In perhaps the book’s best essay, “Then and Now,” Mr. Dirda celebrates his book habit as something more than mere acquisition. Returning to the “down-at-heels steeltown” of his Ohio youth, he stays a few nights in his childhood bedroom, where late-night reading gave him his first real sense of a larger world. “As my father used to say: ‘Live fast,’ ” he writes. “In fact, I’ve lived slow, dithered and dallied, taken my own sweet time, and done pretty much what I’ve repeatedly done ever since my mother first taught me to read so long ago: Found a quiet spot and opened a book.” […]
Mr. Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book reviewer for the Washington Post, is an engaging storyteller, but he is not, by his own admission, a flashy one. “If only I had a flair for striking similes and metaphors! Alas, nothing ever reminds me of anything else,” he writes. Newspaper writing, he adds, has strengthened his natural tendency toward plainness. In lieu of vividness, Mr. Dirda gives his readers intimacy: “I like a piece to sound as if it were dashed off in 15 minutes—even when hours might have been spent in contriving just the right degree of airiness and nonchalance.” […]
~ Danny Heitman, Restless Reader, a review of Michael Dirda’s new book titled “Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books.”
Notes:
- Michael Dirda’s New Book Published August, 2015: Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books
- Michael Dirda’s page at the Washington Post and his page at wiki.
- Photo – Journal of a Nobody
[ Smiles ] Quiet spots are so darn hard to find these days and it is always a wonderful idea to have a good book with you in order to pass the time easily.
So true.
I love that last quote of his. Must check out some of his writing, as airiness and nonchalance are two of my favourite things!
Yes, hooked me too.
Here’s more:
Though my heart leaps up when I hear the gorgeous music of 17th-century prose (Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, Jeremy Taylor), such organ-concert grandeur is simply beyond me. If only I had a flair for striking similes and metaphors! Alas, nothing ever reminds me of anything else. Equally elusive are the twists and turns of intricately layered, Ciceronian syntax: I have enough trouble holding a thought in my head for more than a couple of lines, let alone carrying it through serpentine clause after clause. I do sometimes console myself by remembering Isaac Babel’s famous dictum: “There is no iron that can pierce the human heart with such stupefying effect as a period placed at just the right moment.”
Dirda, Michael (2015-08-15). Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books (p. 6). Pegasus.
Maybe he manages similes and metaphors without realising it. I’ve had people read my work and say, “I really love that metaphor”, and I think, was that a metaphor? Well, maybe it was to them, but not to me (on a conscious level, at least)!
And here:
Beauty, I learned, grows out of nouns and verbs, and personal style derives from close attention to diction and sentence rhythm. When Yeats decided that his poems had become too ornamented and flowery, he took to sleeping on a board. Before long, he’d put the Celtic Twilight far behind and was producing such shockingly blunt lines as “Nymphs and satyrs copulate in the foam.”
Dirda, Michael (2015-08-15). Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books (p. 6). Pegasus.
Years ago, somebody said that my writing was like wading for a field of treacle. I guess that at school we’re taught to use lots of adjectives and adverbs, then we have to unlearn all this and start again, if we’re not to bore the pants off people by being too verbose. Writing haiku is a good discipline for shedding extraneous adjectives and banning adverbs altogether.
Yes, Haiku cuts right to the gist of it.
And I promise, this is the end…but couldn’t resist sharing:
A writer’s greatest challenge, though, is tone. I like a piece to sound as if it were dashed off in 15 minutes— even when hours might have been spent in contriving just the right degree of airiness and nonchalance. Not that I make it easy on myself to achieve that lightness of touch, given my almost antiquarian penchant for quoting all sorts of authors. See the previous paragraphs for examples. At all events, let me honor Addison’s injunction: I am neither black nor fair but somewhat in between, my disposition tends toward the ironic and self-deprecatory, and I am married with children (now grown). Other “particulars of the like nature” will emerge over time. Onward!
Dirda, Michael (2015-08-15). Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books (p. 7). Pegasus.
just bought Browsing on Amazon–must have really liked exerpt………….
Me too!
an air of nonchalance – yes, that’s it.
Thank God (or whomever) for readers!
He may have a natural tendency toward plainness, but the guy’s vocabulary is lovely and layered (what he says he can’t do). I love how blind we can be to our own beauty.
Yes, to say he is plain would be the equivalent of saying I’m illiterate.
Reblogged this on hocuspocus13 and commented:
jinxx💓xoxo