You Can't Make Enjoyment a Goal

 

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or endeavoring something for the public good.

— Thomas à Kempis

Minus the prayer, I spend a lot of my time in retirement along the lines recommended by Thomas à Kempis, a 15th-century advocate of what today we would call mindful living.

I read, write, ruminate, and try to remain a productive citizen.

I hope in the long run to devote even more time to mindful activities, reducing to near-zero the time that I spend on mindless pursuits, such as watching TV, scrolling through social media, and worrying about the state of the world.

But no matter how I wind up spending my time, there are no guarantees.

For as I have discovered in four years of trial and error, you can't design a retirement guaranteed to produce enjoyment.

You can only try things. 

Golfing, gardening, hiking, biking, birdwatching, breadmaking, singing, sailing, painting, philanthropy, or songwriting.

Globetreking.

Tutoring schoolkids.

Or playing dominoes in the park.

Whatever floats your boat.

When they promise you that, with sufficient planning, you'll enjoy your golden years, the retirement experts are lying to you.

Yes, retirement is an opportunity to reimagine yourself.

You no longer have to react to bosses and customers, or go places and perform tasks not of your choosing.

You're free to do what you will enjoy.

The problem is, you can't decide in advance that you'll enjoy an activity.

You cannot make enjoyment a goal.

"Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity," said the writer Paul Goodman.

The best you can do is to test out a lot of important activities, and learn whether enjoyment follows.

While they're still working, people wonder mostly whether they'll have the money to retire. 

The smart ones make saving a goal.

But they don't give thought to whether they'll enjoy retirement.

And there's a good reason for that.

You can't make enjoyment a goal.

Faking It

 

To fake it is to stand guard over emptiness.

— Arthur Herzog

Fraudsters know it's easy to make a fast buck from a phony "news" website.

To prove how easy it is, journalist Megan Graham conducted an experiment a couple of years ago.

She built her own website and filled it with stories she stole from CNBC.

"Within days, I had the ability to monetize my site with legitimate advertisers," she reported. 

"It was shockingly easy."

Graham's success was no doubt due to advertisers' shoddy ad-buying systems, which funnel ad money through third parties.

Those companies take their fees off the top and buy ads with the money left over.

But in their haste to earn fees, the companies lose track of where that money is spent.

"Half a brand’s digital marketing spend is absorbed by middlemen," Graham says. "It’s impossible for advertisers to know exactly where their money is going."

But suckering advertisers and their agents isn't the real crime here. (It's perfectly legal to create a website filled with gobbledygook.)

Plagiarism is.

To sustain the illusion that they're legitimate publishers, fraudsters rip off stories from legitimate publishers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.  

Fraudsters can even automate plagiarism by using website plug-ins known as "scrapers," which swipe articles from legitimate publishers hourly.

To cover their crime, before posting the stolen stories, the more artful fraudsters run them through a paraphrasing app.

These apps thinly disguise the plagiarism—but only thinly.

They also provide inadvertent chuckles.

Consider, for example, how one fraudster mangled parts of a story about a Congressional hearing on stock-trading:

Original 

Some legislators called for more transparency. Rep. Nydia Velázquez asked about the lack of requirements for hedge funds to disclose short positions.

Fraudster

Some legislators necessitated additional transparency. Rep. Nydia old master asked regarding the shortage of needs for hedge funds to disclose short positions.

In this case, the fraudster simply published the paraphrasing app's results verbatim:

• Called for more was replaced by necessitated additional
   
• Velázquez was replaced by old master
  
  
• Asked about the lack of requirements was replaced by asked regarding the shortage of needs

How do the fraudsters get away with this?

As Graham showed, they count on advertisers' inability to detect original from plagiarized stories.

"It’s easy to make money from advertisers just by setting up a web page," she said, "That means there’s significant incentive to create sites filled with outright plagiarized content."

But fraudsters also count on visitors' shabby reading habits.

