Muscular, crepuscular

“Is the literary world elitist?” asks the headline on a provocative piece by Laura Miller, a senior writer for Salon.

Miller takes as her text an essay in Metro by Eleanor Catton, a New Zealand novelist and the winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize for her second novel, The Luminaries.

Catton, in her turn, was reacting to a comment on Twitter complaining that the use of the word “crepuscular,” relating to twilight, is self-indulgent and elitist.

Because what is Twitter for, if not to complain about self-indulgence?

My colleague K.I. Press, author of three books of poetry with another one in progress, shared these essays with Creative Communications instructors this week after we indulged in another of those discussions about what language skills we should expect from post-secondary students.

I would love to see a student use “crepuscular” properly in an assignment in journalism, my area.

Vigorous, specific language works well in journalism – even if it sends a reader to a dictionary. Especially if it sends a reader to a dictionary.

The person who dies with the largest vocabulary wins.

Body of writing, bawdy of work

An emaciated body and emancipated, lush bodies: themes of two writers featured at the Winnipeg International Writers Festival Sept. 20 to 27, 2009.

In the scary graphic novel Tyranny Lesley Fairfield gives the skinny on eating disorders, based on her 30-year struggle with anorexia and bulimia. Her sane, quiet bottom-line message to students and other book-lovers at Red River College: "I got well."

On the other hand, the raunchy (if not raucous) George Elliott Clarke covers corporeal excesses. Check out any of his books, particularly his latest, I & I.

Long poem? Verse novel? Whatever. Here's a taste from page 72:

The lovers laugh, get loose, snuggle.

Each sugars each sweetmeat sex.

(Betty's "hot," caramel-licorice wiggling

Summons Malcolm's molten satisfaction.)

All this, and funky footnotes, too.