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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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October 12, 2007

TEV GIVEAWAY: AGAINST THE DAY

AtdHe ain't heavy, he's my Pynchon.  Well, ok.  He is heavy.  Mailing this one off to the winner is going to hit us in the pocketbook (which Mrs. TEV informs us is too east-coast a thing to say), but we are pleased to be able to offer up a copy of the about-to-be-released paperback edition of Against the Day.  (For those of you who missed it, Jim Ruland devoted a week to things Pynchon around here when the hardcover came out.)  Here's the TLS on Against the Day:

What is different in Against the Day is the way absence becomes clearer to us at a structural level. Indeed, one criticism that has already been levelled at the book is that it is impossible to hold on to its many characters. This is partly because of the sheer mass of the narrative, but also because so many of them simply drop out of the plot. These are not Dickensian “moments of uncompensated kindness”, when a character absent for 400 pages is brought back on stage. Pynchon is playing out, on a textual level, the very experience of being obliterated that he is writing about. For this loss is representative of what the novel protests against – loss of life, loss of plot, but, in particular, the loss of the individual in a mass of capitalist greed.

We all know the rules, say it with us:  Drop us an email, subject line "PROFANE FOR PYNCHON."  Include your full mailing address so we know where to aim the catapult.  Since we posted this late, we will take all comers until noon Saturday (PST), at which point the Random Number Generator will speak, and a winner will be chosen.  Previous winners inelgible.  Thanks for playing.

UPDATE: Congratulations to winner James Crossley of Seattle, WA.

Posted by TEV at 09:16 AM in Giveaways |

Comments

Kit Stolz

Isn't it strange that as people in our society have increasingly less time, novels by famous writers (such as Pynchon, Wallace, and Mailer) are getting longer and longer?

I like Pynchon, but who has time to read a 1100-page novel with a plot that can't be followed? Not me.

Posted by: Kit Stolz | October 13, 2007 at 11:16 AM

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