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June 29, 2005

Comments

Len Vertig

Maybe the lack of outrage has something to do with the fact that Judith Miller is almost universally loathed in her profession. Or that she wrote a lot of absolute nonsense about Saddam's WMD. Or it's because those who might otherwise get worked up about it really want to know who blew Valerie Plame's cover.

In principle, you're right, of course. Schadenfreude shouldn't trump free speech. And who wants to turn that c*nt into a First Amendment martyr?

TEV

I'd begun to go in and remove your expletive (elided though it might be) when I realized that to do so in a post touting the First Amendment would be somewhat inconsistent. But I don't really care for that sort of language.

Still, I'm glad you see the wider point, however reluctantly - the first amendment is not a popularity contest, selectively applied to nice people. If it's not universal it doesn't work.

Personally, I think the leaks should be publicly exposed - as part of a legitimate bit of investigative journalism about how the Bush administration goes after its enemies using attack dogs like Novak. But that's should come from the press, not the goverment.

Patry Francis

Okay, you've nudged my conscience. Sitting around saying 'ain't it awful?' while our freedoms vanish and good people pay the price for trying to defend them isn't enough. We have to act. All of us.

Fred Schoeneman

Mark,

The First Amendment is designed to protect free speech, I thought. I didn't know it was intended to protect witnesses to crimes from having to testify about them.

f

M.G.

Len: Why is Judith Miller "almost universally loathed in her profession"? Besides the WMD/Chalabi stuff, what else did she do to earn that universal loathing?

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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."