NoteSlate

“[Y]ou will love the wooden feeling of writing or drawing”: NoteSlate, a $99 electronic tablet. I think they need to work on the translation.

(Found via kottke.org)

Battling The Elements

In a review of Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence, Adam Haslett slams The Elements of Style and the “old Strunkian superego”:

The trouble with the book isn’t the rules themselves, which the authors are sage enough to recognise “the best writers sometimes disregard,” but the knock-on effect that their bias for plain statement has tended to have not only on expositional but literary prose.

The Art of Good Writing (Financial Times)

Haslett holds Strunk and White (and that guy Hemingway) responsible for the “pared-down prose“ “that has become our default ‘realism.’”

Josh Rothman responds:

[E.B. White] wasn’t an enemy of literariness. He saw, instead, that beginning writers face two struggles. On the one hand, there is lazy inattentiveness; on the other, there’s a self-conscious sense of “literary style,” which can stand in the way of a beginning writer’s progress. His suggestions about finding a middle way are as useful now as they were in 1959.

In Defense of Strunk and White (Boston Globe)

I’ll add one thought: Strunk and White’s emphasis on brevity does not preclude long sentences. The real point is concision — avoiding clutter (e.g., “the fact that,” “the question as to whether”) and combining short, choppy sentences to make longer, more fluent sentences. From the famous “Omit needless words” section of The Elements:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

A related post
Fish on Strunk and White

Proust on French TV

Bill Madison has written a/an hilarious account of a television adaptation of À la recherche du temps perdu: Proust, the Miniseries. Go, enjoy.

Fish on Strunk and White

Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One (HarperCollins, 2011) seems to be positioned as a replacement for William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style. Indeed, the second chapter is titled “Why You Won’t Find the Answer in Strunk and White.” Fish quotes a newspaper’s praise of the (so-called) little book and then strikes:

“This excellent book, which should go off to college with every freshman, is recognized as the best book of its kind we have.” No doubt this praise is deserved if the person using the book already knows how to write; already knows, that is, what a sentence is. For then advice like “Do not join independent clauses with a comma” and “The number of the subject determines the number of the verb” will be genuinely helpful. But if you’re not quite sure what a sentence is (and isn’t) and you understand the words “number,” “subject,” and “verb” but couldn’t for the life of you explain how they go together or what an independent clause is, Strunk and White’s instructions will make no sense.

In short, Strunk and White’s advice assumes a level of knowledge and understanding only some of their readers will have attained; the vocabulary they confidently offer is itself in need of an analysis and explanation they do not provide.

No doubt Fish sees his book as more useful than theirs. But his claims here just aren’t accurate. Analysis and explanation do in fact accompany the rules that Fish quotes. So do examples, perhaps the best kind of explanation. This lovely sentence, for instance, is one of those illustrating problems with subject-verb agreement: “The bittersweet flavor of youth — its trials, its joys, its adventures, its challenges — are [is] not soon forgotten.” Fish, like Geoffrey Pullum, seems to forget that The Elements of Style is a book, not a list of commandments.

As for Strunk and White’s assumptions about the reader’s knowledge of grammar: things are more complicated than Fish allows. It is the case that the 1959 Elements of Style assumes a rudimentary knowledge of grammar, as do the 1972 and 1979 editions. But the fourth edition of the book (2000) adds a glossary of grammatical terms (number, subject, verb, &c.) with simple definitions and examples. One might argue about its adequacy, and Fish might be amused that sentence is missing. But it’s not the case that The Elements of Style in its present form assumes a knowledge of grammatical terms. As I wrote in a post about another recent mischaracterization of Strunk and White’s advice, “There are good reasons to find fault with The Elements of Style, but one should be sure that it’s The Elements of Style one is criticizing — the thing itself, not some rumor.”

The stunning thing in the passage from Fish that I’ve quoted is its tacit acknowledgment that many students entering college do not know what subjects and verbs and independent clauses and sentences are. But that’s a subject for another post.

