‘The ordeals of ‘litel clergeon’* and Cambridge freshman are circumstantially very different, and essentially very much the same.”
— Abbie Findlay Potts, Wordsworth’s Prelude: A Study of Its Literary Form (Cornell University Press, 1953), pg. 283
*a schoolboy in Chaucer’s The Prioresses Tale
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A splendid sentence by a magnificent writer.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 2023
Jason Gay wrote:
Baseball [has] a clock [now].
This is how it should be, and how baseball once was. Have pitchers pitch. Have batters bat. How much of your existence have you already surrendered to this maddening game, which dawdles like an oblivious customer in an airport Starbucks–a tall is the small one, right–as your flight announces its final boarding? [italics added]
— “Thought Baseball Games Were Too Slow. Now They’re Too Fast?,” By Jason Gay, The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2023
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 2023
Just by the red-roofed town the tributary Ripple flows with a lively current into the Floss. How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice, as to the voice of one who is deaf and loving. I remember those large dipping willows. I remember the stone bridge.
And this is Dorlcote Mill. I must stand a minute or two here on the bridge and look at it, though the clouds are threatening, and it is far on in the afternoon. Even in this leafless time of departing February it is pleasant to look at,—perhaps the chill, damp season adds a charm to the trimly kept, comfortable dwelling-house, as old as the elms and chestnuts that shelter it from the northern blast. The stream is brimful now, and lies high in this little withy plantation, and half drowns the grassy fringe of the croft in front of the house. As I look at the full stream, the vivid grass, the delicate bright-green powder softening the outline of the great trunks and branches that gleam from under the bare purple boughs, I am in love with moistness, and envy the white ducks that are dipping their heads far into the water here among the withes, unmindful of the awkward appearance they make in the drier world above.
The rush of the water and the booming of the mill bring a dreamy deafness, which seems to heighten the peacefulness of the scene. They are like a great curtain of sound, shutting one out from the world beyond. And now there is the thunder of the huge covered wagon coming home with sacks of grain. That honest wagoner is thinking of his dinner, getting sadly dry in the oven at this late hour; but he will not touch it till he has fed his horses,—the strong, submissive, meek-eyed beasts, who, I fancy, are looking mild reproach at him from between their blinkers, that he should crack his whip at them in that awful manner as if they needed that hint! See how they stretch their shoulders up the slope toward the bridge, with all the more energy because they are so near home. Look at their grand shaggy feet that seem to grasp the firm earth, at the patient strength of their necks, bowed under the heavy collar, at the mighty muscles of their struggling haunches! I should like well to hear them neigh over their hardly-earned feed of corn, and see them, with their moist necks freed from the harness, dipping their eager nostrils into the muddy pond. Now they are on the bridge, and down they go again at a swifter pace, and the arch of the covered wagon disappears at the turning behind the trees.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
— posted by Roger W. Smith
December 2022
re:
“The Yankees’ Dream Is a World Series. Their Nightmare Is Aaron Judge on the Mets.”
By Jason Gay
The Wall Street Journal
August. 5, 2022
Jason Gay is a popular (deservedly) sportswriter for the Wall Street Journal.
I think that this piece and Mr. Gay’s writing demonstrate something that I would say is not that common among journalists and writers in general. Which is to say a rare and unique talent. To write naturally . Fluidly. To let one’s thoughts guide you, the writer, and shape as well as inform the piece.
As distinguished from the usual essay, report, or op-ed, which is, by comparison, plodding. In which the writer’s personality is subsumed in the interests of an orderly “agenda,” or what is known as exposition.
Russell Baker could also do this.
It’s writing “from the top of one’s head,” done with great skill. Like a stage actor who seems almost unrehearsed, but is totally convincing and effective in the role.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
August 6, 2022
“Observer; Baseball for Hitler”
By Russell Baker
The New York Times
June 18, 1996
Baseball turned its back on Adolf Hitler last week. As the team owners said in a formal statement, “When your business has troubles as bad as ours, who needs to mess around with Der Fuhrer?”
So saying, they persuaded Marge Schott, majority owner of the Cincinnati Reds, to give up control of her business. In a flagrant exercise of the First Amendment, Mrs. Schott had spoken well of the early Hitler.
