Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Dave Winer told me he writes software for people who are very smart and very, very busy. I found his attitude refreshing–too many techy types treat the people who buy our stuff with secret contempt.

Jakob Nielsen, for instance, plans for users who are both lazy and stupid. (What was that joke–“Your interface is so ugly, Nielsen hates it”?) But why not give users ugly interfaces, whose simplicity shoves them rudely toward what they need?

Across the house, my husband is playing Mozart–the sound of it fills the kitchen and makes me smile. Even the odd blurred chord or hesitation tells its own story of struggle and aspiration.
Professional pianists, like professional tech folk, spend hours every day improving their skills. The rest of us fit in our practice-and-learning around the rest of our lives–which doesn’t make us lazy and stupid people.

And programmers, like Dave Winer, who understand that, write better software than people who just don’t get it.

Halley: Halley’s father

Ohhhhh, those sick kid blues. I remember, although for me it was way back when. We did a lot of reading aloud to pass the time away, and even listening to recorded books together. (With my older daughter, born 1974, we’re talking pre-history–wonderful 33 1/3 rpm records of Tammy Grimes oh-so-naughtily reading the Frances books.) Years later, those sick days stand out in everyone’s memory as some of the best days there were.

Rainer Brockerhoff blogging about what other people said about World of Ends.

Did you see the recent Inquirer article–Joy of Blogging: Like the Joy of Sex but Not Really? Darn good, considering the author is (whispering) not a blogger!

“Alice at once fell in love….In that flash of ecstasy she suddenly knew what all poetry, all music, all sculpture, except things like winged Assyrian bulls, or the very broken pieces in the British Museum, meant.”
Angela Thirkell, Pomfret Towers

Both like and unlike young Alice, I get flashes of ecstacy from other people’s words. Some of my favorite quotes are basically funny–dear Angela Thirkell, god bless her. But that quote of hers stayed with me, and gave new meaning when many years later I got to see winged Assyrian bulls in Chicago’s Oriental Institute, or when, on another occasion, I had to smile (discreetly) at the reverential assembly of rubbishy bits of once-grand marbles, their ears and noses and dongs all lost to history, at LA’s Getty Museum.

What is it about the quotes that live in our memories–like pebbles rubbed almost smooth by a New England glacier, and carried thousands of miles from the place they started? (Or like a sweater handed down by your mother.) Their previous lives make them precious, weighty, authentic.

I plan to share some of my favorite quotes in this blog.

Wow! The variety and invention of our blogworld!

• Blogging as jazz: Jeneane’s impulse to blog 30 posts in 30 minutes (starts here) is full of fun riffs, sweetspots , and memorable tunes.
• Blogging as creation: If you haven’t seen David Weinberger’s “History of My Face”, go check it out. Part satire, part autobiography–remarkable for its courage as well as its humor, with neither of these elements hurting the other.
• Blogging as love: Elaine’s photo of the Elmo pillow she made for her grandson, emblematic of the many ways love makes life a noble adventure, even after the fade on that-cute-nubile-couple-rides-off-into-the-sunset.
• Blogging as activism: Josh Marshall sent me to “Campaign for America’s Future” for information about how conservatives use polls with slanted questions to promote their goal to “privatize” Social Security.
• Blogging as fun: You know the Web has everything when you stumble across Brendan Loy’s photopage of Psychokitty versus Saddam Hussein. (Thanks to Malcolm for the link.)
• Blogging as metablogging: That’s me today!

Dave Winer blew me away today with a blog entry called “Why blogs are cool“. Dave, a major blog-software guru, has been thinking aloud online about Google and Blogger–and thereafter suffering through having other people quote, misquote, analyze, mis-analyze, etc. whatever he said. Dave responds to it all with good humor. My favorite quote:

Because I have a weblog, I can write about it at length, several times. I can write until I’m finished. If you don’t care, that’s cool too, you can hit the Back button. But I get to say what I want, and I can get it right, and if I don’t there’s a fresh empty page tomorrow that I’m going to fill, Murphy-willing of course.

Can you think of a better, or shorter, description of why blogs are cool? Thank you, Dave Winer.

I was touched by the blog a friend on Slashdot linked to, an Army reserve guy now in some sandy place full of diesel fumes, calling himself “Lt. Smash”.

Don’t be put off by his bursts of bravado–can you blame him for trying to keep his courage up in such circumstances? His struggles with personnel, bugs, and smallpox vaccination are human and moving.

