chabot@miles.DEC (L. S. Chabot) (02/22/85)
I have a very strong recollection of a list of books banned somewhere, that included _Charlotte's_Web_ and _Stuart_Little_. My recollection is strong because it struck me as ridiculous to ban such good and innocent books, but it's not a strong enough recollection to contain where I saw it, where they were banned, and such. Does anybody have an idea? By the way, there is a bookstore in Seattle (Elliot Bay Bookstore, I think) at which you can buy buttons that say "I read banned books." L S Chabot UUCP: ...decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-amber!chabot ARPA: ...chabot%amber.DEC@decwrl.ARPA USFail: DEC, LMO4/H4, 150 Locke Drive, Marlborough, MA 01752
jfh@browngr.UUCP (John F. Hughes) (03/31/85)
E.B. White, the author of Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet
of the Swan, is about 86 years old. Most people know him only for the three
books just mentioned, which they read when they were very young.
His other work is worth reading!
He revised "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk, which lots of people
have read in writing courses. Thinking of it as a text, they found it a drag.
Try it as pleasure reading sometime--it's pretty remarkable.
White also worked as an essayist for Harper's for many years, as well as
writing some essays and poetry for The New Yorker. He also edited their
'newsbreaks', which are the little quotations (from various publications)
which The New Yorker uses to fill out the bottoms of pages--White wrote
the wry comments on these newsbreaks.
There is a biography of him by Scott Elledge, but it suffers some from
comparison with White's work. The biographer doesn't write as well as the
biographee.
Some good books to read: try Charlotte's Web again (did you know that
the farmer and his wife are Mr. and Mrs. Arable?), or The Essays of E.B.
White, or The Second Tree From the Corner.
Some particularly good essays are (I think): Once More to the Lake,
The Years of Wonder, and Afternoon of an American Boy.
White also wrote a much anthologized science fiction piece called
The Morning of the Day They Did It. He doesn't think of it as his best
work, but it is interesting to read...
Here's a brief excerpt for those who don't believe--it's from a Harper's
essay called "Two Letters, Both Open". The letters are to the SPCA and the
IRS. This is from the SPCA letter:
Dear Sirs:
I have your letter, undated, saying that I am harboring an unlicensed
dog in violation of the law. If by "harboring" you mean getting up two or
three times every night to pull Minnie's blanket up over her, I am harbor-
ing a dog all right. The blanket keeps slipping off. I suppose you are
wondering by now why I don't get her a sweater instead. That's a joke on
you. She has a knitted sweater, but she doesn't like to wear it for
sleeping; her legs are so short they work out of a sweater and her
toenails get caught in the mesh, and this disturbs her rest. If Minnie
doesn't get her rest, she feels it right away. I do myself, and of course
with this night duty of mine, the way the blanket slips and all, I haven't
had any real rest in years. Minnie is twelve.
In spite of what your inspector reported, she has a license. She is
licensed in the State of Maine as an unspayed bitch, or what is more
commonly called an "unspaded" bitch. She wears her metal license tag, but
I must say I don't particularly care for it, as it is in the shape of
a hydrant, which seems to me a feeble gag, besides being pointless in the
case of a female. It is hard to believe that any state in the Union would
circulate a gag like that and make people pay money for it, but Maine
is always thinking of something...
Notice that the punctuation is perfect, the choice of words is wonderful. Graves
and Hodges, in "The Reader Over Your Shoulder," remark that the reader's eye
should never stop at a phrase; if it does, the writing is bad. White's writing
might be called bad in this sense: every now and then there is a phrase so
lovely that one rereads it for the sheer joy of it.
I hope this sends you to your library to look for his stuff.
-jfhlowell@fluke.UUCP (Lowell Skoog) (10/03/85)
E.B. White died this week at the age of eighty-six. Here is an excerpt from
his book, THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE.
Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from
principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once
remarked, "Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar."
This moral observation would have no place in a rule book were it
not that style IS the writer, and therefore what a man is, rather
than what he knows, will at last determine his style. If one is
to write, one must believe--in the truth and worth of the scrawl
in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's
intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing...
...Full of his beliefs, sustained and elevated by the power of his
purpose, armed with the rules of grammar, the writer is ready for
exposure. At this point, he may well pattern himself on the fully
exposed cow of Robert Louis Stevenson's rhyme. This friendly and
commendable animal, you may recall, was "blown by all the winds that
pass/And wet with all the showers." And so must the young writer be.
In our modern idiom, we would say that he must get wet all over.
Mr. Stevenson, working in a plainer style, said it with felicity,
and suddenly one cow, out of so many, received the gift of imortality.
Like the steadfast writer, she is at home in the wind and the rain;
and, thanks to one moment of felicity, she will live on and on and on.