Talk To The Hand

What at first appeared to be a minor, if painful, injury to my left hand is having lasting effects. The effects are subtle but unmistakable, and limited almost exclusively to my guitar playing.

The injury resulted from an embarrassingly stupid mishap. It’s almost irrelevant that I was traveling at the time, except that the back seat of the rental car was occupied by a suitcase. A remaining five- or six-inch swath of seat cushion seemed to be just enough room for the six pack of beer I’d purchased at a Trader Joe’s minutes earlier. But no sooner had I placed it there than it rolled sideways, caught the tip of my left hand middle finger, and hyperextended the hell out of it.

If it had been an ordinary six pack, the cans would probably have tumbled out. But it was sealed, so I caught the full weight of those six cans. Bitter irony: it’s one of my favorite beers, a regional IPA (Upper Hand, oddly enough) brewed in northern Michigan and unavailable in my western state.

The top of the hand swelled up, and that night I noticed that making certain guitar chord shapes  was difficult. The middle and ring fingers wouldn’t properly align; they seemed to bump into each other. (Yes, I know that sounds strange.) There was also a dexterity issue.

After I got home I saw my regular doctor, who felt my hand and detected no breaks. Give it a month, she advised.

But the problem persisted so I went to an orthopedic surgeon, who took x-rays and ordered an MRI. It seemed like a good omen, during the MRI, when the music that played through ill-fitting headphones included several in my repertoire: “What A Wonderful World,” and “Fly Me To the Moon.” But I should know better than to believe in omens. I do know better.

The issue revealed by the MRI, the ortho said, is with your flexor tendon. It isn’t torn, but it is strained. Yet ultimately she said to me: “I’m stumped.”

Soon after, I had a friendly chat with a woman I knew to be a Doctor of Osteopathy, though that had nothing to do with our chat. The discipline impresses me. I stuck out my hand and she did a thirty-second assessment, then referred me to a hand specialist.

This resulted in a few months of physical therapy, as well as the insight that damage to soft tissue, tendons in particular, can take longer to heal than bone breaks.

Now, nearly six months after that six pack mishap, the damage lingers. I think it’s a bit better – some of those chord shapes are a little easier to make, though still troublesome. Is it healing, oh so slowly? Is the PT paying off? Or is it that humans are endlessly adaptable, and I am unconsciously making necessary guitar playing adjustments? Or, all of the above?

Smell a Rat?

Note: This post was written a few days after the November 2024 election, but not posted until the following February. It just seems so futile. Now, I figure, what the hell! Plus, someone – Greg Palast – has finally shot up a flare.

Does no one smell a rat?

There’s been plenty of anguish since the second elevation of The Dump to the presidency. I share it. This development is a catastrophe, politically and otherwise, for more reasons I’ll enumerate here.

The pundits I’ve heard since November 5th have uniformly accepted the results and are busy playing the blame game. I’m not remotely interested in this. No one, so far as I know, is suggesting what seems entirely plausible to me: that maybe, just maybe, the results of the 2024 Presidential election are illegitimate.

Instead, there’s been blame heaped on Kamala Harris: a poor candidate, some say. Yet she ran a virtually flawless campaign and absolutely wiped the floor with Dump in their one and only debate.

There’s been blame heaped on Biden for not stepping aside sooner; for not holding to his 2020 pledge to be a one-term, “bridge” candidate. An open campaign with multiple candidates and all the primary trimmings, some argue, would have produced a stronger candidate who could have won.

There’s been blame on voters themselves: a substandard election day turnout by Democrats.

I’m highly skeptical. I cannot accept that The Dump legitimately won. He betrayed the constitution and his oath of office by fomenting an insurrection. He was convicted on thirty-four felony counts. He is a known sexual predator. He bragged about ending abortion rights. He is transparently incompetent, unqualified, and corrupt, and has never done a selfless, public-spirited act in his life. He ran the shabbiest campaign imaginable, with no real policies beyond a baldly stated plan for retribution against his political opponents. He is a known cheat. None of it adds up.

By now this wretched soul has done everything but shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. He belongs in a penal colony.

And yet this traitor “won” because of the price of eggs?

And no one smells a rat?

Rabbit is Racist

Rabbit is Rich is the third of John Updike’s “Rabbit” series of novels. It is preceded by Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, and followed by Rabbit at Rest and Rabbit Remembered.

