James, James, James. How Could You?
I love James Lileks. He’s probably my favorite (and most prolific) syndicated columnist. I read The Bleat daily, and follow his Backfence and Newhouse columns. In fact, James invented what has become for me a favorite expression, “striver“:
Right before I woke up I dreamed I had an assignment: write a bad feature story in the style of the New York Times. When I woke I had the last sentence still in my head; I stumbled next door to the studio, woke up the Mac, and typed this sentence:
Over in the field, a hound was hunched over excreting a “striver,” the local’s term for the hard, elegantly tapered stools for which the wild dogs are renowned.
I recounted this dream to my buddy Bill, the copy editor who sits a few feet away from me at work, and we agreed that a “striver” would be the new term for a piece of writing that was painstakingly crafted, produced with some difficulty, and was an absolute piece of crap.
How can you not love a man whose mind works like that?
But in today’s Bleat James commits a grievous error. A nearly unpardonable sin.