Shel’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

I've been reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. There must be something in the water...

Welcome!

I tried calling suncadia at 866-904-6301 but no one appears to be around today. I bet they could tell you.

I recently saw the film version of The Killer Inside Me and thought it was really well done.

I know it's not for everyone, and there were a couple of scenes that were really brutal, but I still thought the film was good.

"Friendly local pool shark"? I'm in. And I can't play pool.

Damn. If my telescope wasn't as big as I am I'd bring that too.

Did someone say... Chimposium?

Pennie and Jay sound like two incredibly nice people.

I think that will be enough sleeping space for everyone. Should I bring a sleeping bag or is there bedding? Sounds like this place has bedding, too.

Brian, you have raised the Dork up to a new standard. :)

Brian, please promise me you will get equally drunk in August.

Wasn't Nabokov a trained musician? Maybe I'm confusing him with someone else. I do agree with the music of his word choice. Read it aloud -- sounds like poetry.

I wrote about this book, but who knows how long ago it was.

I read Lolita for the first time in college when I was 19. Our professor deliberately had us stop just before the abuse began and discuss the first portion of the book.

I remember not "getting it" until it was explained to me because -- I guess -- it had never occurred to me that someone would write a book that looks at, or uses as a device (or however you want to put it) pedophilia from the point of the view of the abuser.

Even though American Psycho came out around that time.

I read it again a couple of years ago, mostly from a writerly perspective, which is very different from the ethical one that will step in at some point -- I think it just will, and the book pushes and pulls at those strings on purpose.

Maybe I did it that way because I have a ten-year-old daughter. That really puts a different spin on things. Even looking at it as a work of "literatuah" I could not eliminate how sick the abuse scenes made me feel. Just - sick. Because I know how my daughter is as a child, now, and have the barest sense of what the taking of that innocence would mean.

you're right, Brian. There's a trust-in-the-universe thing that the travel planning part of my brain hasn't quite embraced yet. :)

Thanks, Jennie!

So far it doesn't look like anyone is leaving the 6th, like me. How do we find out what will it take to get someone carless to some point where they could conceivably get to the airport?

Jennie can I get a ride out with you? Sounds like we arrive at nearly the same time.

Arrival: August 1, 1:20 PM PDT (afternoon)
Departure (SEA): August 6, 2:15 PM PDT

I will not have a car and seeing as how I just got laid off on Monday it's probable I won't be able to get one - I am happy to contribute to gas or snacks, etc., though for anyone who will let me sit on the roof!

Aw - thanks you guys. Much appreciated. :)

Thank you! Much appreciated. :)

We have an awesome record store here, Reckless Records. They have CDs and movies too, but the bulk of what they have are records, and there is nothing like flipping through records -- I think we even lost something in going to CDs.

My record store is for musical... adventure. iTunes is - oh, someone told me about this or I heard it on Pandora, so I go find and buy it. Totally different experience.

Oh, and at the Lit Fair last weekend I saw someone in an Elliott Bay tee-shirt! :)

That sounds like a pretty cool place to work, Patty. I think the recommended reading for my workplace is probably something like this, which was required reading when I worked at Fannie Mae...

R.A. wrote And, there's something great about what I call "puttering." Some folks have a different term. It's that state of being surrounded by books (and/or your writing) where "they pull you." Seemingly haphazard, a book pokes out from the shelf, and one picks it up, reads only here and there . . . and then another . . . then "putters" around, waters this or that plant . . . then "Bingo." Something happens. Some synthesis. Some analysis. Some metaphor that incites a wonderful idea.

This is a fantastic explanation I need to use to describe why I do not put my books away. I have a whole piece of furniture dedicated to recent purchases that make up my to-read list. They are stacked in the order I bought them. I look at them all the time. I remember why I bought them, what pulled me to them in the first place. It helps with the writing to have those words so nearby. Puttering.

I just started Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which has been sitting on my shelf since this group read of Ubik.

The other day I picked up What If Our World Is Their Heaven? which is a series of interviews with him about his work that starts with Androids and runs through works of his right up until 2 months before his death. It was a random find at a used bookstore. And I've decided I love interviews with writers since subscribing to The Paris Review.

Anyhoo, everyone's respect here has permeated my membranes to the point where I knew I had to have that book and that I needed to start reading this guy immediately.

The reason at first was the storytelling. Just before spotting this book I was checking out the stack of library-edition Nancy Drews this store had, the bright blue covers and old, campy pictures on the front, and I was thinking, I've lost my sense of story. Now those books had story. They kept you turning pages; I read every single one, more than once. And my aunt says of me that I can't read a book without a colon or semicolon in the title because it's all serious literature and that, I think, began to take its toll on my sense of story. I am noticing with Androids that we have interaction, then a fair amount of exposition that doesn't feel like exposition because it's so revealing, or maybe it's the tone or the humor, but it's so... concrete compared to other stuff I usually read.

I think that in sci fi literature you have to be careful with story. I mean, clearly there's ideology here about empathy and what it means to remain human in a decaying world that our own species destroyed, but to do that he has to weave not just a narrative that we can relate to, but he has to do it in a world we don't know. That is where the fascination is held for me in science fiction movies and TV - but the literature is where, I think, the true point lies. I can discern the point of an episode of Star Trek but I'm not going to pick up the gravity of it, not really, unless I'm immersed in a character's point of view.

OK, I'll stop rambling now about what is probably obvious.

Oh, no reason to buy... I think Netflix/hulu will stream them to you ...

I'll second that. Haven't read the books but I love the show. Anything Alan Ball does has a quirky aspect to it, fantastic music, and this show in particular is fun and campy. Love love love it.