The Elegant Variation: JIM HARRISON ON ... MONEY?

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June 23, 2004

JIM HARRISON ON ... MONEY?

OK, this is just one of those oddities that the TEV mailbox seems to attract. It's an interview with Jim Harrison, which is not, on the face things, odd except that it's conducted by Bankrate.com, a financial website, and deals almost exclusively with the financial side of his career.

Bankrate: Did you at some point emerge from the fog and knuckle down to some financial planning?
Jim Harrison: Yeah, I had to when I was in my 50s because I didn't have any retirement. So then I got pretty smart. It was just this gradual feeling as I got older that I wanted to make sure that my wife and two daughters had some sort of benefits from the fruits of my labor. I got an adviser and entered one of these plans, which is a bitch where you have to save so much every year. Sort of like an inflated IRA. I had to meet this mark for six years. It was ghastly, but I did it.

Bankrate: What were your major expenditures?

Jim Harrison: Oh, wine and food. Drugs for a while, but I quit that almost 20 years ago, almost without thinking about it. I'd lucked out and had been researching a film on Brazil for a month. After being in Brazil, there was never any point to touching American cocaine again, so I never did. But it was simply the sense that you're aging and now is the time to save up for later.

Posted at 12:22 AM | Permalink

Comments

If this writing thing doesn't work out, Harrison's got a promising future at Goldman Sachs.

Posted by: Jimmy Beck | June 23, 2004 at 05:33 AM

I adore Bankrate.com's author interview series. So damned practical and often silly. Works for me.

Posted by: Sarah | June 23, 2004 at 08:09 AM

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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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Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee

Now, on the one hand, you scarcely need us to alert you to the existence of a new J.M. Coetzee novel, or even to have us tell you it's worth reading. But we can tell you - we insist on telling you that Diary of a Bad Year is a triumph, easily Coetzee's most affecting and fully wrought work since Disgrace. Formally inventive, the book intertwines two narratives with the author's own Strong Opinions, a series of seemingly discrete philosophical and political essays. The cumulative effect of this strange trio is deeply moving and thought provoking. It's increasingly rare in this thoroughly post-post-modern age to raise the kind of questions in fiction Coetzee handles so masterfully - right down to what is it, exactly, that we expect (or need) from our novels. It's telling that, for all of his serious pronouncements on subjects ranging from censorship to pedophilia to the use of torture, it's finally a few pages from The Brothers Karamazov that brings him to tears. Moving, wise and - how's this for a surprise - funny and lightly self-mocking, Diary of a Bad Year might well be the book of the year and Coetzee is surely our essential novelist. We haven't stopped thinking about it since we set it down.
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*Now in Paperback*

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SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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.
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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

June 23, 2004

JIM HARRISON ON ... MONEY?

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

June 23, 2004

JIM HARRISON ON ... MONEY?

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism