Word: metaphoritis
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...aesthetic load weighing on such a slight situation. But the sweet muse, Natalia, would smile upon a good writer trying to define and dramatize the mystery of creativity. In the end, Tony thinks, "If Natalia was sun and earth, I was gravity." It is a stunning metaphor for a writer's goal: the illusion that he controls, even for a euphoric moment, the attraction of heavenly bodies...
There was a time in the stone age before the Beatles, as Pop Critic Richard Goldstein once put it, when everybody under 20 seemed to be searching for the "perfect wave." Along with hot-rods and sports cars, surfboards had become both means and metaphor for the new, rootless mobility of the American young. In Southern California especially, sunning, surfing, chasing chicks, gobbling Cha-Cha burgers, even watching TV became life values worth celebrating...
...Higgins is a B-grade writer with a weakness for overstretched metaphor: "Her dentures clattered like castanets on crusts of French bread," for example, or "popping back on her feet like a piece of bread from a toaster." He does have a fine ear for dialogue and a relish for tattletales that make Madame entertaining bathtub reading. If someone would do him the favor of stealing his dog-eared thesaurus, he might even make a good gossip columnist. ·Gerald Clarke
...brings Karin to his excavation to show off his prize, a centuries-old madonna, which is being consumed from within by mysterious insects that had lain dormant for 500 years and revived only when the figure was brought up from underground. It is an obvious and not especially felicitous metaphor for Karin herself. When the lovers finally part and Karin desperately pursues David to London, she meets his sister, a cripple suffering from an unnamed muscular paralysis, which she claims to share with her brother. Karin reacts to this as if it were a kind of sign (as indeed...
...Poets Unhoused. The certainties of language, like so many other certainties today, Steiner suggests, have become a privilege of the past. The Tower of Babel is once again an appropriate metaphor: "Increasingly, every act of communication between human beings takes on the shape of an act of translation." Our cultural anti-heroes are "poets unhoused and wanderers across language," contends Steiner, who is a cosmopolite himself, born in Paris of Austrian parents and educated in the United States as well as England...