” she said, “his mother was English.”
Categories: Word
Tagged: Avedon, Coco Chanel, Cougers
