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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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« THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGING? | Main | THURSDAY MARGINALIA: THE "ON THE ROAD" EDITION »

May 07, 2008

TRAVEL DAY

I'm on the road now, first to San Francisco and then Seattle, for some readings.  I will update as opportunities present from the road, but in the meantime, topping the list of things far worse than recent travails, a writer could have his mother talking smack about him day and night to the press, which is exactly what Madame Houellebecq continues to do, to anyone who will listen:

Then, in 1998, when Houellebecq was at the height of his fame, she says she stumbled upon an article about him winning a literary prize for Atomised. (In the photo he was wearing "the same anorak he had been wearing for years".) She went to a bookshop, picked up Atomised and was furious. "I said, 'Fuck, it's not true.' He described me as a kind of whore, kept by I don't know what American. That's slander. All my life I've toiled to earn money for other people. I want him to apologise. If I was law-suit minded, I would have sued him and won."

I'm not expecting problems, but MOTEV is bound and gagged in the cellar for the duration.  Just to be safe.  (She's Austrian.  It makes a certain kind of sense.)

Posted by TEV at 12:01 AM in Harry, Revised |

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