I’ve read the first two, am nearly finished with the third, and intend to continue through the series. The titular “Rabbit” is Harry Angstrom, so nicknamed in high school as a star basketball player. Those years turn out to have been the high point of his life, and the novels, published at about ten year intervals, chronicle the rest of his ordinary, everyman existence.

The books are quite good. A couple of them, in fact, won Pulitzers. Each is written in the present tense, which is a little odd at first, but you get used to it. Some of the overall story is quite moving, as in a meeting between Rabbit and a former lover some twenty years after their fling.

But this isn’t really a review. I want to comment on what I see as the casual racism in the series, which is most noticeable in Rabbit is Rich, when Harry is in his complacent, financially secure middle years. While no characters (most of them white) are klan members or anything that extreme, there is an unmistakable bigotry, a sort of benign intolerance, that is quite bothersome. A character will invoke a slur or stereotype, but no one stops to interject, “That is so racist!”

True, the N-bombs, anti-Semitic bombs, and homophobic bombs are not in abundance. But they are frequent enough. Since they are so casually part of the narrative, they’re like a slap to the face.

It’s that casualness that is so galling. Presumably Updike is just painting a portrait as he sees it, but he never condemns the sewage that spills from some of his characters’ lips.

There is, of course, much more to Rabbit is Rich and the others than what I’m here calling casual racism. I love a good sentence, and they are plentiful. There are also parts – in Rabbit is Rich, especially – that made me laugh out loud. I must admit that it’s tempting to ignore the stereotypes and slurs as outdated reflections of their times, which they are. But it’s difficult to overlook them, not without comment.

(In spite of what I have written here, I do recommend these novels. If you decide to read them, I strongly recommend looking at the entire series as a whole, and reading them all).

Project 2025

Project 2025’s defining document is more than 900 pages of ruthless, self-justifying policy objectives. The media usually calls it a “blueprint” for a second Trump term. It is really a blueprint for minority rule.

Bearing the arrogant title Mandate for Leadership, this long, dense document has no executive summary or précis, no bulleted main points. This is by design, because there is much to hide.

“If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration,” its authors state on the Project 2025 website. “This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project."

Their defining document identifies “four broad fronts that will decide America’s future.” I quote:

1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

The hypocrisy is stunning.

The so-called “mandate for leadership” is no mandate. These people and their ideas are broadly unpopular. They are devoted to money and power. They are devoted to white male minority rule. They are committed to getting what they want by any means necessary. They are unalterably opposed to anything that stands in their way. They are prepared for a bloodbath.

In a fair election they will lose, but the wild card remains: there is nothing they will not stoop to. They will cheat and call it winning. If that fails, they will unleash the minions, as we saw on January 6, 2021. Only this time, it will be far worse.

Follow this link to learn more about Project 2025.

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A Helluva Book

As part of an ongoing project to downsize our cluttered abode, I recently confronted several over-stuffed bookcases with the determination to get rid of at least a few armloads of books. It would require some tough decisions. I’d have to admit that I hadn’t looked at certain titles in years – had even lost interest in them – and would likely never open them again. Not easy admissions for me to make.

I’ve confronted this before, and with a similar determination. And I’ve followed through. I almost always regret it.

This time, as the gotta go pile grew, I came across a copy of Flags Of Our Fathers. I’d forgotten I had it, but do have a recollection of my late father (d. 2016) giving it to me some years back.

I opened it to the flyleaf to see whether he’d inscribed it, as he often used to do. No – but I did find an envelope. Inside it was a brief, undated letter from him that I’d totally forgotten about.

My dad was too young to have served in World War II, yet thought of himself part of the so-called “greatest generation.” He loved Flags Of Our Fathers – and considered it, as he wrote to me, a helluva book.

“It has a meaning for every one of us, I think,” he said. “Not just for war veterans. But for all of us. I want you to have it because of a number of things. First because that time is an important part of me...”

My immediate reaction: skepticism, quite frankly. I don’t know much about Flags Of Our Fathers. It has something to do with Iwo Jima, and that iconic flag-raising picture. I suspect a faux patriotic pulse; that it’s faintly (or not so faintly) jingoistic and rabidly macho, beckoning to an America that never was.

Whatever triumphs resulted from the sacrifice of these flagraisers, and the hundreds of thousands they symbolize, is threatened by the same elitist malignancies that caused World War Two, and today is poised to topple what passes for our democracy.

