The Elegant Variation: PAGING JOHN FREEMAN

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June 26, 2006

PAGING JOHN FREEMAN

By the way, we never responded to John Freeman's foolish blog post about bloggers and money and conflicts of interest because, honestly, it seemed like one of those wrong-headed ideas best left to sink under its own weight. But had we mustered up the interest in responding, we probably would have said something along these lines: By Freeman's reasoning, his own reviews (at least, any positive ones) can similarily be dismissed, given the acceptance of his host publications of advertising dollars from the publishers of said books. Oh, he tries to preempt that line of debate:

It's one thing to accept advertising money: that's what has kept papers afloat for years. It's quite another to make a commission off the very object you are purporting to criticize

It's a nice little tautology but doesn't really go anywhere. Freeman never really explains why sustaining a newspaper should be any different than sustaining a blog. And why shouldn't we assume there's a possibility that reviewers might be subtly pressured to review a book one way or another? Editors can be notorious for watering down - or heating up - negative reviews. And finally, it's arguably considerably more meretricious to take adverstising greenbacks from anyone who can pay your page rates, versus being selective about who you choose to promote. Basically, John wants us to take his word for his purity but doesn't accept that bloggers might, in fact, make decisions about their titles before slapping on an Amazon link. (And in case you're wondering, we don't use any partner programs here, mainly because we're too lazy to manage the small amounts of money they might generate; but we don't look askance at those who do.)

C'mon, John. If you want to pick a fight with bloggers, there are dozens of legitimate fronts you can attack. But Amazon pennies? You're normally an acute critic, but for that one, you win the TEV Out Of Touch Award for the week. Let us know where to send your prize, a copy of John Updike's Terrorist ...

Posted at 12:25 AM in The Wonderful World of Publishing | Permalink

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Book (series) suggestion
'Young Adult Mystery Series'
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Posted by: Bob Erickson | June 06, 2008 at 08:30 AM

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MY NOVEL

HARRY, REVISED - Get all the details here.

TOUR DATES

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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."

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Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick

"History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages which separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent. Read the entire review here
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*Now in Paperback*

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Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger

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Reviews & Criticism

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The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
The Rider by Tim Krabbe

Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

June 26, 2006

PAGING JOHN FREEMAN

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MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

June 26, 2006

PAGING JOHN FREEMAN

Comments

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

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MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism