Sixteen writers on the election

Online (no subscription needed) and in the November 21 New Yorker , the one with a nearly finished brick wall on the cover: “Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America.” Among the sixteen: Toni Morrison and George Packer.

How to improve writing (no. 69)

[Mark Trail , November 15, 2016.]

Two things to consider. One is the importance of choosing the right word: Mark means to say impending . Garner’s Modern English Usage explains the distinction: “What is pending is awaiting an outcome”; “what is impending is imminent (in the literal sense of the word, ‘hanging over one’s head’) and harmful.” Volcanic eruptions are always harmful.

The second thing to consider: writing that represents speech should resemble speech. (And here I remember the English teacher who took off points when my daughter used contractions in a story’s dialogue.) Writing that represents the speech of someone fleeing an erupting volcano should exhibit greater terseness, greater urgency. A possible revision:


[Mark Trail revised.]

Or better yet: just keep your mouth shut and run, Mark, as Abbey Powell is doing. Run, Mark, run.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts : “How to improve writing” and Mark Trail posts : Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Please imagine the links in the form of a Venn diagram.

[I wrote a note to the teacher about the contractions but, as you might guess, I got nowhere. This post is no. 69 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

From an old notebook

And he got inside and he got out. And he goes back. And the people are there now. And all the balloons come all around and all the colors. And the boy was so happy. And the ones flew away and two twins have two red coats and they have balloons and then they popped it. And now he got it now. And he was under it. And he was holding the strings. And then he goes up to the sky. And then the boy was a string.

Ben, four years old, narrating The Red Balloon.

*

“The speaker buys an apple and stuffs a rotten spot in it with rat pellets.”

Jonathan Holden, in The Fate of American Poetry .

*

The teacher’s seriousness is supported by the proximity of other serious teachers, just as the seriousness of the student is nourished by the presence of other serious students. . . . The maintenance of intellectual integrity is not only a matter of strength of character, but it is also a function of the immediate environment of the teacher. . . . Consciences reinforce each other in intellectual matters as well as in others.

Edward Shils, The Academic Ethic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Also from an old notebook
Alfalfa, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, metaphors : Alfred Appel Jr. on twentieth-century art and literature : Barney : Beauty and the Beast and kid talk : Eleanor Roosevelt : John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch : Plato, Shirley Temple, vulgarity, wisdom, Stan Laurel : Square dancing, poetry, criticism, slang

The PBS NewsHour remembers Gwen Ifill

We broke our no-television-news resolve to watch the PBS NewsHour tonight. Nearly the entire broadcast was devoted to remembering Gwen Ifill. If you missed it, you can watch at PBS.

Gwen Ifill (1955–2016)

The news that Gwen Ifill has died is a terrible shock. As host and moderator of Washington Week and co-anchor of the PBS NewsHour (with Judy Woodruff), Ifill was unbeatable. Here she is in 2013, speaking about the NewsHour to a New York Times interviewer (quoted in the NPR story I’ve linked to):

“When I was a little girl watching programs like this — because that’s the kind of nerdy family we were — I would look up and not see anyone who looked like me in any way. No women. No people of color,” she said. “I’m very keen about the fact that a little girl now, watching the news, when they see me and Judy sitting side by side, it will occur to them that that’s perfectly normal — that it won’t seem like any big breakthrough at all.”

I will miss Gwen Ifill’s intelligence and exuberance. Watching her, I always had the feeling that we were all in this (that is, current events, of whatever sort) together.

Salinger and Tewksbury

In The New Yorker , Jill Lepore writes about J. D. Salinger and Peter Tewksbury (the director of Father Knows Best , among other things) and a never-realized film adaptation of “For Esmé — With Love and Squalor”: “The Film J. D. Salinger Nearly Made.”

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)

[Orange Crate Art is a Father Knows Best -friendly zone. The show is much better than you might think. For instance. And for instance. And for instance.]

“The safest shelter”

Stefan Zweig, Erasmus of Rotterdam  , trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Viking, 1934).

Zweig knew this feeling. I think many people in November 2016 know it too.

Other Zweig posts
Destiny, out of one’s hands : Erasmus ekphrasis : Fanaticism and reason : Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world : School v. city : “A tremendous desire for order” : Urban pastoral, with stationery : Zweig’s last address book

Nell Irvin Painter on the election

Nell Irvin Painter in The New York Times on whiteness in the Trump era:

Conveniently, for most white Americans, being white has meant not having a racial identity. It means being and living and experiencing the world as an individual and not having to think about your race. . . . The Trump campaign has disrupted that easy freedom.

[No arguments here, please. I’m sharing this link because I think it’s good food for thought.]

Leon Russell (1941–2016)

The musician and songwriter Leon Russell has died. The New York Times has an obituary.

Leon Russell was only occasionally on my radar. But many years ago, I held a microphone up to the television set and recorded this performance on a cassette, Furry Lewis and Russell and company performing “Furry’s Blues.” Watch the way Russell and the rest of the band adapt to Lewis’s flexible sense of time.



The whole show is at YouTube too.

Mark Shields on the election

From his syndicated column:

A friendly suggestion to Democrats: This blame-the-customer explanation is self-defeating. We basically have two political parties; if you demonize the people who support the other party’s candidate as moral lepers and ethical eunuchs, you’re probably not going to win either their goodwill or their votes.

I always like seeing Mark Shields on the PBS NewsHour , but I haven’t watched a minute of television news since Tuesday night. I’m reading instead — Shields’s column among other things.

[No arguments here, please. I’m sharing this link because I think it’s good food for thought.]