Or maybe I’m being too harsh. Wouldn’t be the first time.

That brief letter ends with, “I love you, son. Dad.”

He had me with hello. 

Book Review: Starkweather

The 1958 killing spree by Charles Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate ushered in our modern era of senseless mass murder. That, at least, is a premise of Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree That Changed America, by Harry N. MacLean.

Whether MacLean makes his case, and how much of the story really is untold, is debatable. But I did learn a few things from reading this book. Before, I had only a vague sense of these horrific crimes. I’d thought that 19-year-old Starkweather killed a few people in Lincoln, Nebraska for no apparent reason, and then he and his young accomplice fled by car across several states, murdering others along the way: a hitchhiker here, a guy with a flat tire there, and so on.

What really happened is that one day, Starkweather murdered Fugate’s mother, stepfather, and two-year-old sister. Then he and Caril hid out at the Fugate home for the next five or six days, before fleeing on their cross-country rampage. Only then did Starkweather murder seven more people, most of them in the Lincoln vicinity. Both were in custody within a few days.

The real question is: did Caril Ann Fugate participate in the murders? She insisted she did not – that she hadn’t even known her family was dead. But the legal system didn’t believe her, and gave her a life sentence. Starkweather got the electric chair.

In spite of this book’s title, Starkweather is at least as much about Fugate, and perhaps moreso. She always maintained her innocence, and MacLean presents evidence for and against her. Though she was never exonerated, Caril Ann Fugate was released from prison after serving eighteen years. As of this writing she is still alive, but in declining health, living in a nursing home.

There are flaws in Starkweather, clumsy ones. This susprised me, because according to a jacket blurb, Harry MacLean is a prizewinning writer of True Crime stuff.

In spite of this credential he fails to explain certain things, and the book suffers for it. During that five to six day period between the first murders and leaving on their cross-country spree, for example, Starkweather and Fugate stayed at the Fugate home (the initial victims stashed in a shed behind the house). On several occasions people came knocking on the door, but Fugate got rid of them, explaining everyone inside was ill.

Among those calling were two cops. They left with the crimes undetected – but why were they there in the first place? MacLean doesn’t explain. Even in the context of a more innocent time, would two experienced cops really buy an “everyone is sick” story?

The book also throws a lot of names and details at the reader, but there is no index. It is hard, in places, to keep everything straight. An index would be invaluable. The same is true of citations: there are no end notes, no footnotes, no page references – only a brief Author’s Note at the end.

If there is anything missing from MacLean’s telling of the crime saga itself, it is motive. But it seems to be beyond us, at this late date. Starkweather gave conflicting accounts of why he did what he did, then went to the chair. Surviving records provide nothing conclusive.

All that said, readers interested in a detailed account of this horrific murder case will not be disappointed by Starkweather.

Wildfire: Two Years Later

This is a summary of how we escaped the Marshall Mesa wildfire that swept through parts of Boulder County, Colorado, on December 30, 2021 – killing two people, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, and upending thousands of lives.

“We” is my wife and me and our cat, while “upending” is a very imprecise term to describe the trauma, psychological and otherwise, to specific individuals during and after the conflagration, and to the community at large.

It happened on a Thursday, the last day of the work week – Friday being the New Year’s Eve holiday. Sometime in mid-to-late morning le spouse and I, both working from home, detected the unmistakable smell of smoke – woodsmoke, like a campfire. As it persisted we looked out a front window, and saw what was reminiscent of coastal fog.

At some point my wife looked at social media. Someone had posted something about a wildfire that was burning across many acres of open space, a few miles west of our neighborhood. Winds in excess of 100mph whipped its intensity. We took solace in the knowledge that a six-lane highway separated us from where the fire appeared to be burning.

A little later le spouse checked social media again. Now someone had posted video of flames burning across a wooden fence in their back yard, much closer to us. That wide highway hadn’t stopped the fire’s progress, after all.

Before much longer it became obvious that we might have to flee. It felt premature – and in truth, unreal – but I gathered a few things, like a toothbrush and a change of clothes. Also got my guitar and camera (photo ops), and the pet carrier our cat despises.

Meanwhile the smoke visible out the front grew denser and, presumably, closer.

Finally, a little after 1pm, we got the inevitable emergency robocall telling us that if we valued our lives, we would get the hell out. There are certain things you only need to hear once. Amid ever-increasing fear and uncertainty, we piled our stuff into the car and pulled away.

