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November 17, 2005

HARD-HITTING LIT NEWS ON HOLD

Mark is off to Tucson for his 109-mile bicycle race, so the more confessional stylings of moi (where did TEV get the idea that I’d be on point?) will occupy this space for the next couple of days.

Yesterday’s post about M’s last bit of training before the event made me think that I need to exercise more — a walk around the block after dinner just isn’t enough. Once upon a time, though, I was a fit young lass. Years spent climbing the hill in this photo is why.

Michel_6It’s also why I didn’t own a bicycle till I was 16. My childhood home was way up there at the top, right where the trees converge. The pic doesn’t quite convey how steep this hill is: it’s actually 3 drops in succession, a half mile from top to bottom, deadending into Sunset Blvd.

The bike was a Xmas present, a Schwinn 10-speed, and I had it for about a year, during which time I ran through a set of brake pads each week. I commuted on it to high school in Hollywood, out to the beach with friends, and to my job at the Farmer’s Market. But it was strictly transportation. In those years the air in LA was worse than it is now, and city riding wasn’t all that pleasant. Besides, I was saving my worker-bee pennies to buy a car. Which I eventually did, a used Volkswagon squareback. For a week, I parked the VW across from the house; for a week, I neglected to turn the wheels to the curb. You see where this is going, yes?

One afternoon, the emergency brake failed and the car rolled down the hill and smashed into a parked vehicle. The VW was totaled, but I was very lucky no one was killed. I can’t imagine I’d ever have gotten over it. I suppose I might then have gone on to write about characters wounded by the past, marked indelibly by their own foolishness and stupidity, instead of writing about … oops … never mind.

Posted at 12:05 AM |

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Comments

genevieve

I pass a van every afternoon that is parked precipitously on a very steep incline. Perhaps I'll take a different direction from now on!

Posted by: genevieve | November 17, 2005 at 01:02 AM

Janet

The same damn thing happened to me, and my car was also a Volkswagen. ('74 Karmann Ghia, Robin's Egg Blue, to be exact...) There were small children playing in the street. I parked my beloved car at the top of the hill while I ran a pan of brownies into my friend's apartment. When I returned moments later, my car had vanished, and I saw the kids standing frozen in the street staring at my car impaled on a parked truck at the bottom of the hill. In the time it took me to get to the smashed VW I did not know if it had hit one of the children. The VW was repaired, and life went on.

Posted by: Janet | November 19, 2005 at 09:07 PM

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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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