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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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September 23, 2005

THE DEAD, TOO, NEED SOMEWHERE TO LIVE

In this week’s Calendar picks from the L.A. Weekly:

The photos in Sacred: New Orleans Funerary Grounds are the last images taken of the city's cemeteries before Hurricane Katrina swept in. Photographer Elizabeth Huston—who was married in one of the graveyards—happened to be in New Orleans, finalizing the shots for her book, just one week before disaster struck. Once the pinnacle of creepy-beautiful Southern Gothic, the moss-covered tombstones will never again be seen in their original pre-deluge incarnation. We mourn the loss of the living. Now we mourn the loss of the dead. Sacred is a memento mori twice over. Huston presents Sacred: New Orleans Funerary Grounds at Dark Delicacies, 4213 W. Burbank Blvd., Burbank; Sat., Sept. 24, 7 p.m. (818) 556-6660

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Lickona

And in Catholic-flavored New Orleans, with its tradition of All Souls' Day, the living spent perhaps more time among the dead than in most places. I almost got mad at that throwaway line about being married in a cemetery (!), and then I remembered.
From Walker Percy's Lancelot:
"It makes a pretty scene today, don't you think? All Souls' Day. A pleasant feast for the dead: the women in the cemetery whitewashing the tombs, trimming the tiny lawns, setting out chrysanthemums, real and plastic, lighting candles, scrubbing the marble lintels. They remind me of Baltimore housewives on their hands and knees washign the white doorsteps of row houses."
And again:
"Look at the street. Even the cemetery, especially the cemetery, looks cheerful. The mums are still fresh and yellow. The tombs spick-and-span, the rain trees bright as new copper pennies. Yesterday young people were singing in the old section. Some of them even sleep in the oven crypts, shove the bones aside and unroll their sleeping bags, a perfect fit. An odd thing about New Orleans: the cemeteries here are much more cheerful than the hotels and the French Quarter. Tell me why that should be, why two thousand dead Creoles should be more alive than two thousand Buick dealers?"

Posted by: Lickona | September 23, 2005 at 08:34 AM

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