As studies have shown, digital readers are evincing ever-greater degrees of "cognitive impatience," robbing them of the ability to "deep-read."

To put it succinctly, digital readers lack discernment: we'll accept any crap that's dished out, no matter the source or the quality.

In a real sense, we're complicit in the fraudsters' crime.

Anger of Repose

Free speech is the right to shout "Theater!" in a crowded fire.

— Abbie Hoffman

After millenniums of suffering second-class citizenship, Western women can take heart in the fact they're at last on equal footing with men. 

You'd think they'd kick back and relax, at least a bit.

But, no.

A lot of Western women are still incensed and, as a result, unable to tolerate a man's literary opinion when it differs from their own.

I ran headlong into that anger yesterday when I (naively) commented on an article posted by the feminist historian Max Dashu on her popular Facebook page, "Suppressed Histories Archives."

The article, by a playwright named Sands Hall, described how Wallace Stegner plagiarized the diary of a Victorian woman, Mary Foote, when he wrote his Pulitzer-prize winning novel Angle of Repose.

Hall's contention was that Stegner stole more than a diary; he stole the diarist's life.

The unanimous tone of the steamy comments by Dashu's fans rankled me. 

I am, after all, partial to Wallace Stegner and to all novelists' right to fictionalize.

Those comments called Stegner "morally bankrupt" and "corrupt," a "colonizer," "thief" and "oppressor" who enjoyed "destroying a woman's character and reputation."

He was also compared to a rapist.

For good measure, Dashu's fans indicted other loathsome males for plagiarizing women's writings, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Jung, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Einstein and Homer.

Yes, Homer.

"I wish Stegner were still alive to be shamed, sued, and stoned," one fan wrote.

Stegner should go to the "chopping block," said another.

"A curse on the name of Wallace Stegner," added another. 

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. 

"Who do we cancel next?" I commented.

Big mistake.

For my five-word comment, I was told I was "petty," "cheeky," "hysterical," "reactionary" and "misogynistic." And I was assaulted for my age—even though Max Dashu is three years older than me.

But wait, there's more. Adding nuance, I commented further:

"Thanks for posting this article. I was not aware before of the accusations against Stegner. There is a good podcast featuring Sands Hall at the link below. She amplifies the article and related play she wrote. Calling for Stegner's posthumous stoning and the retraction of his Pulitzer is a clear-cut form of 'cancellation,' whether the word bothers you or not. Many of the comments sound like those of a frenzied mob clutching to its grievances. Sands Hall calls Stegner's ripoff of Mary Foote's journal an instance of early 'postmodernism.' But the mob wants to exhume his body, like Cromwell's, and desecrate it."

Max Dashu replied, "So according to you, no one should be outraged at him stealing a woman's work and then stomping on her reputation? He in fact canceled her!"

"In the US," I responded to Dashu, "we’re sensitive to mobs after the Salem Witch Trials."

"What 'mob?" Dashu wrote. "A woman tracked down the story of a man who massively appropriated a woman's work while smearing her life story, and you whine about 'cancellation.' He hasn't been canceled. Someone shone a light on his misdeeds."

And at that scolding, Dashu's fans started to pile on. 

"Shut up misogynist," one wrote.

"Calm down, Nancy boy," said another. 

"Robert is mad that women are pushing back," said another.

"I’m sensitive to slandering a woman since the witch trials," said another. "And I’m a witch, so don’t even fucking go there."

"It’s pathetic that you’re so testerical and worked up over this dead guy who stole women’s work," another said. "He STOLE her work and passed it off as his own. Typical male entitlement and privilege on your part to think you get to define everything around you. SHUT THE FUCK UP."

Based on my encounter with Max Dashu and her fans, I could write a play about an fiery mob rushing to judgement. 

Twelve Angry Women.

But it's been done before.

POSTSCRIPT: Learn more about Wallace Stegner's plagiarism from a new interview with Sands Hall. Great stuff!

