Reading time: Less than 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a metaphor from Adam Gopnik.
I’m not sure I care enough about the Beatles to want to read a three-volume history about them, (frankly, I’m more interested in Linda Ronstadt’s book Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir.)
But I’m interested enough in the work of Adam Gopnik to read just about anything he writes.
Thus, I uncovered Gopnik’s review of the first-volume Beatles history, Tune In, in a recent issue of the New Yorker. (The article, which also reviews a new biography of Duke Ellington, is “locked” but you can read the abstract without a key.)
Here is the sentence — and metaphor — that captured me:
Week by week, guitar by guitar, fan by fan, Lewisohn manages to fill in blanks that no one knew were empty.
I like the tripartite momentum that builds from the beginning of the sentence, piling weeks on top of guitars, on top of fans. And I admire the way Adam Gopnik is able to visualize the history of the Beatles as a fill-in-the-blanks quiz, that no one even knew existed.
[Photo credit: Omroepvereniging VARA. Cropped. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands license.]