Off on a last minute trip but we've got some good stuff today, so here it comes drive-by style ... more considered thoughts to follow ... The Los Angeles Times looks at the new L.A. Noir anthology (check out Denise Hamilton's events in the sidebar at left) ... Gore Vidal is slated to receive the new PEN/Borders prize later this month ... What is it with us and snarky reviewers? But we do so love William Logan, and this profile looks not just at his criticism but at his poetry ... More on the "new" production of Boris Godunov ... American Icons' remarkably cool Gatsby page (Thanks, Keith) ... We enjoy Annie Dillard on fiction considerably more than Annie Dillard fiction (ibid) ... Ruth Frankin on the "new" Primo Levi for Slate ... We did not know (for the best, we imagine) that a Casino Royale "stage play" (are there other kinds?) had been commissioned ... Don't miss tomorrow's Friday's giveaway - Christopher Buckley's Boomsday.
WORTHY READINGS
- 06/16 - Bloomsday at the Hammer
- 05/21 - Gideon Lewis-Kraus & Tom Bissell
- 05/22 - Cecil Castellucci
- 05/22 - Sherlock Holmes Event at Hammer Museum
- 05/31 - Richard Ford
- 06/03 - Nell Freudenberger
- 06/05 - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
- 06/05 - Steve Almond
- 06/11 - Elizabeth Crane
- 06/20 - Alan Furst
- 06/28 - Dana Spiotta & Janet Fitch
- 07/11 - Literary Death Match
- 07/16 - Joshua Henkin
- 07/25 - Charles Yu
BEST SMALL PRESSES
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."
Other Stuff
- The Elegant Variation | CafePress
Visit the store.
Blogroll Me!- Technorati Profile
« LATBR CHANGES | Main | SO HE GOES »
April 11, 2007
Comments
Verify your Comment
Previewing your Comment
This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.
Your comment could not be posted. Error type:
Your comment has been posted. Post another comment
As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.
Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.
RECOMMENDED
- Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen
This slim volume by the president and founder of the Nexus Institute, a European-based humanist think-tank, stands as the most stirring redoubt against the ascendant forces of know-nothingness that we've come across in a long time. A full-throated, unapologetic defense of the virtues of Western Civ – in which "elite" is not and never should be a dirty word – this inspiring exploration of high art and high ideals is divided into three sections: The first looks at the life of Riemen's great hero Thomas Mann as a model for the examined life. The second imagines a series of conversations from turning points in European intellectual history, populated with the likes of Socrates, Nietzsche and others. The final section, "Be Brave," is nothing less than an exhortation to dig deep, especially in times of risk. The notion of nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever before, and there are worse ways to read the accessible Nobility of Spirit than as a crash refresher in the Great Thinkers, free of academic jargon and cant. As a meditation on what is at stake when the pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside by the pursuit of fleeting material gain, however, Nobility of Spirit might well be the most prescient book we've yet read on what's at stake in the current election cycle and in the developing global situation. Agree or disagree with Riemen's profound, ambitious and high-minded plea, you will be thinking about his words for a long time. It's been ages since a work of non-fiction moved us this way. Read it. Discuss it. Argue about it. - Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
With rave reviews from James Wood, Michiko Kakutani and Dwight Garner, it might not seem like we need to tell you to drop everything and go read Netherland, but we are telling you, and here's why: The way book coverage works these days, everyone talks about the same book for about two or three weeks, and then they move on and the book is more or less forgotten. Whereas a berth here in the Recommended sidebar keeps noteworthy titles in view for a good, long time, which is the sort of sustained attention this marvelous novel deserves. A Gatsby-like meditation on exclusion and otherness, it's an unforgettable New York story in which the post 9/11 lives of Hans, a Dutch banker estranged from his English wife, and Chuck Ramkissoon, a mysterious cricket entrepreneur, intertwine. The New York City of the immigrant margins is unforgettably invoked in gorgeous, precise prose, and the novel's luminous conclusion is a radiant beacon illuminating one of our essential questions, the question of belonging. Our strongest possible recommendation.
