Something phishy

Hillary Clinton’s e-mail reply to a message purporting to be from the personal account of a State Department official, a message that contained what the FBI calls “a potentially malicious link”:

Is this really from you? I was worried about opening it!

What do you when you get such a message? You delete it. You do not reply. Unfuckingbelievable.

Yes, that word goes after the un- . It’s an instance of what’s called expletive infixation and an exception to the more usual practice of placing the word before a stressed syllable. The word unfuckingbelievable is also an expression of my deep and unerasable misgivings about voting for Hillary Clinton.

Beverly Cleary, writing by hand

Beverly Cleary, writing by hand:

To me, writing involves my imagination, a handful of 29-cent ball point pens, a stack of paper and time free from interruption. I often begin books in the middle or at the end and play about with my characters in my poor handwriting until I am satisfied with their behavior, which is often a surprise to me. That is the fun of writing. I then rewrite my books in somewhat more legible typing and take them to a typist who telephones for translation of words written between the lines but manages to return pristine manuscripts. I find typing the most difficult part of writing, and once bought and returned a German typewriter that had Achtung! printed on the front. Battling a typewriter is distracting enough without having it giving me orders like an arithmetic book. Telling stories quietly and privately with pen on paper is my joy.

This passage appeared in a 1985 essay published in The New York Times , “Why Are Children Writing to Me Instead of Reading?” A good question, one that results from the classroom study of “living authors.” Cleary quotes from a letter by E. B. White to a librarian in which he wonders about the wisdom of having classrooms’ worth of children write letters to writers. A sentence from the letter that Cleary is too kind to quote: “The author is hopelessly outnumbered.” In another letter, to a child, White explained why he hadn’t written another book for children: “I would like to write another book for children but I spend all my spare time just answering the letters I get from children about the books I have already written.”

Elaine found her way to the Times essay after reading Cleary’s two memoirs. They’re on my to-read list.

On an unrelated note: it’s really hard to type while listening to the Kinks.

Related posts
Beverly Cleary : handwriting : E. B. White (Pinboard)

[White’s letter to the unidentified librarian is dated May 7, 1961. The letter to a child-reader dates from late March 1961. From Letters of E. B. White , ed. Dorothy Lobrano Guth (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). White would go on to write one more book for children, The Trumpet of the Swan (1970).]

“Somewhere in the invisible”

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday . 1943. Trans. Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964).

This passage strikes me as perhaps the saddest in The World of Yesterday : a picture of an intellectual worker, one for whom individual freedom and European unity were the highest values, powerless as he watches the world fall apart once again.

This passage reminds me of an observation from the writer Romain Rolland, as quoted by Zweig: “Art can bring us consolation as individuals, but it is powerless against reality.” That sentence struck both Elaine and me; she wrote about it in this post.

*

3:57 p.m.: A comment from a reader makes me want to add: If this passage makes you think about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, well, me too. As does what Zweig says elsewhere about a desire for “order.”

Other Zweig posts
Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world : School v. city : “A tremendous desire for order” : Urban pastoral, with stationery : Zweig’s last address book

An Elements of Style collection

If The Elements of Style were an arcade game, Jerry Morris would have the highest score, and the next highest score, and the score after that, and so on. He has an impressive collection of different editions, even if he’s missing 1918.

What do I think of The Elements of Style ? That it’s a better book than its detractors claim. It is, however, sadly dated, and not an especially good choice for twenty-first-century students seeking to improve their writing. Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing is far better.

Related reading
All OCA Strunk and White posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

[The radio was on. ]

“Come listen! This person being interviewed is answering every question by starting with the word ‘sure.’”

“So?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Criminal : “The Editor”

An excellent episode of the podcast Criminal : “The Editor,” about an unlikely friendship between a prison inmate and a Merriam-Webster editor.

To my mind, the best podcasts are those that let me forget that I’m listening to a particular podcast, a particular brand. In other words, there’s only the content. Criminal is one of my favorite podcasts.

Recently updated

How to e-mail a professor The Old Reliable, now with a not-behind-a-paywall link to Ben Yagoda’s essay “What Should We Call the Professor?”

[Note to The Chronicle of Higher Education : moving items from one side of the paywall to the other and back again is unfriendly to long-term links.]

For handwriting

New York Times readers strike back: “Why Handwriting Is Still Important.” They’re responding to Anne Trubek’s opinion piece, “Handwriting Just Doesn’t Matter.”

I especially like the windshield-wiper story.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)
Handwriting, pro and con

How to improve writing (no. 66)

A partial sentence from a short piece at The New Yorker website:

I stopped by Three Lives & Company, one of the best bookstores the city has ever made a home for — Zadie Smith, Patti Smith, the late Oliver Sacks, and other luminaries are devotees of the small, elegant, intimate space — to find out that it may have to look for a new home.

There’s a rather odd and awkward problem: the present tense will not work with that sequence of names. A possible revision:

I stopped by Three Lives & Company, one of the best bookstores the city has ever made a home for — Zadie Smith, Patti Smith, and other luminaries are devotees of the small, elegant, intimate space, as was the late Oliver Sacks — to find out that it may have to look for a new home.

But now the distance between “I stopped by” and “to find out” feels vast. And Three Lives & Company, the antecedent of it , seems lost. A better choice is to recast what’s here as two sentences:

I stopped by the bookstore Three Lives & Company, only to find out that it may have to look for a new home. Three Lives is one of the best bookstores the city has ever made a home for: Zadie Smith and Patti Smith are among the devotees of the small, elegant, intimate space, as was the late Oliver Sacks.

You’ll notice that I’ve omitted luminaries , but that’s just me. I hope that Three Lives doesn’t vanish from New York.

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

[This post is no. 66 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

A short post about Mike Love

A New York Times review of Mike Love’s Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy notes that “boasts and grudges overpower the writing style.”

Boasts and grudges? From Mike Love? Say it ain’t so!

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys posts (Pinboard)

[Arthur Schopenhauer: “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”]