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

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Brian, I want your reading list. You have such interesting stuff on it.

These days I go with whims. Recently I had an Emily Dickinson month. This past month was Jack Kerouac. Earlier this year, Faulkner. I find myself deep diving into familiar work.

I think those writers and the passion with which I pursue their work for about a month at a time are all about what's happening in my life right now so I'm rolling with it. I think it will be interesting to look back on what I was reading, and what I wrote about it in my journal, a year from now.

BUT... when I get my head back on, get a job, move, etc. etc. I still have a reading list created from our MySpace group with about 200 titles on it, recommended over the course of what, two years? I used to just pop the word doc and copy and paste titles in there. Near the top is The Magus, so that may give some of you an idea of how far back in time that list goes.

I'm also really liking some of the kids' books that we've been reading lately. This year we started reading together in the evenings and I've been reading everything from Diary of a Wimpy Kid to Swiss Family Robinson. Some of the books my daughter is reading are really amazing -- The Underneath and The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Brian, I want your reading list. You have such interesting stuff on it.

These days I go with whims. Recently I had an Emily Dickinson month. This past month was Jack Kerouac. Earlier this year, Faulkner. I find myself deep diving into familiar work.

I think those writers and the passion with which I pursue their work for about a month at a time are all about what's happening in my life right now so I'm rolling with it. I think it will be interesting to look back on what I was reading, and what I wrote about it in my journal, a year from now.

BUT... when I get my head back on, get a job, move, etc. etc. I still have a reading list created from our MySpace group with about 200 titles on it, recommended over the course of what, two years? I used to just pop the word doc and copy and paste titles in there. Near the top is The Magus, so that may give some of you an idea of how far back in time that list goes.

I'm also really liking some of the kids' books that we've been reading lately. This year we started reading together in the evenings and I've been reading everything from Diary of a Wimpy Kid to Swiss Family Robinson. Some of the books my daughter is reading are really amazing -- The Underneath and The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Oh Christy, it's my fault the discussion died. I thought I could handle it -- no really -- I thought that I would dive right into and consume myself with discussions here, with major changes in my personal life but I was mistaken.

Anyway, House of Mirth, in a nutshell.

Spoilers!

Lily Bart to me is Wharton's penultimate woman character, other than the Countess in Age of Innocence.

She can't quite bring herself to totally play the game. She blunders, she even knows she is doing it, but can't stop herself.

She understands and sees the game for what it is but I'm not so sure she ever sees a way out of it - glimpses are all she sees, and those glimpses are unappealing (her mother's assertion that you either live like pigs, or you live as they did).

Selden helps along her perception but plays with her, cat-and-mouse style, not seeming to grasp what's at stake for a woman like her. I view him as a too-little-too-late character in her life. I have a few of those in my own life.

In the end she does seem like a woman tossed about by her society's rules, unable to even take one small step outside the lines without paying dearly. I feel for her, I really do, and I think that the only thing she can do is die.

R.a. wrote: "I recently finished an anthology of Mansfield's stories which, on the whole, I enjoyed very much.

I couldn't help but notice the Chekhov influence.

It's interesting how Woolfe found Mansfield..."

Mansfield's lifestyle probably posed more of a threat to Woolfe than anything else. I know that sounds kinda girly and catty but think about it. Mansfield was known for living this bohemian lifestyle full of passion and lovers and travel, and here's Woolf, married, depressed, trying to create art in what I would call an extremely repressed life...

But I realize I could be projecting... ::laughing::

Is it really December? Or, wait, almost December?

I can hardly remember my year. SmartyKate told me it would be that way, and so it is. That SmartyKate earned her nickname.

Maybe this is the year I just write off, so it's just as well I didn't get terribly serious about Infinite Jest.

OK. So what's your favorite Kerouac.

Mine is Dharma Bums.

Honestly, I'm partial to beat poetry more than the novels because there is some confusion in there about Eastern philosophy... but I love On the Road, too.

Wait. Could Franny & Zooey be considered beat literature?

You hit my procrastination bone at precisely the right moment -as I was writing out my Thanksgiving plan of attack.


1) What author do you own the most books by?
As a percentage of work, Faulkner. Somehow I ended up with 7, I think.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
Light in August. Three. I have lots of doubles of French books, though, in French and English. Or, I used to until I gave them all away.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
No. Like my children fighting in the car's back seat, I tune it out.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Edward Cull...just kidding. Probably Darcy.

