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  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."
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« BIG FUCKIN' SURPRISE | Main | THEN PAM ANDERSON SHOULD DO JUST FINE »

August 03, 2004

UNDER THE GUN

Notes, notes and more notes. Unbelievably, we're doing one more revision on this script (weep for us) but it needs to be wrapped up today, so I'm gonna toss out the links all I-Ching like today and let you pore over them for some deep, hidden meaning. Don't try too hard.

* A Korean literature professor muses on how "literature is transcendent."

* The African-American Literary Awards Show has announced its First Annual Open Book Awards nominees. They're leaving no one out:

The nominees ranged from first time authors such as Erica Simone Turnipseed to celebrities like Al Roker, Patti Labelle, Beyonce and Alicia Keys to celebrated authors such as Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou to the works of deceased authors James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks and Lorraine Hansberry to civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

* All Africa's coverage of Wole Soyinka's 70th birthday continues.

* The second annual Parati International Literary Festival in Brazil is proving to be quite the draw for the literati.

* Open letters are all the rage. Here's one in the Australian to Christopher Hitchens.

* August Wilson - who we confess we've always considered a terrible playwright - has won a Chicago Tribune award.

* Didn't we link to this story yesterday?

* At last, there's a repository worthy of our lofty ideas: The Library of Unwritten Books.

* Don't miss Dale Peck: The Audio Version.

* The Shanghai Book Fair is kicking some serious butt out there.

* Clavell Tower, inspiration of writers from PD James to Thomas Hardy, is about to be moved before it topples into the sea.

* TEV reader Michael Moore (no, not that Michael Moore!) writes in primarily to smack Carlos Fuentes around ("Here's a brief and highly selective highlight reel of postwar history, just off the top of my head: the Korean War; Mao's Great Leap Forward; the Vietnam War; the Cambodian genocide; the invasion of East Timor; famine in Biafra, Ethiopia, and Somalia; civil war in Angola; the regimes of Idi Amin, Alfredo Stroessner, Rios Montt, Augusto Pinochet, and, yes, Saddam Hussein; the entire lifetime of Apartheid (ca. 1948-1994); the Dirty War in Argentina; the civil war in El Salvador; the Contra war; the Iran-Iraq War; the Rwanda genocide, the the 1991-1995 Balkan Wars...that's how many tens of millions dead? And Fuentes thinks the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which at least had the benefit of removing one of the aforementioned scourges, even if a formerly U.S.-sponsored one, is the worst thing that's happened since 1945? The man's out of his mind.") but more importantly to advise us of the opening on Equator Books on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice. We share Michael's conviction that it's always nice to see a new independent put out its shingle, especially in these high-rent areas.

So what's ahead? Well, the project will be completed and turned in; there will be much celebratory drinking, probably to excess; tomorrow will pass in a hungover daze, thus resulting once more in crappy blog quality; and with any luck we'll be dried out, cleaned up and finished up enough by Thursday to become marginally useful once again. Your patience is appreciated.

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Comments

birnbaum

Mark

You are now referring to the final final final
revision?

I'm on my way to check the Open Letter to Sam
Tanenhaus—lot's of fun there— but I couldn't pass by the righteous dither by the not -that -Moore guy.

Sometimes writers and even other people exaggerate to make a point. To both Moore and Fuentes I would keep in mind Chou En Lai's [Chou was the number 2 man in Red China] response when asked what he thought about the French Revolution, "Too soon to tell."

Posted by: birnbaum | August 03, 2004 at 04:17 AM

Michael Robertson Moore

I believe that was Chou En Lai's response to a question about the MEANING of the French Revolution, and he might have had a point. Though let's keep in mind Chou had a lot of blood on his hands and could hardly afford NOT to be a little casual about the comparatively small body count racked up by a piker like Robespierre.

Anyhow, I have a hard time imagining any respectable history book, in fifty, a hundred, or two hundred years' time, rating our invasion of Iraq as a greater catastrophe than Pol Pot's reign. Neither do I see any point to be made by that sort of hysterical exaggeration, except to whip into a frenzy those who are more than frenzied enough.

Michael Not-The Fat-F#@k-From-Flint-and-Hardly-a-Ditherer Moore

Posted by: Michael Robertson Moore | August 03, 2004 at 10:36 AM

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