words, words, words

    Here I come again in Robbie's wake, swinging my bell
    & my censer - or whatever it is that acolytes swing.

    I won't presume to intrude in the dialogue between
    himself & Jim - which leaves me, in its biblical erudition,
    far behind. (While continuing to command my limping,
    short of breath, attention.)

    Except.

    To express my drop-jawed astonishment that Fr Rovira
    sees a rich vocabulary as one of the indicators of literary
    mastery. I should have thought it was just as often the mark
    of the essentially ungifted hoping to compensate his inadequacy
    through long night hours tucked up with Increase-Your-Word-Power.

    I realise minimalism is no longer flavour of the year but I still
    feel the commanding writer achieves his condensed power through
    self-imposed restraints - be these the observance of strict
    poetic forms, or the deliberate limitation of his vocabulary to
    the 'plain' words ... or whatever.
    (One of my several complaints about Salinger is his scatter-gun
    use of picturesque, but not precisely apposite, words.)

    'Simple' words have wide - & so, one might think, inexact -
    connotations. We geniuses, though, know how to structure
    the context of their use in such a way as to lend them
    the uniqueness & power denied the ten dollar items.

    Scottie B.

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Received on Tue Aug 5 05:01:52 2003