Dive in, splash around, skim and dip and spout about the latest quotations, metaphors, words and, of course, triologisms. You’ll feel better for it!
The first golden age
Continuing his retelling of the myth of Creation, Ted Hughes reminds us of a first golden age when humans were so close to 'the source' that they...
Alighting stars
I like this hint of stars being both lit up and alighting in their permanent positions in the firmament, after an eternity huddling together in the...
Creation redux
Ted Hughes' retelling of the tales of Ovid is one of the most vibrant pieces of poetry I've enjoyed. I had read Ovid's Metamorphoses in an old...
Podcast review – Elizabeth Goudge’s Little White Horse
Listening time: 13 minutes. One of my top two children's books of all time, I first read Elizabeth Goudge's Little White Horse as a...
Poems for my family 006 – Cavafy
This poem has been in my mental saddlebags for about a quarter of a century. I can't remember how I came across it but after a few readings it...
A beautiful flowing hand
The American chef Julia Child describes how her husband approached letter-writing in an age when trans-Atlantic telephone calls were prohibitively...
A quote to note
Drawing on thousands of sparkling, moving and inspiring quotations amassed during decades of attentive reading. To delight your mind and spirit and improve your presentations beyond belief.
Who needs maps?
Here is a long winded anecdote, no doubt embellished in the re-telling, which you can stash away in your own postprandial story-store. And feel...
Merry Christmas dear kind readers
Dear Kind Readers,WritingRedux wishes you a Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, and in any case a hefty dose of Peace on Earth along with an...
An electric moment
Having a soft spot for foxes, I loved this description of a hair-raising drive careering through the mountain roads of Ithaca in the 1950s, with a...
It will do what it is supposed to do
Listening time: 7 minutes. This marvelous prose-poem comes from a travel book by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who toured a number of...
Metaphorically speaking
More marvelous metaphors on Mondays … Monday, metaphor day.
Unreel writing
There's something of fairy-tale magic in this idea of writing as a thread teased out from the writer's cupboard of experiences, unwinding like a...
Technique as dousing
In discussing the technique of writing, Seamus Heaney conjures a water diviner as a metaphor. At first glance far-fetched, as he follows it...
The masonry of verse
A brick-solid image to convey a sense of Anglo-Saxon verse, implying it is precisely constructed and built for the ages. But then this is a poet...
Sunlight dripping
Durrell's various Greek island books and Miller's Colossus of Maroussi enchanted me with their marvelous descriptions of people, places and the...
Triologisms
Bringing you pithy, evocative imagery in the form of three-legged microcosms of meaning. Updated on Tuesdays … Tuesday, triologism day! You’ll never see this day of the week in the same way again.
Acorn-bearing boughs
This is the season of acorn crunching paths, after the boughs have released them. A couple of times on my near-daily walk, I have filled my pockets...
Moss-eyed rascal
You can't but help like such a maverick, something in the moss-coloured eyes, and the difference between him and the rest of the family making him...
Green-glowing fields
What a glorious image, enhanced by the animals trotting past - aggrieved camels I can envisage, but never thought of donkeys as being...
Thick-pelted richness
Lovely notion, a frog-hopping place, cosy and dense with goodness, not to mention harbouring secrets. See also this meadow's durability. Frogmead,...
Self-renewing meadow
An image of ancient sustainability, a meadow which has renewed itself for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, and with the lovely name of...
Rheumy-eyed earl
Adam Nicolson appears to have grown up among the casual antiquity of aristocratic homes, leaving him with the childhood memory of being stared at...
Words
Sharing words that sparkle, appeal, intrigue or otherwise grab me, including in other languages. And adoring alliteration, words are added on Wednesdays… Wednesday, word day. See you back here then.
Lauzengier
Lauzengier (also 'lauzenger') appears in the songs of French troubadours. An old Occitan word but surely one which it may be timely to pluck from...
Gulch it down
Mervyn Peake uses Rabelaisian vocabulary to describe the gargantuan appetites and appearance of Swelter, the castle cook in his Gormenghast trilogy....
Mummarella
You would know the 'true' octopus if you saw it, wouldn't you? Reading a book about Mediterranean seafood, Luiz learned that according to an...
Ullage of sunflower
Something about this word that you can roll around the mouth like a good swig of wine or cognac, the removal of which would result in its ullage in...
Cragfast
Stuck? In a tight corner? No going forward ... or back? Call yourself Cragfast. A sheep cornered on a crag, to starve in the absence of rescue....
Gummocks
This glorious word being no longer current, I invite you to revive it the next time someone does something daft or useless. Perhaps combine it...
I find it moving that no literary text is utterly original, no literary text is completely unique, that it stems from previous texts, built on quotations and misquotations, on the vocabularies fashioned by others and transformed through imagination and use. Writers must find consolation in the fact that there is no very first story and no last one. Our literature reaches further back than the beginnings of our memory permits us, and further into the future than our imagination allows us to conceive, but that must be the only barrier.
Source: Alberto Manguel, The City of Words, CBC Massey Lecture Series (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2007), p. 139
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