[Having read excerpts from How to Write a Sentence via Amazon, I suspect that Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (Graphics Press, 2006), which collects more than a thousand sentences from twentieth and twenty-first century writers, is a more capacious and useful guide to the art of the sentence. Fish begins with (and acknowledges) the beautiful sentence that begins Tufte’s book, from Anthony Burgess’s Enderby Outside (1968): “And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.”]

*

Here’s my review of How to Write a Sentence.

Related posts
Battling The Elements
The Elements of Style, one more time
Pullum on Strunk and White

The Daily v. NYTimes for iPad

Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily, “the first digital news publication with original content created every day exclusively for the iPad,” is rated “9+,” for “Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence.” I assume that such violence is to be found in The Daily’s Apps & Games section. In contrast, NYTimes for iPad is rated “12+,” for “Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes, Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity, Infrequent/Mild Realistic Violence, Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References.”

It’d be nice to read news in which violence, whether cartoonish or “realistic,” is infrequent and mild. But that’d be the news from nowhere. Who at Apple decided that it would make sense to describe the content of the news in these terms? And why the three-year age difference between these two sources?

[The Gossip section of The Daily must be pretty tame stuff — no Suggestive Themes, none at all?]

“Ice and Snow Blues No. 2”

The ice is much thicker today.

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

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“Ice and Snow Blues”

Michiko Kakutani, messy

New York Times book-reviewer Michiko Kakutani is known for her frequent (some might say too frequent) use of the verb limn. Far more frequent is her use of the adjective messy. Indeed, it was the appearance of the two words in close proximity in Kakutani’s review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom — “limning their messy inner lives” — that made me wonder whether messy appears with any frequency in her writing. It does. And how.

Messy first appears in 1979, in a description of the Gotham Book Mart: “a messy profusion of literary magazines, journals and booklets arranged in alphabetical heaps and rows.” Then, a slight drizzle:

“Ruth Gordon was apologizing for her messy apartment.” [1979]

“[T]he messy ambiguities of life.” [1980]

“[A] messy sexual tryst,” “messy lives and aimless talk.” [1982]

Then, a steady rain:

“[T]his messy affair,” “a noisy, somewhat messy interruption in their daily lives,” “the messy fortunes of four young people coming of age in a small, unnamed English town,” “declaring on the witness stand that their house is very messy.” “Whereas fictional events may be orchestrated and shaped into a pleasing pattern, real events tend to be messy and resistant to the tidy, idealized designs favored by the imagination.” [1983]

“[L]ots of messy relationships and compromising positions,” “increasingly messy,” “messy wisps of ‘maybe’s.’” [1984]

“[M]essy entanglements,” “the messy entanglements and conditional values of humdrum daily life.’ [1985]

“[M]essy coincidences,” “messy convolutions,” “messy narrative,” “messy human emotions.” [1986]

“[A] messy affair,” “messy affairs,” “messy housekeeping.” [1987]

“[A] messy seduction scene,” “messy to begin with,” “messy private life,” “small, messy lives.” “If this sounds messy, things are to get considerably more complicated as the novel proceeds.” [1988]

“[M]essy life,” “bizarre three-way relationships and messy complications.” [1989]

“Julie's messy life,” “the messy world of human emotions,” “messy dangling ends.” [1990]

“[T]he messy facts of his father’s life,” “the messy facts of Poe’s life.” [1991]

Then, a downpour:

“[A] messy hodgepodge of a book,” “incongruous and messy relationships,” “messy relationships with men,” “the messy, often incomprehensible facts of life,” “change, confusion and messy emotion.” [1992]

“[A] messy maelstrom of emotions,” “messy moral dilemmas,” “Naomi Wolf’s messy new treatise.” [1993]

“[T]his lax, messy book,” “the random, messy business of life,” “a messy hodgepodge of familiar complaints and hyperbolic assertions.” [1994]

“A Novel About a Novelist and His Messy Life,” “messy involvement,” “the messy details of real life,” “a messy series of adventures,” “a finely observed but messy novel.” [1995]

“[Howard] Stern’s messy, free-associative new tome,” “messy, entangled lives,” “this messy and prosaic book.” [1996]

