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February 18, 2011

Comments

Anne Fernald

Amazing. I'm going to pop over and read that now. There was a Hogarth Press prodigy--a very young poet--who, in later years became, I'm told, a famous figure in a bad way--that crazy lady who hangs around Cambridge.

I'm glad, I must say, that my 8 year old leaves her stories abandoned for Sponge Bob and Legos.

All best to you, Mark!

Susan D. Anderson

Dear Mark,

I have read the essay about Barbara Follett by Paul Collins, out of respect for your opinions and recommendations. That you don't see what happened with Barbara Follett as child abuse is very disturbing. Any caring parent would see the warning signs early in this essay - four thousand words a day for an eight-year-old is a distinct type of privation - and would not overlook the judgments at the end of the essay:
"Extraordinary young talents are all the more dependent on the most ordinary sustenance...This girl - who should have been America's next great literary woman - was abandoned by the two men she trusted, and her fame forgotten by (the) public...Her writings...taken together...are the saddest reading in all of American literature."

Susan D. Anderson
The Obsessive Reader
theobsessivereadersculturedghetto.blogspot

Sandra

I was fascinated by the article, thank you. I have to admit that I had not heard of her. What a tragedy.
I've followed TEV for some years now and enjoyed it very much, albeit in silence.

TEV

So, Susan.

Child abuse is, I think, a bit extreme here. Unless you consider Leopold Mozart a child abuser as well, in which case we simply come from very different perspectives.

Do I think this article represents a model for good parenting? Certainly not. And did I not describe the tale as "heartbreaking"?

I think anyone who has read me long enough knows the 4,000 word bit was my usual black humor. I'm sorry if it passed you by this time but I assure you, my own daughter will be expected to write no more than 1,000 words a day. Max.

Susan D. Anderson

Mark,

We agree.

Susan

tod goldberg

Mark, that you cannot see that this is also very clearly an act of terrorism is, I believe, terribly disturbing.

Shelley

Glad you're not a "tiger father."

Niall

Great article, Mark. Thanks for sharing. Perhaps I've just been watching the ID channel too much (spouses murdering spouses 24/7), but it seems obvious to me she was murdered by her husband. Poor thing. I see Clare Danes in the biopic.

Judy

I would love to see this tale fictionalized. It would make a great novel. I am daydreaming about who could write it. Fernanda Eberstadt? Rebecca Goldstein? Jennifer Egan?

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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."