The Elegant Variation: DAVID MARKSON DIES

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June 07, 2010

DAVID MARKSON DIES

I lift my head from the gloom to note a deeper gloom - David Markson has died, as has been widely reported.

Little known to the general public, Markson was idolized by a core of fans that included Ann Beattie and David Foster Wallace. He was celebrated for his insights and for how he expressed them, often in paragraphs lasting just a sentence or two. "Wittgenstein's Mistress," his most acclaimed work, and other novels were interior monologues on the state of the world and the state of the author's mind. "Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like" was how he summed up his approach, in the novel "Reader's Block."

The titles noted above are as good a place as any for the reader new to Markson to begin. I have a soft spot for Springer's Progress, an earlier novel that isn't written in the High Markson Style but one that has stayed with me for years. A sad, sad day.

Posted at 04:03 PM in Obit | Permalink

Comments

Sad. I liked Vanishing Point the best of his "seminonfictional semifictions," which are all wonderful.

Posted by: bruckner | June 08, 2010 at 03:52 PM

I'm glad someone among the blogs I read regularly has posted something about Master Markson's passing...If there is anyone who hasn't read Wittgenstein's Mistress (and I know, I know, there are LOTS of you): please go purchase it and read it this weekend. You will laugh, you will shiver, you will thrill, you will have tons of your own formerly forgotten memories of "small" moments in your life come flooding back at you, and I defy you not to cry--at least a sniffle..."In the beginning, sometimes I left messages out in the street..." "Post-apocalyptic literature fanatic, you call yourself? Pah. Read WM. Now. I will miss him...and I'll never get to know what would have come after The Last Novel...because you and I both know there was at least one more in him...

Posted by: RJH | June 08, 2010 at 07:37 PM

Sometime LA Times reviewer Tom McGonigle expresses a dissenting opinion of Markson at abcofreading.blogspot.com. Somewhat unsurprisingly, this has to do with a particular Village watering hole of old.

Posted by: Lawrence Tate | June 09, 2010 at 09:21 AM

Re: McGonigle's dissenting opinion. I don't think he is dissenting about Markson's work, but rather, he calls Markson a "mean and nasty man."

I recall reading an essay by McGonigle somewhere, in which he complains that whenever he runs into Markson in Greenwich Village bookstores, Markson never acknowledged him as a writer.

Posted by: James | June 10, 2010 at 03:58 PM

Markson was exceptional.

Posted by: Edward Renehan | June 15, 2010 at 06:22 AM

Check out http://readingmarksonreading.tumblr.com to see some of his marginalia.

Posted by: Tyler Malone | October 21, 2010 at 12:35 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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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."

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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

June 07, 2010

DAVID MARKSON DIES

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

June 07, 2010

DAVID MARKSON DIES

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