Grammar

People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.

— B. R. Myers

On a Facebook group dedicated to the prize-winning writer Shelby Foote (a fav of mine), a civil war broke out after I corrected someone who used "hung" to mean "executed." (If a man or woman was executed by hanging, as grammarians know, he or she was "hanged.")

Some group members backed me, but many went apoplectic over my comment, insisting grammar was irrelevant to communicating.

Facebook even banned me for 24 hours, saying "your comment didn't follow our Community Standards."

The irony of advocating sloppy grammar in a group dedicated to Shelby Foote escapes them, as, I'm afraid, do most subtleties.

B.R. Myers is right: sloppy grammar signals a sloppy thinker—or at least a poorly read one.

No, sloppy grammar doesn't prohibit communication.

But it does reflect a pitiable sort of poverty.

Start with You

When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author.

— John McPhee

Far too many writers inject themselves into otherwise interesting pieces.

If you're one of the culprits, please, get over yourself. 

We don't care that you struggled to start your piece; thought about it for days on end; wrote about the same topic in the past; wrote on a tablet; wrote with your cat in your lap; wrote while suffering anguish about the state of the world; wrote late into the night; absolutely adore your subject; absolutely loathe your subject; are uncertain you've done your subject justice; or are delighted with your final product.

We. Don't. Care.

We care about the world outside your ego. 

Readers, if nothing else, are avid. 

They're searching for news, opinions, and new ideas.

Your ego provides none of that.

The masterful writer John McPhee put it succinctly:

"Let the reader have the experience. Leave judgment in the eye of the beholder. When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author. If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost. Give elbow room to the creative reader."

To the extent that your piece is "all about you"—your process, insecurities, devotion, or judgements—your editorial job is crystal clear.

Cut the crap.

NOTE: Here's an example of "it's all about me" writing.

The Way Some People Spell

I don't see any use in having a uniform way of spelling words.

— Mark Twain

Mark Twain thought that policing the way people spelled was a merry chase, like policing the way people dressed. Thorstein Veblen called it a "conspicuous waste," "archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective."

My grammar school teachers, on the other hand, taught me that spelling was like math: there was one, and only one, right answer.

Of course, that was the early 1960s. 

They also taught us that policemen were our friends, that beatniks were dirty, and that America was the greatest country on earth.

Critical Race Theorists would say they were abusing their authority in order to oppress us and make us conform to the "dominant identity;" but, actually, they were following the lead of a mild-mannered Connecticut teacher, Noah Webster, and teaching us to be Americans.

Frustrated by the outdated teaching materials on hand, Webster revised America's grammar school textbooks immediately after the Revolutionary War, to rid them of references to the king. He also wrote a famous dictionary to rid the new nation's language of Briticisms. In the process, Webster simplified the spelling of hundreds of words. Travelling, for example, became traveling; colour became color; and publick became public. 

Webster believed his spellings, being humbler than their British counterparts were "of vast political consequence" to the young republic. 

And perhaps they were.

But we're an old republic now, soon to become a dictatorship. 

Humble is passé.

We don't care whether you spell smoking as smocking or coffee as covfefe. Just as long as you don't mention white supremacy, marginalization, or dominant-determined identifies.

For my part, call me a dinosaur, but I like Webster's democratic way with words.

Short

It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.

—Ernest Hemingway

Some things never change.

Good writing has never changed, even though writing itself has—a lot. 

We have, for example, seen use of the subjunctive (as in, "It's necessary my boss be at the meeting") nearly cease; sentence fragments (as in, "No can do") achieve acceptance; and verb conversions (such as "impact," "onboard," and "minoritize") shake off the stench of barbarism.

But good writing remains unchanged.

Good writing is good, first and foremost, because it's short. It coveys what's essential and leaves out the rest. Readers get the writer's point, because the point is made straightaway. 