“Which way shall we go?” asked le spouse.

My first thought: you’re joking, right? To the west, towering columns of dense smoke. To east, clear skies.

So I sang my reply: “Blue skies, smilin’ at me! Nothin’ but blue skies...”

She was not amused.

Thousands of others fled, too. The usual five minute drive out of town became half an hour, maybe longer. Finally we reached relatively open road – but had nowhere to go, so we zig-zagged aimlessly. I don’t remember how long that lasted, or how we learned of the emergency evacuation center set up at the local YMCA. But once we did we headed over, and spent several tense hours there. Few facts were available at this point. But we did learn that our grown-and-gone kids had heard of the fire and were tracking our movements via the Find My Friends app.

That night we wound up at a hotel, where we smuggled in the cat and got our first good look, on CNN, at the scope of the disaster: jaw-dropping video of familiar sites – buildings, shopping centers, neighborhoods – consumed by immense, wide-spread flames.

The next day I posted to social media that my wife and I were safe.

We spent a largely sleepless night of profound uncertainty. I sprawled on the bed like a body with chalk lines not yet drawn. The cat kept nestling against me in this nook, that cranny, before emitting a stressful yowl.

Returned home this morning to the immense relief of finding our abode unscathed. Reeks of smoke but our neighborhood survives. Yet we are surrounded by catastrophic, unimaginable loss.

One inevitably turns to truisms at such times: like the fleeting nature of life, and the difference between what is truly important and what only seems so.

Ultimately, the cause of the fire was pinned on smoldering, wind-whipped embers, and loose power lines. Many lawsuits are pending.

As the fire’s first anniversary approached, I talked to some people directly involved in these events. Can we ever recover? “We, as a community, are all irretrievably altered,” one said to me. “It’s a communal trauma.” Recovery is a relative term.

Now, two years after that devastating event, the trauma remains. To a casual observer the worst may seem over: homes being rebuilt, burned debris hauled off, once-charred open space covered in new growth.

But take a closer look, and the scars are plain as day. The wildfire is never far from my thoughts, and is never far, no doubt, from the thoughts of anyone else who lived through it. A windy day, common enough around here, is a psychological trigger. And probably always will be.

Ham On Rye: A Book Review

Early in his career, the novelist William Kennedy was a journalist whose writing included book reviews. In an essay collected in Riding The Yellow Trolley Car he describes how he hated writing bad reviews – probably because, as a fledgling author himself, he knew how hard the discipline is.

I find myself recalling this now as I begin my review of Ham On Rye, Charles Bukowski’s offensively ill-written novel from 1982.

I’ve never read anything by Charles Bukowski before, and maybe this novel isn’t the best way to ease into the work of someone I’d always thought of as a poet. I understand that he is highly regarded by many people; that he is viewed as a sort of poet-laureate of the Outsider. Maybe that’s why my expectations, in terms of literary merit, were so high.

There just isn’t much redeeming value to Ham On Rye, an autobiographical coming-of-age story. Bukowski had a crappy childhood. I get that. He grew up poor during the Great Depression, with an abusive father and almost no nurturing or encouragement. That much comes across. The novel’s big flaw is that its main character Henry Chinaski (Bukowski’s alter-ego) is nearly devoid of introspection, and is almost entirely unsympathetic.

As I see it, Chinaski/Bukowski decided very early on to more or less devote his life to excessive drinking, and to life on the outside. An unanswered question is, why?

In Chapter 22 (there are 58 chapters in all, many of them quite short, in this ordinary-length book) he describes his first encounter with alcohol. He’s around twelve years old when a friend shows him his dad’s stash of homemade wine, and goads him into trying some. After a few glugs, Henry says, “I like this stuff.”

It was magic. Why hadn’t someone told me? With this, life was great, a man was perfect, nothing could touch him.

This may be Ham On Rye’s most worthy detail, even without accompanying exploration: Bukowski’s immediate reaction to, and affection for, alcohol. By now science may have answered the question of why some people are so drawn to alcohol, while others can take it or leave it. Bukowski’s recollection is a kind of case study, presented with elegant simplicity.

The novel ends in Chinaski’s young adulthood. On one hand, he seems to want to better himself – his education and station in life. On the other, he is critical of aiming too high, and happily devoted to self-destructive behavior. His greatest passion seems to be drinking. It may have been a choice, or it may have been surrendering to addiction. To me, it seems like a waste. Illustrating this may be Ham On Rye’s greatest value.

