How to improve writing (no. 63)

Here’s a sentence from a piece about David Foster Wallace at the The New Yorker website. The books in question are Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion :

Both books have fans, but I think it’s safe to say that no twenty-year-old will ever stick either of them in his or her backpack alongside Infinite Jest when they go trekking in Nepal.

The shift from “his or her” to a singular “they” is awkward. Sticking with singular pronouns — “his or her backpack when he or she goes trekking” — would be awkward too. The sentence needs rethinking. Or as we say in east-central Illinois, the sentence needs rethought:

Both books have fans, but I think it’s safe to say that no twenty-year-old will ever stick either of them in a backpack alongside Infinite Jest when trekking in Nepal.

I’d go further:

Each book has fans, but I doubt that a twenty-year-old will pack either book alongside Infinite Jest for a trek through Nepal.

I’ve removed the boilerplate “I think it’s safe to say,” reduced “stick either of them in a backpack” to “pack,” and made the work of packing precede the trek. And why “either book”? Look at the work “either of them” does in the original sentence:

Both books have fans, but I think it’s safe to say that no twenty-year-old will ever stick either of them . . . .

Having noticed that glitch, I find it impossible to un-notice it. Adding the word “book” keeps those fans out of the backpack.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve tried to set a good example by replacing quotation marks with italics for the title Infinite Jest . This post is no. 63 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Editing Donald Trump

From The New Yorker: Copy-Editing Donald Trump.

[Following its own course, The New Yorker spells copy-edit with a hyphen.]

A teaching dream

The clock was running down and I was paging through a well-annotated paperback, trying to find a necessary passage from Walter Pater. (Walter Pater!) But the clock was running down, and the students were getting ready to go. “Make sure to be here on Thursday!” I yelled. “I’ll be assigning a novel you need to read for Monday.” Yes, the entire novel. Some turnaround! The time ran out, the students left the room, and I was still turning pages.

My dad (a tile contractor) told me late in his life that he had been dreaming of work for years after retirement. He was a tile ace. But in every dream, the job was going badly.

A 2006 Wall Street Journal article (or even the small piece of it not behind the paywall) suggests that such dreams are common. Perhaps they allow us to wonder whether we really did as well as we think we did. Or perhaps they remind us that there’s much not to miss about work. Though in that case, I should have dreams in which I’m grading.

This dream marks my second classroom appearance since retiring. The first came last September.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[I loved teaching as long as I was doing it. But I don’t miss it. Thirty years is enough.]

Henry Dreyfuss ice cream

Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day: a Henry Dreyfuss design for an ice-cream label. It makes me think of Joe Brainard’s work.

You can subscribe to the Object of the Day e-mail here.

Goodbye, “M”

First the Metropolitan Museum of Art ended the use of the “M” admission button, and now it’s doing away with the “M” altogether, a beautiful and art-historical “M.” Justin Davidson calls the Museum’s new logo “a typographic bus crash.” I agree. And I’d add that there won’t be another bus coming along any time soon.

Elaine, when I just showed her the new logo: “Ew.”

Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for passing on news of the new (ew) design.

[It’s really spelled ew, not eww . Who knew?]

Orderly, dark and deep

Verlyn Klinkenborg (born in Colorado, living in upstate New York) recounts waking up with “a deep taxonomic yearning” to identify the trees around him. So he begins learning. Hemlock: its needles have two white lines. Black birch: it grows on “disturbed ground.” White pine: its needles grow in fives.


Verlyn Klinkenborg, “February,” The Rural Life (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002).

My knowledge of the natural world is scant, and mostly derived from works of literature. (I have often learned about trees and flowers and such by first reading about them in poems.) I admire Klinkenborg’s knowledge of nature’s variety.

An inventory of wildlife at Dreamers Rise prompted me to pull this passage from Klinkenborg’s book. I admire Chris’s knowledge of nature’s variety too.

Related reading
All OCA Verlyn Klinkenborg posts (Pinboard)

[Post title with apologies to Robert Frost.]

Today in sardine history

Our son Ben is drawing history, at History Comics.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

George Gaynes (1917–2016)

The actor George Gaynes has died at the age of ninety-eight. The New York Times has an obituary. It omits mention of Gaynes’s role as Arthur Feldman — old friend, suitor, and, finally, husband of Florence Bickford (Allyn Ann McLerie), who played the mother of Molly Dodd (Blair Brown) in the television series The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd . I didn’t know until reading the Times obituary that Gaynes and McLerie were real-life partners, married in 1953.

The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd is an abiding preoccupation in our household. Here’s to all its company.

Related reading
All OCA Molly Dodd posts (Pinboard)

“Go buy some pencils”

Siegfried N. Lodwig, a retired professor of chemistry and mathematics, argues for the simplest tool of thought:

The fundamental technology of the pencil is as useful today as it was in the year of its invention, 1662. No, I’m not a Luddite. I just want to urge that we teach students to use a hammer to drive a nail. A pile driver is not the correct tool to drive a nail. Go buy some pencils for your students.

Lodwig’s thinking make me think of my own antipathy to the word-processor as a tool for writing. I stand by what I wrote in 2011: “I consider a word-processing window a hostile workplace.” Writing is not word-processing. There are better tools for putting words together.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

[Difficult to say that the pencil was invented in 1662. But Wikipedia says that “the first attempt to manufacture graphite sticks from powdered graphite was in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1662.”]

Recently updated

Who Donne it John Milton, as The New Republic now acknowledges.