from “Dancing with Really Real Stars,” April 26, 2008

We went dancing last night. Couples drew complex sentences on the floor, a way of thinking we were unable to follow. We enjoyed the live and lively sound of the Pranksters, an 18-piece swing band that filled the stage with horns, rhythm, and vocalists. We had arrived an hour early to take advantage of a dancing class, learning just enough about triple-step swing to watch the dancers with increased interest. Our favorite couple, a lanky fellow and his sparse partner, flitted and flirted about the floor like two mosquitoes bouncing against the ceiling on a sultry night in August; by the end of the evening, a tie of sweat dripped down his shirt. We took a few notes, thinking of a post, thinking about the difficulties of both dancing and writing.

from “What We Will Miss When Newspapers Disappear,” April 8, 2008

In “Irma La Douce,” Jack Lemmon, playing Nestor, the defrocked, now homeless policeman, spending the night with Irma, hangs curtains, improvised from newspaper, across her bare windows to shield her from the possibility of being seen from the Paris street below. He has already described to Irma how he often inserted a folded newspaper under his uniform jacket to help keep warm on rainy beats.

from “The Amateur Spirit in Writing,” March 12, 2008

The “Talk of the Town” pieces these days only occasionally reach E. B. White’s wit or brevity. He often captures a moment of his own time while gazing into some distance, foretelling. A case in point, his May 11, 1929 piece, where he writes: “‘Writing is not an occupation,’ writes Sherwood Anderson. ‘When it becomes an occupation a certain amateur spirit is gone out of it. Who wants to lose that?’ Nobody does, replies this semi-pro, sitting here straining at his typewriter.” One blogs in the hopes the amateur spirit will prevail, painfully aware that blogging also makes it easier, as White later said, “for persons who are not artists and writers to continue the happy pretence” (May 21, 1938).