“[A] messy tangle of contradictions,” “messy human emotions,” “this otherwise messy, discursive novel,” “so messy that its refusal of closure feels less like an artistic choice than simple laziness.” Time itself becomes a big hot mess: “The solar year is made up of a messy 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45.96768 seconds; the moon takes an inconvenient 29 1/2 days (or to be more precise, 29.53059 days) to circle the earth.” [1997]

“[T]he messy process of artistic creation,” “the messy, spoiled world of civilization,” “this messy, discursive book,” “a messy, shaggy-dog tale.” [1998]

“[T]his messy volume,” “the messy world,” “the messy fallout of an art forgery scam,” “messy romantic entanglements.” [1999]

“[M]essy confirmation hearings,” “messy emotions,” “the messy ingredients of life,” “a messy hybrid of a book,” “a messy adventure.” [2000]

“A messy hodgepodge of styles and ambitions,” “a messy kitchen sink of a book,” “messy and wildly ambitious epics,” “disclosures about Luke’s messy life,” “the messy web of extortion, payoffs and election fraud that afflicted Jersey City and its neighbors in Hudson County,” “a scintillating, if messy, tapestry.” [2001]

“[A] messy hodgepodge of ideas, experimental dream sequences and leaden leitmotifs,” “simultaneously schematic and messy,” “a messy, unconvincing assemblage.” [2002]

“[T]he messy 2000 election standoff in Florida,” “a messy one,” “lazy craftsmanship and a messy, improvised story.” [2003]

“[T]he messy cacophony of city life,” “a messy pastiche,” “a messy, musically structured hodgepodge of a novel,” “his own messy, even felonious inner life,” “messy and predictable at the same time.” [2004]

“[A] messy love triangle,” “a messy hodgepodge of case studies,” “the whole messy story,” “the whole messy sprawl,” “their own messy stew of emotions.” [2005]

Slowing to a drizzle:

“[A] messy, doomed affair,” “a smart, saavy [sic] but messy hodgepodge of a book.” [2006]

“[B]ig, messy, controversial issues,“ “the useful if messy new book.” [2007]

“[A] messy agglomeration,” “his messy, increasingly implausible plot.” [2008]

“This messy, longwinded [sic] volume,” “an entertaining, if messy and long-winded, commentary on the fiction-making process itself.” [2009]

“[A] messy divorce,” “limning their messy inner lives.” [2010]

And the new year is thus far tidy. You can literally eat off the floor, figuratively speaking.

Every writer has stock bits of diction and phrasing. It’s good to become conscious of them, lest they develop into writerly tics. Me, I have to watch out for wonderful, which I’ve used fourteen times in Orange Crate Art posts — it’s probably a Van Dyke Parks influence.

[All quotations from the New York Times. I’ve rearranged some material within individual years for cadence.]

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Eric Schmidt, literally

Eric Schmidt, literally

Going forward, he might have to think twice about literally.

[Yes, going forward is a joke. What do you take me for?]

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Eric Schmidt on the future

Janis Joplin’s handbag

An inventory:

There are: two movie stubs, a pack of cigarettes, an antique cigarette holder, several motel and hotel room keys, a box of Kleenex, a compact and various make up cases (in addition to a bunch of eyebrow pencils held together with a rubber band), an address book, dozens of bits of paper, business cards, match box covers with phone numbers written in near-legible barroom scrawls, guitar picks, a bottle of Southern Comfort (empty), a hip flask, an opened package of complementary macadamia nuts from American Airlines, cassettes of Johnny Cash and Otis Redding, gum, sunglasses, credit cards, aspirin, assorted pens and writing pad, a corkscrew, an alarm clock, a copy of Time, and two hefty books — Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.

What Was in Janis Joplin's Handbag? (The Hairpin)

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Q and A (Marianne Moore’s handbag)

“Ice and Snow Blues”

Today is a good day for Clifford Gibson’s 1929 recording “Ice and Snow Blues.” You can listen at YouTube.

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]