Louise Morgan

Who doesn't use:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November,
all the rest have thirty-one...

to remind themselves which months have 30, 31 or 28 days?

This book is nothing but mnemonics like the above, for just about everything: spelling, grammar, mathematics, history, science, health and a few other odds and ends.

My mom used to teach me mnemonics as a little kid; mostly for spelling. (Geography and Mississippi.) My dad taught me one for weather. They were incredibly helpful for a kid trying to remember things that felt huge. The geography and weather mnemonics, or variations of them, made it into the book, but am I the only one who learned how to spell Mississippi by saying:

M, I, crooked-letter, crooked-letter, I, crooked-letter, crooked-letter, I, hump-back, hump-back, I?

Anyway, this was a fun, quick read for a language lover and there were quite a few useful aides here for future Trivial Pursuit challenges.… (mere)

This small book, published in 1931, consists of interviews with eight authors: WB Yeats, Richard Aldington, Sinclair Lewis, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Edgar Wallace, Wyndham Lewis, Somerset Maugham, and A.E. Coppard. Morgan's goal was to discover these authors' methods of work and the nature of their "inspiration". The questions she asks of the authors are trivial (e.g., "when do you write?" "do you revise your writing very much?" "why do you write?"). Many hearken back to a long-past time of the last century ("do you write with a fountain pen?" "do you use a dictaphone?" "do you like the gramophone and the radio?" "how about that modern invention, the cinema?").

To no great surprise, Morgan finds no useful generalizations. She shows no familiarity with the actual content of each writer's work, and is in no position to discuss their writing intelligently. Thus, except in cases where the writer uses her question as a reason to launch an extended explanation (as in the case of Somerset Maugham), the answers are perfunctory and shallow.

I sought this work out due to its inclusion of Somerset Maugham. He comes across as the most interesting of the writers she interviewed, but I found nothing in her interview that isn't available elsewhere in Maugham's work.

Here's an exchange with Edgar Wallace that caught my eye: Morgan: "What do you think of women writers?" Wallace: "They're pretty good, -- up to a point. The trouble with women writers is that all their sex runs to the brain. They are too intellectual. Unmarried women read treatises on obstetrics and then they think they know everything about life."

1931 turns out to have been quite a long time ago.… (mere)