The Elegant Variation: THE LESSER BLOG

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June 19, 2006

THE LESSER BLOG

Wendy Lesser, editor of the excellent Threepenny Review, has launched her own blog - and sets down her own rules:

For one thing, it will be very organized, with listings of its contents (once it accumulates any contents, that is).

For another, I will not be making daily or even weekly postings, and the format will in no way resemble a diary or journal. Each posting will be a little (or not so little) self-contained essay, perhaps more chatty than my usual essays in the magazine, but nonetheless resembling a printed article more than most blog entries do.

And finally, I do not plan to include any photos of my cat or best friends or any other personal items that you would be required to take an interest in. This should come as something of a relief — a blessedly impersonal blog.

Her first post looks at the choreography of Mark Morris:

Mostly, when people call something camp, they mean that it is so bad it is good—bad becomes good because we, with our superior sensibility, can laugh at it. This is so counter to anything Mark Morris is doing, or has ever tried to do, that I find it remarkable anyone could even think to apply this notion to his work. He is always trying to make something good (I am tempted to capitalize Good—that's how important such discriminations are to him). Usually he succeeds; and on the few occasions when he fails, the result is never laughably bad, but frustratingly difficult to absorb. In fact, Morris's least successful dances are, in my opinion, the least likely to be called camp, because they leave the audience feeling blank. It is the ones that provoke laughter in some and tears in others that are most often saddled with this label. And for those of us who lean toward tears (in the snowflake scene of The Hard Nut, for instance, or the final dance of Going Away Party, or the moment when the eponymous nymph learns she's been duped in Platée), nothing is more annoying than the laughter of Morris's so-called fans. We want to leap out of our seats and smother them; we want awed silence, not knowing chuckles and hoots of I-get-it appreciation. We take our Mark Morris seriously — perhaps too seriously — and we resent it when other people do not.

Posted at 12:30 AM in Litlinks | Permalink

Comments

She apparently forgot to add "Oh, and there will be no RSS feeds."

Posted by: Pete | June 19, 2006 at 07:53 AM

I simply have to state that I love the wordplay on "lesser." Her blog certainly seems richer than most.

Posted by: Fadzilah | June 19, 2006 at 09:20 AM

What Pete said. These look to be hand-coded pages rather than a blog. So I don't think this quite counts. Still, just about any Lesser is good Lesser.

Posted by: ed | June 19, 2006 at 04:46 PM

I've been reading some of the posts around on this and I've got to say that the normally expansive/inclusive blogosphere has taken a surprisingly strait-laced view of What A Blog Must Be. I had no idea the rules had so set into stone ...

Posted by: TEV | June 20, 2006 at 04:43 PM

Actually, I took down the paragraph with all those silly rules (or nonrules) after some kind member of the blogging community wrote to me and explained that I really didn't know what I was talking about. So the rest of The Lesser Blog stands, but the part that has everyone in a tizzy has now disappeared from its original location and only exists in quoted form on this and other sites. Ah, well, I guess that is the nature of the blogosphere...

all best,
Wendy

Posted by: Wendy Lesser | July 02, 2006 at 11:00 AM

Wendy, thanks for responding here and at my place. But I'm still extremely curious why you wrote those words in the first place. I've been methodically asking various print media types about why they feel so belligerent about the blogosphere (most recently, Victor Navasky) and they point the finger to us. Can we broker a detente here instead of pointing fingers and getting into a pissing match over who has the more authoritative voice? Seems to me that there's pros and cons to both forms.

Posted by: ed | July 02, 2006 at 12:46 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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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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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 19, 2006

THE LESSER BLOG

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 19, 2006

THE LESSER BLOG

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