blogger of slackness

Apologies for not blogging in a month, but I have been extremely busy eating cookies.

The highlights of my existence of late have been twofold:

1) A brownie consumed minutes ago, acquired from a plate of the same located in the break-room provided by an anonymous co-worker. These brownies had nuts in them, which is ok, but ultimately nuts in brownies are wack. For some reason, however, almost all recipes for brownies call for some sort of chopped nuts. What is up with that? Are brownie recipe-makers in denial about the general lack of enthusiasm for nutted brownies? Is there a secret deal between the chocolate industry and the nut industry? Regardless, the maker of these brownies was too easily tricked by the attemps of the recipe-maker to make him or her include nuts in the brownies.

2) The Elements of Style Illustrated, a Chrismtas gift from Dick. In the last few months I've hardly read more than five pages of anything, excepting the optics book I finally started only to discover that I have to learn calculus first to undertand any of it. Having attended a small Catholic school that paid its teachers so poorly that some of them qualified for food stamps, the quality of my education was highly variable. I learned how to write from my 11th grade English teacher, who was kind of nuts but passionate about literature. In 12th grade AP English my teacher was an ex-southern belle. Her husband had left her, and she spent our classes telling stories about the days when she was young, thin, and wealthy; about how she had never paid bills before her 40's; about how she was part of an organization of young women at Clemson in the 70's that helped recruit football players by joining them for dinner in a uniform of white miniskirt and orange go-go boots. "That is not selling sex," she claimed, "it's showing school spirit!"

Where am I going with this? Oh, right...so I never actually had to buy, read, or use The Elements of Style in high school, and at college they expected that I already knew everything there was to know about that sort of thing, so this is my first encounter with Strunk and White's little book. And it's great. It reads less like an instructional book than a manifesto and reminds me a great deal of Ezra Pound's ABC's of Reading. I like the illustrations in themselves for their sort of childish surrealism and in the book becauase they are completely gratuitous in a text about grammar and language usage. It's a wonderful piece of simple, aesthetically pleasing bookmaking.