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September 19, 2006

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

* The Sharak trial is about to begin, and the author says she's just awaiting doctor's clearance to attend.

* We draw your attention to our events calendar at left, which includes word of Jim Ruland's reading this evening at the Cobalt Cafe.  More from the Lazy Mick soon in the form of October's Vermin on the Mount ...

* A literary festival in Belfast is set to name the World's Worst Writer.  Relax.  It's no one we know.

* The latest update on the film version of Disgrace has shooting commencing in January from a script by the director's partner ...

* The Booker Prize people have posted a blog, though it's devoted Booker reading groups, not the behind-the-scenes stuff.  But they've even figured out how to use RSS.

* Nicely done.  The Washington Post is hosting online author Q&As in association with November's National Book Festival.  We wish the choice of authors was more interesting (Geradline Brooks is the clear highlight) but we love the concept.

* The first thing we do when we arrive at anyone's home is go straight for the bookshelves.  The Chronicle of Higher Education's Jay Parini checks out shelves of note, including Graham Greene and Gore Vidal.

I've known any number of writers and have warm recollections of wandering in their houses, seeing what books they had on the shelves, by chance or choice. Sometimes an anomaly struck me. I remember being shocked, for example, by how few books Graham Greene had in his home in Antibes. It was, of course, an apartment, not a big house, that Greene occupied. And he was by nature peripatetic, shifting among countries, even continents, right to the end of his life. It was, he told me, an inconvenience to own a lot of books, as they're heavy in one's bag. So he kept only those authors who really mattered to him: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and, to my surprise, the 19th-century naval hero and prolific novelist Capt. Frederick Marryat. "Now Marryat," Greene said to me, "there is a writer!"

On a related note, we've only dipped into Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer's Desk, but it's that same sort of literary voyeurism we so enjoy.  Looks promising, worth checking out.  And you get to support a University press in the process ... 

* Fear of the Dark, Walter Mosley's latest, returns readers to 1956 Watts.

* We've a grim fascination with the way our British brethren afflict writers and the press - draconian libel laws, and that most peculiar of beasts, The Official Secrets Act.  Now, a cashiered MI6 agent is defying the law by publishing chapter one of his spy novel online.  Visit his old mirrored blogs which include a spreadsheet of MI6 agents.  Weirdly fascinating stuff.

* Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth are among the literary notables lobbying the Indian government to overturn a colonial-era holdover law banning homosexuality.

(Aside, from Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love:
Chamberlain: We discuss what we should call ourselves.  'Homosexuals' has been suggested.
AE Housman: Homosexuals?
Chamberlain: We aren't anything until there's a word for it.
AEH: Homosexuals?  Who is responsible for this barbarity?
Chamberlain: What's wrong with it?
AEH: It's half Greek and half Latin!
Chamberlain: That sounds about right.)

* Unbridled Books has posted their second podcast with author Ed Falco.

* Finally, if you're in the Las Vegas area, stop by the Interbike show for a rare chance to meet the legendary Eddy Merckx, a five-time Tour de France winner.  That's something you don't get to do every day.  He'll be signing Wednesday, September 27th from 4 p.m. until 5 p.m. at the VeloNews booth # 3359.

Posted at 12:01 AM 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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