Thursday Morning

Thinking about writing.

Thinking about how a writer [in this case, Roger Angell] puts together words to portray ideas, images, perspective--with just the right details, just the right contextualization, and just the right modifiers for emphasis--to convey his meaning, his understanding and contemplations about his chosen subject [in this case his step-father E.B. White].

Looking at Angell's words about White's words and, perhaps most significantly, his life routines and writing practices. Trying to deconstruct Angell's re-imagining of "the format of the author's mind" [in this excerpt from his book review of White's ''One Man's Meat''] so that I can see how a/this writer creates meaning for the reader about both his subject and himself. The paragraph that follows [the first paragraph] is about both the book and the man. I have marked particular phrases that stand out for me [that are quite quite beautiful] in red and with italics.

Modest in its size and presumptions, engaging in tone, E. B. White's ''One Man's Meat'' has resisted becoming historic, even after a nonstop run of 55 years in print. First published in 1942 and reissued in expanded form two years later, the book was unweighty by design, being not a sustained single work but a compilation of the writer's monthly columns for Harper's Magazine (which he had begun writing in 1938), along with three casual essays first published in The New Yorker. Because of this format and the format of the author's mind, the book has always had the heft, the light usefulness, of a bushel basket, carrying a raking of daily or seasonal notions, and, on the next short trip, the heavier burden of an idea. (The image owes much to White himself, whose remembered easy, unstriding walk across a pasture or down the shore road of his Maine farm remains unique, as does his touch with the homely utensils of prose.) Strewn with errands and asterisks, farming tips and changes of weather, notes on animals and neighbors and statesmen, ''One Man's Meat'' is too personal for an almanac, too sophisticated for a domestic history, too funny and self-doubting for a literary journal. Perhaps it's a primer: a countryman's lessons that convey, at each reading, a sense of early morning clarity and possibility.*

Just so you know, Roger Angell wrote the forward for the 4th edition of The Elements of Style by Shrunk and White---a tiny book about writing with "clarity clarity clarity," as White put it.

*excerpt from The Making of E. B. White by Roger Angell