Dream State

Quite recently, I had very minor surgery to correct a potentially serious condition. I was in the OR, sedated and oblivious, for only a couple of hours.

With most surgical procedures, even minor ones like mine, there is a void afterward, a gap in your memory. One moment you’re on a gurney with an IV in your arm. The next someone says, “We’re starting the sedation now,” and you’re invited to count down from one hundred. Few get below 95.

Then comes the void – an indeterminate period of time. Long, short, who can tell? The surgeon tinkers on you. But at some point the void passes. You become aware, only vaguely, that it’s over, that you are creeping back; that you have more or less reached a semi-conscious dream state.

I reached this state the other day, and drifted passively along. Then some dusty back room in my brain began to supply a weird mix of images. Most of them evaporated quickly. But one stayed with me: the vivid sense of having my son’s dog Gizmo in my lap. Gizmo (pictured) lives in Arizona. But I swear he was with me; surely it happened!

The dream state fades, though, and the next post-op phase begins. It involves gradually, groggily, becoming semi-alert. I realized I was gradually, groggily, becoming semi-alert. My brain beckoned. This made me think of the Mose Allison song, “My Brain.”

Before long a nurse named Bonnie came into my curtained off area. “How are we doing?”

This groggy, semi-alert phase includes a near-total lack of judgment and inhibition. “Listen to this,” I slurred. “I’m going to sing you part of a song.”

My brain is always workin, my brain.

My brain is always workin, my brain.

My brain is always workin – long as you keep that coffee perkin

My brain, cool little cluster that’s my brain.

Bonnie clapped lightly and laughed. “How nice! I’ve never had a patient sing to me before. Do you want coffee?”

I didn’t, so she offered me apple juice and applesauce. These I accepted, in spite of the stitches in my mouth. Powerful anesthetic residue coursed within me but mental clarity crept closer. An hour or so later I was discharged.

Mose Allison – My Brain

Leaving the House (eventually)

We expect to be in our house for a couple more years. But with the kidlets now graduated, grown and gone, the house is too big. There is too much room. Thus our time here grows short.

I love this place. I’ve always liked it, but my affection has really grown. Le spouse and I sometimes dismiss it as a cheap tract house, which it is. But I love the floor plan, and a series of remodeling projects (for which le spouse gets 100% credit) have improved many of its shortcomings.

It is also, of course, where our kids grew into adults.

We survived two natural disasters here: a flood and a wildfire. We have also lived through lesser catastrophes, such as hailstorms, snowstorms, and the like.

But leaving this house behind is inevitable. It will be sad, but is utterly pragmatic – and at some point, the right thing to do.

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When I was in high school one of the guys in my immediate circle of friends had to move to a distant city. All of us in that circle were disappointed, to put it mildly. We were, after all, becoming young adults learning to determine our own destinies – but this move involved parental maneuvering beyond our control.

And then: a reprieve! Or so it seemed. According to eyewitness accounts, the friend’s dad was seen walking around their back yard, fondly taking it all in. Surely, we convinced ourselves, he was having second thoughts about leaving.

Now, approximately one ice age later, I understand what was happening. The dad was, indeed, fondly taking it all in. That’s where little Billy used to play cops and robbers, he must have thought. There’s the tree he fell out of, and broke his arm. And right over there, we had a great birthday party.

There was no reprieve.

I’ll miss this place.

Joseph Anton

In February 2023 David Remnick appeared on the Stay Tuned With Preet podcast to discuss a profile he’d just written about Salman Rushdie. Their discussion focuses on how the novelist has fared in the months since he was viciously attacked, and nearly killed, in Chautauqua, New York.

That brutal assault resulted from a more than thirty-year-old fatwa, or death order, issued against Rushdie by Iranian hardline fundamentalists because of his novel, The Satanic Verses.

In the course of the interview Remnick, a New Yorker editor, mentioned Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s nonfiction account of his fatwa years. Curious, I got it from the local library. It is astonishingly good. The prose is superb; within a page or so its hooks were in me. Why on earth have I never read anything by Salman Rushdie before?

Published in 2012, Joseph Anton describes life under the constant threat of violent death. It is riveting, chilling, and in places, even funny. In has, in short, all of the elements needed to grab the reader’s attention and hold it to the last page.

