“Strunk & White was the first text for millions that persuaded reluctant writers that the writing craft was not an act of magic, but the applied use of both rules and tools”: Roy Peter Clark writes about “Why Strunk & White still matters (or matter) (or both).”
In 2009 Geoffrey Pullum’s Chronicle attack renewed my interest in “Strunk & White” — or The Elements of Style, a book I hadn’t thought about for many years. (My response to Pullum is one of the most widely read posts on this blog.) I remain ambivalent about The Elements: I couldn’t imagine using the book (so painfully dated) in a writing class, but I think it has greater value than its detractors allow.
Related reading
All OCA Strunk and White posts (Pinboard)
Thursday, September 20, 2018
Strunk and White mattering
The Write Stuff
From BBC Radio 4, The Write Stuff, “the radio panel game of literary correctness.” Alas, the show is not a podcast; it plays only on radios and in browsers. If it were a podcast, you would want to listen at a higher speed. Very fast and alarmingly smart.
Thanks to OCA reader Steven for telling me about this show.
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Yesterday and Today
To the journalist who found my post about Christine Blasey Ford and asked that I ”help [him] out” with a column he’s writing by providing specific examples of the epithet “that woman”:
As we used to say in elementary school, Do your own homework. Or, Keep your eyes on your own paper. Jeez.
[I imagine that someone who writes for USA Today and other newspapers might think of me as ”some blogger.”]
Weavers and writers
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998).
Related reading
All OCA Sebald posts (Pinboard)
[See also Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925), in which a historian’s manuscripts and a dressmaker’s patterns become “papers.” And in which the historian’s notes are “woven into their proper place in his history.” I made much of these matters in an essay on the novel.]
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
The, that woman
If I hear one more talking head on television speak of Christine Blasey Ford as “the woman” or “that woman,” I will have to say something about it. And now I will. “The woman” or “that woman”— no longer anonymous — has a name, just as Brett Kavanaugh does. Her name is Christine Blasey Ford. Her university webpage identifies her as Christine Blasey. Thus, Dr. Blasey, or Ms. Blasey.
There is more than a touch of misogynist condescension in “the woman” and “that woman.” Remember Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”?
Pocket notebook sighting
[Dead End (dir. William Wyler, 1937. Click for a larger view.]
The neighborhood cop and an ambulance attendant write down the gruesome details of Baby Face Martin’s demise. Good thing they have notebooks.
More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Time Table : T-Men : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window
“Clouds of paper”
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998).
The Ashbury family lives a secluded life in a three-story country house at the foot of the Slieve Bloom Mountains in Ireland. I won’t even try to explain beyond that.
Related reading
All OCA Sebald posts (Pinboard)
Monday, September 17, 2018
Megan Garber on “boys will be boys”
At The Atlantic, Megan Garber writes about Brett Kavanaugh and the claim that “boys will be boys.” Two excerpts:
Here is the deeper venality of the boys-being-boys defense: It normalizes. It erases the specific details of Christine Blasey Ford’s stated recollections with the soggy mop of generalized male entitlement. What red-blooded guy, after all, its logic assumes, hasn’t done, in some way, the kinds of things Ford has described? Who, as a younger version of himself, hasn’t gotten stumble-drunk, pinned down a woman, groped her, tried to undress her, and then, when she resisted, held his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams? (“It was drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven,” the Fox News columnist Stephen Miller tweeted, derisively.)I vote for morally intolerable. And I suspected from the start of the hearings that something dark and violent in Kavanaugh’s history might come to light. If Ford is telling the truth (and I believe her account is credible), Kavanaugh is unfit for the Supreme Court — not only because of his actions as a high-school student but because of his denial today.
*
Americans talk a lot, these days, about norms. What will be preserved, in the tumult and chaos of today’s politics; what is worth preserving; what will fall away. Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was already, in the profoundest of ways, a matter of norms: It will determine, almost inevitably, whether the women of America maintain autonomy over their bodies. Here, though, in Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that a young Brett Kavanaugh compromised her autonomy in another way, another norm is being litigated: the way we talk about sexual violence. Whether such violence will be considered an outrage, or simply a sad inevitability. Whether it will be treated as morally intolerable . . . or as something that, boys being boys and men being men, just happens.
Mystery actor
Sunday, September 16, 2018
Postage due
[Zippy, September 15, 2018.]
Late, like the mail sometimes.
Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
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