The Elegant Variation: WE'LL TELL YOU EXACTLY WHAT'S BLOWING IN THE WIND

TEV DEFINED

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."

January 24, 2005

WE'LL TELL YOU EXACTLY WHAT'S BLOWING IN THE WIND

It's been a staggeringly eventful weekend in the City of Angels. In addition to our ongoing quest for new digs (we're getting close, thanks to all you well wishers), we also got to spend some time with Kevin Smokler, a passionate advocate of the marriage of technology and books who is the brains behind the Virtual Book Tour. And we attended a get-together at the Standard for Erik Barmack whose first novel The Virgin is hitting stores this week, and who will be an upcoming 3MI victim.

In the meantime, everyone's been leading with the fact of Dylan's National Book Critics Circle Prize, but we're much more interested in the fiction nominees,Philip Roth, Edwidge Danticat, Marilynne Robinson, Alan Hollinghurst and David Mitchell (always a bridesmaid, eh David?). Hey NBA types, are you paying attention? That's a worthy list of nominees ...

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Comments

I am surprised you didn't mention James Wood's nomination in the criticism category.

That's all.

Posted by: birnbaum | January 24, 2005 at 12:40 AM

What Birnbaum said. You going senile on us with your passions, Mark?

Posted by: Ed | January 24, 2005 at 07:34 AM

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January 24, 2005