Friday, October 21, 2005
Does this song sound familiar? (Quoted from a New York Times story):
The setting with the remarked-on acoustics was the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library. The unlikely libretto is one I point students to every semester, Strunk & White's Elements of Style. The Times story introduces a new edition of the Elements, with a twist: This time the "little book" of grammar rules has pictures... and a song cycle.
The Times asked Maira Kalman, the artist who did the pictures, whether William Strunk Jr. and his more famous pupil E.B. White would have approved of this multimedia approach. She thought they would:
Perhaps they would have shared an ironic chuckle when the Times had to run a correction on its "'Style' Gets New Elements" story. The online edition of the Times notes that the newspaper story earlier this week "referred incompletely to the book's origins." That is, it mentioned only the 1959 edition, which introduced White's additions to Strunk's 1918 booklet.
For those on a budget, or those who want to get back to the basics of basics, that 1918 just-Strunk edition -- with no pictures, no sounds and, unfortunately, none of White's updates -- is available for free on the Internet at Bartleby.com.
12:56:33 AM #
At a rehearsal last week, the tenor Matt Hensrud stood on the elevated
catwalk ... and sang mellifluously of
punctuation and orthography. "Do not use a hyphen between words that
can better be written as one word: 'water-fowl, waterfowl,' " he
intoned, his voice echoing in the churchlike acoustics. He was joined
by the soprano Abby Fischer for some tenderly turned philology: "The
steady evolution of the language seems to favor union: two words
eventually become one."
The setting with the remarked-on acoustics was the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library. The unlikely libretto is one I point students to every semester, Strunk & White's Elements of Style. The Times story introduces a new edition of the Elements, with a twist: This time the "little book" of grammar rules has pictures... and a song cycle.
The Times asked Maira Kalman, the artist who did the pictures, whether William Strunk Jr. and his more famous pupil E.B. White would have approved of this multimedia approach. She thought they would:
"They both had a great sense of humor and were very
irreverent," she said. "It wasn't about being prim and proper."
Perhaps they would have shared an ironic chuckle when the Times had to run a correction on its "'Style' Gets New Elements" story. The online edition of the Times notes that the newspaper story earlier this week "referred incompletely to the book's origins." That is, it mentioned only the 1959 edition, which introduced White's additions to Strunk's 1918 booklet.
For those on a budget, or those who want to get back to the basics of basics, that 1918 just-Strunk edition -- with no pictures, no sounds and, unfortunately, none of White's updates -- is available for free on the Internet at Bartleby.com.
12:56:33 AM #
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