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February 13, 2007

L.A. EVENT - BLACK CLOCK AT REDCAT

Black Clock at REDCAT Feb. 15th at 7.30

REDCAT
631 West Second Street
Los Angeles 90012
Tickets are $5.

"Black Clock is a national literary magazine published by CalArts. Within a short lifetime of three years, it has established itself as one of the leading journals of its kind, attracting attention from Los Angeles to New York and publishing writers such as Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Joanna Scott, Jonathan Lethem, Miranda July, Rick Moody, Darcey Steinke, Shelley Jackson, Greil Marcus, William T. Vollmann and many others".

Appearing at REDCAT will be

AIMEE BENDER, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own and Willful Creatures,
FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK, author of Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books,
BEN EHRENREICH, author of The Suitors,
YXTA MAYA MURRAY, author of The Conquest, The Queen Jade and the forthcoming The King's Gold,
SUSAN STRAIGHT, author of A Million Nightingales, Haywire Moon and I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots,
LISA TEASLEY, author of Heat Signature, Dive and Glow in the Dark,
DAVID L. ULIN, author of The Myth of Solid Ground and editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review,
and STEVE ERICKSON, editor of Black Clock and author of Our Ecstatic Days and the forthcoming Zeroville, in conversation with MICHAEL SILVERBLATT, host of KCRW's "Bookworm."

This event is co-hosted by the CalArts MFA Writing Program and the School of Critical Studies. For ticket information please call REDCAT at (213) 237-2800 or visit www.redcat.org.

Posted at 12:30 AM in Events |

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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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