“Schwartz’s poems, especially the later ones, are dated. They groan under a freight of leaden rhymes and — Schwartz had a capacious mind — showy philosophical and literary references, spillover from the overstocked pantry that was his mind.”
— Dwight Garner, “Delmore Schwartz’s Poems Are Like Salt Flicked on the World,” The New York Times, April 8, 2024
review of The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz, edited by Ben Mazer
— posted by Roger W. Smith
April 11, 2024
Ben and Jerry’s – WSJ 3-19-2024
Posted here:
Ben & Jerry’s Owner Loses Its Taste for Ice Cream
Unilever plans to spin off its ice-cream business, which includes Magnum and Popsicle, and could consider a sale
By Saabira Chaudhuri
The Wall Street Journal
March 19, 2024
My business journalism instructor, Gilbert T. Sewall, was correct when he observed that the Wall Street Journal is notable for the excellence of its writing per se.
The best term I can come up with to describe this piece is limpid.
Everything is covered, succinctly. The facts have all been reported, are all there.
The business issues are made clear.
A layman (i.e., someone not in the business world) can enjoy this piece. Pithy phrases achieve this result:
Ben & Jerry’s owner Unilever has lost its taste for the business.
Ben & Jerry’s, once regarded by analysts as a jewel in Unilever’s crown, has turned into something of a thorn in its side.
Ben & Jerry’s hasn’t shied away from taking a stand on social causes.
Ice cream has been a tough business for … consumer-goods companies. …
Our high school English teacher taught us about topic sentences. Here we see embedded “topic sentences” that ensure that the reader does not get lost and gets the import of the piece.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 2024
Exemplified by … MYSELF.
What I would say (advise) is: cover the content of the book, what it’s about, what should be noted.
And: give your reviewer’s opinion of the book and whether it (implicitly) is worth reading.
Roger W. Smith review of Arthur Henry bio – Dreiser Studies, winter 2005
— posted by Roger W. Smith
‘Rare Six-Planet System Discovred in Milky Way’ – WSJ 11-29-2023
Posted here is the following article (text plus marvelous photos):
Rare Six-Planet Star System Discovered in Milky Way: Worlds orbiting a sun-like star 100 light-years from Earth could unlock secrets surrounding the formation of our solar system
By Aylin Woodward
The Wall Street Journal
November 29, 2023
I have been studying writing all my life. I know a good writer (and good writing) when I see one.
Both the famous ones and writers whom I encounter in my daily reading.
Aylin Woodward is a science writer for The Wall Street Journal. Her work is superb.
“A family of six gaseous worlds circling like rhythmic dervishes around a sun-like star will soon help astronomers better understand how planetary systems like our own formed and evolved.
“This newly discovered system, about 100 light-years from Earth, is unusual because its planets orbit a bright host star in a pattern that appears unchanged since its birth at least 4 billion years ago, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.”
This is a very effective lead. Note how in the first paragraph, in just once sentence, the whole article is “capsulized.” The scope and importance of the subject, the findings, are stated with admirable concision.
The rest of the piece speaks for itself. My high school English teacher would have given it an A+.
I know from experience how difficult it is to adhere to word limits and write a brief article which reads well and sustains reader interest, while getting all the facts in (no easy task) and making their significance clear. Often the latter involves quotes — in this case from experts whom the author, Ms. Woodward, interviewed. All the facts and quotes have to be blended in skillfully without interrupting the flow of the piece.
While never losing sight of the overall significance of the findings and their import, This is done by the writer adhering to principles of writing such as unity and coherence
All of the best writers — including novelists — do this: mix the general with the specific. facts (narration) with exposition.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
November 30, 2023
Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always make part of their lives. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it,—if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass; the same hips and haws on the autumn’s hedgerows; the same redbreasts that we used to call “God’s birds,” because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?
The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet, what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows,—such things as these are the mother-tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle, inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
MARVELOUS
— posted by Roger W. Smith
June 2023
‘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.
*****************************************************
Absolute genius (on Russell Baker’s part).
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 2021
Roger's rhetoric 