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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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« HERE COMES OED'S FIRST "SEX IN THE CITY" CITATION | Main | NYC EVENT: CUPCAKE READINGS »

December 10, 2004

BIRNBAUM v. GOLDMAN

The mighty Robert Birnbaum is back wiedling his tape recorder, pointing it most recently in the direction of Francisco Goldman, with whom he discusses "the '80s in Central America, Jose Marti's famous poem, La Nina de Guatemala, the Guatemala City Hermoteca, Walter Benjamin, Edward Jones' The Known World, sneezing, the import of Marti, Ruben Dario, Alejo Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Guantanemara, Garcia Marquez, Henry James on the historical novel, Jose Raul Capablanca, Paul Wolfowittz's comb, the Bishop Gerardi case, life in Mexico City, and Goldman's novels."

Be there, or be that most unfortunate other thing.

Posted by TEV at 12:15 AM |

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