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June 10, 2009

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Brooklyn Bibliophile

Good luck juggling all those balls, Mark. Recently I ran across some suggestive research on voles, indicating major changes in male vole brain chemistry after a litter of pups. (Evidently, vole fathers are quite involved in the nurturing and rearing of their offspring.) Researches believe that similar neurobiological changes can take place in male homo sapiens sapiens.

As a father of three young sons, I struggle constantly with the tension between work and parenting. I know you're only a few days into this fatherhood thing, but I'm curious: have you noticed any shifts in your thinking about parenting vs. blogging/writing? Have any expectations or assumptions fallen to the wayside?

TEV

Blogging? Writing? What are those?

Right now, as you no doubt know, everything is so intense and so new, there's really very little emotional or mental bandwidth for anything else. (That's one of the reasons I still haven't posted the Joseph O'Neill interview.) I tried to do some work on the new novel the other day and, after about 20 minutes, I knew it was hopeless.

I suspect once we're settled into our new place (we're moving next month), things might become a bit more balanced. But right now, it's all about the little 'un ... I did tell a friend that when I held Clara for the first time, I became almost physically aware of the rest of the world, and all its concerns, melting away.

Brooklyn Bibliophile

Thanks for the update. There's nothing like that first moment. May you treasure it forever. And best of luck with the move!

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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."