One sports story reported that she had said “Hitler was good at first.” This sent me to the archives where I discovered that Hitler was no good at all at first, and not at second either.
Rudolf Hess’s memoir says, “The Fuhrer could have been a great shortstop if he hadn’t gone into politics,” but Hess was crazy as a loon when he wrote it.
A more reliable source, Hitler’s masseuse, wrote a book titled, “I Rubbed Hitler the Wrong Way,” which indicates he had very little interest in baseball. “One day while massaging Hitler’s arm,” she wrote, “the Fuhrer seemed in a light-hearted mood, so I ventured to speak to him as follows:
” ‘Do you know, mein Fuhrer, that if you were an American baseball pitcher what your pitching arm would be called by the scribes?’
” ‘Scribes? Scribes?’ he said. ‘Explain scribes to me.’
” ‘They are sportswriters,’ I said.
” ‘So,’ he said, ‘these scribes would call my pitching arm what?’
” ‘They would call it “the old soupbone,” ‘ I said.”
Hitler ended the conversation abruptly, telling the masseuse that when the Wehrmacht occupied America he would like to see a game from the best seat in Camden Yards, but that would have to wait until he finished conquering Russia.
Here is final proof of Hitler’s ignorance of baseball: Camden Yards was not built until 50 years later, and even then he couldn’t have got a decent seat unless he was a corporation. By then, of course, no scribe had called a pitching arm “the old soupbone” for 50 years, and no sportswriter had been called a scribe for 45.
Most of the Nazi leaders were hopelessly ignorant of baseball, as we discover in the Hitler file. Hermann Goring, being the great collector and chief looter in the Nazi hierarchy, apparently wanted a baseball signed by Babe Ruth.
In a note to Hitler the propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, wrote that Goring was writing to a woman in enemy America. Impressions in Goring’s desk blotter, said Goebbels, showed that a note had been sent to a New York woman named Babe Ruth.
Totally ignorant of baseball, Goebbels advised Hitler to turn Goring over to the Gestapo and explain his correspondence “with this American Mata Hari.”
Hitler, who was soft on Goring, was “delighted,” he wrote in a note to Eva Braun, to show his “superior knowledge of American culture to Goebbels.”
“I told him that Babe Ruth was the name of an American candy and that Hermann, who has a sweet tooth, was probably ordering some from New York,” Hitler wrote.
We now know, of course, what Goring was really up to. His gardener’s memoir, “Down the Primrose Path With Goring,” reports that he was often ordered to stand in a hay field for hours chasing fly balls Goring hit off a fungo bat. The gardener writes:
“He once said to me that Hermann Goring was not much more corpulent than the greatest batter in history. ‘What’s more,’ said Goring, ‘both of us are named Hermann.’
“I didn’t know then that Herman was only the second name of the famous Ruth and that it had only one ‘n,’ while Goring’s was his first name and had two ‘n’s.’ ”
Goring apparently hoped to meet Babe Ruth once the Wehrmacht occupied New York and to impress the Yankee slugger by smacking a few batting-practice pitches out of the park. Babe Ruth, he hoped, would be impressed enough to sign a baseball, thus making it unnecessary to loot the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The baseball owners’ distaste for Hitler reminds us that baseball and Adolf once had something in common. Hitler became furious because a black American sprinter, Jesse Owens, beat the flower of Aryan athletics in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Such an embarrassment could not have happened that year to major league baseball owners. They simply didn’t let blacks play.
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Absolute genius (on Russell Baker’s part).
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 2021
Please see my post
Roger W. Smith, “Leo Durocher”; “Wesley Branch Rickey”
at
Roger W. Smith, “Leo Durocher”; “Wesley Branch Rickey”
In addition to what I say about my own writing there, aspiring writers may wish to note the effectiveness of my leads to each of the two pieces, in both creating interest anecdotally, as it were, and framing the content of each article.
— Roger W. Smith
December 2020
Henry Miller letter to Emil Schellock
Attached is the text (downloadable Word document above) of a letter dated December 1, 1930 from the American writer Henry Miller — written by Miller from Paris — to his American friend Emil Schnellock. Miller and Schnellock had known each other since schooldays at P.S. 85 in Brooklyn (class of 1905). They were lifelong friends. Emil Schnellock was a successful commercial artist.
