Do you trust your fellow WordPress users to chose the best post on Quiver Quotes? According to the dubitable measuring stick of “number of people who clicked like” the most meritorious of this year’s posts with a total of 60 button-presses is:
The Art of Writing: Quirks and Perks: We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom, says Ray Bradbury. A fitting end-of-year sentiment: do not think of how you are becoming older, but of how you are becoming wiser. Then, if you are so inclined, mine your experience for jewels to be burnished with words. The generations to come may appreciate it.
The runners-up:
The Woman and the Painter: John Banville’s vivid description (ekphrasis) of a woman sitting for a sordid painter captured the eye of my readers. Homer, Shakespeare, Keats and Borges get a mention too. I admire Banville’s style and have written numerous posts about his work, so his appearance on this list is no surprise.
Style: Quirks and Perks: Style is an increment in writing, says E. B. White. Ah, I’m glad he made this list too, for a copy of Strunk & White lies at the foundation of my writing. Even when I forsake pith in favour of flourish, I abjure in order to (I write to) and the fact that (I delete it).
The Unnatural Act: A post on what I termed the metaphorical itch. Nice to have one’s invented “speech figure” make the cut as well. I suspect it’s actually the attractive illustration and the quirky subject of surrealism that helped insinuate the post into the dark favours of my readers. Or could it have been my attempt at grotesque surrealistic prose?
I love all my baby-posts equally but I tend to forget the earlier ones, so as personal favourites I’d probably class any of the ones I wrote in November. If I’m pressed to say which ones, then I enjoyed inventing meld words in Poetry of Hyphens: Elements and imagining flash-fiction in Poetry of Hyphens: Exotic.
Now for a few items off my Quiver Quotes to-do list from the past year. Most readers won’t care, but list connoisseurs are not entirely extinct: a view into someone’s self-set tasks is second only to reading their diary. The brackets contain my current commentary.
- Items related by content or in time and space, but not enough to be listed with periods or commas, require the binding and. The word and is the minimal joining word. [Some sensible drivel about asyndeton. I write the oddest things on my to-do list.]
- Peel up peel in peel down peel on. [No idea what this was about. Poetry?]
- Write a post about reading Proust or books on small screen or perceptions of the medium. Size of letters too, font etc. [This was marked as done—I can attest, as can anyone reading this blog—not done.]
- Write a how-to annotate books post. [Check—wow, a genuine to-do list item, completed.]
- Writing works for me because I’m porous to influences. [How was this ever a task?]
- Get Illuminations by Rimbaud. [Didn’t get, but marked as done.]
- The Sunset Limited (closet drama). [Did get, but didn’t read.]
- Write an end-of-year post: look at the to-do done folder. [Check, aptly self-referential: the Old Year abuts the New, which inevitably becomes the Old.]
This is part of a series of short holiday posts that are based on excerpts and thoughts from my diary. Here is what a “usual” post on Quiver Quotes looks like: Humour: Quirks and Perks.
A Quiver Of Quotes 