PART III

HONING YOUR CRAFT

Let men and women make good sentences. Let them learn to spell the sound of the waterfall and the noise of the bathwater. Let us get down the colors of the baseball gloves, the difference in shade between the centerfielder’s deep pocket and the discreet indentation of the catcher’s mitt. . . . Let us enlist the Vocabulary, the Syntax, the high grammar of the mysterious world.

—STANLEY ELKIN