And the wisdom in brevity never changes, as Ernest Hemingway once told his editor.

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.

"It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short," Hemingway said. 

"The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics."

Pronoun Police

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

― John Fowles

Goodly readers on occasion complain that my old-school use of pronouns and impatience with pronouns of choice reveal insensitivity and bias.

Under the hot lights of these pronoun police, I'll admit, I'd probably cop a plea.

But for the moment suffice it to say my one true bias is a bias for brevity.

Brevity speeds communication; and life's too short to stuff a mushroom.

But, incisive as it is, brevity almost always ruffles feathers. 

By fostering favoritism, brevity can't help but trigger the aggrieved.

• Men at work. 
• Boys will be boys. 
• Drama queen.
• All men are created equal.

We could easily enough scrub favoritism from these phrases, but what value would we really add?

• Proletariats laboring up ahead.
• Youths will behave as they frequently do.
• Histrionic person.
• All human beings either are created equal or turn out that way due to randomized instances of syngamy.

I wish I could be as cheery about our current obsession with wokish circumlocution as the linguist John McWhorter, who recently applauded this sentence:

• The boy wants to see a picture of herself.

"There are times when the language firmament shifts under people’s feet," he wrote in The New York Times. "They get through it."

And if they don't, the pronoun police will be there to assist.

Bitched

We are all bitched.

— Ernest Hemingway

It's 1934 and F. Scott Fitzgerald has just published Tender is the Night, his first novel in a decade.

Fitzgerald is out of favor with readers, who are impatient with stories about rich people (it's the height of the Depression, after all).

He's anxious to learn whether Tender is the Night is any good and writes to Ernest Hemingway to ask his opinion.

Hemingway responds by saying the characters in the novel seem like little other than "marvelously faked case histories." He scolds Fitzgerald for "cheating" readers by inventing characters who merely give voice to his own self-pity.

"Forget your personal tragedy," Hemingway says. 

"We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you."

We could use a little of Hemingway's stoicism right now. We're awash in self-pitying writers. 

And why not? 

Self-pity is, as James Fallows says, The American Way.

A current example appears in writer Beth Gilstrap's article "A Monstrous Silence," in the new issue of Poets & Writers.

Gilstrap describes her agonizing efforts to write while attending to her cancer-patient mother-in-law. Needless to say, the writer's art suffers. And oh how it suffers!

The struggle to chauffeur her mother-in-law to the cancer center twice a week overwhelms the dolorous Gilstrap, and she finds writing eludes her. "When you spend so many hours in hopeless environments," she confesses, "it becomes difficult to see the point of continuing to make art."

And art is her raison d'etre, her "identity," her "sense of self." 

Never mind that Mom wears an unreliable IV drip, endure bouts of nausea, keeps getting blood infections, and has to undergo repeat intubations—Gilstrap's art is suffering! 

"I people-please myself damn near out of existence," she writes.

Golly.

To a writer like Gilstrap, I just want to say, "Honey, hate to break the news, but we're all bitched. If you don't believe me, ask Mom."

Forget your personal tragedy. Don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you.

But Hemingway is out of favor, alas; and self-pity, The American Way.

I'm wasting my breath.

Nouning

All bad writers are in love with the epic.

― Ernest Hemingway

The English language isn't precious; but it has its charms.

So when self-proclaimed wordsmiths defile it, I get pretty sore.

Among the greatest defilers are consultants.

When they speak, gibberish bursts from their mouths like puss from a boil; and when they write—or, as they prefer, when they "wordsmith"—clear English turns into hooey.

Consultants love, in particular, nouning: deadening verbs by converting them into nouns.

Nouning, they believe, elevates their jejune statements—and justifies their fees.

For example:

We're experiencing a disconnect.

Watch for my invite.

I know a foolproof hack.

That was an epic pivot.

That was an epic fail.

Equally vile are headline writers. 