The book was published ten years before that murderous attack by a knife-weilding zealot, on a public stage before hundreds of eyewitnesses. Knowledge of the attack haunts the book, and from the perspective of 2023 makes for some disturbing reading.

During the worst of the fatwa Rushdie lived under near-siege conditions, in a series of secret locations and with round-the-clock security. On a visit to New York his wife arrives at his hotel room unexpectedly. For security reasons they did not travel together, and she is confronted by a guard who doesn’t recognize her. “Elizabeth’s cool,” Rushdie quickly intercedes. “Elizabeth’s with me.”

The guard replies that if he wanted him dead, she is exactly the type of person he would send to do the deed. He gestures toward a table, and its array of snacks and cutlery. “If she were to take one of those forks and stab you in the neck...”

It’s presented as a light moment. But when the attack finally came in 2022, something very much like it happened. “He was stabbed in the neck, you know," David Remnick told Preet Bharara. “A quarter of an inch, one way or another, he would’ve hit his carotid artery and he would’ve bled out immediately.”

Elsewhere, Rushdie describes coping with what, in ordinary circumstances, would be considered writer’s block. His inability to focus and create is completely understandable. Yet he overcomes it and writes several new books, along with various shorter pieces.

Rushdie’s protectors insist that he take a pseudonym for them to use. That way, they explain, if they inadvertantly refer to him in a public place, it won’t give anything away. He comes up with Joseph Anton (after Conrad and Chekhov), and because of this pseudonym (presumably), Joseph Anton is written in the third person. In places it confused me –  the he did this and the he said that got me a little mixed up. But you back up a sentence or two, and are straightened out.

A longing to be free of 24/7 security is one of Joseph Anton’s through-lines. Toward the end of the book Rushdie, by then in hiding for seven years, reflects on this. It “might not just be a phase of his life ... the rest of his life might be like this.” A few pages later high-ranking counterintelligence types tell him of Iran’s “long-term plan to find and assassinate” him.

And sure enough, the attempt to murder Rushdie happened in the long term: more than three decades after the fatwa began. It coincided with the rising tide of fascist intolerance in the United States (and globally). There are book bannings and the suppression of free thought and intolerant fundamentalism – the very elements that nearly cost Salman Rushdie his life.

Salman Rushdie was attacked by a man younger than the fatwa itself, someone brainwashed into believing words printed on a page are so dangerous, and so unforgiveable, that the person who wrote them must forfeit his life. Rushdie is fortunate to have survived, though Remnick told Preet he is now blind in one eye, one of his hands doesn’t work right, and is coping with PTSD, among other aftereffects.

Be that as it may, Joseph Anton is a powerful book that deserves to be widely read. Next up on my reading list: The Satanic Verses.

Strunk and White

The Elements of Style is a must-have resource for most writers. Grammarly may have its place, but the concise Elements has set the standard for decades. Millions of copies, in multiple editions, are in print.

The authors are William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White; thus the book is often referred to as Strunk and White. It has a curious history, of the sort that fascinates me. I must have known it at one point, but when I read its Introduction recently saw that I had all but forgotten it.

As E.B. White explains, Strunk had written the original Elements of Style by 1918, when it served as the text for the English 8 class Strunk taught, and White took, at Cornell. Its purpose, White said, was “to cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin.”

When White first encountered it as a student it was privately published. Many years later White was asked to edit and revise it for formal publication. By that time Strunk (pictured) had died.

“Even after I got through tampering with it,” White said, “it was still a tiny thing, a barely tarnished gem. Seven rules of usage, eleven principles of composition, a few matters of form, and a list of words and expressions commonly misused – that was the sum and substance of Professor Strunk’s work.”

“Vigorous writing is concise,” Strunk declares on p. 23, under the heading Omit Needless Words.  A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, he argues, “for the same reason a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”

The chapter called “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused” is probably my favorite. The subject is dear to me. Though written over a century ago it, and the book, remain valid and valuable.

Find The Elements of Style, read its fewer than 100 pages, and keep it nearby at all times.

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Addendum: E.B. White wrote Charlotte’s Web and a lot of other stuff. According to Ralph Keyes in The Courage to Write (also recommended), he “worried over every word ... and sometimes pleaded with the postmaster ... to return a just-mailed manuscript so he could punch up its ending or re-write the lead.”