You had me at “Agatha Christie, surfer.”
Mystery writer Agatha Christie with her surf board “Fred” in 1922. She was one of the earliest Britons to master stand-up surfing while visiting Hawaii. (via Retronaut)
OH MY
LOVE.
H. L. Mencken Uncredited and Undated Photograph
“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” H. L. Mencken, “A Mencken Chrestomathy” 1949
Who’s this lovely Victorian lady? Why that’s F. Scott Fitzgerald in drag
The photos were taken in 1916 to help promote The Evil Eye at Princeton’s Triangle Club. Fitzgerald was in his third year at Princeton when the musical-comedy troupe performed the bawdy lyrics penned by the future Great Gatsby writer. In a review of his performance, the Times referred to Fitzgerald as “the most beautiful” girl in the whole production.
Lester Bangs was a wreck of a man, right up until his death in April of 1982, at the age of thirty-three. He was fat, sweaty, unkempt—an out-of-control alcoholic in torn jeans and a too-small black leather jacket; crocked to the gills on the Romilar cough syrup he swigged down by the bottle. He also had the most advanced and exquisite taste of any American writer of his generation, uneven and erratic as it was…
“
| — | Maria Bustillos on how rock critic Lester Bangs taught her to read: http://nyr.kr/TSuQXm (via newyorker) |
George Orwell - On Writing
Six questions and Six Rules
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
- What am I trying to say?
- What words will express it?
- What image or idiom will make it clearer?
- Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
- Could I put it more shortly?
- Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
One can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
* From Orwell’s essay“Politics and the English Language”
George Orwell is the author of 1984, Animal Farm, and Down and Out in Paris and London, and such essays as “Shooting an Elephant.” Orwell was a passionate defender of good writing.
Source: Gotham Writers
