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February 27, 2007

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

* We've figured out how to bludgeon Teheran into submission - we're sending them Tony Coelho.

* Steven Millhauser - author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Martin Dressler - has a new story in The New Yorker.

* Matthew Sharpe - whose Jamestown is high up on our TBR list - is profiled in Poets & Writers.

* John Freeman profiles Elif Shafak for Newsday.

Since 2003, she has lived in Turkey and traveled to the United States to teach. She calls herself a commuter, not an immigrant. "There is a metaphor I like very much in the Quran, in the Holy Book, and it's about a tree that has its roots up in the air. When my nationalist critics say you have no roots, you are a so-called Turk, I say no, I do have roots, they're just not rooted in the ground. They are up in the air."

* Personally, we think an editor should be fired for using La La Land in a headline to describe Los Angeles.

* Amitava Kumar has a brief report on Colson Whitehead's recent Vassar reading.

* Dylan Jones seems to be trying to say something about the forthcoming Roth Zuckerman book but we're fucked if we can figure out what he's on about.

* At Mary Beard's new TLS blog "A don's life," she asks whether authors should reply to wrong-headed reviews, the case in point being Zadie Smith's comment on Trajan's column:

The truth is that no one ever scrutinises a review with quite the obsessive intensity as the book’s author. The chances are that your self-defence will actually draw attention to your alleged inadequacies. And there’s a high risk too that you’ll come across as more miffed than traduced. Unless the allegations are career threatening (plagiarism and the like) or your letter is drop-dead clever and witty, it may be better to hold your horses, to wait and see if anyone writes in on your behalf, and claim the dignified high ground .

* And, finally, hats off to Levi Leipheimer for his GC win in the Tour of California.  Watching the Solvang time trial got us fired up to get back in the saddle, so we've worked up our own training plan to hit the Piru Time Trials post-honeymoon, when those French dinners will need to be worked off ...

Posted at 12:08 AM in Marginalia |

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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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