When they start nouning, you'd better reach for the kidney dish. 

For example:

AMC hoping sales reach $5.2 billion. Here’s why that’s a big ask.

Windows 11 preview: What’s in the latest build?

Dems put divides aside, rally behind Biden.

Need a good eat plan?

Feeling anxious? Declutter your overwhlem.

Nouns like these aren't just pompous. They're nauseating.

"Many of us dislike reading or hearing clusters of such nouns," says wordsmith Henry Hitchens.

"We associate them with legalese, bureaucracy, corporate jive, advertising or the more hollow kinds of academic prose. Writing packed with nominalizations is commonly regarded as slovenly, obfuscatory, pretentious or merely ugly."

Ugly is right.

So I ask—as your consultant—need a solve for this problem?

The next time you encounter a nouner, grab a hammer.

Monikers

Monikers have always fascinated me.

The Sultan of Swat. 

The Wizard of Menlo Park.

The Angel of the Battlefield. 

The Desert Fox. 

The Elephant Man.  

Moniker is a hobo's term meaning "nickname." It was borrowed directly from Shelta, the form of Gaelic spoken by Irish gypsies.

But not all monikers are alike.

Sobriquets are praiseworthy monikers. 

Epithets are derogatory ones.

A sobriquet—derived from the Old French word for jest—is bestowed out of fondness (the Old French word sobriquet literally meant a "chuck under the chin.") A sobriquet is also bestowed out of awe. The Man of Steel is an example.

An epithet—derived from the Greek word for added—is bestowed in order to disparage.* The Mutton-Eating Monarch is an example.

Grammarians would say sobriquets and epithets are adjectives (adjectival phrases). But onomasticians insist that, because they substitute for a person's proper name, sobriquets and epithets are in fact pronouns.

If that's the case, I might start insisting my pronoun of choice isn't he, she, or they, but "The Maven of Monikers."

Sadly, fanciful monikers are fast becoming extinct. But some are ageless. 

Among the hundreds of ageless sobriquets, my favorite include:

• The Bard (William Shakespeare)
• The Boss (Bruce Springsteen)
• The Duke (John Wayne)
• The Father of His Country (George Washington)
• The Godfather of Soul (James Brown)
• The Governator (Arnold Schwarzenneger) 
• The Great Emancipator (Abraham Lincoln)
• The King of Rock & Roll (Elvis Presley)
• The Lion of Round Top (Strong Vincent)
• The Man from Uncle (Napoleon Solo)
• The Prince of Peace (Jesus Christ)
• The Swamp Fox (Francis Marion)

Among the hundreds of ageless epithets, my favorite include:

• The Bastard of Bolton (Ramsay Bolton)
• The Boston Strangler (Albert DeSalvo)
• The Butcher of Lyon (Klaus Barbie)
• The Hick from French Lick (Larry Bird)
• The Iron Lady (Margaret Thatcher)
• The Kid (William Bonney)
• The Little Corporal (Napoleon Bonaparte)
• The Louisville Lip (Mohammed Ali)
• The Old Pretender (James Francis Edward Stuart)
• The Tangerine Tornado (Donald Trump)
• The Teflon Don (John Gotti)
• The Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski)

What are your favs?

*Nickname literally means "added name." The word derives from the Old English word ekename. Over time, English speakers garbled it. "Babe Ruth had an ekename" became "Babe Ruth had a nickname."

Get the Name of the Dog

My task is, by the power of the written word, 

to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, 

before all, to make you see.

— Joseph Conrad

In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White pooh-pooh lazy writers—the majority—because they're so often satisfied with imprecision.

You see their slothfulness on display every day:

• "The Searchers is the greatest Western ever made."
  
  
• "The number of Americans diagnosed with 'broken heart' syndrome has steadily risen in the past 15 years."
  
  
• "Some records from The British Invasion in the mid-'60s can be very valuable."

