El trabajo del editor
Through editing... one could make a second-rate composition publishable, but not splendid... I did... bring many a linguistic prohibition to my editing of the magazine (The American Scholar). This entailed my rather long list of prescriptivist peeves. I decided never to llow the words 'impact' (except for car crashes) or 'intriguing' (except for spying) into the journal; 'special' 'caring', and 'sharing' were also proscribed. 'Arguably' and other weasel words were ruled out. The word 'indeed' as no longer allowed to appear at the head of sentences, and the phrase 'in terms of' anywhere in any sentence. No 'if you wills' or 'as it weres' were permitted; the much overused 'focus' was also barred, and no 'whatevers' whatsoever. The words 'process' and 'values' were disdained, and 'lifestyle' was put out to pasture.
Saul Bellow
Saul's (Bellow) conversation was lively, sharp, gossipy. I once remarked to him that I thought Joe DiMaggio impressive in taking care of all the details of Marily Monroe's funeral after her death by suicide. He informed me that Arthur Miller, who was married to Monroe after DiMaggio, told him, Saul, that DiMaggio beat her up fairle often. 'The other side of brutality,' Saul said, 'is often sentimentality'. I once characterized the behavior of an intellectual acquaintance of ours as insecure. 'Insecure?' Saul said. 'Whatever happened to a good old-fashioned word like 'cowardly'?'
Marty Sommerfield
... was, like me, smallish, but, unlike me, or for that matter unlike anyone else I knew, absolutely fearless. He would crash into walls to catch fly balls. In football he played running back without a helmet. (In later life he wouldn't back down from fights with guys sixty or seventy pounds heavier than he.). He had a chipped front tooth, which on him looked good, admirable even. He had scientific interests, and in the basement of his family's bungalow on Coyle Avenue he dissected frogs and kept mice for experiments. He would go on to Evanston Township High School, on whose baseball team he played and at which he won a Westinghouse prize for a scientific project on enzymes. The prize gave him a scholarship to Swarthmore College, at wich, one day in his sophomore year, he dynamited a three-hundred-year-old oak tree, for which he was kicked out of school. Marty's was a storied life. At one point he was arrested for burglary; he later dropped by Ann Arbor to pick up a doctorate in mathematics; he spent some time with Albert Schweitzer in Africa and afterward walked around with a pet monkey; he ended up teaching in Southeast Asia; and when it was discovered he had a hopeless cancer, he, his physical courage never having deserted him, took his own life
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