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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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« KULTURAs CLOSES | Main | TEV GIVEAWAY: THE GOD OF WAR »

June 25, 2009

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

* Carolyn Kellogg offers sensible commentary on the l'affaire de Chris Anderson.

* Edward Hogan has won the Desmond Elliott Prize.

An "extraordinary new voice" with a tale of an albino in a depressed mining community has won the Desmond Elliott prize. Edward Hogan, who describes his previous jobs as "grass-strimmer, pot-washer, conservatory salesman, bloke holding the board in Leicester Square, and teacher", won the £10,000 first novel prize for Blackmoor, a novel set in a Derbyshire village at the time of the miners' strikes.

* Ismail Kadare has won the Asturias literature prize.

* Retracing the steps of Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall in the Times.

* Reducing literary classics to tweet-length.  Would that make the condensers "twits"?

In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature - they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling - into 20 tweets or less - that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.

* Aleksandar Hemon plays twenty questions.

6. You're proud of this accomplishment, but why?

Once I fell asleep in a dentist's chair during a root canal. Keith Richards fell asleep during a Rolling Stones show, which is as impressive as can be, but I had a little nap with the dentist's hand up to his wrist in my mouth.

After years of being able to sleep in any situation: on the street, at work, in school etc., I managed to sleep through pain. That's pretty impressive, if I may say so myself.

And I wrote four books in English, not my native language. That's not too bad, either.

* Top ten literary threesomes.

* The Big Read is just throwing money at you - 269 new grants have been announced.

* Maud Newton on all things Jean Rhys - first, an epistolary essay at Granta online; and then, a biography reviewed at The Second Pass.

* And, finally, please check out Masha Hamilton's Afghan Women's Writing Project.

Posted by TEV at 12:16 AM in Marginalia |

Comments

Niall

L'affaire Chris Anderson raises some interesting questions about plagiarism. Clearly, if you're cribbing from an individual author's published work, that's real plagiarism and that needs to be exposed and punished. But cribbing from Wikipedia? Give me a break. It's a free public resource, edited by thousands of anonymous people. What exactly is the problem with that? And cribbing from some company's website - I mean really, how many ways are there to say when Campbell started its advertising campaign? I think people are getting a little hysterical around this issue.

Posted by: Niall | June 25, 2009 at 10:08 AM

Jacob Silverman

I think you forgot the link for the Hemon interview. Thank ya.

Posted by: Jacob Silverman | June 25, 2009 at 11:09 AM

TEV

Fixed, with apologies!

Posted by: TEV | June 25, 2009 at 11:15 AM

Niall

I thought Hemon was just being very, very inscrutable!

Posted by: Niall | June 25, 2009 at 01:52 PM

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