(Continued from E.B. White, Part 1)

White uses and reuses the device of surprise reappearance by an apparent digression. We readers have seen this trick before, but each time we love it all over again. The “retired” soprano comes back for just one more concert? Hurray! And if the soprano comes back at the end of the show, for just one last bow, we’re even more thrilled.

A joke with a “capper” gives twice the dose of humor (both surprise and congruence.) Revival with a new image or a new setting gives you new insight into big topics like change, eternity, death. (White attempts a much wider range of subjects than Barry.)

White’s diction is quirky. He writes for New Yorker readers and for himself–the general level is quite a bit higher than Barry’s. He rummages through his treasure-chest of words looking for just the one needed right now, bringing forth things new and old. Most often, a short, direct word does the job–“his hard little body, skinny and bare”–but White has no false shame about “teeming” or “petulant.” And he makes no apology for “slummiest” or “pawed over.” White himself is not slumming. He is writing for equals.

The girders that hold up White’s essays are found in Strunk (later Strunk and White.) “Use the active voice.” “Put statements in positive form.” “Omit needless words.” I would like to compare the original Strunk (available online) to the more famous Strunk and White. White’s additions would be full of meaning–but this is a pleasant goal for a more-leisured future.

Strunk says, “…the proper place for what is to be made most prominent is the end.” This rule “applies equally to the words of a sentence, to the sentences of a paragraph, and to the paragraphs of a composition.” White took the advice to heart.

In Once More to the Lake, White’s last two paragraphs draw together all the essay’s big themes. Then, in this now comfortable, familiar setting, White’s ending delivers an even-more massive surprise.

Here’s how he does it: A thunderstorm brings back the themes I call “Then” and “Now”– the long-ago summers of childhood and this summer’s trip with his own young son. White also revisits two closely-related themes I call “Eternity” and “Change” –the indestructible one-ness of lakeside summers, despite an admission that “Now” some detail has changed. (The others are all going swimming, but “Now” the narrator sits languidly watching.) One last time, we share White’s “Illusion” of changing places with his son or his father. The author watches the boy of today, feeling once more what he felt as a long-ago boy, but in the final word of the final phrase of the final sentence, we see what has been, so far, so carefully hidden: “death.”

Wow.

The essay Here is New York (only excerpts online) is less finely crafted. White’s major theme throughout is “his” New York–a brisk catalog of the city’s pleasures and fears, virtues and flaws, tossed off in a series of small, sharp images that add up to one huge impressionistic daub, like a “face” made up of a hundred tiny photographs. This part is brilliantly done. Less successfully, the end (an expression of hope for the United Nations) seems merely tacked on, for all his craftsmanship.

Still, let’s see how the master tries for his effect. This essay has lots of short-run themes–ideas that crop up a few times in successive paragraphs, then disappear. In the final paragraphs White brings back many of these, reminding us of our shared journey thus far–images of construction, housing projects, the invisibility of big events, racial harmony, sky-scraping buildings with planes overhead, now seen as an emblem of menace.

The final paragraph comes back to specifics, one single specific tree in Turtle Bay, a symbol both of the city itself and of all that we have to lose when we lose what we love. By no coincidence–White first published “Once More to the Lake” in 1941; “Here in New York” dates from 1948–the final word of both essays is the same image of the fear of infinite loss: “death.”

E.B. White’s essays are less like a Dave-Barry-roller-coaster than they are like a car trip with Dad. For one thing, White wants to take you to some destination–some realization or insight he wants you to share. But that’s not why you go along. You know he will keep you interested, charmed, amused–and that’s still only part of why you go along. You want to be with him, and you want to be the person you are when the two of you are together.

White’s essays have many funny moments, but humor is just one part of his wide-ranging charm. His model is Thoreau, not Perelman. If he’s selling you something (and he is, he made his living by writing), it’s warmth and wisdom, not punch lines.

Most important–this is why people still read him–he’s not just selling you his warmth and wisdom. He’s selling you on your own.

White is a master of sharp, sharp, specific writing. He carefully chooses sights and sounds and smells that seem to come straight from your own past. Those half-remembered days, those half-forgotten emotions–how sweet they seem as White brings them back to you. Here they are, not lost after all–your summer by the lake, your ambitious strivings in a garret, your joy at a circus, your love for a creaky old dog. How warmly you now see your own young self again, and how fully you feel you understand at last.

White makes it all look so easy, so offhand, so simple–and this is one more part of his skill as a writer.

I don’t mean to cast doubt on White’s warmth or his sincerity. Knowing that you like apple pie better than peach doesn’t make Mom an insincere person, nor is she being devious when she takes down a well-thumbed recipe and bakes it for you.

How does E. B. White do it?