« HE'S BAAAAAAAACK | Main | BYE BYE BROSNAN »

February 13, 2004

Comments

Terry Teachout

Nah, why bother? Anybody who actually reads "About Last Night" knows I'm not an anti-modernist--the opposite, in fact. That's not worth a punch in the face mask.

TEV

Yes, I have to admit, that comment suggested to me a striking unfamiliarity with your body of work. But we like a good dustup as much as the next blogger and remain ever hopeful ...

Terry Teachout

Dream on, buddy. Old Hag and Cinetrix are at the door, and I have better things to do!

Daniel Green

Perhaps Mr. Teachout could explain his Virgina Woolf comment a little further. Precisely what makes her work barely readable?

TEV

Terry may (or may not) decide to weigh in if he can ever tear himself away from the ladies, but to be fair it should be noted that the comments he made were offhand blog postings and hardly considered criticism, so it's probably a mistake to read too much into them. Smart people of wide ranges of taste can disagree on many things; my hero James Wood thinks Woolf is a master but I find her a bit of a slog myself. At any rate, I won't speak for Terry, who is more than able to speak on his own behalf if so moved.

Daniel Green

His precise words were that Woolf was "marginally readable," and, lumping her in with the other Bloomsburyites, "the sooner they're forgotten, the better for British literature." (Does this include E.M. Forster, by the way?) This is offhand?

TEV

Absolutely. It's not a serious critical overview of Bloomsbury. It's not a detailed analysis of Woolf. He was expressing a personal perspective and tossed it off lightly, I expect, hardly imagining he'd be called "conservative" for that. But as I said, Terry don't need no defendin' from me.

Sarah

Otherwise known as a throwaway, slightly bitchy comment made on the fly and forgotten about until a moment to be determined later. AT least that's the way I saw it at the time.

That being said, I don't know exactly what the perceived problem is here; "conservative" isn't a bad word, but for some reason it gets these additional connotations that make it seem that way. It's not like Terry's a Luddite or anti-modernist--how many other boomer-age arts critics are out there blogging? (Can't imagine that would be something Bill Keller would want to do anytime soon.) He just, like anyone else, has issues of taste that are at times--dare I say it--idiosyncratic.

So Mark, keep the fight drool on hold till it's really necessary, because we'll need it then!

The comments to this entry are closed.

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."