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May 30, 2008

Katherine Taylor Says Goodbye.

For the second year in a row, as my guest-hosting week approached, I tried to convince myself, blogging can be fun! And then at the end of the week, for the second year in a row, I remember, blogging is best left to the professionals. Also, guest-blogging should probably not be undertaken the same week a paperback is released, as an easily distracted person is off-the-charts distracted, missing everything from appointments to freeway exits, forgetting what day of the week it is, etc etc etc.

Topics not covered: what the year is like after the release of your first novel, paperback vs. hardcover experience, Elaine Dundy, expanding on the "literary community" idea (specifically the depth and support of the literary community in Los Angeles), Skylight Books and their new space (magnificent! congratulations to Kerry Slattery and everyone at Skylight!), how maybe I should get a dog but am probably too irresponsible, Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, and writing the second novel.

A hearty, loud thank you to Mark Sarvas for allowing me to squat here for the week. And thank you to the TEV readers, of course, who read.

The author is deeply grateful.

Posted at 07:51 AM in Guest Bloggers |

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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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