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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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« L.A. EVENT - A PUBLIC SPACE | Main | TEV GIVEAWAY: GOTZ AND MEYER »

October 16, 2006

MONDAY MARGINALIA

* From its humble beginnings, The Bat Segundo Show has turned into one of the most formidable respositories of writer interviews on the web.  The most recent addition in T.C. Boyle (Part II).

* Will Maud pack her bags and head to Missouri for the Mark Twain/William Faulkner conference?

* A police investigation into 10 years of New Zealand book thefts has wrapped up.

* More deserving attention to E.L. Doctorow's Creationists.

When it comes to Edgar Allan Poe, he begins by calling him "that strange genius of a hack writer" whose "life was an unremitting disaster." For Doctorow, Poe isn't much of a stylist. His poetry is mere novelty and his great contribution to the short story is the unmodulated voice: he begins high and ends high. And yet Poe is also in some strange way capable of embodying the new American consciousness ("the metaphysical disquiet that comes with a secular democracy"). He is a prophet who lays bare the nation's darkest nightmares.

* There's plenty of Orhan Pamuk coverage everywhere you go.  We note this Q&A with Time International in which we learn that, like John Banville, he wanted to be a painter.

What made you want to be a writer? Originally I wanted to be a painter. I am the sort of person who cannot work in an office with others, who cannot give or take orders from others. I have to be in a room, alone, and be fanciful and dreamlike. So when I switched from painting to writing, it was a major change, of course, but in lifestyle it wasn't a change. I was still alone in a room. And years ago, when I was thinking if I'm not going to work with painting now, then I want to write [it was] because at that time, I was reading those good, thick books like "The Possessed," "The Brothers Karamazov," "Buddenbrooks," "Anna Karenina." These were books that left their mark on my spirit. For me the great authors of fiction are Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mann, Proust and Nabokov.

* Don't overlook the Giller prize amid its more ballyhooed brethren this week.

* And speaking of ballyhooed brethern, here's a tale to bring a bit of hope into the otherwise gray and dreary lot of the average struggling scrivener - Kiran Desai reports that "no one wanted" her Booker-prize winning novel The Inheritance of Loss at first. 

In a frank admission, winner of Man Booker prize this year, India-born Kiran Desai says initially "no one wanted" her book, which she finished after toiling for nearly eight years.

"No one wanted it. No one cared," says the 35-year-old author, the youngest person to win the prestigious award for her book The 'Inheritance of Loss'.

* Seamus Heaney is recovering from a stroke.

* Readers of un certain age will remember a time before CheerleadingVixens.com when, to educate oneself in carnal matters, one turned to the juicy bits of literature.

Sometimes an amazing thing happened: you’d find the dirty bit, but it was so interestingly and compellingly written that you’d flick back to page one, and start reading the book properly. This is how I first came across Philip Roth: the dirty bits in Portnoy’s Complaint were rewardingly filthy, but also so engaging and funny that even my feeble teenage one-track mind was impressed, and went back to the beginning.

And of course one of the marvellous things about finding out about sex through books was that it instilled a love of reading — whether the books in question were potboilers, collections of Victorian erotica by “Anonymous”, or “proper books” we’d found lurking on our parents’ bookshelves, like those of John Updike.

* Finally, many TEV readers will recall the London Review of Books' essay on the Israel lobby, which launched dozens of letters, op-ed pieces, and responses.  A recent panel discussion hosted by LRB, which included Shlomo Ben-Ami, Martin Indyk, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, John Mearsheimer and Dennis (authors of the essay), is now available via video for those who missed it.

Posted by TEV at 12:01 AM in Litlinks |

Comments

You know me too well!

Posted by: Maud | October 16, 2006 at 10:27 AM

I've always been on the fence with Poe, but Doctorow comes close on this one.

Regardless I wind up reading Murders in the Rue Morgue every few months.

Posted by: Johnson Bronson | October 16, 2006 at 01:12 PM

I hate to be the one to point this out, but www.cheerleadingvixens.com is not already registered -- so if anyone wants to start a site there for high literary discussion, go for it. The irony would be rather fabulous.

Posted by: tim haynes | October 16, 2006 at 03:04 PM

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