Miller moved to France in 1930 (he made a previous trip there lasting a few months in 1928) and remained in France for approximately ten years. During this period, as an exile. Miller experienced profound feelings of liberation and a burst of creativity, both of which are seen in his autobiographical novel Tropic of Cancer.
— Roger W. Smith
September 2020
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addendum:
This letter “charmed” me when I first read it some thirty (perhaps) years ago. I thought to myself: Now that’s how to write a letter!
Reading it again now, I guess I would say that I am not quite as entranced. Maybe what thrilled Miller almost a century ago doesn’t thrill (or titillate) us the same today. But this is vintage Miller. The raconteur who when he gets going should not and can not stop. It all comes tumbling out, not carefully crafted: the minute observation and the grandiose impression or thought; the connoisseur and intellectual as well as the sensualist and extoller of the tawdry, the carnal and prosaic. One thing I would say about Miller’s writing is that, it all tumbles out pell-mell, but he has a great “ear.” The tone, rhythm, and pacing are just right. I guess that’s gift a writer such as Miller is born with.
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addendum:
See also my post:
“Henry Miller”
Excerpts from the works of the historian Francis Parkman are posted here (above) as a downloadable Word document.
In view of my mentions of the historians Carlyle and Macaulay in recent posts on rhetoric and style, I got to thinking this morning about the historian Francis Parkman, author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and the monumental seven-volume France and England in North America; and of an early, forgotten work: Vassall Morton: A Novel (1856), which, I dare say, few have ever read. (I am proud to be able to say that I have.)
A student at Harvard College of the historian Jared Sparks, by whom he was greatly influenced, Parkman was fluent in French and was an admirer of Froissart, whose works included the Chroniques (Chronicles) a prose history of the Hundred Years’ War written in the fourteenth century. Parkman’s style of historical writing would probably be termed “romantic” and perhaps lyrical. His research in primary sources was prodigious, belying the impression (which would show ignorance of them) that his works are not scholarly or objective. His narrative is crystal clear.
He can — and has by his admirers — be read almost for his style alone.
What modern historian writes narrative history with metaphors and descriptive passages such as the following?
a rolling sea of dull green prairie
On the right hand and on the left stretched the boundless prairie, dotted with leafless groves and bordered by gray wintry forests, scorched by the fires kindled in the dried grass by Indian hunters, and strewn with the carcasses and the bleached skulls of innumerable buffalo.
Yet hardly anyone reads Parkman nowadays.
— Roger W. Smith
September 2020
downloadable Word document, above
THE GIANT STORY
by Tex Maule
Sports Illustrated
December 23, 1963
https://vault.si.com/vault/1963/12/23/the-giant-story
I was a New York Giants fan in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I am sure I watched the 1963 Eastern Division championship game between the Giants and Pittsburgh Steelers on television. I knew the individual players and thrilled to the exploits of players such as Frank Gifford, Y. A. Tittle, and Del Shofner. Shofner was always getting open for miraculous receptions of Tittle’s passes lofted downfield in a high arch. I knew the defensive stars such as Sam Huff and Rosey Grier. I recall Frank Gifford’s one-handed catch in the 1963 game, assuming that this was the play I remember. Or did he (again) or another Giant player do it in a later game?
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The reason for this post is my commentary on Tex Maule’s 1963 Sports Illustrated story about the 1963 Giants-Steelers game. Does any sportswriter write like this nowadays? I would say no, there is no such example. Read Maule’s story and see for yourself.
Most sports reporting (game coverage) nowadays consists of essentially “filler’ material putting the game in context — along with a summary account of the game. Some or most of the background material is written before the game or as it is in progress. The Milwaukee Bucks were facing elimination toady in the sixth game of the Eastern Conference finals and the daunting prospect of playing at Boston Garden against a heavily favored Boston Celtics squad. And so on. Then a blow by blow account of the game, and a few post-game interviews, if the reporter can get a quote or two. Down by three runs in the seventh, the Yankees loaded the bases on a single and two walks. Red Sox manager Johnny Pesky yanked his starter and brought in flame throwing reliever Dick Radatz. “He was throwing smoke,” catcher Russ Nixon said.
