Search results for: William Zinsser
On the Trail of Sublime
July is when America packs its kids into the car and goes looking for the sublime—even if nobody knows that’s what they’re looking for. I used to think “sublime” was a dumb word, a mushy rhyme found in every bad poem and bad song and bad hymn. But when I started writing …
Read MoreUnexpected Visitors
“What is your favorite word?”
That question came in the mail recently from an editor compiling a book in which various authors would name their favorite word and explain their reasons.
“I don’t have a favorite word like williwaw that I keep in a display case to moon over,” I wrote back. “Those …
How to Get to Our House
That bustling noise you hear is the sound of people getting their summer house ready for all the friends they invited to come for a weekend in July or August. You do remember that you promised Bob and Linda that this was the year you’d make it to Moose Lake for sure? You don …
Read MoreThe Last of the Lone Wanderers
In 1933 an 18-year-old Englishman with a literary bent and a nomad’s turn of mind, Patrick Leigh Fermor, set out to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Two years later he arrived. Even on foot that’s a long time to get between two points in Europe. But the hiker …
Read MoreMe and My Relationships
Last week I got a letter from the man I once thought of as my broker, who now calls himself my investment counsel and would probably call himself my wealth management adviser if I had any “wealth” for him to manage. He was writing to tell me that Sandra, “the lead assistant assigned to your …
Read MoreBaseball Without Myths
Unlike the fabulist Kevin Costner, who posited in the movie Field of Dreams that a baseball diamond would sprout in the cornfields of Iowa, I do not expect that ballpark to materialize. Baseball is a world of concrete stadiums, where hardworking young men play a brutal schedule of 162 games and spend endless hours in …
Read MoreWriting for the Wrong Reasons
Depressingly often I hear from people who are stalled on a piece of writing for reasons that have nothing to do with actual writing. They are snarled in the machinery of trying to market what they write. Here are three typical recent examples.
A woman I’ll call Ravi, now in her 30s, came from …
In Memoriam
When I think about Memorial Day my mind goes back to an afternoon I spent at the American military cemetery at Omaha Beach. On that vast plain of 9,386 white marble crosses, every day is Memorial Day.
It was the spring of 1994, and I was there to write a magazine article about the …
Central Park Lite
Central Park and I go back almost as far as a man and a park can go. In the early 1930s, when my sisters and I were children, we sometimes stayed overnight with our grandmother, who lived at 1 West 69th Street. Unskilled at amusing the young, she would give us loaves of stale bread …
Read MoreNo Last Names
My phone rings and a voice at the other end says “Hello, William?” I know right away that it’s a fundraiser; the only callers who call me “William” are people soliciting money. Why would I give money to an organization so unprofessional that it doesn’t address me as “Mr. Zinsser” on a business …
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