5) Who is your favorite fictional character?
I'm partial to the Blooms in Ulysses.

6) What book have you read the most times in your life?
Little Women or D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths, probably a tie.

7) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
I was really into Nancy Drew.

8) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
I started reading Twilight to my daughter. We both agreed to abandon it. Our eyes were rolling too far back in our heads to read the words on the page.

9) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Light in August.

10) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
I'm not tagging. But I'd say The Dead by James Joyce.

11) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
Oh good grief I don't know.

12) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
Can't think of one. Movies ruin it, most of the time.

13) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Infinite Jest.

14) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
There was this one with a vampire and a werewolf... I'm sorry! I already procrastinated with Twilight today.

15) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
DaVinci Code.

16) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
I'm still reading it. Infinite Jest.

17) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Shakespeare. Hands down.

18) Austen or Eliot?
Austen. Again. No contest.

19) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
Russian literature and Faulkner. I kept buying them but haven't really made the effort yet.

20) What is your favorite novel?
I have too many favorites.

21) Play?
I really like Streetcar Named Desire but I'm not super well-read...

22) Short story?
Ha! The Dead! Of course.

23) Work of non-fiction?
I read The Gulag Archipelago - that counts, right? I don't read a ton of NF.

24) Who is your favorite writer?
That's such a loaded question. I can't pick one.

Oh God. You mean there's VIDEO?

I was just talking about this album with a friend on Facebook who saw a show of theirs.

In fact, it was hearing "One Fast Move Or I'm Gone" a few weeks ago that tossed me into a full-scale Jack Kerouac reverie.

One of these days I will not be swayed with deep, month-long passions for certain writers, and focus on Infinite Jest.

Then again, maybe that's just who I am and I should embrace it, as he did: "My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?

Roman candles and Goethe. Somehow it all fits.

There are certain writers I regard as seminal to my development as a human on this earth. Kerouac is one of them.

A high school boyfriend of mine couldn't believe I hadn't ever read the beats. He showed up the very next week, on my 17th birthday, with about 20 books. Among them: On the Road, Big Sur and Dharma Bums (along with Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others).

(Good boyfriend. One of the best - what an amazing gift.)

And Kerouac has staying power. His work means different things to me now - now I focus on the musicality of his language, what he was doing with jazz and words -- not as much on eating fallen fruit -- but still.

Driving home last summer from downstate Illinois, one of my favorite DJs (Vin Scelsa) started to play a recording of Kerouac reading one of his poems. It was one about a jazz club. Driving through corn fields rising ten feet high around my car, kids in the back seat, I was transplanted to a jazz club in the 50s.

Staying power.

Say what you will about the benzedrine, the improvisation, Capote's "that's not writing, that's typing" comment, but there was a flash of something in Kerouac that touches so many of us, really far in.

Does anyone have a special place in their heart for him, as I do in mine?

I read The Year of Magical Thinking and cried on practically every page, more from what was not said than what was.

Congrats, Martha (and to your son, too)... well, maybe a little early, but still!

I like Selden best, and in a way I think he is a foil for Wharton.

Lily is tragic enough to feel sorry for, but not necessarily like.

I can't believe two people posted to my thread! Now I can write a bunch more. :)

Watch out! JE is a tyrant about the syrup... You'd better bring a few bottles with you and hide them all over the kitchen.

Then we can play hot and cold until he finds them.

I'm in, and this time I promise to help more in the kitchen... :)

Happy birthday JPO!

Ooo! Ooo!

Last year I bought a 1903 set of his complete works for $30!

The person who owned them had no idea what they were selling for practically nothing.

His travel journals are incredible.

Dan wrote: "Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar made an album Kerouac's novel Big Sur. It comes out on the 20th but you can listen to it on NPR now.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st......"

I've been hearing this on Sirius - The Loft. Pretty damn awesome.

OK, so the patterns.

I find that the book is full of - mini-plays, if you will.

Scenes are set, and there seems to be a definitive end to them. Then you get a chapter of back-story... then moving forward.


I wonder if the boring, lifeless, dull parts are sort of... this is what life really is for these people.

I will have to think on this one more.

I kinda think thirtysomething, but that may be because I wasn't thirtysomething when it was on and it all seemed like whining to me.