Shel's comments (member since Mar 05, 2009)

Shel's comments from the fiction files redux group.

The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton

I did update it. Starting next year, we'll be rejuvenating this thread and I added suggestions from others as we went. I am looking forward to more Russkis, myself.

Adrian, those are absolutely fantastic.

Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence

Well... as someone who has at least one foot in IT, I'd have to say, um, no.

It's actually safer, because most electronic information is stored in more than one physical location, if it's done properly. And its integrity is easier to maintain in terms of version and replicability.

Also, as to formats - while it may have been the case in the past that people designing formats such as ... say... PDF (portable document format) thought in an analog way about data formats, this is no longer the case. XML is a perfect example of what amounts to a universal language. It makes a blinding number of things possible on the web. And any future markup language will have to be backwards compatible with it, so it was a very carefully constructed language and continues to be carefully maintained.

Also, we are moving more and more away from the "document" that has "authors" as such, so that will change how we think of books, too.

All this goes to say, physical copies have the same limitations as electronic ones, both in terms of physical safety and language limitations.

Think about translations of Dostoevsky - couldn't you compare translating to his works into English for the wider world to the shift from basic HTML to the more advanced, extensible, and usable XML? I think so.

Oh no, please. I would love to talk about it now but I'm trying to be considerate of the holiday stuff. I know how busy it can get this time of year for most people.

You gave me a ton of food for thought on the re-read!

Wow. The altered atlases are way cool too. Nice find, Dan.

Well, I'll try to catch all the devil references but I can't make any guarantees. My religious education is feeble at best and leans mostly toward the non-devil side of things...

Yeah, there is the caught up in the moment feeling to her actions, perhaps the lack of impulse control.

I can remember swooning over a boy who might quote a certain song or poem at a certain moment, and definitely shaking my head afterward, wondering what happened. Now I laugh at it - sing me some Dylan or read me some Byron and I'm yours? Wow. I hope I'm a teensy bit smarter than that now.

Her initial reaction to him was so spot on that I was thinking, why on earth are you even talking to this guy who just pulled up to your house like he's known you for years?! Jeeeez!

I thought that the buildup of sheer terror was - well, that's what kicked me in the gut.

I also wonder if men respond differently, or parents, to this story.

OK, sorry I'll save it for January... :)

Yeah... isn't there one about a book club and Jane Austen or something? I sometimes wonder if those add-on ideas don't come about much the same way rehashes of movies do - it's a "bankable" kind of thing, in other words.

Or I suppose the argument could be made that there's no original ideas so that's what we're left with? I think that's a cop-out.

Another paragraph - wow, her dad was something else...

These criticisms [her father's:], it seems, fell disproportionately on Louisa. Impetuous, high-spirited, and cursed with a sometimes ferocious temper, she resisted her father’s efforts to shape her into a model child. Bronson’s theories could account neither for her violent mood swings nor for the fact that her favorite pastimes included falling out of trees and running away from home. Never guessing that Louisa’s volcanic nature might signify a greater brilliance than his paradigms accounted for, Bronson denounced Louisa in his journals, calling her “unfaithful” and even a “devil.” Louisa tried to parry his critiques with humor, signing early letters to him as “your loving demon.” But Bronson’s faultfinding had deep effects. It took decades before Louisa felt sure of his love in all aspects of life.

I'm wondering why creative impulses and selfish impulses are separate.

But anyway.

I read Little Women countless times as a little girl and always, always thought I was like Jo.

"Teen girls have the power to shape the market because they don't have financial responsibilities, tend to be passionate about their interests, and share those interests socially. If a girl likes something, she's liable to recommend it to her friends; a shared enthusiasm for Edward, or the Jonas Brothers, or anything else, becomes part of their bond. Marketers prize teenage girls, even as the media scoff at them.

If we admit that girls are powerful consumers, then we admit that they have the ability to shape the culture. Once we do that, we might actually start listening to them. And I suspect a lot of contemporary girls have more to talk about than Edward Cullen."

You know, this kind of reminds me of the "revelation" that the women in households make what, 90 percent of buying decisions? And that suddenly we are a "prized" group of consumers? Sigh. I suppose it does no good to get upset.

Too late. I'm irritated. Let me stop before the feminist ranting begins.

I've never read a story that kicked me in the gut so hard. And I've read a ton of her stuff. Whoa.

And on that note I am off to Amazon with my Kindle in hand. :)

I feel a passionate swoony thing with DFW coming on. I may start posting to this thread on a daily basis.

Well. This Phoebe Zeit-Geist thing has peaked my curiosity. I can't find a single synopsis anywhere.

I've read Consider the Lobster, which I enjoyed, but it's been a number of years now.

Maybe it's the latent, unearthed jock in me that loves the sports stuff. It just takes sports to that metaphysical place, you know, the one where we're not concerned about Tiger Woods' infidelity or Agassi's drug use, but the purity of the game.

I know I know I know! I was so excited to see that in the table of contents!

I want to add it to our short story calendar. What fun.

I just started IJ again and I'm in tennis world. I love what he does with the sport.

It turns out that Edna Ferber's The Eldest is not available online, not anywhere I can find it, anyway.

Also, with the holidays coming up, I think it might be best to start up our short story group again in the second week of January. If people really want to get going sooner, I'm game - not much going on for me except maybe a move to a new home - but I'm trying to make sure we re-start at a time when people have more time in general to participate.

I will adjust the calendar accordingly. But I think this will be our first one. And it says it's "for Bob Dylan" -- so this should be fun.

http://www.usfca.edu/~southerr/works/wgo...

Wrapped in a kilt, he's her holiday wish come true.

Priceless.

And not one, not two, but three writers?

You're right Dan...the lack of multi functionality makes it less appealing as a device.

I think what will end up happening is that we will all carry around something that looks like one of those little netbooks and all of our data will come from a cloud, so no need to lug a heavy computer around, and we we will switch our netbooks to book reading mode for reading, which will change the screen.

The reason it has to be a different kind of device has to do with refresh rate and contrast on the screen itself. To look at a screen for a long time, as we all know, messes with your eyes. That's why the Kindle has the screen it has, and the argument that it should go to color is ironically a really bad one.