Subject: Re: misc.
From: Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Date: Wed Jan 26 2000 - 06:57:04 EST
At 11:49 PM -0800 on 1/25/2000, you wrote:
> Maybe I have a good ear for that sort of thing.
> I've - perhaps for lack of a better way - always had a fondness for the
> presumably unreliable "sounding right" method of grammar.
I'm a firm believer in the strength of a well-tuned ear when it comes
to grammatical constructions. It doesn't do anyone good if the
sentence is "perfect" on paper but is unreadable. The journalist
Murray Kempton used to write sentences that would have made Mr.
Fowler delighted, but he frequently obfuscated even the tiniest
portion of his subject. On the other hand, a columnist like Jimmy
Breslin (a product of Catholic schools and Latin study) writes
columns by breaking the rules left and right, but to the ear it is
splendid.
> What prompts the mailing of the digest? It seems like it shows up in my
> mailbox pretty irregularly. Is it on some sort of schedule? Does it
> wait until the collection of posts meets a specified size? How does it
> work?
The rules are that it either sends out a digest when there are X
number of lines, "X" being a number I created, since some mailers
can't handle huge messages; or, if there has not been much activity,
any messages older than one day. I believe the time line for that is
2:30 - 3:30pm Eastern time (five hours behind Greenwich Mean Time).
> I was reading the information that amazon.com provided for all of its
> titles that related to Salinger and in one of the reviews of some
> biography or somesuch it was mentioned that Salinger's house caught fire
> sometime recently and reportedly burned some unpublished stories,
> possibly inciting the (perhaps temporary) decision to publish Hapworth.
> Does anybody know if there's any truth to this?
There was a fire in his house. Nobody knows if manuscripts were
lost, but rumor was that nothing was lost.
I doubt it would have any connection to the delayed Hapworth
publication, because it happened quite a while before the Hapworth
deal.
Good luck with your finals.
--tim
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