How to improve writing (no. 39)

In August 2008 I wrote a note to myself with some book-buying advice. It ended like so: “Ask yourself, self, the crucial question: do you need to buy this book, or can you be happy getting it from the library?”

More and more often, I am happy getting it, whatever it is, from the library. So it is with Kenneth Slawenski’s J. D. Salinger: A Life (New York: Random House, 2011), a book I found myself rewriting as I read it. Its language is filled with tiresome phrasing: criticism is scathing; friends are close and personal; royalties are handsome; stories are finely crafted.¹ The words actual and actually, often meaningless intensifiers, appear again and again. Some sentences appeared to have been run through a thesaurus: “The episode scorched Salinger fans, a sensation exacerabated twelve years later when Internet booksellers replayed the feint only to deliver disappointment once again.” And Slawenski’s efforts at lit crit rely upon lengthy paraphrase and reductive symbolism: “The room also symbolizes Franny’s spiritual and emotional state.” “The value of acceptance through faith is symbolized by the character of Muriel’s tiny great-uncle.” No, and no.

Here is a sample paragraph, about a novel that was to be devoted to the Glass family:

In attempting such an ambitious work, Salinger tried to employ the same method that worked for him so well when he had penned The Catcher in the Rye: he sought to construct the new book by sewing together pieces that could also stand on their own as self-contained stories. “Zooey” is a prime example of this method. While his letters leave no doubt that “Zooey” was intended to rest with the new novel upon the book’s completion, the story’s most immediate purpose was to stand alone as a sequel to the story “Franny.”

Here’s my more readable version, which omits reference to ambition (as there’s no explanation of what makes this work so ambitious), drops the slightly pompous penned, avoids the illogic of a stand-alone sequel, and reorders elements of the paragraph to make a more logical point: yes, the story is a sequel to “Franny,” but it was meant to be more:

Like The Catcher in the Rye, the new novel was to be a sequence of self-contained stories. While “Zooey” would first serve as a sequel to the earlier “Franny,” Salinger’s letters leave no doubt that the new story was meant to be part of the novel.

Shame on Random House for not making this book’s prose better. Back to the library.

¹ And then there’s this sentence about Claire Douglas, who became Salinger’s first wife: “At the time Claire could not have suited Salinger better had he crafted her himself.”

[This post is no. 39 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

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WTC, 1980

[From a 1980 New York City subway map.]

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At the World Trade Center and St. Paul’s Chapel

From the eighty-fourth floor

A handwritten note from the eighty-fourth floor of Two World Trade Center found its way to the writer’s family in 2011. Bringing consolation? No.

Proust on 120 CDs

The New York Times reports that Naxos AudioBooks is releasing a 120-CD recording of Remembrance of Things Past.

[Remembrance of Things Past, not In Search of Lost Time: the text appears to be the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation.]

William Kennick on writing

William E. Kennick to his students: “I want you to be writers of prose, not processors of words.” Kennick, who taught philosophy at Amherst College, required that undergraduate papers run no more than five pages and draw on primary sources only. David Foster Wallace was among his students. Kennick’s words appear, unsourced, in D. T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (Viking, 2012). More on the book soon.

[Kennick’s 1958 essay “Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?” was one of the best — and most lucid — things I read in grad school. I still have my xeroxed copy.]

A Plain Text Primer

At A Better Mess, Michael Schechter is writing about the benefits of working with plain text files. Two installments so far: A Plain Text Primer and Plain Text Primer: nvALT 101.

In a December 2011 post, I listed my favorite writing tools: index cards, pocket notebooks, legal pads, and the Mac apps TextWrangler and WriteRoom. I can now add nvALT: with Markdown, it’s perfect for creating blog posts. I continue to consider a word-processing window a hostile work environment. Writing is not word-processing.

“I Won’t Talk”

Yesterday, in Iowa, Ann Romney declined to answer a journalist’s questions about contraception and equal marriage. “This election,” Mrs. Romney explained, “is going to be about the economy and jobs.”

Elaine Fine has responded with some help from Jerome Kern and company.

Recently updated

Stuyvesant principal resigns retires The new principal has suggested that the school create an honor code.

Also in the news: Studies Find More Students Cheating, With High Achievers No Exception (New York Times).

Jennifer Granholm at the DNC

If you weren’t watching C-SPAN last night, you most likely missed it: former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm speaking to the Democratic National Convention. This woman was on fire.

My favorite line: “In Romney’s world, the cars get the elevator, and the workers get the shaft.” Yes, an elevator for cars.

[I want to point to a noteworthy speech, not argue politics.]

It’s called lifelong learning

Hay ≠ straw. When you go into the farm-and-home store to buy stuff to cover the grass seed you’ve strewn across the lifeless stretches of your so-called lawn, you should ask for “straw,” not “hay.” Hay is grass. Straw is stalks.



[From the New Oxford American Dictionary.]

I think that most hayrides are in fact strawrides.

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[I sure hope the grass grows.]