The Elegant Variation: MONDAY MAILBAG: THE "BACK FROM A LONG TRIP" EDITION

TEV DEFINED

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."

April 14, 2008

MONDAY MAILBAG: THE "BACK FROM A LONG TRIP" EDITION

* Five Chapters celebrates its 75th story with Kate Christensen's Voice Lessons.

* There goes the arrondissment: The Academie Francaise admits a pop songwriter. Elsewhere, from the "Department of Fun as Only the French Can Have It", the fate of the semi-colon hangs in the balance.

* Amitava Kumar offers his own coverage of the recent Philip Roth shindig. Elsewhere, Sam Tanenhaus reports on the Buckley and Mailer memorials.

* Bruce Bauman considers a new collection of 41 previously uncollected Leslie Fiedler essays:

Unfortunately, with the exception of a handful of essays, the pieces here do little to highlight the myth that was the thunderous Fiedler. Too many reiterate points Fiedler made with greater flair elsewhere -- especially in regard to the homoerotic undercurrent in many American novels. Too much time is spent on Fiedler's disdain for the New Yorker and its middlebrow taste, as well as his enmity toward the "New Critics" and the French theorists. He meticulously, um, deconstructs "The Grapes of Wrath" until it fits quietly in the middlebrow book bin. There's a funny piece on Twain's little-known pornographic skit "1601," and other pieces draw perceptive parallels and distinctions between William Faulkner's Temple Drake and J. D. Salinger's Franny Glass.

* The Telegraph considers the new iteration of Granta under editor Jason Cowley, and delivers a mixed but hopeful notice. (Incidentally, the new Granta site goes live April 15 - an auspicious date, indeed.)

* Arturo Vivante, who wrote more than 70 short stories for the New Yorker, has died.

“His stories were very much of their time,” Roger Angell, a fiction editor at The New Yorker, said on Thursday. “Short fiction was becoming shorter, coming down to the intentionally modest. He was thoughtful in his perceptions of human emotions.”

* Steve Wasserman uses the occasion of the publication of Fidel Castro's autobiography to wonder how history will judge the dictator.

* Time Out New York catches up with several of our favorite people - Maud Newton, Lauren Cerand, Kimberly Burns - who try to untangle the "unpredictable world of publishing."

* The New Republic hosts a debate/discussion about comics' golden age.

* Nigel Beale interviews David Solway on "What makes a poem great?"

* In his latest Tommywood column, Tom Teicholz reflects on the closing of Dutton's.

Dutton's was old school: I had a house account there that allowed me to sign for books for which I was billed monthly; my 10-year-old daughter had signing privileges on my account. I had imagined the day would come when she would have her own account, but that is not to be. (This reminds of the time my father was approached about buying a "lifetime membership to a health club," and he replied, "My lifetime, or your company's?" He outlived that business by several decades.) So it goes.

* Robert Birnbaum and Chip Kidd pull up a chair for a long chat.

* And, finally, for those of you unsure which political bumper sticker to affix to your vehicle this year ...

Posted by TEV at 12:01 AM in Litlinks | Permalink

Comments

Kurt Vonnegut said that the only thing the semi-colon was good for was showing you went to college. I still like it sometimes, but I used them a lot less once I heard him say that.

Posted by: BradyDale | April 14, 2008 at 04:01 AM

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April 14, 2008