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February 19, 2014

My Top 10 Banned Literary Essay List

I have not ranted in a good long while, so:

Herewith this date, any further essays on the following topics are banned, due to my colossal lack of interest:

  • Anything that mentions The Great American Novel.
  • The whole literary vs genre pissing contest (or anything that mentions Jennifer Weiner).
  • Too many male reviewers and/or novelists (or anything that mentions Jennifer Weiner).
  • The ressentiment of the Internet/The evils of Twitter.
  • The Internet has killed civility/print/attention spans.
  • Democratized Self Publishing vs. Gatekeeping Traditional Publishers.
  • The Ebook as a harbinger of End Days.
  • The Ebook as the savior of publishing and writers.
  • Why MFA programs suck.
  • Why MFA programs are awesome.

Please don't get me wrong.  I think that many, if not all, of these topics are of genuine importance. But I have already read your essay.  I read it last year.  I read it the year before.  I've been reading it for the last decade.  And it wasn't interesting or original then, either.  So, editors, if you're thinking of assigning any of these chestnuts, seriously rethink it.  And writers, if you really feel the need to wade in yet again, you sure as shit better bring something new to the discussion.  Because the Internet is starting to feel like Groundhog Day on steroids. 

Posted at 01:41 PM in Hors catégorie, Obsessions |

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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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