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October 12, 2005

THIS JUST IN

Steve Almond takes a full six pages of precious Salon space to tear us into little pieces.  We're flattered that he took so much trouble, even if there's scarcely an honest word in the thing.

Well, he was a writer, of course. You could tell this because there was a portable typewriter right next to him in his photo, which was taken outside. So he was clearly dedicated to his craft. But he was also a cool writer, the kind who wore a leather jacket and shades while hanging out next to typewriters outside.

Sarvas lived in Los Angeles and this meant he was a novelist and a screenwriter. Somehow, between novel drafts and pitch meetings, he managed to produce a blog that he had named, unpretentiously, the Elegant Variation.

His entries did not compose a meaningful discussion of literature -- few of the so-called lit blogs actually undertake such a thing. They were gossip items for the most part, links to articles, an occasional belch of schadenfreude. His prose style favored elevated diction, convoluted sentences, serial use of the royal "we" and, in an effort to convey a stream of consciousness ... lots ... of ... ellipses.

There's more like this.  Lots more.  We leave it to you to enjoy.  We certainly did.

If you're stopping in for the first time via the Salon link, welcome.  We hope you'll poke around through the archives and make your own decisions about what you find here.  There are category links down the right side below our recommendations, which will bring up interviews, reviews, discussions - all those things litblogs don't provide.  And, if in the end, you agree with Herr Almond, please check out the blogroll at left for sites that do it better, and vaya con dios!  Peace out.

(Oh, Steve, as you're surely reading this, we make one minor distinction.  We certainly don't hate you.  We're, at best, indifferent to you.  What we hate is your writing.  Such as it is.  We've actually got a soft spot for hacks, being one ourselves.)

Posted at 07:14 PM in Litlinks |

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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."

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