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Something for the Weekend

Short and sweet today…

“All they do is show you’ve been to college” — Ben Dolnick on his love of the semicolon, at the New York Times:

And so, far from being pretentious, semicolons can be positively democratic. To use a semicolon properly can be an act of faith. It’s a way of saying to the reader, who is already holding one bag of groceries, here, I know it’s a lot, but can you take another? And then (in the case of William James) another? And another? And one more? Which sounds, of course, dreadful, and like just the sort of discourtesy a writer ought strenuously to avoid. But the truth is that there can be something wonderful in being festooned in carefully balanced bags; there’s a kind of exquisite tension, a feeling of delicious responsibility, in being so loaded up that you seem to have half a grocery store suspended from your body.

(You’ve surely read this by now, but…) Also in the NYT Tim Kreider on the ‘Busy’ trap:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day… More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

And finally…

Busted — Leah Price, author of How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, on the history of reading at The Browser:

Ernest Hemingway had this to say about James Joyce: “I like him very much as a friend and think no one can write better, technically. I learned much from him.” But if you look at Hemingway’s copy of Ulysses, which is kept today in a library in Boston, you see that the first and last pages are the only ones that have been cut. So you can’t always trust people to tell the truth about their own reading. What makes it fascinating and also frustrating to study is that reading is one of the most private things we do.

One Comment

  1. HazeGray

    I love the semicolon; Vonnegut’s cranky dismissal of them just shows he was a transvestite hermaphrodite representing absolutely nothing. So it goes.

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