By saying so little, sentences like these tax readers' minds. They squander readers' energy in guessing what the writer means to say.

Good writing avoids imprecision by drawing word-pictures.

Word-pictures comprise concrete details—specifics—that allow readers easily to imagine the world the writer seeks to depict. 

Anything less is filler. Eyewash. Baloney. Horse hockey.

• "The Searchers is the greatest Western ever made" merely tells you the writer likes this cowboy movie.

• "The number of Americans diagnosed with 'broken heart' syndrome has steadily risen in the past 15 years" merely tells you that incidents of a weird disease have increased.

• "Some records from The British Invasion in the mid-'60s can be very valuable" merely tells you there's demand for vinyl recordings by bands like Peter & Gordon.

Precision, on the other hand, would have told you, among other things, what distinguishes The Searchers from all the other hundreds of Westerns; how fast cases of "broken heart" are accelerating—and whether the disease affects a lot of people, or only a few; and which mop-top bands' records are hot.

Lazy writers favor the generic, as Victorian sociologist Herbert Spencer said in The Philosophy of Style; and, because they do, they always leave readers guessing. They should, instead, aim to produce "vivid impressions" with their words.

Writers should avoid, Spencer said, abstract sentences like "When the manners, customs, and amusements of a nation are cruel and barbarous, the penal code will be severe." They should write instead "When men delight in battles, bullfights, and gladiatorial combat, they will punish by hanging, burning, and the rack."

Spencer calls the use of vivid word-pictures a "thorough maxim of composition."

Writing coach Peter Roy Clark calls Spencer's maxim "Get the name of the dog" (or the "Fido Theorem").

"Such was my affection for this writing strategy," Clark once told an interviewer, "I wanted to use it as a book title. 

"Anticipating the literalism of SEO, my publisher decided the title should reflect what the book was really about. In the end, Get the Name of the Dog became Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. 

"Get the name of the dog" does appear in Clark's Writing Tools as Tool Number 14. But it's much more important.

"It ranks as Number 1 in my heart," Clark said. "Every strategic move I’ve shared over 30 years derives its existence from the Fido Theorem. 

"'Get the name of the dog' stands, for me, for the whole. In other words, if the writer remembers to get the dog’s name, he or she will be curious enough and attentive enough to gather all the relevant details in their epiphanic particularity."

Got an email to write? A memo? A report? 

Get the name of the dog.

Writing Rule #26

An unnecessary word is like a cinderblock on the highway.

Fluff

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

— Mark Twain

Verbose writing is frilly, flowery, frivolous and fluff-brained. A thing, at all costs, to avoid.

But some fluff is tasty.

Take, for example, the kind used to make a Fluffernutter.

The Fluffernutter was invented in by one Emma Curtis, who with her brother began making and marketing Snowflake Marshmallow Crème in 1913 in their home-state of Massachusetts.

The great-great-great-granddaughter of Paul Revere, Emma knew to keep watch on her competitors, of which there were scores.

To outdo them, she published brochures packed with recipes for marshmallow-crème treats, and advertised the brochures in newspapers and on radio. 

One, published in the middle of World War I, contained Emma's short recipe for the Liberty, a marshmallow crème and peanut butter sandwich.

The Liberty became her all-time hit.

But, sadly, Emma was not to reap all its rewards.

A local competitor, Durkee-Mower, trumped Emma, not by running ads, but by sponsoring an entire radio show. 

Named The Flufferettes, it aired in the half-hour spot before The Jack Benny Show and featured comedy, music, and recipes—including the recipe for the Liberty.

In 1960, Durkee-Mower's ad agency renamed Emma's sandwich The Fluffernutter, and rest, as we say, is history.

Fire the Writer

Well, that's putting your foot in your mouth. Or your toe in your mouth.

On its website, the amateur-league baseball team Savannah Bananas boasts that "we toe the line."

We are not your typical baseball team. We are different. We take chances. We toe the line. We test the rules. We challenge the way things are suppose to be.

