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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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« NOTA BENE: THE END OF SLEEP | Main | GAINES AWARD »

April 24, 2008

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

* Juan Gelman has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most prestigious literary award.

Gelman, 77, is considered Argentina's poet laureate and once belonged to the Montoneros, a leftist guerrilla group that fought the Argentine juntas that ruled in the 1970s and '80s.

* You've already heard about problems facing The Mount.  Now a Scottish trust has been formed to try and save Sir Walter Scott's "most famous home."  Elsewhere in News Of Writers' Houses, Norman Mailer's house is set to become a writers colony.

* Although we're well past the point of interest with respect to Christopher Hitchens, we share this lengthy Prospect profile for those whose taste for punishment is limitless.

For Hitchens, 1968 had little to do with the cultural explosion of the time—music, drugs, alternative lifestyles—and he remains a rather macho figure, untouched by feminism, except in an abstract political form. He had been recruited to his "eccentric" organisation—the International Socialists, or IS—in Oxford shortly before arriving at the university. He was noticed heckling a Maoist at an anti-Vietnam war meeting, and was approached by Peter Sedgwick, who Hitchens describes as a "noble remnant of the libertarian left." At the time, the Oxford IS had five members. By the end of 1968, there were around 300. The exhilarating sense of operating on a large scale from within a tiny organisation is one that has suited Hitchens for most of his career since.

* Can there be a dumber idea out there than a print version of Wikipedia?

* A Nobel Prize for food?  Who knew?

* The best reason to date not to live in Brooklyn - to avoid the anxiety and/or crippling shame of being left off the Brooklyn Literary 100 list.  Can the Queens 15 list be far behind?

* Goncourt Prize winner and Academie francaise member Maurice Druon turns 90 and motherland Russia takes note.

* Prague is hosting a month-long biennale honouring Borges and Kafka.

Up until late May, biennale visitors will get a chance to see, for example, a screening of Jan Němec’s 1975 film of The Metamorphosis as well as a version of The Trial put on at Prague’s Divadlo Komedie (Comedy Theatre). There is also an installation featuring Borges’ writing. The Franz Kafka Society’s Markéta Mališová again.

* Anne Enright has entered the Hennessy X.O. Hall of Fame, which prompts all sorts of questions about product placement and someone's inability to spell "Man Booker," but when you consider where liquor sponorships dollars go in this country, it's probably churlish to complain.

* If you are looking for something to do tonight in NYC, you could do a whole lot worse than to find yourself at Habitus Magazine's event with Arnon Grunberg.  (Here in L.A., we'll be attending a screening of the long awaited Fugitive Pieces, about which we plan to report as soon as we can.)

* Finally, if you are a deep-pocketed TEV reader, you might want to consider attending the Los Angeles Public Library Awards Dinner honoring Larry McMurtry.  Individual tickets start at (gulp!) $750 but there are few better causes than supporting your library, dontcha think?

Posted by TEV at 12:03 AM in Marginalia |

Comments

As a Brooklynite who was left off the list (presumably because I did not schtup Keith Gessen), I should point out that being left off lists while living in ANY borough in New York (even Staten Island!) comes with the territory. I am proud to be left off of this meaningless list, which has as much worth to humanity as the shopping list I am dutifully scribbling for this afternoon's grocery run.

Posted by: ed | April 24, 2008 at 08:04 AM

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