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

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Jonathan wrote: ". . .also, if digital takes over, expect to see more talented would-be novelists jump ship to write for tv and film, because a novelist can't survive on 7% of 9.99 retail . . . it's certainly not good for anyone dedicating their lives to writing novels(at the risk of starving) . . . i dunno, if you're gonna' use a bunch of bells and whistles, why bother using novels at all? . . .why not just create some lousy hybrid medium the kids will like more . . . "

You mean... like... graphic novels? ;)

Jonathan, I'm about as old fogey as it gets about books. Witness my ever-growing used/older edition library. Well, I guess you'll have to take my word on that one, actually.

I'm just saying, let's not negate the possibilities.

No, seriously, I know you're not that shortsighted.

Can't you see a future in which the devices are donated to schools much like one laptop per child? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Lapt...

Or the schools where reconditioned computers get installed all the time?

And haven't you heard about schools where aging textbooks have to be shared?


All that's needed is some critical mass of the texts themselves and a foundation whose mission is education. Two years from now, max.

Hm.

Dare I say, I beg to differ.

I think there are lots of possibilities out there for building communities of readers much like this one, using apps. I think that, when viewed through the lens of connecting people to the books and to one another, good things can happen. This is the evolution of MySpace, and the web itself, that we are watching.

I can see a social networking app based on books being read by people all over the world, and being invited to join a discussion chapter by chapter. If the keyboards on these devices become more usable, that is. I can use the one on my Kindle but it's probably easier on the iPad.

I'm not on anyone's bandwagon and I'd be the first one to say that there are terabytes of uselessness out there. I think apps are really just a way for people to organize their online activity in a world (the web) that is simply overwhelming due to its lack of organization and it's yet another attempt companies make (that will fail) to dominate the web as a commercial enterprise and not a knowledge-sharing one.

I also think that dismissing things outright because they're not comfortable for us is to deny possibility or evolution of the role books can play in our lives.

My mom told me of this saying in the south about how a woman can hold a knife inside her - strength and the ability to fight - and a butterfly, to learn how to act with grace in even difficult situations.

The trick is to learn how to be a butterfly even when the knife is being or could be used... and it seems like Harper learned how to be the butterfly, while Salinger had the knife out all the time.

I'm a child of the 80s. I admit it. So when I think of Isak Dinesen, I think of "I had a houuuuse in Ahhhhfreeeekaaaah." And Outback Red shirts. And long suede skirts. And Meryl Streep and Robert Redford and record players and colonialism.

And in looking her up really quickly, I had no idea that she was Karen Blixen and that Out Of Africa is autobiographical! I should probably read the book.

Anyway, I read Sorrow-Acre for a seminar I'm going to this weekend and holy crap.

This woman can write.

Anyone else read her stuff? Thoughts?

My cousin found this article about what some authors had to say about others. I pasted some of the more interesting ones here. The article is at http://www.examiner.com/x-562-Book-Ex... .

1. Ernest Hemingway, according to Vladimir Nabokov (1972)
As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

4. Edgar Allan Poe, according to Henry James (1876)
An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

9. J.K. Rowling, according to Harold Bloom (2000)
How to read 'Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone'? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, according to Vladimir Nabokov
Dostoevky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity -- all this is difficult to admire.

15. James Joyce's Ulysses, according to George Bernard Shaw (1921)
I have read several fragments of 'Ulysses' in its serial form. It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon around Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed, foul minded derision and obscenity.

24. J.D.Salinger, according to Mary McCarthy (1962)
I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can't stand it.

25. Mark Twain, according to William Faulkner (1922)
A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

Congratulations, Martyn!

Chinua Achebe is considered one of the first and greatest writers about the era of neo-colonialism.

That era, in post-colonial Africa, was about what happened once the colonizers left, and the governments that took their place were just as bad, if not worse, in terms of its treatment of citizens and care for the country as a whole. In other words, the "natives" that replaced the "colonizers" were only interested in taking for themselves, only interested in treating countries in Africa as places from which to gather natural resources and sell them to "first world" economies.

Considering that nearly every country on the continent was arbitrarily formed after World War I with absolutely no consideration as to the people living in the various areas, and the subsequent total exploitation of the resources of the countries... well... Achebe was a little pissed off.

His most famous book is Things Fall Apart. He also wrote a famous essay about the colonialism/racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Among the things Achebe and other authors of the time struggled with was how to go "back" to a civilization and culture that no longer existed. The fable is a traditional method of passing values down in the verbal cultures they wanted so much resurrect in their "pure" and "true" form. So, what is the genuine literature of a group of people who values the spoken over the written?

That's what I know of Achebe.

Remember all the little people who love your purple socks! :)

A friend gave me a gift of Catcher last year that looks like a pulp fiction novel. It was the one they published in the Times next to his photo when he died. I know it's in a thread here somewhere. I can scan it if you want and email it to you.

I have a similar pulpy version of A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

I love this! A high school acquaintance of mine designs book covers -- he designed Her Fearful Symmetry, which I see advertised on here all the time, Point Omega by Don Delillo, The Mercy Papers, Half Broke Horses (endless list, really) -- here's his book cover blog:

http://bookcoversanonymous.blogspot.com/

http://www.englishdaily626.com/storie...

In two parts.

Starting April 19... only a month late!

I saw a Matisse exhibit this past weekend and this Burroughs essay makes me think of it.

Not just for the obvious cut-out betes de la mer reason, but for what Matisse was trying to do, and what the exhibit I saw showed him working towards - an art of the elemental, the fundamental, the geometric, the focused, the stripped down, the recombined, the reimagined, the play with dimension, perception.

Welcome back! I have been told I have a very comfy couch.

Dramatic reading of Prescription for Love.

Yeah. That's the ticket.

I have a good friend who writes an amazing blog. She wrote this post about love and service, about how we are everyone, even George Bush. It made me think about all that we share between us, even collective fear and anxiety, which made me think of this story.

http://www.lovehateflow.com/2010/03/2...

The New York Times has a tag list that includes DFW, so you can see all of the references to him in recent stories:

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/ta...

Well, I was trying to question what the ritual of human sacrifice might do for a society. What something so built on fear is all about. Whether or not it's a collective exorcism of evil or anger or fear or repressed versions of those things.

But there are so many things to question, aren't there? It's almost hard to get to the fundamentals, there is so much minutiae. Words like "values" and "culture" stand in the way of digging down, all the way, to the first principles.

Every time I get a flier from that hotel on Mackinac Island I think of whatshisface riding up on a white horse and sand in a bathing suit.