Word: brenan
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THOUGHTS IN A DRY SEASON by Gerald Brenan Cambridge University Press 177 pages...
...only thing wrong with this book of delights is its title, taken from T.S. Eliot's Gerontion: "Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season." Despite the calendar, which says he is 84, Gerald Brenan has a luminous mind and an ageless talent. His collage of quotes, aphorisms and observations, in the style of Cyril Connolly's short masterpiece, The Unquiet Grave, deserves a permanent place on the night table. Opened at random, it will provide a refreshment, and occasionally a shock, on nearly every page. Brenan can sometimes be wrongheaded, but he is never dull...
Though he has lived in and written about Spain for nearly 60 years, Brenan was an active member of the Bloomsbury group, and he is at his most pungent when he talks of writers and writing. Of modern verse he complains, "Sometimes I feel that there is a faraway country where much of the English poetry that is printed today was originally written. Our poets, without knowing the language well, translate it into that universal idiom known as translatese. Hence its lack of poetic rhythm, its inability to leave the ground. And when our poets do know how to write...
...that word tamer. "Every writer and artist wonders what in the world people of other professions can find to live for. This is the great advantage they possess, which more than makes up for the little they usually earn." The words may jump and snarl, snap and bite when Brenan sits down at his own desk. But when they march onto his page, they almost always perform marvelous and original tricks. - Gerald Clarke
...letter to a struggling young writer, Gerald Brenan, Virginia Woolf dropped her entertaining-letter-writer mask to confess: "I am doubtful whether people, the best disposed toward each other, are capable of more than an intermittent signal as they forge past...