William Strunk’s advice to “Make the paragraph the unit of
composition” (Elements of Style,
1972) is undoubtedly right. But, for me, reading’s deepest pleasure is sourced
in the colors, contours and textures of artfully crafted sentences. This week’s
issue contains two gems. The first is from Amelia Lester’s “Tables For Two”
piece on the Empire Diner:
Young families, their tabletops littered with sippy cups and
mezcal cocktails, tend to finish their meal by attacking the Platonic ideal of
the banana split, all wet walnuts and melting Neapolitan ice cream.
What a mélange of delightful, surprising ingredients! I
particularly like the incongruous juxtaposition of “sippy cups” and “mezcal
cocktails.” And the combination of abstraction (“Platonic ideal”) with specificity
(“banana split, all wet walnuts and melting Neapolitan ice cream”) is ravishing.
The whole thing is like a gorgeous Rauschenberg – Washington’s Golden Egg, say, or Monogram. I’m glad to have read it.
The other line that caught my eye is in Roger Angell’s
wonderful “This Old Man”:
I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom
of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take
wing below your window.
The analogy between blogging and making (and launching) a
paper airplane is brilliant. It exactly expresses the “ease and freedom of the
form” that I feel when I post an item here. Praise of blogging by a master
writer like Angell is inspiring.
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