by beatriceotto | Sep 18, 2017 | metaphors
Having occasionally lain in bed practically hypnotised by the dappling and dancing of light bouncing from water up to ceiling, I liked Hoban’s reference to flashes of mystic writing, like a watery, visual morse. ‘… dancing light reflected from the...
by beatriceotto | Aug 29, 2017 | triologisms
Such jaw-gripping tenacity is used to describe the force that the ending ‘-cious’ adds to words, as in the word ‘tenacious’. Thoreau observes and analyses language as incisively as he observes and analyses nature. ‘… the...
by beatriceotto | Aug 22, 2017 | triologisms
In his acknowledgements, Leigh Fermor thanks a number of people for ‘kindness and haven during restless literary displacements’, and it seems he spent considerable time writing at their homes, or homes in their possession, over the years. One of those...
by beatriceotto | Aug 11, 2017 | writing & writers
A fine parting injunction to a friend you are seeing off at the train station. Julián did as he was told. ‘Write,’ he said. ‘I’ll write to you as soon as I get there,’ answered Julián. ‘No. Not to me. Write books. Not...
by beatriceotto | Jul 21, 2017 | poetry mojo, writing & writers
First, the unusual simile, I never thought of a lamb’s bleat as free or lawless. Then the idea that a true poetic sentence is free and lawless. I found several similar comments in Thoreau, and something about them gave me a sense of liberty. I was once...
by beatriceotto | Jul 21, 2017 | writing & writers
In recent weeks, while typing up scores of quotations from Thoreau on the nature of writing, I started reading some essays by Seamus Heaney. The first one began talking about finding your voice as a writer, finding the words to express yourself, and then I see that I...
by beatriceotto | Jul 7, 2017 | think ink, writing & writers
All laud to Labaume, going to such heroic lengths to write his journal. I will have to introduce this makeshift front-line writing into a story I’m concocting: gunpowder mixed with melted snow in the hollow of your hand, and your raven’s quill cut with the...
by beatriceotto | Mar 28, 2017 | triologisms
A damning description of Victorian writing, contrasted with the delicious sizzle and flavour of ‘fat-bacon language’. ‘After the fat-bacon language of my earlier reading I hated (Sir Walter) Scott’s dry, latinized prose, finding its false...
by beatriceotto | Dec 5, 2016 | metaphors
Such an imaginative construct to describe a jagged script! I had fun looking for an image of a cabbage-looking butterfly flitting around a spiky plant. And in case you aren’t sure what ‘Japhetic’ means, I have copied the wikipedia definition below. Bear in mind that...
