A LACK OF LOVE OF LANGUAGE MUST BE THE ROOT CAUSE, I surmise, of its continuing degradation. What else can be so destabilising a factor as to result in the puerile whimsical puns of journalists and a street proliferation of ‘kwik’ contractions with all their implications of speed, of being ‘bite-sized’, of being dumbed-down for [...]
THIS TOPIC IS INSPIRED BY DISCUSSIONS IN THE FORUM about the use of pseudonyms by members of Writers’ Dock. The use of avatars is closely linked to this and it seems logical to examine this in some detail. Descent in Human Form: Avatar is a Sanskrit word rooted in the Hindu concept of ‘descent [...]
EZRA POUND (1885 – 1972), THE AMERICAN POET AND CRITIC MAKES THIS OBSERVATION about the language used by fellow American poet, Walt Whitman: You can learn more of nineteenth century America from Whitman than any other writers . . . The only way to enjoy Whitman thoroughly is to concentrate on his fundamental meaning. If you [...]
GOLDEN LANGUR CONSIDERS WHAT THE TITLE OF A WRITTEN PIECE LENDS TO THE WHOLE. A. L. Kennedy, the judge of 2011 Bridport Short Story and Flash Fiction Prize, commented: A number of writers seemed to have real difficulty finding a title that would help them . . . She went on to say that the [...]
STORY TELLING IS AS HOARY AS THEY COME. But, before the Renaissance, the voice of the storyteller was that of the religious-cultural orthodoxy of the time. In his magnum opus, The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin (1865-1975), a Russian scholar of literature and language, whose works have influenced theories of the narrative in western literature, argued [...]
STEPHEN KING, THE WELL-KNOWN AMERICAN WRITER, says that a writer must write the type of book/poetry that he/she wants to read. In his work, Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold (1822 – 88), the English poet and literary critic, argued that a society needs more than the gratification of the individual, more than scientific knowing and [...]
YOU MAY REMEMBER THAT LAST YEAR I STARTED A SET OF CRABBIT’S TIPS FOR WRITERS. Here’s No. 5. To find the others, go to the list of labels on the right (scroll down) [on my blog] and choose Crabbit’s Tips for Writers. You can also go here to download the pretty pdf and print it out, [...]
IN THE PREFACE TO HIS STUDY OF ELIOT’S ANTI-SEMITISM (1995), Anthony Julius says: ‘. . . anti-Semitism beguiles, not just demagogues . . . but also creative artists of the highest quality. This usually surprises us, because we tend to sentimentalise our great writers and often think better of them than they deserve. Expecting our poets [...]
GOOD WRITERS ARE LIKE HEN’S TEETH. It’s relatively easy to report or relay information on a subject the writer has a background in; it’s much harder to take any subject matter and serve it up in a way that is both entertaining and informative. Good writing – unlike grammar, punctuation and spelling – cannot be [...]
IN ONE OF THE GREATEST WORKS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, the narrator steps back in time and recreates the sights, sounds, smells and landscape of his childhood. Indeed, this work has given rise to the literary concept of ‘Proustian moment’, which is an intense reliving of the past in [...]
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