AOL buys Huffington Post

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AOL has purchased the Huffington Post for $315 million.

[The pseudo-links are sarcastic high jinks. I’ve never been impressed by HuffPo’s style of journalism.]

Snail Mail

[Click for a larger view.]

“Without ZIP CODE the growing U.S. Mail load would move at a snail’s pace — if it moved at all!”: an advertisement from Life, November 22, 1968.

Poor Mr. ZIP: he lived to see all mail become snail mail. The Oxford English Dictionary traces snail mail — “the physical delivery of mail, as by the postal service, considered as slow in comparison to electronic mail; a letter, etc., sent by post” — back to 1982. Mr. ZIP retired in 1986. He later died of a broken heart.

Another SMiLE?

Beach Boy Al Jardine tells an interviewer that a Beach Boys version of Smile (or SMiLE, the traditional spelling) is on the way:

Are there plans for a new Beach Boys archival project?

Capitol Records plans to issue a Beach Boys version of Smile sometime this summer to begin the celebration of The Beach Boys’ anniversary. Smile is the Holy Grail for Beach Boys’ fans, so it will be good.

I don’t have many details on it, although we didn’t do any new recording. I’m happy to see it finally come out. Brian’s changed his mind about releasing the material, but it was inevitable, wasn’t it?

Beach Boys versions of songs from SMiLE have been released on various LPs (beginning in 1967 with Smiley Smile). More SMiLE material appeared in 1993 in the Capitol box-set Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys. And as you might guess, vast amounts of SMiLE and SMiLE-related material have become available on bootlegs. And Brian Wilson recorded and released SMiLE as a solo album in 2004. Mike Love even sued cousin Brian about it, which would seem to make it official.

A new release of Beach Boys SMiLE material (with, I trust, excellent remastering) would be a welcome thing, but it’s not as if the music is finally coming out.

[SMiLE, music by Brian Wilson, lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, began its legendary life in 1966. It’s a masterpiece. Surf’s up!]

Trochees

From xkcd, Trochee Fixation. And, on a similar note, Iambic Pentameter.

[Yes, my name’s made of trochees, but I try not to call attention to it.]

“Ice and Snow Blues No. 3”

Light to moderate my eye. It is really, really snowing. Only after I trudged out did I realize what a dumb thing I was doing: had I slipped, our camera would likely have been ruined.

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Related posts
“Ice and Snow Blues”
“Ice and Snow Blues No. 2”

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?]