The Elegant Variation: MEANWHILE, WE'RE STILL WAITING FOR OUR TWO HUNDRED BUCKS

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April 29, 2008

MEANWHILE, WE'RE STILL WAITING FOR OUR TWO HUNDRED BUCKS

The Los Angeles Times's Scott Timberg reports on a hoax in which con artists posing as authors are trying to bilk indie bookstore owners out of some Western Union cash.

This tale is typical: Slattery was heading out of the store, not long ago, to see a movie down the street when a staffer handed her the phone. The caller addressed her like an old friend: "Oh -- thank God I got you before you left," he began.

The call came from someone who said he was the Los Angeles blogger and first novelist Mark Sarvas, who was reading at the store in a few days and seemed to be in a pinch. His car had been impounded, he needed money to get it back and he needed it right away.

"I thought, 'Why isn't he calling his wife?' " recalled Slattery. "But maybe he can't reach anybody, maybe he had an extra drink. . . . It never occurred to me that it wasn't him.

Actually, Mrs. TEV learned to stop taking our calls long ago ...

Posted at 07:23 AM in Local Heroes | Permalink

Comments

Come to think of it - it'd serve these buncopersons right if you made their setup an incident or part of the plot in your next novel. The way I see it, it'd take them a half-century at this scam to raise a sum equivalent to, say, what Publishers Marketplace calls a "very nice" advance.

The story really has a grifters-who-couldn't-scam-straight quality. For one thing, the operation is inherently very limited in scope - for instance, the number of people whose names could plausibly be invoked. Many writers, especially ones living in NY, don't have a car and in some cases have never had a license to drive one. Ergo, the setup is inherently suspicious.

In the shower this morning I wondered what sort of strategies these jokers would use to improve their chances if they did have half a brain. Phoning a bookstore and pretending to be Peggy Selzer aka Margaret P. Jones seeking some impound money? Now, given Selzer/Jones' known history, I don't see why an employee would doubt it was the "Love & Consequences" author. The drawback to this ploy is that it logically follows that the employee would assume Selzer/Jones was fibbing about an impound or whatever, and refuse to pony up. (A few other writers come to mind in this category, but since they variously have reps for lawsuits, flaming, or driving big noisy choppers, I'll refrain from mentioning them.)

Posted by: Robert Nedelkoff | April 29, 2008 at 08:33 AM

Mark,

I feel downright awful your stolen identity has had it's car impounded. But it shouldn't have had so much to drink in the first place. Gotta show some tough love on this one.

Posted by: Jerry Sticker | April 29, 2008 at 08:34 AM

Mark,
If you're going to impersonate yourself on these calls at least try the new Nigerian strategy of threatening to kill the person all their friends and relatives unless they send money, quick.

Posted by: John Shannon | April 29, 2008 at 08:36 AM

We do what we can to get our names on the front page of the calendar section, right?

(Smart move to throw them off the scent with Ray Bradbury, Russell Banks, and Eric Alterman's assistant. Reminds me of that Law & Order where all the random sniper shootings turn out to be a coverup for a regular old murder.)

Seriously, though, Mark, I almost spit up my coffee this morning.

Posted by: Antoine Wilson | April 29, 2008 at 09:00 AM

I am surprised this would work if it WAS the real author calling to get money. Do (notoriously strapped) bookstores really hand out emergency money to authors that come to do signings. Shouldn't a call to a bookstore come after, say, a call to your significant other, friends, agent, publisher, publicist or local author? And if all those people stiffed you, maybe you aren't a very good risk.

Posted by: EG | April 29, 2008 at 09:01 AM

Sorry for all the trouble, Mark, but I really could use $150.

Posted by: Jim | April 29, 2008 at 09:20 AM

I've started calling churches posing as Tim Lahaye, telling them I need $500 to dispose of a hooker I accidently killed, and if I don't get it, well, the Jews will win. It's been working surprisingly well.

Posted by: tod goldberg | April 29, 2008 at 01:42 PM

Meanwhile, Ed is strangely silent on the matter...

Posted by: Steven Augustine | May 01, 2008 at 04:32 AM

Sorry for the silence, Steven. Snorting blow right now off a homeless man's ass crack, courtesy of my impeccable impersonation of Jonathan Lethem. As for Mark, I'm waiting for Novel #2. So he's been warned.

Posted by: ed | May 01, 2008 at 10:57 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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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."

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen

This slim volume by the president and founder of the Nexus Institute, a European-based humanist think-tank, stands as the most stirring redoubt against the ascendant forces of know-nothingness that we've come across in a long time. A full-throated, unapologetic defense of the virtues of Western Civ – in which "elite" is not and never should be a dirty word – this inspiring exploration of high art and high ideals is divided into three sections: The first looks at the life of Riemen's great hero Thomas Mann as a model for the examined life. The second imagines a series of conversations from turning points in European intellectual history, populated with the likes of Socrates, Nietzsche and others. The final section, "Be Brave," is nothing less than an exhortation to dig deep, especially in times of risk. The notion of nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever before, and there are worse ways to read the accessible Nobility of Spirit than as a crash refresher in the Great Thinkers, free of academic jargon and cant. As a meditation on what is at stake when the pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside by the pursuit of fleeting material gain, however, Nobility of Spirit might well be the most prescient book we've yet read on what's at stake in the current election cycle and in the developing global situation. Agree or disagree with Riemen's profound, ambitious and high-minded plea, you will be thinking about his words for a long time. It's been ages since a work of non-fiction moved us this way. Read it. Discuss it. Argue about it.
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Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick

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Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee

Now, on the one hand, you scarcely need us to alert you to the existence of a new J.M. Coetzee novel, or even to have us tell you it's worth reading. But we can tell you - we insist on telling you that Diary of a Bad Year is a triumph, easily Coetzee's most affecting and fully wrought work since Disgrace. Formally inventive, the book intertwines two narratives with the author's own Strong Opinions, a series of seemingly discrete philosophical and political essays. The cumulative effect of this strange trio is deeply moving and thought provoking. It's increasingly rare in this thoroughly post-post-modern age to raise the kind of questions in fiction Coetzee handles so masterfully - right down to what is it, exactly, that we expect (or need) from our novels. It's telling that, for all of his serious pronouncements on subjects ranging from censorship to pedophilia to the use of torture, it's finally a few pages from The Brothers Karamazov that brings him to tears. Moving, wise and - how's this for a surprise - funny and lightly self-mocking, Diary of a Bad Year might well be the book of the year and Coetzee is surely our essential novelist. We haven't stopped thinking about it since we set it down.
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The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier
*Now in Paperback*

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Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger

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Home Land by Sam Lipsyte

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SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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

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."

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

April 29, 2008

MEANWHILE, WE'RE STILL WAITING FOR OUR TWO HUNDRED BUCKS

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

April 29, 2008

MEANWHILE, WE'RE STILL WAITING FOR OUR TWO HUNDRED BUCKS

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism