![]() In reviewing the film Dark Victory, he performs a surgical takedown of the main character, who steals herself away to a small compound to get away from things for a while. White’s essays on “Movies” for May 1939 is one of the more amusing pieces. In the last two and a half years I managed a complete makeover of my own office, I replaced a desk and a chair, and I secretly told myself that all of this would make me a better writer. While not explicitly stated (does it have to be?) I think White is talking about distractions that writers seek out to keep from facing the blank page. Half a man’s life is devoted to what he calls improvements, yet the original had some quality that is lost in the process. I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuff chair and is fast asleep in it. In “Progress and Change” (December 1938*) he writes, White hedged his bets, but he was right on both counts: some television has been an unbearable disturbance (talk shows, news programs, reality TV) and yet some television has been a saving radiance in the sky: M*A*S*H, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The West Wing, Ted Lasso.Īt heart White is a writer, and his observations of writers, through himself, always amuse me. We shall stand or fall by television–of that I am quite sure.įor a technology so new, this is an astute observation. I beleive television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. He often makes keen observations, as in his essay “Removal” from July 1938, where he write, White writes about whatever strikes his fancy, and does so with a degree of skill and clarity that I think is hard to find today. White, Andy Rooney, Isaac Asimov, and many others were proto-bloggers. Whether monthly, weekly, daily, there is comfort in knowing you’ve got a friend to tell you what’s what just around the corner. For good blogs (ones that I enjoy, anyway), there is a rhythm to these columns. The blogging tradition seems to take some of its DNA from magazine columnists. I think that many essayists of the past who wrote regular columns for the magazines or newspapers were like this. Reading the book again made me realize that E. There, in his “One Man’s Meat” column, he wrote about his life on the farm, books that interested him, movies that puzzled him, really whatever came to mind that month. He needed a break from The New Yorker, and with his wife, an editor at The New Yorker, he left New York City for a salt water farm they had in Maine. White wrote between 19, mostly for Harper’s magazine. ![]() ![]() One Man’s Meat is a collection of essays that E. I return to this book when I feel the need to be recharged both as a reader and a writer. I recently re-read it for the fifth time. There are certain books I return to again and again.
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