At the risk of sounding like a whiny, pretentious brat, I’m going to go ahead and say that—English major that I used to be (still am?)—I miss some of that high-falutin’ book talk I used to get in college. Gone are the days of debating Hardy over the cafeteria table, replaced with albeit more timely subjects, such as Lohan’s latest relapse, debated over the cubicle partition. It’s gotten to the point where I probably read the same amount as I did in college in terms of word count, except that now it’s all on the Internet and it’s all poisoned with unhealthy doses of snark. And I’m fighting mad at myself about this sad fact. “How did it come to this?” I ask myself while scrolling through Perez Hilton’s celebrity gossip rag. It’s then that I very deliberately dial my browser over to someplace like Mark Sarvas’ blog, The Elegant Variation, in search of signs of intelligence in the universe.
The Elegant Variation is a literary blog and Sarvas is quite a literary-type guy (meaning he writes stuff and all his friends write stuff and when they get together they are all very cool and smart and literary together, I’m sure). His first novel comes out next winter. The blog is heavy on the contemporary fiction talk, part lit-world gossip and chatter, part book reviews, part intelligent idle musings, part pretentious idle musings and, for the most part, eminently readable. Sure, the guy can be a prick occasionally, but that’s what keeps life exciting. And while I hate him sometimes, I also love that he gets me thinking about useless things that still matter to me in my better moments of self-awareness.
Personally, my favorite Elegant Variation activity is to stock up on my feelings of inadequacy by making sure that I take notes on the books he recommends that I will probably never get around to reading. I have a sneaking suspicion that these are mostly books by Sarvas’ friends. But that’s O.K., since he seems to have friends that I want.