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

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Isn't my mom cute, you guys? She's awesome. I wish she would post more!

Anyway. Back to the regularly scheduled programming.

I think uncritical love is the only kind that counts.

Manana... not a lot of work on the novel this summer, I've been busy ending my marriage. So soon. Soon. Promise.

I must post a retraction, per my mother.

She totally gave me a well deserved smackdown in email!

She reminded me that she read Rudyard Kipling and Carl Sandburg to me all the time. She also tried to read Tale of Two Cities and Mill on the Floss to me, apparently, which didn't go over as well.

She is, after all, the one who gave me The Good Earth when I was 14.

Mea culpa mom. Of course you were, and still are, far more of an influence on my reading habits than my teachers.

Martha, Alex generously read a draft of mine from a novel I'm working on.

He deserves a whole bottle to himself, just for that.

Alex, can I just say that totally, uncritically, I LOVE YOU.

And it's not the wine.

Wow. I was really lucky to have some amazing teachers.

I just found out my physics teacher from high school won a national award this year.

I had two fantastic English teachers who taught me for three years in high school.

(My math teachers were slightly less than inspiring.)

My parents read a lot... of spy novels. When I brought home Howl as a teenager I think my mom was worried.

I read a lot as a kid because there was nothing else to do. Literally.

Wow. I was really lucky to have some amazing teachers.

I just found out my physics teacher from high school won a national award this year.

I had two fantastic English teachers who taught me for three years in high school.

(My math teachers were slightly less than inspiring.)

My parents read a lot... of spy novels. When I brought home Howl as a teenager I think my mom was worried.

I read a lot as a kid because there was nothing else to do. Literally.

OK, everyone, bumping this thread...

I LOVE SHERWOOD. I should have named my son Sherwood.

Patrick, I think it would be fine to let the kids vote on a selection, say, once every six weeks? But a whole year... yes. The kids are shortchanged. It's a teacher's JOB to GET the kids engaged in To Kill A Mockingbird...!

I like Captain Underpants, but Diary of a Wimpy Kid is way better.

No. This is NOT a good idea.

As the stories were a collection of epiphanies...I would dare say that The Dead is the tale of how Ireland betrayed her own spirit...and the spirit of its people...echoed in personal acts...and the dawning of such realisations.

I hadn't thought of it this way, Martyn. That does explain the final paragraph about the snow falling all over the Ireland that Gabriel is so sick of.

Welcome Rebecca! Glad you could join us.

The political stuff makes me think of Portrait, the first chapter, the Moo cow one where our protagonist is at a dinner table and Parnell is being discussed.

The "symbol of something" moment is one of the moments where the idea that this is a life changing moment for Gabriel falls apart. It seems as though he doesn't come to any deeper understanding of her as a woman and individual. She is still a symbol, of some...thing.

That said, at the end, I think that realizing one's mortality - the finality of your own and that of others - probably helps along the idea that loving and being loved are probably the two most important things in a human life... just maybe.

I like this soapbox. Can you stand on it with one foot so I can climb up, too?

With Joyce, one might suspect that the colors are about Ireland or Irish history.

red, yellow and green.

I think you're right, the military allusion is unmistakable. Rival ends of the table. colours of their uniforms...

I read that last part of the story again last night, Michael and SmartyKate, and cried like a baby. Well, not like a baby, but still. I'm right there with you.

I'm still holding onto my thought that Gabriel isn't really transformed, but my toe is starting to cross the line into thinking... maybe. Just maybe.

As long as it's a warm Guinness, I think it would be just fine.

It's hard for me to focus on mortality these days (trying to stay positive...eh, what for), but I am inclined to agree with both of you. Particularly being annihilated by another's perspective. Well said.

So, Martha, how's it goin'? Should we just sit here with a bottle of wine and some good pasta until the others get here? Play a round of bingo while we wait?

Personally, I'm hanging on my patio with a glass of fantastic wine and some kick ass music, probably by a group from Austin, blaring out the sound of the trains below.

And so... my reading list grows... again.

It's a wonder I ever finish anything.

There was a time when reviews used to be considered criticism because they used to be thoughtful.

The reviews I like now are written almost exclusively by writers because they have that lens into the work being a result of the creator's craft.

And I like Michael Dirda. Because I've read him for years.

Criticism in the strictest sense... is now relegated to the use of theory in the ivory tower. It has its uses, I suppose. I probably use what I studied all the time without really thinking about which theory I'm using, mostly because it was beaten into my brain for 4 years.

My kids asked me what I was reading. I flipped to page 67. They both play tennis for fun and so I read this to them, realizing that sports as a metaphor for life is done so eloquently here and sounds like DFW might be just talking:

In this dream, which every now and then still recurs, I am standing publicly at the baseline of a gargantuan tennis court. I'm in a competitive match, clearly: there are spectators, officals. The court is about the size of a football field, though, maybe, it seems. It's hard to tell. But mainly the court's complex. The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convoluted as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net. I stand there tentatively. The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It's simply huge. And it's public. A silent crowd resolves itself at what may be the court's periphery, dressed in summer's citrus colors, motionless and highly attentive. A battalion of linesmen stand blandly alert in their blazers and safari hats, hands folded over their slacks' flies. High overhead, near what might be a net-post, the umpire, blue-blazered, wired for amplification in his tall high-chair, whispers Play. The crowd is a tableau, motionless and attentive. I twirl my stick in my hand and bounce a fresh yellow ball and try to figure out where in all that mess of lines I'm supposed to direct service. I can make out in the stands stage-left the white sun-umbrella of the Moms; her height raises the white umbrella above her neighbors; she sits in her small circle of shadow, hair white and legs crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.

The umpire whispers, Please Play.

We sort of play. But it's all hypothetical, somehow. Even the 'we' is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.

Is that a Molly Bloom YES or just a regular old yes?