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

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Ha! Chewie in a bow tie.

See? There is a reason for these stories. Comedy.

Clearly she wasn't paying attention during the part where you find out they are TWINS.

Good grief, Charlie Brown.

Dan wrote: "Shel wrote: ""

I really liked that book. I read it about 7 years ago. Now I want to reread ..."

I always thought "Popper's Poker" would have been a more fun title. But c'est la vie, he wasn't the one wielding it.

As to the crazy lady and her situation, god I don't want to spoil it for anyone... but I really did buy the idea that there are no people any more. In a post traumatic stress disorder kind of way.

Didn't we have this conversation once over in the originial fiction files about fan fiction?

It's not something I am familiar with; I seem to recall Lauren knowing quite a bit about it.

Anyway, whenever I read about these things I think of fan fiction. I also think of remakes of the movie Footloose.

"The timeless tale continues... The most popular and beloved American historical novel ever written, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind is unparalleled in its portrayal of men and women at once larger than life but as real as ourselves. Now bestselling writer Alexandra Ripley brings us back to Tara and reintroduces us to the characters we remember so well..."

oooh. Dan, the Idea Man. Thanks!

Ooooohhhh YUM. On the list. Right now. Vermont, Irish or French butter. Sea salt... YUM. Wow. I'm hungry.

Neil Gaiman is going to be in Chicago for the Lit Fair this weekend! Accepting an award for Coraline.

Sadly, I do not have tickets.

I was joking with a friend recently about trying to scalp some. But that would be kind of dorky...

... however, I am seriously considering trying to do it for Dave Eggers, who will also be here... :D

Patty, I need to get that radish recipe...! I keep buying them because they look so pretty, but then I get them home and can't figure out what the hell to do with them.

I joined Infinite Summer. I think I'm supposed to start reading... yesterday...?

Here's the cast:

http://www.hbo.com/deadwood/cast/

I'm referring to William Sanderson, who plays EB Farnum

Of course there's also Timothy Olyphant, always hot, wait I mean excellent; the doctor is great; Wild Bill is well-represented; and the character of Joanie Stubbs, I really liked a lot too.

You're making me want to bump up a couple of seasons into my Netflix queue.

Deadwood is excellent. The writing is amazing, the characters jump from the screen. I really enjoyed it.

One of my favorite characters was the hotel manager, played by the guy who was the first Darryl on Newhart. He has these Shakespearian soliloquies that are just ... amazing.

And Calamity Jane. And the saloon owner whose name I can't recall just now.

At its core, I thought, it was about unbridled human nature, steeped in Rousseau's nasty, brutish and short assertions about us as a species, and the arrival of the rule of law/negotiation of the social contract... just as the series Rome was about the decline of a great civilization...

I say let's put it in the group reads the minute it comes out in English...

Afraid we'll be going it alone with my feeble mind on this one, Michael. But I think we're all collectively up to the task.

Hey, didn't JE have something on Witt. in Lulu?

I want first to say that I love Sherwood Anderson. Love, love, love him, can't say enough, total literary crush.

So how did this imaginary love affair begin? Well first, with Winesburg, Ohio. I loved the characters, I loved their... off-kilteredness. I loved the way he built them. Loathed the society that judged them. That book spoke to me probably more than The Stranger did, the first time I read it in the same school year. His characters lived and breathed for me in ways that even Mark Twain's didn't.

Then I bought a short story collection of his called Certain Things Last The Selected Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson a few years ago.

Inside that collection is this story with characters in it from Southern Illinois, which is where my family is from. He captured the dialogue and body language so precisely that I thought, holy SHIT. This guy is a total master. This is exactly how they walk, talk and think. I haven't read anything before or since that so accurately captured the picture of the people I (sporadically) grew up around.

The Egg is a great little story - about ambition, failure, the cycle of life and death... can't wait to discuss it.

http://www.online-literature.com/sher...

I know, I'm starting early.

Well. I've only read enough philosophy to be dangerous at cocktail parties, and I don't know how you've done it but now you have me interested, Michael.

I am not sure about playful. Playful dies pretty quickly for me - when she talks about Greek heroes, etc.... which I read as her telling me that her story is a timeless, repeated one? What I have read of the book so far is for sure therapeutic and personal language.

OK I'm going to try really hard *not* to spoil it for anyone but even in the first few pages any reader can tell the woman has been traumatized by something.

At first I was all struck by the holy-shitness of being the only human left, kind of like when I watched I Am Legend (and I really must read the original story). Omigod! She's burning paintings! That bitch!

But I started questioning her reality pretty early on, and started conceiving of her as this sort of... hermit-like person wreaking havoc everywhere she goes, because after that trauma no other people exist for her.

So personal language. I get that this is what he's playing with. How well does that language translate for an objective reader, how much can we get pulled into the reality of the narrator? Is that what we're seeing? Or am I being too literal?

Totally signed up for that one on FB. Looks like fun.

I think I'm ready for it. I think. 75 pages a week is nothing, in other books... I expect it to be "something" with this one, of course. 11 pages a day, I can do, while writing, running the short story thread, and other stuff.

Ha! Really. How tall are you. How does that fit into hard core-ness?

I'm not saying how short I am. Let's just say I'd make a good elbow rest for Michael.

I dunno, I read it as a kid trying to say he's seen some crazy shit and that he wouldn't pull that with a girl, so everyone in the group should want to go out with him. The "But look! I'm a *nice* guy!" thing... I've heard things like that before from guys, in different, less assault-oriented ways ("I'll give you everything you want, not like that guy who won't take you shopping." "I'll share all the chores with you, not like that guy who sits around watching sports all day." "I'll love you forever, not like that guy who left you."). That was long ago and far away, though.

I wasn't thinking he was all that menacing. But I see where you're coming from. (And I'm not always the best judge of character, too trusting I think is the term used most often.)

Oh. my. The topic list is just... wow.

Apparently Hard Core Chicks like Hello Kitty. And Twilight. And though the group is supposed to be for chicks only, here is a guy posting about what guys are "really like" in comparison to him. Though I had tremendous trouble following this, I think he's trying to make himself... appealing to the opposite sex (I would have run for the hills as a teenager if this had come at me):

well some guys are aholes because they don't tret a girl with respect they only want to grab at them and antaganize them I am really nice to girls I help them out of trouble keep them from getting hurt and get guys off girls from hurting them I look for the personiallity and the charater of a girls not just her looks canbe decieving what about you bella no offince but what do you care what a guy looks lik or what and this question actually goes out to all the girls in this group

To which the response is, and I kid you not (from a girl with a Hello Kitty for her profile photo):

"whoa i want a guy like that..."

Not that I'm making fun, you understand. I mean, these people are working out some serious issues.

That have nothing to do with reading books.