My father was in town visiting for the weekend, so we had a chance to drive up to Loveland Pass (snowy, windy, closed) and around the Dillon Reservoir before the show. He actually made it to the studio, but ESPN and Don Imus notwithstanding, radio isn't the most exciting thing in the world to watch. Sadly, he refused John's invitation to sing.
He was expected, but not until Friday evening, so when the dog started up at 3:00 AM Friday morning, the house was a scene of much confusion. Turns out the he decided to save a night's hotel room and turn I-70 into his own private Le Mans de 24 hour. I wasn't feeling terrific to begin with and I'm afraid his first day here was spent mostly reading the paper and watching me drink tea.
The bad news is that he headed back this morning. The good news is that there's hope, after all. Just remember: "When dangling, use participles."
I can't say I'm a big fan of diagramming sentences. I do think that the best way to write well is to read a lot, but only after you learn to operate the machinery, and grammar is the machinery. Grammar isn't the engine, but rather the stick shift. Get it right, and you've got both power and control at your disposal. Screw it up, and you've stripped the gears and burnt out the head gasket. Stretch a metaphor too far, and you sound like a pompous moron. Some people figure this stuff out early. We call them, "writers." Some people never quite get the hang of it, and we call them, "editors."
Making a fetish of grammar is an unappealing but probably necessary phase for anyone who takes it seriously. I'm glad to say that I am now more likely to be confused than morally offended at mistakes in parallel construction, for instance. More like to roll my eyes than to cringe at people who think "it's" is possessive. According to his daughter, Clifton Fadiman had taken to correcting restaurant menus on red ink, although not to actually grading them. This seems to me going too far. Subsequent patrons deserve the levity of seeing chicken described as "foul" just as much as you do.
Strunk and White (or, Strunk and White) get it about right - the important thing is to be understood, and grammar should aid, not inhibit, that quest. If you're spending minutes on end trying to shoehorn your idea into a 4th-grade teacher's idea of proper grammar, you might want to tear up the sentence, or the idea, or both, and start over.
The other advantage of my Dad's visit was that I had a chance to introduce him to a couple of my best friends in town. Both Dad and Dov have a virtually inexhaustible fund of stories, so they were able to keep each other entertained. You might think I was bored by hearing two sets of stories for the multipleth time, but in fact, it just keeps me sharp listening for something new. In my Dad's case, it turns out that a couple of bank robbery stories (cut it out: he used to work at a bank, not rob them) that were separate had somehow merged into one in my retellings. With them untangled, I now have two stories instead of one.
I also spent Shabbat reading a couple of essays by my favorite essayist, Joseph Epstein. If there are any books by Epstein you don't possess, fix that. Now. I don't save and display emails, but I was delighted to get a reply to a fan email I sent Mr. Epstein telling him that the only reason I had bought a particular number of the Weekly Standard was one of this essays.
Most of his stuff is somewhat light, a little wisful. But his essay defending Mencken against charges of anti-Semitisim is serious business, even if he seems to have lost his lonely argument with the rest of academia. The judgment was so swift and so decisive, even if so unjust, that in the 15 years or so since the controversy over his diaries erupted, Mencken has been quietly dropped from the journalistic pantheon by the same people who've squandered all the capital he spent his career building up. Any biopic is unthinkable, since he exists now only as a caricature of a curmudgeon.
Harrumph.