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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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« R.I.P., MADELEINE L'ENGLE | Main | COMPARE AND CONTRAST: An Occasional Series »

September 10, 2007

MONDAY MARGINALIA

* Everyone appears excited about Mister Pip's Booker chances.

* Rare book dealer Madeleine Stern has died.

Stern was doing research on Alcott for a biography she planned to write when she discovered hints that the author of wholesome fiction also wrote stories of "blood and thunder," as Alcott referred to them. She filled them with "pirates, wolves, bears and distressed damsels" and gave them titles like "The Maniac Bride," Alcott confided in a letter of 1862.

* Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is interviewed in the Kansas City Star.

* Naipaul on Walcott.

* Bitter Author Alert!  Bitter Author Alert!

* Bitter Country Alert!  Bitter Country Alert!

* Writing for the Telegraph, Andrew O'Hagan shares some "highs and lows" of his festival-going life.

I once agreed to speak at a festival in Norfolk and then felt sure I was going to be abducted by the pair of sinister men who came to meet me at the railway station.

I spoke at another one where a kind old lady asked me how my baby was and whether I could tell her where we bought the green cardigan she was sporting in a recent newspaper photograph.

In Ireland, many moons ago, I went to a writers' festival that involved staying up for two days singing songs and falling asleep between the verses. In Sydney, a woman asked me if I'd marry her daughter.

* Mark Z. Danielewski is interviewed at Metromix Los Angeles.

You’ve spoken about the “wonderful analogue qualities of paper, especially paper that is bound together in book form.”
Definitely. A book, I maintain, is still the most efficacious way of communicating and translating information. There’s an enormous amount of information available from a book. Images provide a certain type of information, but it tends to be just static information. You can see what Iraq looks like to no end in sight, but when you’re reading a book on the Iraq war, you’re getting a far denser amount of information.

* The lost novel of Walt Whitman continues to get review attention, to the chagrin of Bitter Authors the world over.  The consensus?  Awful but instructive.

* And, finally, not a literary link but if you don't yet know the miraculous and moving story of Saul Raisin, a 24-year-old cyclist who returned to competition from a brain injury and a coma, check out this brief CNN report.  (Saul's story is recounted in Tour de Life, which he co-wrote with Dave Shields, our occasional Tour de France guest blogger.)

it

Posted by TEV at 12:01 AM in Marginalia |

Comments

Dude, at least 75% of the "bitter author alert" blog post from Peter Sacks wasn't anywhere near bitter.

Of course, I probably wouldn't have read it if you'd posted a link saying "Peter Sacks bemoans the current state of book publishing!"

Posted by: Antoine Wilson | September 10, 2007 at 11:22 AM

Perhaps we just have different "bitter" thresholds - a sampling of his follows. (And that doesn't include simultaneously attacking Amazon whilst praying for an Amazon ranking bump.)

"I am drug down by the sensation that I'm beating my head against the Great Wall of American popular culture, which seems absolutely impervious to books about serious subjects."

"Yes, I confess, I'm one of those. I am a writer of "serious" non-fiction. Worse, I labor in the trenches of the "midlist," which is book-talk for relatively unknown authors who toil for modest advances and modest sales, who write books that, maybe, ten thousand people on Planet Earth will read in a good year."

"I write books basically for free. In fact, when you consider that pound of flesh I lose each time I produce a well researched, engagingly readable 350 page book, giving my heart and soul to something I believe deeply in, I am in essence paying for the privilege of giving the world that book."

"But I am troubled (actually, I'm rather pissed about it) that the inflammatory garbage being written these days can pass for a "book." Such "books" have no detectable ideas or thoughts, and yet these so-called books seem to be what many readers want."

"I have done justice to the notion that some readers really do care, and are willing to open their eyes wide to reality rather than be put to sleep by the Huxleyan drug of American Idol and Paris Hilton."

"Oh, by the way. I use big words sometimes and what some might call obscure literary references. I occasionally write in complex sentences, too. Maybe that's part of my problem."

"We are all bloggers who produce "content," and content is now a commodity. You don't need much talent to produce a commodity. You don't need to be particularly creative or to have an original idea. When you produce content, you feed a machine, which chews upon your commodified words for a few fleeting moments until it spits them out into the void of digital hyperspace."

Posted by: TEV | September 10, 2007 at 11:30 AM

Most of what Sacks says is more or less true, but the tone also strikes me as being on the bitter side. And the first sentence made me grumpy: "Finishing a new book and see it go out into the world should be a time of great relief and excitement for me as an author." I assume he means either "Finishing a new book and seeing it go ..." or "To finish a new book and see it go ..."

Posted by: Karen | September 10, 2007 at 01:27 PM

Okay, okay. 65%. Ha ha. I guess I was swayed by the straightforward honesty at the outset, before it devolved.

This passage definitely warrants the lit-world equivalent of a tin foil hat:

"Oh, by the way. I use big words sometimes and what some might call obscure literary references. I occasionally write in complex sentences, too. Maybe that's part of my problem."

But this one (which now looks a wee bit bitterer to me) on first read seemed rather realistic, clear-eyed:

"I write books basically for free. In fact, when you consider that pound of flesh I lose each time I produce a well researched, engagingly readable 350 page book, giving my heart and soul to something I believe deeply in, I am in essence paying for the privilege of giving the world that book."

Posted by: Antoine Wilson | September 11, 2007 at 11:31 AM

"Awful but instructive." What a fine turn of phrase, Mark. Can you blurb that for my first novel?

Posted by: Pete | September 12, 2007 at 11:29 AM

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