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Every play and the game itself are put into context and elucidated with consummate skill and meticulous attention to detail in Maule’s account of the 1963 Giants-Steelers game. It is an incredible piece of reporting — it speaks for itself. The reader feels like he was there, on the field.
Note how Maul intermixes reportage (description) with exposition. Some examples:
* * *
Buddy Dial, who was cut by the Giants in his rookie year only to become one of the best receivers in the league for Pittsburgh, found a long stick during practice one day and sneaked into a meeting of the defensive club with it.
“Here, fellows,” he said. “You better take this. You may need it to knock down Tittle’s passes Sunday.”
He was a better prophet than he knew, although even a 10-foot pole would not have been ong enough to reach Del Shofner on some of the passes Tittle threw him.
* * *
The first touchdown came on a 41-yard pass play from Tittle to Shofner, who was yards beyond Willie Daniel, the Steeler corner back attempting to cover him. Daniel, a young back in his third season, found Shofner’s experience and speed difficult to cope with. Earlier in the game Tittle had attempted a sideline pass to Shofner, luring Daniel up close. This time Shofner faked the sideline, then broke downfield, and Daniel, coming up too hard, could not reverse direction and could only watch helplessly from far behind as Shofner took the perfectly thrown pass.
Late in the second period Tittle did almost the same thing to set up the second Giant touchdown. Again it was a first-down play–a play on which Tittle does not often pass. Again Shofner beat Daniel and this time the pass carried down to the Steeler 14-yard line for a 44-yard gain.
* * *
The Steelers, whose main threat is the running of John Henry Johnson and Theron Sapp, had moved sporadically over the frozen ground during the first half. Their drives were aborted when [quarterback] Brown went to the air but could not connect with his receivers and the Giant defense, with linebackers playing up close, stopped Johnson and Sapp.
* * *
The Steeler field goal came with seven seconds left in the half, and the drive that produced it was frustratingly typical. From the Giant 20, first and 10, Brown threw three passes. On all three he had plenty of time, but none of the passes was within reach of a receiver, and twice receivers were in the clear. On fourth down Lou Michaels kicked a 27-yard field goal.
For a few moments after the Giants got the ball for their next series of downs, it appeared that the Steelers, encouraged by their quick score, might take control of the game. They rushed Tittle hard and forced him to hurry a pass so that it fell incomplete. They smothered Phil King on a running play. It was third and eight, Del Shofner was out of the game with bruised ribs, and the Giants were in trouble–or so it seemed.
But then Frank Gifford took over Shofner’s role as first-down getter. Gifford had been laying flanker back all afternoon–just getting exercise. Tittle had thrown to him only once. Gifford’s covering man was Glenn Glass, a second-year corner back. Glass, aware that Tittle’s favorite pass to Gifford is to the outside, near the sideline, had been following Frank closely to the outside, almost conceding him the inside routes, where help might be expected from a safety or a linebacker. The Giants had discussed this during the half-time intermission, and now Tittle called a pass pattern that sent Gifford down and in. When he broke to his left, toward the center of the field, he left Glass cross-legged. Tittle’s pass was low, and Gifford reached down with one hand, hoping to tip the ball up. The ball, amazingly, stuck in his hand for a completion on the Steeler 47, a 30-yard gain and a first down. …
“That Gifford catch was the end for us,” Steeler Coach Buddy Parker said later. “It looked then like we were beginning to pick up and they were sliding. But you could see the whole club come alive after that play.”
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Hamilton Prieleaux Bee Maule (1915-1981), commonly known as Tex Maule, was the lead football writer for Sports Illustrated in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
— Roger W. Smith
August 2020
pithiness — terseness and economy in writing and speaking achieved by expressing a great deal in just a few words
“The pretended rights of these theorists [of revolution] are all extremes; and, in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false.”
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
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This is pithiness by definition. It is a great example of how a great writer and thinker, a master of expository prose, can have the reader stop in his or her tracks, and think, say to oneself: so true — I never saw this before. And of how a single statement can focus and reorient one’s thinking; and enable one to not only see things more clearly than heretofore, but anew in a way not perceived before.
— Roger W. Smith
July 2020
Roger's rhetoric 