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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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January 31, 2008

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

The NBCC has rechristened its "Best Recommended List."  The new iteration?  The much catchier GoodReads.  Which is a good reminder to alert you all to an event I will be moderating on Tuesday evening at Skylight.  Yes, I know it's election day, so cast your vote early and then come by and get your mind off the results.  Details:

Tuesday, February 5, 2008, 7:30 p.m.
Panel: The NBCC GoodReads Winter List.

In December, the National Book Critics Circle launched "The Best Recommended" project - now rechristened GoodReads - in which the NBCC asked its members to recommend books that they'd recently read and truly loved, trendy or obscure.

On February 5, the NBCC will announce its second round of recommendations and this panel will look both at the recommendations themselves, as well as the art of recommending: Who are your best recommenders (we all have them, right?), the worst recommenders (someone who consistently doesn't get your taste)? What constitutes a meaningful recommendation and what do you look for when you hear one? What about the business of recommending itself: who has the authority to do it, where do good ones come from and how does it sell books, if at all?

Please join the NBCC award winning poet Amy Gerstler, the NPR book critic Veronique de Turenne, the novelist Katherine Taylor, the novelist and critic Darcy Cosper, and the blogger and novelist Mark Sarvas for this entertaining and lively discussion, and bring along some of your own recommendations!

Posted by TEV at 01:13 PM in Events |

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