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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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« GUEST REVIEW - DEATH OF A MEXICAN AND OTHER POEMS | Main | GUEST REVIEW (AND INTERVIEW): SONS OF THE RAPTURE »

October 02, 2006

MONDAY MARGINALIA

We've got an exciting week planned here at TEV.  As we've mentioned already, we'll be participating in the Online Book Fair tomorrow.  And we've got Jim Ruland here on Monday, Wednesday and Friday focusing on the readers at the next Vermin on the Mount, a line up including Joe Meno and Todd Taylor.  And as if that wasn't enough, the literary links seem to keep piling up:

* Last July, we spent a NY to LA flight wrestling our advance copy of Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map out of GOTEV's hands.  (She won, we won't explain how.)  But we were both engrossed by this non-fiction account of the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, in which science was finally brought to bear on the problem of disease transmission.  In conjunction with the release of the book this month, check out this Ken Burns-esque interview in which Johnson talks about the epidemic and his book.

* Hungarian writer Suto Andras has died.  The International Herald Tribune notes his passing as well. 

* In The Literary Life, Poets & Writers magazine looks at "The Pressure to be Exotic."

These days, not only must the literary purist make posterity believe he did indeed live, but if he wants to find an agent, receive a decent advance, get published by a name house, and endear himself to a marketing and publicity team that will ensure a prime spot on the front table at Barnes & Noble, positioning his book to climb the sales ranks and thus securing a contract for his next book, he needs to make posterity believe—by writing it in his latest memoir—that he lived more dysfunctionally, more tragically, more multiculturally, more exotically than anyone else.

* Susan Salter Reynolds - one of the enduring bright lights of the Los Angeles Times Book Review - contributes her thoughts on the politics of the Nobel Prize to the op-ed page.

Littleprince

* The enduring appeal of The Little Prince.

* TEV favorite Andrei Makine (Dreams of My Russian Summers) is planning to travel to Iran.

* Edna O'Brien is getting her share of attention at the moment, including a profile in the Sunday Herald and an interview with John Freeman.

* Penguin South Africa is on a mission to save ten "local classics from oblivion."  (Thanks, Andie.)

* Maud Newton reviews Ancestor Stones for Newsday and finds it "strong, memorable and original."

* At the risk of outing ourselves as serious usage geeks, we're thrilled that the Chicago Manual of Style is now available online.

Posted by TEV at 12:03 AM in Litlinks |

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