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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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« TEV GIVEAWAY: WIZARD OF THE CROW | Main | DOG DAYS, DARK MATERIALS »

August 10, 2007

FALSE DICHOTOMY, PART II

Writing for the Washington Times, Kelly Jane Torrance eschews the usual print v. bloggers storyline (we also called it a "false dichotomy" when the LA Times came calling) and looks, instead, at how literary bloggers might actually be influencing and/or anticipating print coverage.  It's more along the lines of the "peaceful co-existence" scenario that most bloggers endorse.  You'll find some familiar names, including Ed, Ron and your humble host.

The Inquirer review [of The End of Mr. Y] was written by Mark Sarvas, who runs the influential lit blog the Elegant Variation. He mentions other titles that first hit it big online. " 'Home Land' by Sam Lipsyte was probably the first case of a book really going viral among the blogs, and in an organic way — there was no concerted effort to focus on it," he says. "Blogs were also early enthusiasts for Joshua Ferris' debut novel 'Then We Came to the End,' which subsequently received a front page review in the New York Times Book Review."

Call us the canaries in the coal mines.  As it happens, we'll be participating in a panel at Colunbia University on September 18 about all this very interesting stuff.  And we'll have more to say about Steve Wasserman's admirable and farsighted embrace of web-based book reviews.

Posted by TEV at 11:47 AM in Litlinks |

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