December 10, 2009 @ 6:25 pm | Filed under:
Family The baby was just dozing off in my arms, not quite ready to be transferred to the bed, when the doorbell rang. Girls ran to answer it. Bean’s head appeared in my doorway.
“Mom, it’s, um, Guy.”
Guy is our very nice next-door neighbor. It’s highly unusual for him to ring our bell, so I slid the baby onto the bed rather more hastily than was conducive to his remaining asleep. As I hurried down the hall to the door, I heard him already beginning to rouse and fuss. Shoot. I’d had things to get done during that nap.
When I got to the door, no one was there—except a stranger walking away down the sidewalk, a sheaf of flyers flapping in his hand. We get many such visitors, young men wanting to let us know about discount on vinyl siding or yard work.
I turned to Beanie in befuddlement.
“I thought you said it was Guy!”
“No, Mommy. I said it was ‘some guy.'”
December 10, 2009 @ 7:25 am | Filed under:
Books Pulling this up from the comments of yesterday’s post—a question I keep meaning to ask here:
As for White, this reminds me I wanted to put one of his essay collections on my birthday/Christmas wish list. Any favorites, anyone? Becky of Farm School, are you reading blogs these days? I’m guessing you’ll have an opinion on this topic. 😉
Essays of E. B. White? (Perennial Classics paperback.)
One Man’s Meat?
Writings from the New Yorker?
If you had to pick just one.
Updated: just found a 1977 New York Times review of Essays:
They’ve brought out “Essays of E. B. White” as a companion volume to his recently published “Letters.” “To assemble these essays,” writes the author in his foreword, “I have rifled my other books and have added a number of pieces that are appearing for the first time between covers.” This means that a reviewer gets to read or re-read “Farewell to Model T” and “Here is New York,” which came out as little books in 1936 and 1949, respectively; all but three chapters of “One Man’s Meat” (1944); selections from “The Second Tree from the Corner” (1954) and “The Points of My Compass” (1962); the introductions to “A Subtreasury of American Humor,” Don Marquis’s “Lives and Times of archy and mehitabel,” and “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk, Jr.; as well as several previously uncollected pieces that have appeared in magazines and newspapers along the way. They call the reviewing business work, but in this particular case it is pure pleasure.
So that seems a good bet, eh?
More from that review:
But then E. B. White will always be coming back into style. That’s because, as he himself observes of Thoreau, he writes sentences that resist the destructiveness of time. Besides, he’s an essayist’s essayist. With his relaxed serendipitous technique of seeming to stumble on his subject by way of the back door, he lends you confidence that you don’t really have to know much about a thing to write about it intelligently; you need only possess the skill to write, along with a lot of sanity. Thus, if you’ve got the hang of it, you can arrive at the subject of disarmament by way of Mary Martin’s furniture, or at the prospects of American democracy by the route of a dachshund named Fred.
Of course, it’s only an illusion that Mr. White gets by alone on skill and sanity. He happens to know a great deal about a lot of things–about birds and boats and literature, and, best of all, about how silly it would be to worry about the strictures against anthropomorphism and the pathetic fallacy that children’s-book librarians and French new-wave novelists tried to impress upon us in the 60’s.
