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

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Dan, Dan, he's our man! Hip hip, hooray!

hugh, i think you can just img src it if you've uploaded it somewhere else.

Yeah, here's what's in the "some html is ok" box (and I never put dimensions or alt tags in, i know, bad accessibility, so sue me):

Oh, shit, sorry. I just realized the damn site is reading my html no matter how poorly I format it.

So use the some html is ok link.

Happy Birthday, Michael!

Yes, Dan. SPILL!

Lauren wrote: "My play opens a week from today!"

Good show, hon!

I think that we've gotten to the point where we have a few good stories under our belt.

This is the thread to discuss the stories comparatively - against one another, against other stories written by that author if we feel like it or didn't cover it in the thread about that story...

For example. The Lady with the Dog and Garden of Forking Paths. Gurov and the labyrinth. How humans relate and connect, then disconnect.

Or A Poor Aunt Story and The Fly. Again, how humans relate to one another, but also how we cope with pain, grief, suffering and conflict in our lives. The boss tortures and slowly kills the fly; the narrator in the Murakami story shoulders an abstraction...

I find it almost an interesting kind of language, though, if nearly meaningless.

My parents used to talk almost completely in acronyms (about work) - when you don't know the acronyms, nothing makes sense. I had no idea what they were talking about roughly half the time during family dinners.

"How was your day, dear?"

"Oh, the S&T called about this RFP for SOVA, which has to go through OMB first, you know how it is, then OGC called about SSA, and then the Wang crapped out and I had to call..."

A sort of common parlance - "I'm going to show you that I know this great writer and that great writer, and then I'm going to mush them together like this (spread Silly Putty on comics page or mix neon green and fuschia Play-doh together) and look what you get! Only I know what you get because I'm just that witty!"

Also reminds me of the film The Player... or Curb Your Enthusiasm, where you see these funny pitch meetings...

It's Terminator meets Steel Magnolias. Easy Rider meets Star Trek. Grease meets Schindler's List.

It is likely going to put more of a burden of finding the 'good shit' onto the consumers shoulders much as it is with searching the internet for specific information.

I think this phenomenon is actually largely responsible for the evolution of Web 2.0.

Lots of information, very little wisdom or intelligence.

If you accept that Web 2.0 is at least in part about intelligence of the collective being superior to the intelligence of one. Or, replace intelligence with experience, discernment, education, or hell, willingness to express opinions. Do that, and you get Yelp, and a hundred other sites. I forget what that one site is, where people who know everything about purses help you pick one... and so now, we have a proliferation of those sites... multiple places for you to tell me about what the best shit is.

Every day of my life is an effort to separate wheat from chaff, to find the good shit.

The grocery store is a perfect example. A bewildering array of products. I wish stores would get smaller. I want them to choose the best paper towel for me - give me, say, 5 options at different price points, not present me with 500 types of 10 different brands. Or toilet paper. Or dishwashing liquid. Or orange juice.

Oh, of course! I fully expect the conversations to continue as people read and then buzz through the threads... and it's all great content, which helps our group grow.

Yeah, time does keep on slipping, slipping... into the future... so far I'm keeping up...

"No, brothers, to love as the Russian soul loves is to love not with the mind or anything else, but with all that God has given, all that is within you.”

Y'know, that's the impression I got from The Brothers Karamazov, too. I think I'm really going to like reading more Russians. It doesn't hurt that I have a friend with Russian parents who know their writers... so if I need help, I have it.

I'm not sure about other Russian writers, actually... I just could not get into The Gulag Archipelago, though my parents really seemed to really like it...

I've heard that's a really good book. We're talking about that assassination by the coward... oh, crap I can't remember ... wait, hold on! look at that search function!

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford? Right?

I added the story at Mo's suggestion, so I imagine she will have some things to say. :-)

I dunno, I liked it. I thought there were some nice turns of phrase. I am not sure I understand the guy's office or why he's so proud of it. I think there is more to understand.

Mansfield - well, this is a woman who led an interesting life, a woman ahead of her time, I'd say. First, she's a woman writing in a relatively new form. Second, she is from New Zealand. Third, she was openly bisexual and led a romantically complicated life. She married a guy, and left him the same day they got married because the marriage wasn't consummated (that's got to be a good story). She was romantically involved with two brothers. And that was before she started hanging out with D.H. Lawrence and members of the Bloomsbury Group. She died after a protracted battle with TB.