- 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
- Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee
Now, on the one hand, you scarcely need us to alert you to the existence of a new J.M. Coetzee novel, or even to have us tell you it's worth reading. But we can tell you - we insist on telling you that Diary of a Bad Year is a triumph, easily Coetzee's most affecting and fully wrought work since Disgrace. Formally inventive, the book intertwines two narratives with the author's own Strong Opinions, a series of seemingly discrete philosophical and political essays. The cumulative effect of this strange trio is deeply moving and thought provoking. It's increasingly rare in this thoroughly post-post-modern age to raise the kind of questions in fiction Coetzee handles so masterfully - right down to what is it, exactly, that we expect (or need) from our novels. It's telling that, for all of his serious pronouncements on subjects ranging from censorship to pedophilia to the use of torture, it's finally a few pages from The Brothers Karamazov that brings him to tears. Moving, wise and - how's this for a surprise - funny and lightly self-mocking, Diary of a Bad Year might well be the book of the year and Coetzee is surely our essential novelist. We haven't stopped thinking about it since we set it down.
- The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt
David Leavitt's magnificent new novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, mathematical autodidact and prodigy who had been working as a clerk in Madras, and who would turn out to be one of the great mathematical minds of the century. Ramanujan reluctantly joined Hardy in England - a move that would ultimately prove to his detriment - and the men set to work on proving the Riemann Hypothesis, one of mathematics' great unsolved problems. The Indian Clerk, an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, encompasses a World War, and boasts a cast of characters that includes Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lytton Strachey. Leavitt renders the complex mathematics in a manner that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, and writes with crystalline elegance. The metaphor of the prime number – divisible only by one and itself – is beautifully apt for this tale of these two isolated geniuses. Leavitt's control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times – and yet despite its scope, he keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. The Indian Clerk might be set in the past but it doesn't resemble most so-called "historical fiction." Rather, it's an ageless meditation on the quests for knowledge and for the self – and how frequently the two are intertwined – that is, finally, as timeless as the music of the primes. (View our full week of coverage here.)
- Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
Joshua Ferris' warm and funny debut novel is an antidote to the sneering likes of The Office and Max Barry's Company. Treating his characters with both affection and respect, Ferris takes us into a Chicago ad agency at the onset of the dot-bomb. Careers are in jeopardy, nerves are frayed and petty turf wars are fought. But there are bigger stakes in the balance, and Ferris' weirdly indeterminate point of view that's mostly first person plural, underscores the shared humanity of everyone who has ever had to sit behind a desk. It's a luminous, affecting debut and you can read the first chapter right here.
- Christine Falls by Benjamin Black
Coming to these shores at last, John Banville's thriller, written under the nom de plume Benjamin Black, has drawn rave reviews across the pond since it first appeared last October. Those who feared Banville might turn in an overly literary effort needn't worry. Influenced by Simenon's romans durs (hard stories), Banville unspools a dark mystery set in 1950s Dublin concerning itself with, among other things, the church's trade in orphans. At the heart of the book is the coroner Quirke, a Banvillean creation on par with Alex Cleave and Freddie Montgomery. Dublin is rendered with a damp, creaky specificity – you can almost taste the whisky.
- The Paris Review Interviews, I by The Paris Review and Philip Gourevitch
Scanning our Recommended selections, one might conclude we're addicted to interviews, and one would be correct. If author interviews are like crack to us, then the Paris Review author interviews must surely be the gold standard of crack (a comparison Plimpton might not have embraced). The newly issued The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I (Picador) rolls out the heavy hitters. Who can possibly turn away from the likes of Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Dorothy Parker, Robert Gottlieb and others? The interviews are formal and thoughtful but never dry and can replace any dozen "how-to" books on writing. What can be more comforting than hearing Bellow, answering a question on preparations and conception, admit "Well, I don't know exactly how it's done.” The best part of this collection? The "Volume I" in the title, with its promise of more volumes to come.
- Above Paris
See, we’re not all literary fiction here. Princeton Architectural Press’s absolutely breathtaking Above Paris is very much the kind of thing we’re eager to bring to your attention. Between 1950 and 1972, pilot and photographer Roger Henrard recorded more than 350 images of Paris from the seat of a single-engine Piper cub, documenting Paris from its outskirts to its center. His photographs show not only Paris's famous landmarks - they also give you a sense of the way the city is interconnected: the tight-knit medieval districts as well as the expansive geometry of the grand boulevards. Maps at the beginning of each chapter and fine captions and essays by Jean-Louis Cohen help you navigate the City of Light as never before. Just glorious.
- The Dead Fish Museum: Stories by Charles D'Ambrosio
The best short story collection we've read since ... well, certainly since we've started this blog. And we might even say "ever" if Dubliners didn't cast such a long shadow. The short story is not our preferred form but D'Ambrosio's eight brilliant stories are almost enough to convert us. Defy the conventional wisdom that short story collections don't sell and treat yourself to this marvel. (We're especially partial, naturally, to "Screenwriter".)
- The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier *Now in Paperback*
What would you do if the woman who’d left you high and dry ten years ago called out of the blue to invite you to a party without any further explanation? If you’re French, you’d probably spend a lot of time pondering the Deeper Significance Of It All, which is exactly what Grégoire Bouillier does for the 120 hilarious pages of The Mystery Guest. This slim, witty memoir follows Bouillier through the party from hell, and is a case study in Gallic self-abasement. Before it’s all done, you’ll set fire to any turtleneck hanging in your closet and think twice before buying an expensive Bordeaux as a gift. But fear not – just when it seems that all is, indeed, random and pointless and there is no Deeper Significance, salvation arrives in the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf, and the tale ends on a note of unforced optimism. Parfait.
- Ticknor by Sheila Heti
When George Ticknor's Life of William Hickling Prescott was published in 1864, it received rapturous notices, and reviewers were quick to point out that the long-standing friendship between Prescott and Ticknor made the latter an ideal Boswell. Sheila Heti has pulled this obscure leaf from the literary archives and fashioned a mordantly funny anti-history; a pungent and hilarious study of bitterness and promise unfulfilled. As a fretful Ticknor navigates his way through the rain-soaked streets of Boston to Prescott's house ("But I am not a late man. I hate to be late."), he recalls his decidedly one-sided lifelong friendship with his great subject. Unlike the real-life Ticknor, this one is an embittered also-ran, full of plans and intentions never realized, always alive to the fashionable whispers behind his back. Heti seamlessly inhabits Ticknor's fussy 19th-century diction with a feat of virtuoso ventriloquism that puts one in mind of The Remains of the Day. Heti's Ticknor would be insufferable if he weren't so funny, and in the end, the black humor brings a leavening poignancy to this brief tale. But don't let the size fool you — this 109-page first novel is small but scarcely slight; it is as dense and textured as a truffle.
- The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers by Vendela Vida
No, your eyes aren't deceiving you and yes, we are recommending a Believer product. Twenty-three interviews (a third presented for the first time) pairing the likes of Zadie Smith with Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem with Paul Auster, Edward P. Jones and ZZ Packer, and Adam Thirwell with Tom Stoppard make this collection a must-read. Lifted out of the context of some of the magazine's worst twee excesses, the interviews stand admirably on their own as largely thoughtful dialogues on craft. A handful of interviewers seem more interested in themselves than in their subjects but in the main this collection will prove irresistible to writers of any stripe - struggling or established - and to readers seeking a window into the creative process.
- The Sea by John Banville
John Banville's latest novel returns him to the Booker Prize shortlist for the first time since 1989's The Book of Evidence. In The Sea, we find Banville in transition, moving from the icy, restrained narrators of The Untouchable, Eclipse and Shroud toward warmer climes. Max Morden has returned to the vacation spot of his youth as he grieves the death of his wife. Remembering his first, fatal love, Morden works to reconcile himself to his loss. Banville's trademark linguistic virtuosity is everpresent but some of the chilly control is relinquished and Max mourns and rages in ways that mark a new direction for Banville - and there's at least one great twist which you'll never see coming. Given the politicized nature of the British literary scene, Banville's shot at the prize might be hobbled by his controversial McEwan review but we're rooting for our longtime favorite to go all the way at last. UPDATE: Our man won!
- Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger
We've been fans of Booker Prize winner John Berger for ages, and we're delighted to have received an early copy of his latest work, Here is Where We Meet. In this lovely, elliptical, melancholy "fictional memoir," Berger traverses European cities from Libson to Geneva to Islington, conversing with shades from his past – He encounters his dead mother on a Lisbon tram, a beloved mentor in a Krakow market. Along the way, we're treated to marvelous and occasionally heart-rending glimpses of an extraordinary life, a lyrical elegy to the 20th century from a man who - in his eighth decade - remains committed to his political beliefs and almost childlike in his openness to people, places and experiences. There's no conventional narrative here, and those seeking plot are advised to look elsewhere. But Here is Where We Meet offers a wise, moving and poetic look at the life of an artist traversing the European century from a novelist whose talent remains undimmed in his twilight years.
- Home Land by Sam Lipsyte
In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.
THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism
- A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines & The Man Who Knew Too Much (Philadelphia Inquirer)
- Athena (Boldtype)
- Dictation: A Quartet (Barnes and Noble Review)
- Foreskin's Lament (Philadelphia Inquirer)
- Here Is Where We Meet (Boldtype)
- His Illegal Self (Dallas Morning News)
- Hunk City (New York Times Book Review)
- I Love You, Beth Cooper (New York Times Book Review)
- In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars (Truthdig)
- In the Kitchen (Barnes & Noble Review)
- Indignation (Barnes and Noble Review)
- Out of My Skin (Bookforum)
- Personal Days (New York Times Book Review)
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (The Modern Word)
- The End of Mr. Y (Philadelphia Inquirer)
- The God of War (Barnes and Noble Review)
- The Northern Clemency (Barnes & Noble Review)
- The Raw Shark Texts (Philadelphia Inquirer)
- Ticknor (Philadelphia Inquirer)
- Tom Stoppard's Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon (Threepenny Review)
- Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles (Los Angeles Review)
SECOND LOOK
- 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."
Categories
- 2666 Week
- BEA
- City of Angels
- Compare & Contrast
- Connections
- Critics & Criticism
- Events
- Fathers & Sons
- Galley of the Week
- Giveaways
- Guest Bloggers
- Harry, Revised
- Hors catégorie
- Housekeeping
- Indian Clerk Week
- Indies Under Siege
- Inside the Classroom
- Interviews
- LAT Festival of Books
- LATBR Thumbnails
- Litblog Co-op
- Literary Letters
- Litlinks
- Local Heroes
- Marginalia
- MOTEV
- n+1 v. Believer
- Nota Bene
- Obit
- Obsessions
- On Writing
- Paris Review Week
- PEN World Voices
- Personal
- Poets & Poetry
- Prizes, Prizes and More Prizes
- Pynchon Week
- Readings
- Reviews
- Second Look
- The Close Read
- The Conversation
- The John Banville Interview
- The Joseph O'Neill Interview
- The MFA Debate
- The n+1 Letters
- The Summer of Roth
- The Wonderful World of Publishing
- Tour de France
- Tournament of Books
- Trains of Thought
- Virtual Book Tour
- We Get Letters
- Weekend Read
- Words Fail
- World Beat
- Worthy Titles
- Writers Under Siege
- Writers' Letters
LITERARY LOS ANGELES
- Beyond Baroque
- Black Clock
- Book Soup - "Bookseller to the Great & Infamous"
- CaliforniaAuthors.com/CaliforniaWriters.com ... book news . author and reader resources
- DIESEL, A Bookstore
- KCRW Arts & Culture: Bookworm
- LALitscape.com - A Literary Calendar of Events
- Los Angeles Public Library
- Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
- Redhen Press
- Sam Johnson's Book Shop
- Santa Monica Review
- Skylight Books
- Spoken Interludes - A Salon for Stories
- swink magazine
- The Mountain - Events Calendar
Home of the famed Vermin on the Mount reading series! - the writers junction - home
Where I write. - Tongue and Groove Reading Series
- UCLA Live Calendar - READINGS
- Village Books, Pacific Palisades
My local bookstore. - Vroman's Bookstore
- W O R D T H E A T R E
- Writers Bloc / Los Angeles
Teleplay. Screenplay. If it were, say, "Equus" or maybe even "Peter Pan", the distinction probably wouldn't be necessary. But Fleming's Bond novels have all been filmed -- and there's this latest, rather popular "Casino Royale" just recently out on DVD -- thus the prefixed adjective.
Posted by: janitorman | April 11, 2007 at 03:45 AM
Radio play. Pinter, for example, has written plays specifically for radio.
Posted by: Suzy | April 11, 2007 at 03:46 AM
All of which occured ... but when one merely says "play" do we really think of any other kind of play? Still feels redundant.
Posted by: TEV | April 11, 2007 at 05:12 AM
Yes, you're right, the default form is the stage play and it's a little superfluous.
