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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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October 05, 2004

NEW AND IMPROVED BLOGROLL

OK, we admit we're terrible about keeping the blogroll current. Frankly, it's a miracle that we manage to get anything at all up here but every now and then the collection of new and worthy links reaches critical mass, and we force ourselves to clean and update (although we're still in deep denial and unable/unwilling to remove the mighty TMFTML).

At any rate, literary sites are sprouting like dandelions, and a number of them are excellent and worth adding to your morning roundy-round.

Bitch Novelist: She's already received a warm blogosphere introduction, and we concur with much of her latest post on Old School.

Bookdwarf: Coming at you from an independent bookstore in the Boston area, check out the Dwarf's recent photo shot/drinking party with David Mitchell.

Booksquare: Another L.A. area resident (to whom I should have linked ages ago, sorry!) offers up thoughtful commentary on a variety of literary and publishing issues.

Chekhov's Mistress: Cute kid photos and nice, longer commentary.

Conversational Reading: Quickly becoming a new favorite, another site following the Dan Green model of longer, more thoughful posts over the helter skelter linkage that typifies this place.

h2boro lib blog: How about a major "shame on us" for not linking to this serious site from the Waterboro Public Library long ago.

Leonard Bast: This one's particularly new to us, but we like what we see a lot, especially the recent post on Phillip Roth.

The Millions: Last but certainly not least is C. Max Magee's site. Max used to live here in L.A. and we met at Book Soup but he's since decamped to Chicago. Now that he's settled in he's back and regularly updating this fine and thoughtful blog.

Bookmark 'em. Keep 'em. Check 'em out regularly. We sure will.

Posted by TEV at 12:31 AM |

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Hey, how come I ain't in your thing? G.

Posted by: Gerard Jones | October 05, 2004 at 06:26 AM

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