Brian’s Comments (group member since Mar 02, 2009)

Brian’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

i never read jane austen. is this a good place to start? :D

hey greg... nice to see you all sepia like.

James wrote: "Very cool, Patty. Now I guess I have to bring my camera to the Algonquin. Better yet. I just may take a pic of Prescription for Love laying on the damned round table."

yeah j.o... i'm thinking about a pilgrimage to leeanne's home and maybe the hospital.

on a more serious note, i have pamuk to thank for my trip to turkey. kawabata for my trip to japan. and those crazy russians for my future trip to crazy russia. actually it was the book war & peace that made me decide that russia had to be seen. i'm finding that reading certain writers encourages me to go and visit their countries. and i did the steinbeck country tour on a trip to california years ago. cannery row is just not cannery row anymore. but the countryside... the spirit of steinbeck can still be felt.

after russia i'm planning a trip to bainbridge island to look at the tub that writer evison spends so much time in. i just hope the author isn't using it when i photograph it.

Maureen wrote: "i bet swanny is A BIG weirdo..."

think he's showing his backside? :D

I had a weird teacher who encouraged us to be weird. "

those are the best teachers. i had one of those in high school. she told me to analyze the lyrics of a zappa tune as poetry. i chose 'Evelyn a modified dog...'. she also wore these super short mini's that drove all us young boys crazy especially when she stood up to write on the board and the bottom of her skirt stayed folded up exposing her panty-wear... flip-side is her husband also taught english across the hall. he had a small black coffin on his desk and if he caught you ogling over his wife's backside he'd write your name on a slip of paper and drop it in the coffin. damn, this has the makings of a harlequin... a dark-side version.

cajun heat... just the cover changed my life.

thanks for sharing that... you've made me think about things i've never really thought about... which is good because i hate reruns :)

Whysees... i did think literally 'why'-'see' but didn't take that next step to translate it into 'why are you looking at us'. i should have figured that out.

so are 't' sounds a general problem or just for michael?

sorry if i'm veering off the discussion of the book it's just that this kind of had me thinking a lot lately... the whole voice thing. i'm glad you let michael talk in his language.

now i'll have to go and read your blog to see what's going on in the second book. i hope you've allowed a little sunshine to come through. damn, but those wards need a little happiness and a lot of vengeance.

and the back cover is also wicked nice...

Ok Mr Patrick. I'm finished with gather the weeds (I wrote a review on the book's page so won't restate what I said there). This book surprised me. What is the 'it' that surprised me? The shear horror of it. Through your posts here and at the original Fiction Files I always looked at you as a funny guy... the one that drops the post in a thread that makes me laugh. I guess I expected that voice in the book. That off-the-wall wit did sprout a few times... there were a couple of moments where I smiled and gave a little chuckle. But what you wrote here is what I would call a horror novel. Terrifying, man. Sad too. Really sad.

This book taught me a lot about what it might be like to be deaf... something I never really thought about. As I said in an earlier post up there somewhere, the first part of the book was difficult for me to get used to... the language or voice of Michael. I'm guessing the letter 'T' is not an easy sound to make.

Your book also got me to thinking about not hearing and how that effects language... if it does or not, I just don't know. If someone never heard the spoken word, how does the inner voice sound? Does that make sense? I'm assuming it would sound like Michael's speech? You just made me think about things that I never really thought about... that's good.

I'm curious about the name Whysees... I don't think I've figured out why that name... 'Why' as in the question? I've thought about that name throughout the book and just never came up with an answer. Help me out on this one.

I felt that your writing really started to get 'smooth' around page 100 or so... I thought it developed much stronger. This could also be due to the fact that I started to learn Michael's language, but I don't think so.

It would have been nice, for me, to see a bit more sunshine... a bit more true happiness and good things happen to the people in the Gate. Because the subject of the book is so tragic. It is a sad book. But I'm hoping that Book 2 brings a little relief to the remaining inhabitants of the Gate.

Good job Patrick. I'm glad I finally got around to it.

so i'm about to read that book smashed, squashed, splattered, chewed, chunked, and spewed... that book that mysteriously appears and disappears from the group bookshelf. first page, first paragraph... the author told me, the reader, to fuck myself. i like that. kind of makes me think he knows me. it's one of those moments where i feel like the author and reader connected.

thumbing through the book i notice he likes to use footnotes... a recent fad? his footnotes are crazy and informative in crazy ways.

i'm not sure why i'm reading it but i would like to just take this opportunity to say to the author, lance carbuncle, fuck you.

now we, the reader and the author, each know where we stand and i'm interested to see where we go together. i see beers and a dark bar in the future...

yes margaret... it is falling into the horror zone... i'm in the monkey house...

coin locker babies... the first half of the book especially.