Posted by: Suzy | April 11, 2007 at 07:38 AM
With "Casino Royale" I bet there still could be some confusion down there somewhere in the recesses of humanity, because it's just so *movie*, but generally you write "stage play" for "play" when you're trying to create a particular sort of faux fin-de-siècle highbrowiness -- for which the use of the word "faux" and the phrase "fin de siècle"* are themselves pretty useful, but not "highbrowiness" 'cause I made that up.
"Stage play" is, what there, one of them oxycodones or what you call 'em.
*You ever read "The Orientalist"? Not bad, really. But he used "fin de siècle" I mean like a hundred times. No joke. I was going to go through and count them but I decided that to waste one's precious moments enumerating the specific incidences of a particular phrase in a work of contemporary prose would be oh so fin de siècle.
Posted by: janitorman | April 11, 2007 at 08:29 AM
What?
Posted by: Jack Pendarvis | April 11, 2007 at 09:20 AM
"What?"
My point, exactly.
Posted by: janitorman | April 11, 2007 at 11:13 AM
Ah!
Posted by: Jack Pendarvis | April 11, 2007 at 11:51 AM
RE: the Logan profile:
"But this is only, guardedly, true."
"Looking back on this poetry at its best, we have the freshest of new classics and the most distinguished of experimental."
"To read Logan’s latest poetry is to remember that, in whatever guise, fake art is detectable; that half-educated art is incomplete; that clever, dilettantish, perfunctory work is not good enough; and that to ignore the example of poets prior to1900 such as Jonson, Pope, or Wordsworth (selected passages from the Prelude), is albeit fatal, and until poets and readers learn to school themselves on this as well as more recent poetry, the quality of American poetry, for lacking the maturity of classicism, will continue to find itself in decline."
...if the "Literary Editor" is interested in a little editing, I have a few suggestions...
Posted by: Steven Augustine | April 11, 2007 at 03:29 PM
Having said that (bashing Logan's basher), these sampled lines of Logan's *are* fairly "apucious" (to borrow a neologism from a character in a Woody Allen movie):
"Mostly you drove the gravel driveway,/where the woppa-woppa of a woodpecker,/ beating its head against the clapboard/ like a pile driver, echoed like a magnum at close quarters."
"Common as fingerprints, our lives/burn like decaying atoms/ across the dark cloud of the negative."
"And there on the mantel your wedding photo,/two people fresh and immortal as Saran Wrap!"
That's pretty ham-handed, image-incontinent versifying. Again, "apucious" is the best word for the job here.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | April 11, 2007 at 03:43 PM
There is also Anal Play, a lot of which I've read about in Daniel Craig fan fiction. Very hot. Totally in canon. I recommend all of you read it.
Posted by: tod goldberg | April 11, 2007 at 06:04 PM
Speaking of which...when many of you wake up on Thursday, it will be to find out that the wonderful Kurt Vonnegut has died. And even Gore Vidal has had something nice to say about him for the occasion. And so it...
Posted by: Steven Augustine | April 12, 2007 at 12:19 AM
Tod you are too funny, but stop talking about fanfic or you'll set your brother off again.
Janitorman I actually have read The Orientalist, I love bios about strange folk who disappear into other cultures, like Richard Burton and all those Victorian women world travelers and eccentrics like the Germanically named Brit Wilfred Thesiger who wrote the excellent "Marsh Arabs" and "Arabian Sands."
The Orientalist led me of course to Ali and Nino which I loved way more. Brilliant, sad, cosmopolitan, humane, a look at what was once a truly multicultural place before the word was invented. Baku has sadly dissolved into a backwater and remote outpost again. A little gem of a novel.
Posted by: denise hamilton | April 12, 2007 at 05:54 AM
Denise, for some reason The Orientalist has yet to lead me to Ali and Nino, though that probably has more to do with the Tower of Babel of reading backed up on my desk and night table -- I'm especially avoiding the one in which Dawkins proves to me for good and all there is no God -- than it does the merits of The Orientalist. I truly enjoyed that biography, and was only having a bit of fun with that author's particular stuck-on phrase. I have to say -- oddly, though, I've lost the specific details -- my favorite characterization in the bio was that of the old countess or duchess or whomever living in an old castle in Romania or Austria or wherever who in the middle of the night wrote rock operas.
Posted by: janitorman | April 12, 2007 at 09:44 AM
Oh, Denise, Lee's in Germany right now, so someone has to handle the mockery and such while he's gone.
Posted by: tod goldberg | April 12, 2007 at 05:27 PM