Joan Didion and the new nonfiction

"He didn't know what to make of that, and he began to invoke the names of authors like Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow and William Styron, whom we surely regarded as literary giants. We said those writers didn't happen to be our models, and we mentioned people like Lewis Thomas and Joan Didion and Gary Wills. He had never heard of them. One of the women mentioned Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, and he hadn't heard of that. We explained that these were writers we admired for their ability to harness the issues and concerns of the day."

~~ from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

alert the reader

Learn to alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in mood from the previous sentence. At least a dozen words will do this job for you: "but," "yet," "however," "nevertheless," "still," "instead," "thus," "therefore," "meanwhile," "now," "later," "today," "subsequently" and several more. I can't overstate how much easier it is for readers to process a sentence if you start with "but" when you're shifting direction. Or, conversely, how much harder it is if they must wait until the end to realize that you have shifted.

~~ from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

a whole sweet potato

"That night the entire Rudd family sat at the round kitchen table, and while we talked of hurt and guilt and war, the chicken soup and matzoh balls appeared, plus a steady stream of Jewish appetizers—pickles, chopped liver, coleslaw. (A few days later a reporter for The New York Post got through to my mother and obtained her recipe for chicken soup, including her secret ingredient—a whole sweet potato.)"

~~ from Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen by Mark Rudd

Behold nineteen Luzinskis

The Bull wore number nineteen.

afraid of violence

"A few days later, back in New York, I got a call from Walter, an acquaintance in the black high-school movement in the city, who said that he had watched me during the demonstration and that I had 'just been running with the girl' and done nothing violent at all. I had seen him and a partner throw a garbage can through a bank window. He said he now knew I was a phony and couldn't be relied on in the coming revolutionary struggle.

"I was devastated . . . because his criticism was true. Since I was a little kid, I'd been (and still am) afraid of violence. I was always ashamed of not standing up to bullies, even when they directly challenged me. In my family, violence was for the goyim or the trombeniks (hoodlums). I knew no one who hit another person. I did not play football. I had never lost my fear of violence."

~~ from Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen by Mark Rudd

immediate attention to your manuscript, pays spot cash

 

~~ from The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout

not necessarily the safest place to be

"I was having a lot of problems with my dad. . . We had an argument, and [my dad] says, 'You didn't suffer. He says what you are you whining about? You had easy duty.' Which was true."

"Right. But. . . it's still the military. You're still away from home. It's still not necessarily the safest place to be . . . that's where I struggle with the hierarchy of service. . . [E]veryone served. We just served in different capacities."

The Life and Times of a Korean Veteran Renaissance Man

Once he gets going, this artist-writer-veteran-polio-survivor-German-translator-mime-masseuse-soldier-on-the-Korean-wall-during-Vietnam is good. Have a listen.

 

Mencken's Joyce

"[H.L. Mencken's] the Smart Set published two stories by James Joyce, 'A Little Cloud' and 'The Boarding-House,' in the May issue, the first time that any of any of Joyce's work had appeared in an American publication. (It would also be the last time he appeared in the Smart Set, since Mencken had no use for his later work, dismissing Ulysses as 'deliberately mystifying and mainly puerile. . . . I have never been able to get over a suspicion that Joyce concocted it as a kind of vengeful hoax.)"

~~ from The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout

satsuma

"She hands me a tiny, perfect segment of satsuma, like a sunset."

~~ from "iPad Baby" by Devika Kaul

Mencken's Nietzsche

"[H.L.] Mencken was too commonsensical, too solidly grounded in the reporter's world of things as they are, to readily grasp the essence of so tortured a soul. His Nietzsche is an all-American type, a world-improving, can-do go-getter delighted to have through the fraud of Christianity and gone beyond good and evil: 'He applied the acid of critical analysis to a hundred and one specific ideas, and his general conclusion, to put it briefly, was that no human being had a right, in any way or form, to judge or direct the actions of any other being. Herein we have, in a few words, that gospel of individualism which all our sages preach today.'"

~~ from The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout