Word: tilled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...scene. Now he is the bestselling author of a volume of tittle-tattle diaries, the director of a lugubrious new musical about Actress Jean Seberg, and the star of a brouhaha that boasts enough celebrities, sex, money, backstabbing and even cultural significance to fill every London tabloid from now till Boxing Day. Screaming headlines leap to the imagination...
Sooner or later there comes to every writer the two-thousand, three-thousand, five-thousand word lashing that doesn't just sting for the regulation seventy-two hours but rankles all his life. Zuckerman now had his: to reassure in his quotable storehouse till he died, the unkindest review of all, embedded indelibly (and just about as useful) as "Abou Ben Adhem" and "Annabel Lee," the first two poems he'd had to memorize for a high-school English class...
...greatest essays were to be wrenched from the five years he spent there. A Hanging (1931) records both the execution of a Hindu man and the writer's revulsion at the event: "It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide." Shooting an Elephant (1936) portrays "the dirty work of Empire at close quarters." A rampaging elephant in Moulmein...
...sentence that equates them. He wrote: "In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit." The alternative method promises treachery: "When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing...
...bucked and the air was full of sweat and noise and blood and terror. Roger ran around the heap, prodding with his spear whenever pigflesh appeared. Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his knife. Roger found a lodgment for his point and began to push till he was leaning with his whole weight. The spear moved forward inch by inch, and the terrified squealing became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon...