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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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February 04, 2008

MONDAY MARGINALIA

Tentatively emerging from the sickbed, we blink around ourselves in the daylight and this is what we see:

* The Financial Times offers up the latest in a series of superb James Wood profiles that are banging around out there.

“That’s crazy,” says Wood. “It’s a strikingly anti-formalist thing to say.” Yet, it’s a criticism that seems to speak to a deep, and peculiarly American, suspicion of style – as if “fine” writing were somehow effeminate. “I do think a lot of this is about American masculinity,” says Wood. “The realists from Hemingway onwards retained for themselves a strikingly anti-intellectual stance which had to do with the preservation of a male idea of what writing is – you roll up your sleeves and get on with it. It was also tied in with the whole artisanal aspect of creative writing workshops: it’s about planing a table and making it four square; it’s about drinking a lot; but it’s not about philosophy, it’s not about ideas or aesthetics.”

* Forever prompted for new passwords?  Literature can be your saviour.

* For those of you who were amused, as we were, by Charles McGrath's tale of the Writer and the Fumes, here's the actual story from the Mirror.

* This complaint about the teaching of classics puts us in mind of the line from Godot, which we quote inaccurately from memory - "there's man all over, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet."

* Many, many Peter Carey profiles around these days.  This is one of the better ones.

“I tell them to forget about the business. That's nothing to do with me. I used to be slick at talking about this, but as I've started to enjoy it more, I'm not slick at it. First, I think it saves people time - a couple of years, three years. They'll figure it out in the end. If they haven't got talent, you're not going to give it to them, but they will have it because you've chosen them.

“But they might turn out to not have will; which you can't always judge very easily at the beginning. If they don't have will, they're screwed. But you can't make them write every day or get up early in the morning; you can give them an example, or tell them what they should be doing, and they might listen.”

* It's Dave Eggers's world, we just live in it.

* Russell Banks, profiled in the Post-Star.

* Today's bits of Amis - a review of The Second Plane (more or less what you'd expect) from the Telegraph:

Fear and anger have radicalised Amis. He needs to rethink before he completely transforms into one of his own vivid stereotypes.

... and a weirdly incoherent defense of Amis at the Guardian Comment is Free blog, reinforcing our suspicion that you get what you pay for.

* Damned fine advice from Junot Diaz on how new voices can get heard:

I can't stress enough how one has to become familiar not with the lifestyle of being a writer – not going to Bread Loaf, going to AWP, doing all the social aspects of writing. But one needs to familiarize themselves with the convention they are working in, and what I mean by that is you need to read. Read the works of hailed writers, but also one needs to read the journals. You'll be amazed how many writers I know send to journals that they've never read.

* Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the joy of reading the late Nigerian novelist Cyprian Ekwensi.

* And, finally, don't forget tomorrow night's panel.  Yes, it's election day but what is the point sitting around all night listening to the blathering of pundits who haven't made a single accurate call yet in this election?  Come check out an edifying literary discussion and the results will be neatly waiting for you when you get home ...

Posted by TEV at 12:01 AM in Marginalia |

Comments

Pete

Invoking that same Beckett line, Archers of Loaf once similarly opined: "You can blame on your hat the faults of your head."

Posted by: Pete | February 04, 2008 at 10:19 AM

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