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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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« BANVILLE IN NEW YORK | Main | L.A. EVENT: MICHELINE AHARONIAN MARCOM **HIGHLY RECOMMENDED** »

March 11, 2008

TUESDAY MARGINALIA - DELUXE EDITION

We continue to argue with ourselves about the merits of link roundups, but there's so much interesting literary news out there that we continue to feel a weird obligation to bring the best of it to you.  So excuse the overload, but these items of interest have accrued:

* The Guardian suggests that the shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke is continuing to bring down the barriers between genre and literary.

* Esquire is turning readers' letters into short fiction.

* The novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett (beloved by the Queen in Alan Bennett's charming The Uncommon Reader) hold up nicely, according to A.N. Wilson.

Nothing else was ever like them. They depict an entirely First World War world; they are written largely in quite oblique dialogue. Yet they are ever new. No novels more deserved the name novel than hers. And they are truly subversive.

* There are still too many small-minded Americans running the country's classrooms.

* Francine Prose is set to return to a second term as PEN president.

* The Benjamin Black stories are starting to run - here's Bob Hoover's profile.

JbeBanville, 62, himself is a longtime newspaper staffer, starting with a Dublin newspaper in 1968 as an editor of reporters' stories, called a copy editor, and retiring as the Irish Times' literary editor in 1999.

"Working on the copy desk was wonderful training for a writer of fiction," he believes. "First, you learned the language, even to the importance of a comma. Second, you were involved in shaping the stories, making sure they read properly."

* Colim Toibin profiled in the Chronicle Herald.

* And speaking of Irish novelists, the Irish Book Awards are coming.

* Allen Barra on the complete novels of Flann O'Brien.

But all you need to know is that the man championed as one of the funniest writers who ever lived has just had all of his novels, previously available only individually from the Dalkey Archive Press, collected in one handy volume by Everyman's Library.

* If you're Oxford-bound, the Times has literary tour details for you.

* Former Booker prize judges name their favorites in the Guardian.  Robert McCrum has his own ideas.

* Is the pamphlet dead?

* In the wake of yesterday's ludicrous, indefensible decision in the Tournament of Books (with which 73% of Rooster readers plus one Rooster judge take considerable issue), we offer another review of Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

* Daniel Defoe, Spy.

* Ali Smith suggests there's more to Carson McCullers than is commonly thought.

There is a great deal of sweetness in the prevalent vision of McCullers as the poet of haunting oddbods, the laureate of American loneliness, the gifted bard of adolescent girls. But any reader of McCullers with a half-open eye knows her routing of sentimentality as one of the central actions of her fiction. The Member of the Wedding, published in 1946, has, in more recent years, picked up critical kudos as a mid-20th-century gay classic. It has influenced works as culturally inquiring and politically vibrant as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), the first line of which profoundly echoes McCullers's novel. The Bell Jar's opening pages go out of their way to suggest a close kinship between them. As Morrison and Plath knew, The Member of the Wedding is a cutting piece of fiction, and its antecedents are equally sharp. But still the sentimental image persists.

* We quite liked Jeanette Winterson for a while there, though she's lost us a bit with her recent efforts.  (The Passion remains our favorite, though we're also among the minority who rather enjoyed Gut Symmetries.)  In the Times, she laments the state of English literature education.

* We are all Homer's children, according to the Washington Post.  MOTEV will be surprised, indeed.  (FOTEV, too.)

* Louis de Bernières has a new novel out, and the Times celebrates with an oddly racy photo (and a review).  Presumably, it's a new way to get people to show interest in literature.

* A Brooklyn writer before, you know, "Brooklyn writers" - Joseph Heller.

* And, finally (appropriately), the Utne Reader links to the American Book Review's 100 Best Last Lines from Novels.  Our beloved Gatsby clocks in at number three.

Posted by TEV at 12:01 AM in Litlinks |

Comments

Mark Thwaite

And if anyone is going to the Oxford Literary Festival there is a "bloggers versus critics" (!) debate on the Monday -- http://tinyurl.com/2n9m6p

Come and say hello!

Posted by: Mark Thwaite | March 11, 2008 at 03:42 AM

Tim

"ludicrous, indefensible decision"? Why? Because you didn't agree with it? As one of the 27% that agreed with the TOB decision yesterday, I bristle at the idea that my opinion is "wrong." The second part of Savage Detectives was a complete and rambling mess that ruined the book for me. That's a defense for my position that I don't find ludicrous. Many critics felt the same way. Reasonable people can disagree on these things.

Posted by: Tim | March 11, 2008 at 04:54 AM

Steven Augustine

"Indefensible" may be a tad hard. But "ludicous"... most definitely. Some North American predispositions at work in the judging, I fear: surface flash again triumphs over darkling depths.

Posted by: Steven Augustine | March 11, 2008 at 05:55 AM

Steven Augustine

Or "ludicrous", even.

Posted by: Steven Augustine | March 11, 2008 at 05:57 AM

Sinéad

Mark, speaking of Banville, he contributes the foreward to a booklet of Heaney's poetry, (one of seven 'Great Poets of the 20th Century) free with The Guardian this week. If you can't persuade someone over this side of the Atlantic to pick them up for you, you can buy them all online though.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/greatpoets/0,,2258326,00.html

http://www.guardianoffers.co.uk/mall/productpage.cfm/GuardianOffers/_nmpwmgpx/119304/Great%20Poets%20of%20the%2020th%20Century

Posted by: Sinéad | March 11, 2008 at 06:57 AM

tami

esquire. they'll do anything, they'll try anything, to say that they are literary -- anything at all, except run good fiction.

what tasteless crap.

Posted by: tami | March 11, 2008 at 08:10 AM

Phineas

By all means, keep the link roundups coming so long as they don't replace original content, but rather supplement it.

Posted by: Phineas | March 11, 2008 at 10:18 AM

Jonny

Link roundups are highly appreciated. The 'links & quips' post is one of those beautiful critical forms only available to the blogger. Ed's is missed sorely enough, and there aren't many other great voices who offer anything similar in the lit-sphere...

Where's the reservation?

Posted by: Jonny | March 11, 2008 at 01:37 PM

Matt Pearce

Link roundups are good for those of us who don't have the time to scour the lit world for news. Think of it as being the editor of the Best American Literary Links of the Week.

Posted by: Matt Pearce | March 11, 2008 at 02:13 PM

Martin

That last link is a lot of fun. But that they left out Portnoy's Complaint undermines my confidence in the project.

Posted by: Martin | March 11, 2008 at 08:21 PM

Ken

Best last line I ever read is from James Purdy:

"Up we go, motherfucker."

Posted by: Ken | March 19, 2008 at 10:03 AM

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