I know, I know, that doesn't make The Fly a good story. In fact, I find her life almost more interesting than anything I've read by her. Turns out I read quite a bit of her stuff in college but forgot about it. Which is odd, because usually I don't forget those things.

I remember reading that poem and being completely floored.

An ecstasy of fumbling...incurable sores on innocent tongues... the juxtapositions are incredible...

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

This story was written by Katherine Mansfield toward the end of a long and interesting life. In this stage of her life, much of her writing focused on World War I, because she lost her brother in it.

The generally accepted interpretation of the story is that the fly represents a soldier - such as the boss's son - and the boss represents a general, toying with the lives of soldiers on a massive level not known before in world history.

From what I remember, much of World War I's protest poetry focuses on this same theme - the generals standing in their tents, deciding on life and death of all these young men as though they were God, and the families back home left to cope with the loss. Recall too, that in Europe, losses were much heavier than for the U.S., which didn't enter the war until 1916. 15.1% of the active adult male population in Germany was lost; in Austria-Hungry, 17.1%; in France, 10.5%. In Russia, by 1922 there were at least 7 million homeless children. (All that came from Wikipedia.)

For that reason, after this post I'm posting Wilfred Owens' poem Dulce et Decorum est. The Latin at the end of the poem, called an old lie by the poet, means "It is sweet and honourable to die for one’s country."

But... it's also a story about loss and the lack of the character's ability to face grief of his dead son who fought in the war, about a man in such denial that by the end of the story, after toying with the little fly and finally killing it, can't remember that he was thinking of his dead son.

"Look sharp!" he says to everyone, including the fly - as though looking sharp meant being sharp and prepared or able to survive.

Then there is the antagonist, Woodifield...

So, for example, when Elizabeth is slighted by Mr Darcy at the ball – "she is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me" – the "warrior code" demands she "must avenge her honour ... She meant to follow this proud Mr Darcy outside and open his throat." She's thwarted, however, when a crowd of "unmentionables" pour into the ballroom, and she and her sisters are forced to draw their daggers. "Mr Darcy watched Elizabeth and her sisters work their way outward, beheading zombie after zombie. He knew of only one other woman in all of Great Britain who wielded a dagger with such skill, such grace and deadly accuracy."

Maybe it's my mood this morning - everything seems like small stuff to me these days - but I say, let him take a dagger to a great work of literature if he wants to.

What's next, though... War and Peace with zombie soldiers? Moby Dick with whale-eating werewolves? The Stranger with vampires (wait. That one might actually...)...?

I don't think it will make it into the Western Canon... but I do feel for the paper being used to print it.

Much like it's sitting on my nightstand, and has been for 3 months...

I feel like I might be too distracted by other books and things to really get into it right now. Seems like the kind of book that really needs your focus...

(Go to my profile and scroll down a bit, it's on the right.)

Speaking of adult bookstores and novels, I took a quiz on Facebook about which classic novel I am.

Though I picked the answers most amusing to me as I always do on these quizzes, I ended up being de Sade's Justine while every other friend I have over there ended up being Wuthering Heights or Master and the Margarita. This prompted all kinds of snarky remarks on the part of my friends.

There is a quiz epidemic currently circulating over there, no doubt about it.

I feel like this girl never wakes up again. That this is the end for her. I don't know why but it is something that I feel.

and the very last line of the quoted text reaches me on an emotional level I am not really able to understand.

I thought that, too, Dan - I thought that his fear of her dying was connected with the vanquishing of the poor aunt, and somehow I thought that she might not wake up either.

I agree too with the emotional stuff. I had such an odd mix of feelings. None of them all that describable. At once wistful, relieved, content, sad, joyous... like I had just read something that I would never forget, something that would become part of me in the same way Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have been since I read them.

I know that sounds all new age-y, but there it is.

OK, well, I had never read a single Russian author and loved Dostoevsky last year, Chekhov this year.

I've never really given Faulkner a fair swing at bat. I like that passage. I'll give it a whirl.

I'm sitting here, trying to write. I have my brain-stimulating Creative Mind System 2.0 playing on the laptop. It's a sunny day, the nicest one in ages.

My mind can't seem to come to rest, to walk through the story I'm trying to tell. I can't see what my characters are doing. I can't see what they want.

Can anyone see this poor lady hanging out back there? Can you take her off?