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October 27, 2005

NYC EVENT - FREDERIC TUTEN

Tutenmao_1 We're major fans of Frederic Tuten, with his Tintin in the New World holding a special place of privilege in our cold black hearts.  So imagine our delight (and envy) to learn that he'll be reading from his novel The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, first published in 1971, and which has been reissued this month in a brand new New Directions Classic edition. To celebrate the re-issue, Tuten will be at 192 Books in New York. Susan Sontag wrote, "The Adventures of Mao is soda pop, a cold towel, a shady spot under a tree for culture-clogged foot soldiers on the American long march." The New York Times called it "Almost too good to be true." Tuten, recently the subject of an admiring essay in The Believer, is a Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Writing. Reading: Thursday, October 27 at 7pm 192 Books 192 Tenth Avenue, NYC. Call 212-255-4022 for reservations.  Extremely highly recommended in a sort of "We'd drop everything" kind of way ...

You can read more about The Adventures of Mao after the jump.

The Adventures of Mao on the Long March by Frederic Tuten, with a new postscript by the author and an introduction by John Updike. A revolutionary comic masterpiece, an icon of literature as American pop art, and a book unlike any other, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March breaks all frames. Frederic Tuten's subversive, witty, and triumphant 1971 novel is caught somewhere between the clear-eyed rhapsodies of James Fenimore Cooper and Mao Tse Tung's own Address to the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature. Tuten peppers his deadpan textbook narrative of Mao's long march with loving parodies of Hemingway, Kerouac, Dos Passos, and Malamud. As John Updike comments, the book includes: "twenty-seven pages of straight history of the Long March" and "thirty-six and a half pages of quotations in quotation marks . . . (such as, diligent research discovers, Hawthorne's Marble Faun, Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean…) and twenty-six pages of what might be considered normal novelistic substance—imaginary encounters and conversation. For example: Chairman Mao is in his tent, after the strain of the Tatu campaign. He hears the rumble of a tank: 'A tank, covered with peonies and laurels, advances towards him. Mao thinks the tank will crush him, but it clanks to a halt. The turret rises, hesitantly. Greta Garbo, dressed in red sealskin boots, red railway-man's cap, and red satin coveralls, emerges. She speaks: "Mao, I have been bad in Moscow and wicked in Paris, I have been loved in every capital, but I have never met a MAN whom I could love. That Man is you, Mao, Mao mine." Mao considers this dialectically. The woman is clearly mad. Yet she is beautiful and the tank seems to work.'…"

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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

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