The writer doesn't know the meaning of "toe the line." 

The idiom means do what is expected or act according to another's rules.

You can't both be a maverick and toe the line.

Dear Writer: strike one, you're out! 

NOTE: Toe the line comes not from baseball, but track and field. Officials used to shout, "Toe the line!" Now they shout, "On your mark!"

Web of Lies

No amount of belief makes something a fact.

— James Randi

Goebbels Didn’t Say It may be the best blog ever. 

Nearly a decade old, Goebbels Didn't Say It is an effort by two professors to explode myths and "put a small dent in the amount of nonsense on the Internet."

The professors have chosen to call BS on the effusion of fake quotes attributed to Hitler's chief propagandist.

"We want to reduce the incidence of a fabricated quotation by Joseph Goebbels," the professors say.

Demanding exactitude on behalf of a liar is an odd mission, but a worthy one, nonetheless.

My hat's off to these two tireless debunkers, saboteurs at loose in the falsehood factory.

December Golf

Golf is a game of letting go.

— John Updike

Among the countless magazines where John Updike placed articles—pieces that earned him ten cents a word or less—Golf Digest may seem the oddest, until you realize the writer had a lifelong love for the game.

That love is on full display in "December Golf," a 1,000-word essay that ran in the December 1989 issue.

Its title alone signals Updike's theme—finales—and its opening two paragraphs make clear you're not in for run-of-the-mill sports writing.

You're in for an elegy. 

Through most of the piece, indeed, Updike lingers over closings (the clubhouse, pro shop and regular greens, for instance), the "savor of last things," and the abundant reminders that the golf season is at its bittersweet end.

Just as a day may come at sunset into its most glorious hour, or a life toward the gray-bearded end enter a halcyon happiness, December golf, as long as it lasts, can seem the sweetest golf of the year. 

The sweetest, Updike says, because in December "golf feels, on the frost-stiffened fairways, reduced to its austere and innocent essence."

There are no tee markers, no starting times, no scorecards, no gasoline carts—just golf-mad men and women, wearing wool hats and two sweaters each, moving on their feet. The season’s handicap computer has been disconnected, so the sole spur to good play is rudimentary human competition—a simple best-ball Nassau or 50-cent game of skins, its running tally carried in the head of the accountant or retired banker in the group. You seem to be, in December golf, reinventing the game, in some rough realm predating 15th-century Scotland.

In December golf, Updike says, excuses abound and rules are forgotten, freeing the players at last to compete on equal footing.

John Updike

Excuses abound, in short, for not playing very well, and the well-struck shot has a heightened luster as it climbs through the heavy air and loses itself in the dazzle of the low winter sun. Winter rules, of course, legitimize generous relocations on the fairway, and with the grass all dead and matted, who can say where the fairway ends? It possibly extends, in some circumstances, even into the bunkers, where the puddling weather, lack of sand rakes and foraging raccoons have created conditions any reasonable golfer must take it upon himself to adjust with his foot. A lovely leniency, in short, prevails in December golf, as a reward for our being out there at all.

That leniency compensates for the havoc the untended course and chilly air wreak on Updike's swing, a gnawing irritant both to him and his partner.

It is with a great effort of imagination—a long reach back into the airy warmth of summer—that I remind myself that golf is a game of letting go, of a motion that is big and free. “Throw your hands at the hole,” I tell myself. But by then the Nassau has been decided, and dusk has crept out of the woods into the fairways. 

As early night falls, the December golfers are ready to call it quits, for the day, for the season. And why not? They've discovered how to let go—the secret to the game.

Time to pack it in. The radio calls for snow tomorrow. “Throw your hands at the hole.” The last swing feels effortless, and the ball vanishes dead ahead, gray lost in the gray, right where the 18th flag would be. The secret of golf has been found at last, after eight months of futilely chasing it. Now, the trick is to hold it in mind, all the indoor months ahead, without its melting away.

You can read more of Updike's reflections on golf here.

First, Entertain

It’s a very recent thing that there’s a premium put on
making writing so difficult that only a charmed
aristocracy is capable of understanding it.

— Tom Wolfe

Besides brevity, what improves writing?

The aim to entertain.

When I was a college student, my professors would assign a mountain of papers to write—as many as one every week.

The papers were a serious matter, their grades representing two-thirds or more of the final grade for each class.

I decided early on that if I wasn't entertained by my paper, the professor surely wouldn't be; so I sought a quirky angle for nearly every one.

While I remember few of these papers today, one from a Theology course sticks in my mind. 

The assignment was to react to some book we had to read about the divinity of Christ. 

I wrote my paper all in dialog, from the viewpoint of a subject on a psychiatrist's couch. I swiped that gimmick from Philip Roth, who used it throughout Portnoy's Complaint.

The Theology professor commented that, although I had "underestimated Christ's divine nature," the paper was "entertaining." 

I received an A+.

The effort to enchant my professors worked like a charm for the most part, enabling me to ace papers on topics like Beowulf, Blake, Tolstoy, Bismarck, Hegel, epistemology, subcultures, collectives, and Muscovite hegemony in Yugoslavia.

It didn't quite work out with a paper on protein-deficient neurotransmitters.

The most frequent comment the professors offered was "shallowly thought out, but entertaining."

Aiming to entertain also provided a stimulant (along with coffee), helping me plow quickly through otherwise tedious material. 

That gave me more time to spend on my primary interest: coeds.

There was nothing original about my effort. 

Writers, if not undergrads, have been acting as entertainers since the Bronze Age.

Shakespeare, by injecting prankish novelties into his plays, upped their quotient of "fun" measurably. That effort paid him well at the box office. 

And the late best-selling novelist Tom Wolfe codified the writer's role as entertainer, telling editor Tom Freeman in 2004 that he wanted to make all writers swear to be entertaining.

"I’ve begun working on a writers’ Hippocratic oath,” Wolfe told Freeman. 

"The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is 'First, do no harm.' And I think for the writers it would be: 'First, entertain.'

"Entertain is a very simple word. I looked it up in the dictionary. Entertainment enables people to pass the time pleasantly. And any writing—I don’t care if it’s poetry or what—should first entertain."

But how would Wolfe's dictum apply, say, in business, where the writer's oath is more like, "First, inform."

You might lean on something your audience doesn't expect.

Here, for example, is an email I just received, in its entirety:

Your business is important to us. It's our mission to keep you up-to-date on what's happening with business in the Delaware region and how it affects you. But we need your help to fulfill that mission.

Right now, you're receiving our email newsletters, but you don't have access to our best resources and Insider-only content.

I've got great news.

Now through July 29, you can become a full Delaware Business Times Insider for only $4 per month. This is 50% off our normal rate and is our best rate of the year. As an Insider you'll get all 24 issues per year of Delaware Business Times (digitally or in print), immediate access to all of the Insider-only content on our website, priority registration for all DBT and Delaware Today virtual events and discounted registration for all DBT and Delaware Today in-person events.

Becoming a DBT Insider is a valuable investment for your own business and a strong investment in local business journalism right here in Delaware.

Here's the same email with the fun quotient upped by leaning on, of all things, a pharma commercial:

Physicians agree: there's one thing worse than FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). FOMB (Fear of Missing a Bargain).

Now you can cure both with one easy action.

Through July 29, become a full Delaware Business Times Insider for only $4 per month—half off the normal rate. By subscribing, you'll receive all 24 issues of Delaware Business Times (digitally or in print), access to Insider-only content on our website, priority registration for all DBT and Delaware Today virtual events, and discounted registration for all DBT and Delaware Today in-person events.

You'll never miss an important business story—or the year's biggest bargain—again!