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February 27, 2004

Comments

Pierre Menard

"hopelessly utopian" at $20 a pop? I can subscribe to The New Yorker for less than $1 an issue. Will Weschler be 20x better?

Ed

No different from the $20/issue of McSweeney's, Pierre. Personally, I hope Weschler gets the cash. The magazine climate needs new blood and the Believer/McSwee people need to be kept on their toes. They have no edge. And I think Weschler might be the guy to do it.

R Birnbaum

Weschler is both a wonderful writer and a smart and sensitive journalist and for anyone to fail to acknowledge that is as , uh, wrong-headed as calling Dale Peck stupid.

Plus, what's the urgency to weigh in with humorless (and useless) speculation —either Omnivore will deliver the goods or not.

Self appointed web pundits are starting to sound like Soviet political propogandists—the adventurist revanchist McSweeney's clique and the running dog lackey Beleiverists and the reactionary Zionist New Yorkers—what a bunch of bloodless technocrats.

Phooey!

TEV

Um, I did say that I like the guy and look forward to the magazine. I can only assume Robert's posting is perhaps aimed "in absentia" at Jessa, who has no comments feature on her own site?

As it happens, I've contacted Weschler since posting this, and he very graciously has agreed to send me a copy. So I hope to weigh in more substantially. But to reiterate my posting - I think the world of him and wish his venture well.

lynn Travata

I am hoping you will share with me your address for Lawrence Weschler. When I contacted the New Yorker they suggested I try at the NY Institiute for the Humanities. I'm about ready to read him with a suggestion and contact for a piece, and cruising for an address I found you first, with the intersting prospect of Omnivore. I hadn't heard about it. Can you help? Thank you, Lynn Travata

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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."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."