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July 24, 2007

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

* Three Percent, the blog of the University of Rochester's new Open Letter, is now open for business.

* Coetzee's essay collection Inner Workings has gotten decidedly mixed reviews, we've noticed.  We've professed our admiration and we're pleased to see New York Magazine respond similarly:

J.M. Coetzee's literary tastes are decidedly Eurocentric and mid-century: Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005, his latest book of criticism, includes appreciations of dead white guys like Bruno Schultz and Robert Walser. Those unfamiliar with such difficult writers shouldn't be put off, though. Coetzee writes clear, focused prose and avoids academic abstractions and navel-gazing.

* Thanks to The Chronicle of Higher Education for providing this link to an essay about the connections between Ralph Ellison's politics and his writing.

* Cyberpunk demigod William Gibson is interviewed at Wired.

* Vietnamese writer Kim Lan has died.

He launched his writing career when he published his first novel Dua Con Nguoi Vo Le (Son of the Concubine) in 1941 in Ha Noi. Later, he wrote a series of short stories, mostly related to his personal recollections of countryside life.

* Our beloved NB takes a look at Tintin in the Congo.  (It's worth noting that most of the illustrations accompanying these stories, including the print version of TLS, are taken from the redrawn, color version, updated in 1946 and then again in 1975.  The original black and white 1931 version is, well ... )   They contrast the flap with a 1996 review of a Herge biography which declared him a hero to the Congolese (at least, back in 1970).

Tc

* Also in the TLS, Adrian Tahourdin on Pierre Bayard's essay on discussing books you haven't read.  (Heck, we could have written that one years ago ... )

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at this confession, or at the revelation that, “in common with numerous university lecturers”, Bayard “has spent enough time in the company of colleagues to have an idea, positive or negative, of the worth of their books without the need to read them”. This comes in a discussion of literary embarrassment, a chapter to which he gives the mock-archaic subtitle “In which it is confirmed, in connection with the novels of David Lodge, that the first condition for talking about a book one hasn’t read is not to be ashamed of it”. Bayard focuses on a scene in Lodge’s novel Changing Places, in which the English academic Philip Swallow initiates his students and fellow academics into a “game of Humiliation”, according to whose rules players have to give the names of great works they have not read: the head of the English department who hasn’t read Paradise Regained is bested by the American academic, Howard Ringbaum, who, in a moment of professional recklessness, confesses to not having read Hamlet. Ringbaum’s mistake, according to Bayard, was to have made this unambiguous confession, for Hamlet is part of what Bayard terms our “virtual” library – works we cannot help but be familiar with. There was simply no need for Ringbaum to be so rash.

* And, finally, you can read more about the unusual event below at Jonathan Ames's blog.

Fight_flyer

Posted at 12:10 AM in Marginalia |

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Comments

Miles Newbold Clark

Intriguing... Participatory Journalism meets the George Saunders Era.

Posted by: Miles Newbold Clark | July 28, 2007 at 03:09 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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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