(PRLEAP.COM) October 29, 2007 - Rocky Mountain Mattress is on a quest to find America's most disgusting bed, and they're willing to share the wealth with the person who shares the most filth. In fact, the Utah-based company, which specializes in high-density memory foam mattresses, is offering one lucky winner a brand new customized memory foam mattress valued at over $2,000 through its Custom Dream Mattress Giveaway. What determines who wins the luxurious new bed? We want to see some of the nasty, old run-down beds that people are sleeping on, said company spokesman Dave Mink. We're basically just looking for a fun way to make someone's dream of a new, top-of-the-line memory foam mattress come to life. In order to register for the Custom Dream Mattress Giveaway, participants will need to create a Website or blog post that includes a photo of their old, worn-down bed, along with an article or post describing why they should receive the new bed. The post must also contain a link to Rocky Mountain Mattress. Once the photo and post / article is live on the Internet, participants must send an email to contestrockymountainmattress.com containing their contact information and the URL to their post / article on their website. This is the perfect opportunity to show off just how bad of shape your current mattress is in! Let's see all of those coffee stains, that deep sag in the middle, the little dip at the corner of the bed where the dog sleeps, or whatever issues your bed has. In addition to sharing the photos of your notoriously disgusting bed, this is also your chance to tell all of the wonderful, horrific, and hilarious stories that go along with your current bed
Source link: http://www.prleap.com/pr/100638/
Its delimited boundaries put me in mind of one of my favourite Wordsworth sonnets, Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room, which extols the paradoxically liberating power of restriction. Just as nuns are freed by the convent's constraints and poets are liberated by the sonnet's 14-line scheme, so was my mind freed - to muse, to reflect, to dream - by what at first had felt like imprisonment.
I fell in love with the essay. It was like being confined in a broken elevator for 12 hours with someone from the office whom you've always vaguely respected but never spoken to at length; discovering that you have everything in common; and realising by the time the doors slide open that you're going to spend the rest of your lives together. Once I was vertical, with a healthy baby in my arms and the freedom to choose any literary genre I pleased, I found that all I wanted to do was write more essays.
What had happened in that broken elevator - or, to return to a more conventionally romantic location, on that cosy mattress? I've already mentioned the essay's combination of limited size and unlimited perspective - the microcosm/macrocosm duality that inspired William Hazlitt's essay On Great and Little Things as well as the title of my current essay collection, At Large and At Small. I was also captivated by the inherently experimental nature of the genre. It's no accident that Montaigne, holed up in his tower in Aquitaine (a sort of 16th-century double mattress), chose to name his new literary form the essaie - in other words, an attempt or trial rather than a finished product. When he was writing about idleness, constancy, fear, friendship, pedantry, moderation, cruelty, presumption, anger, vanity, and sleep - among dozens of other subjects - he never gave the impression that he was being definitive. He was noodling around, hazarding guesses, having fun.
I'm particularly besotted with the 'familiar essay,' a genre that had its heyday in the time of Hazlitt and Charles Lamb
Source link: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/11/make_a_little_room_for_the_ess.html
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