brutal... it is brutal. patrick, ever read any ryu murakami? not the dreamy japanese, the twisted one. some of the scenes remind me of his work. it is not for the squeamish or weak of knees. certain garbage cans should not be opened... and white squiggly spiders are best left alone.

i'm enjoying it. i'm somewhere in the middle or thereafter and i find that you're getting more comfortable with the words.

my daughter loves the cover but i won't let her read the book. she's too young. i can safely say this is not a yaya book.

ok... so far... i'm about a quarter through the book. i[tick:] took me a while to understand and ge[tick:] into the 'deaf' language (the 'retard' language i understood and i'd rather not know what that says about me). michael's voice... it's like a new language to me. i never knew anyone that was hearing-impaired, anyone deaf that i interacted with regularly, so never really understood the signing and importance of sounds... especially the sounds. i'm finding this aspect of the book interesting, insightful. (in singapore i remember a bunch of kids who started learning signing so that they could speak in public privately)

anyway... it's the language that's been shining for me. it took effort early on but i think i'm understanding the voice a bit better. i would like to hear more dialog from the 'flowers' as a contrast... but maybe that's to come? thanks patrick for adding this new dimension into the writing.

and now, 1/4 into the book, i feel a weight, something ominous in the air. i have a feeling something is about to happen. i'm a bit concerned... a bit depressed.

just a quick note on the horror/dystopian/sci-fi tags... the horror for me is in realizing that maybe, to some degree, this isn't really a sci-fi novel... it all seems a bit familiar to me... a little dystopia in the 21st century. i've seen it in retirement homes, had glimpses of it in high school, special classes in my elementary school... the knowing that some of this is real to any degree makes it a horror for me. and then a certain german man comes to my mind...

more to come later...

i read his book Concrete Island A Novel last year and really liked it. i guess he decided to stay on the island. good luck to your mr ballard.

I thought I'd throw my review of his book of lectures called Seven Nights here...

This was good. It's seven lectures that Borges gave in seven nights in Buenos Aires in 1977 (that's a lot of sevens). But it felt more like it was me an Borges sitting in a small room across from each other. He started talking to me about The Divine Comedy: Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso and urged me to shed my fears and read the book. He said I would greatly be enriched. So I told him ok, I will. I was a still a bit intimidated by his presence and at that point would have stuck my hand in boiling water if he told me to. Then he started talking about nightmares and I started to loosen up a bit. This guy had some pretty crazy nightmares and it turns out that one of his friends and me shared a certain kind of nightmare... dreams that try to encompass infinity. I wanted to ask questions but he continued on by talking about the book Tales from a Thousand and One Nights and my mouth just hung open. He said he had the complete volumes but would never get to read all of them. Just knowing they were there gave him comfort. And then he went on to Buddhism and my world started spinning. He made me question too many of my foundations... I wanted to scream but he was relentless never giving me a chance to take a breath. This topic more than any he shared with me that night haunted me. Luckily he switched over to the topic of Poetry and I started to relax a little. And then it was on to the Kabbalah and I had to stifle a yawn. It was getting late. I was tired. And I couldn't get Madonna's vision out of my head. But when he told me he was going to wrap up this little talk by discussing Blindness, I perked up. I sat there looking at this old kindly man. I was probably just a greenish or bluish blob in his eyes but I'm sure he noticed that this blob didn't move. He spoke of blindness as being a gift. He said it taught him so much. He ended our time together with a line of Goethe: Alles Nahe werde fern (everything near becomes distant). 'Goethe', he said, 'was referring to the evening twilight. Everything near becomes distant. It is true. At nightfall, the things closest to us seem to move away from our eyes. So the visible world has moved away from my eyes, perhaps forever.'

An excellent book.

Lauren... have a blast on the stage. savour every moment. it's so fun doing things in front of a lot of people. there will be a lot of people there, right?

Michael... happy birthday brother. i hope you kicked a tire before buying that car. you gotta kick a tire to make sure it's good.

Hugh... there's a photo section where you can upload photos. there's a link to it somewhere up there on the right. the section is kind of secret so don't tell everyone.

Dan... :D what more can i say except "colon capital d" and pack coats and boots and a shovel.

Karen... enjoy london. buy books. buy many books. wave to people for me.

Patty... don't turn your back for one minute.

could be mm... but isn't the origin of these women from the amazonian river region?

and patrick, the book, it feels good in the hands. will crack it open and add my share of discussion soon.

never read bros k. know for sure a horse was beaten in c&p. spent an hour leafing through books. a horse was also beat in a chekhov short and faulkner had a horse beat in 'as i lay dying'. horses in lit don't have an easy life. the c&p scene is gruesomely sad and tragic. just found it strange the way murakami dropped that line so flippantly (is that a word?). but then reading murakami is strange.