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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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« IN WHICH OUR ALREADY PRECARIOUS SCHEDULE FALLS INTO TOTAL DISARRAY | Main | NEW SUBTROPICS WEBSITE »

October 30, 2007

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

* Regular TEV readers know how much we admire Michael Gorra's essays and criticism.  Do check out his latest up at The Smart Set: In Praise of the Town Library.

When I visit a library, I spend part of my time examining the building itself. So I see that in Conway its façade doubles as a Civil War monument, with the names of the town’s dead cut into the wall — Ebenezer Blood, Alonzo O. Sikes. I look at the posters on the bulletin boards — a poetry reading, or instructions on coexisting with the local black bears — and I listen to the buzz of local gossip. Not everybody comes to the library for books, and most of these places seem to fill so many social functions that Mark DeMaranville, the Cummington librarian, says he sometimes feels “like the town bartender here.” But I spend most of my time trawling through the stacks. An early edition of William Dean Howells’ Venetian Hours, two volumes, checked out twice in the last century. Kazuo Ishiguro. Louisa May Alcott, a couple of copies of the new Harry Potter — the children’s sections are usually the most up-to-date. Britannica. At times there are local specialties. Cummington has a selection of literary quarterlies that DeMaranville tells me were donated by the poet Richard Wilbur, who lives just up from the Bryant Homestead.

Elsewhere in the same issue, J.M. Tyree responds to Stephen King on the short story:  Here's to the Death of the "Death of" Article.

* We are completely addicted to The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.  ("Via" Black Market Kidneys.)  We also enjoy Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie.

* Agatha Christie is set to get the graphic novel treatment in the UK.

* Former TEV guest blogger M. Allen Cunningham discusses his novel Lost Son as part of KQED's Writers' Block series.

Lost Son is the vivid, haunting story of poet Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the most uniquely sensitive artists of the modern age. From Rilke's troubled beginnings -- reared as a girl until age six, then sent to military school for five miserable years -- through his later experiences in the midst of World War I, Lost Son explores how this immensely vulnerable personality struggled to make his way in the modern world, and achieved poetic mastery amidst great personal crises.

* What he said:  Hari Kunzru tells it like it is with regard to the Brick Lane pseudo-controversy.

If Monica Ali isn't brown enough or working-class enough or Sylheti enough for you, then, well, that's your weird little identity-political screw-up. Presumably she's not white enough for someone else. I'm sick of all this cant about cultural authenticity, and sick of the duty (imposed only on "minority" writers) to represent in some quasi-political fashion. Art isn't about promoting social cohesion, or cementing community relations. It's about telling the truth as you see it, even if it annoys or offends some people. That's called freedom of expression, and last time I checked we all thought it was quite a good idea.

* Kind words for The Indian Clerk in the Boston Globe and Gay City News.

* Sebastian Faulks talks to the Washington Post about the new James Bond novel.

* This just in from the "Department of I Got Yer Preconceived Notions Right Here":  A novel by a New York City author about an escort has won the Utah Humanities Council's Utah Book Award for fiction.

* At the National Post, John Ivison updates us on Yann Martel's ongoing scheme to send two books a week to the Canadian prime minister, and has some choice words about the whole affair.

* Rutherford's Bar, watering hole of the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle is facing closure, reports the Scotsman.

Ruth Rutherford's, established in 1834, is a unique public house closely linked with the history of the city. It was frequented by such literary figures as Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle. It still boasts many of the artefacts from that period, like the magnificent frontage dating from 1934, the terrazzo floor and marble walls of the lavatory and boxed-in sawdust spittoon channel. The front of the building is listed and under a preservation order. One wonders what the meaning of the word preservation is in this instance.

* Steve Weinberg looks at the very-interesting-sounding Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America.

* Los Angeles Times Book Review David L. Ulin wants to know "Who 'owns' Raymond Carver?"

* We're great admirers of Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, which we were fortunate enough to enjoy in its original London staging.  The play sent us off to read Thomas Powers's riveting Heisenberg's War, one of the books Frayn noted as his source material.  We note it here because one story in particular - the story of baseball player turned spy Moe Berg - stuck with us, and has surfaced again, according to the Guardian in Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea.  (We suggest nothing unseemly - it's probably a well-known tale.  Just caught our eye is all.)

On December 18 1944, Werner Heisenberg, a key figure in the Nazi atomic bomb programme, gave a lecture in Zurich to fellow physicists. In the audience, sitting just behind the discoverer of fission Otto Hahn, was an American. Morris "Moe" Berg, who had been a professional baseball player after studying languages at Princeton, was there to see if Heisenberg gave any hint that the Germans were near to developing the atom bomb. If he had, Berg would have taken out the .45 pistol in his pocket and shot the Nobel Prize winning physicist dead. For Berg was a spy, employed by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America's first central intelligence agency. Heisenberg stuck to his non-military topic and delivered his lecture unharmed.

As we recall, Powers recounts the tale slightly differently, mainly that Berg found the mathematics so over his head that he couldn't comfortably determine exactly what Heisenberg was talking about, and so, gave him a pass.

* As the Southern California fires continue to burn, The Chicago Blog takes a stab at answering the question: Why do firefighters put their lives on the line for this kind of work?

* We note - and approve - of the new Amazon blog Omnivoracious, and welcome it to the blogroll.

* A bit late getting this up for his L.A. appearance but Nick Hornby is interviewed at Metromix LA, in which he manages not to whine about difficult books.

* George Snyder has the goods on Edmund White's recent area appearance.

* And, finally, this is just weird.  Internet weird.  Which isn't necessarily bad.

Posted by at 12:01 AM in Marginalia |

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Comments

Kati

I plum worship Copenhagen.

Posted by: Kati | October 30, 2007 at 01:21 AM

e

You might add Nicholas Dawidoff's Moe Berg bio The Catcher Was a Spy to your TBR pile. It came out about 10 years ago and was well liked. (And, uh, it's been in my pile for nearly that long.)

Posted by: e | October 30, 2007 at 11:22 AM

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