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June 05, 2007

Comments

K.G. Schneider

I waffle on this point (prizes for female authors, not replacing keyboards).

I understand your concern, but I'm old enough and female enough to believe in discrimination against women, sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant.

I just gave one of three keynotes at a conference. Later, a friend (female) said so-and-so (male) was "the" keynote, right? I said there were *three* keynotes and I was one of them. (The only female keynoter, now that I think about it.) In the 1970s, I would have said "Click," but now I just sigh and press on. The work goes on, the cause endures... Oh, and if I get offered the Orange, which would not happen because it's also all about *fiction* and I am but a wee essayist, I will accept. Just so you know. And Oprah? I am so on her show.

By the way, kudos on breaking your keyboard. I love that a writer could do that... so apropos. I'm going to set that as one of my writing goals!

A TEV fan now disappears into the ether to apply herself to her writing for the day...

shauna

Thanks for the guest blogging, here, Katherine. And I guess you can score one for Mac Guy, in the most compelling internecine saga of our times. Weep not, Odin, your sons shall rise again. Weep not.

Reluctantly, I agree with Ms. Schneider about the Orange prize. We still need institutional intervention. We don't win as many prestigious awards as men, which is ridiculous and shows the limited reach of those contests, just like we still need the Supreme Court to rule in favor of equal pay for equal work. (Wait, what? They did....what?

Francisco Rodriguez

"Clouds like dark cathedrals"


Is that a joke? Is that good writing?

Katherine Taylor

I think I'll write more on the Orange Prize tomorrow, when there's more to write on. Though I find it all very depressing and thus exhausting, I'm rooting for Rachel Cusk. Of course. But really, more on that later.

And yes, can you believe -- good service at the Apple store??? It's a first. I think perhaps Cupertino is beginning in some mild way to realize pretty monitors aren't all that.

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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."