Patrick’s Comments (group member since Mar 09, 2009)

Patrick’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

I know an area in Philadelphia where Edgar Allen Poe slept in a hotel...I think it is on Germantown Avenue.

I remembered my doctor from high school telling about Kurt Vonnegut doing a lecture about the pressures of budding writers to emulate famous alcoholic writers by trying to drink like them, shot for shot, pint after pint, and trying to become alcoholics themselves. I would have thought they might actually sit down and write a single word THEN drink after feeling bad about failing to measure up to their talented idols.

Yeah...I always thought PM was stories that are beyond my comprension. I was glad to see that The School is a short humoreous piece.

I still think it is a bit of too much coinedence (sp) that everything that passed through the children's hands die. I was surprised that the teacher did not at least feebly quote from Shakespeare: All that lives die... ( I might have to check out that again in Hamlet.)Perhaps he was an incompetent biology teacher rather than an incompentent English teacher.

I live just 30 to 40 minutes away from Reading, PA where John Updike was born. I alway called that place a fine town to pass by at 70 miles per hour.

Stupid me, I typed in John Steinbeck. God forbid if the family in Grape of Wrath came from PA. Otherwise it would be Grape of Wrath complete with sicking dead babies jokes and fart jokes.

'It's dusty here allright. Let me clear out some of the dust.' (Pffffweet!)

I really like that story. It sounds like the author was trying to explain to authorities about all those living things that kept dropping like flies, (which are probably also dead to begin with).

Those children are such little angels...angels of death I should say.

I read 'There Are More Things' by this author. The title is used from Williams Shakespeares' Hamlet. 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than dreamt in your philosophy,' I just got that off the internet. I had to read it twice to kind of get it. He also gave us a homage to H.P. Lovecraft which tells me that Borges was a finer reader as well as a finer writer.

It appears to me a horror short story but yet it isn't. After reading you guys' postings, I am sure the same is true for all genres that Borge experimented with.

He also made an allusion to H.G. Wells and Samuel Johnson. The house itself is designed by an architect who study under John Knox and the narrator's uncle was known as a free thinker. I found it interesting that the designer of the house considered Catholic religion as an idol worship while as a Catholic I believe in that so called idol as that one true God. And the designer pre-humously (I made up that word)added which I felt was very significant in term of one facet of philosophy of leaving everything to interpretions. "Abomination comes in many shapes."

The reader is told to fear something in the form of Iberra, a local thug who is friendly to the narrator, and his report. He reported seeing something so frightening that it scared the horse he had been riding on into rearing up.

I am rather put off that Borges may not have heard of a writer named Edwin Abbott, because the concept of perceptive really fit in his short, clever but boring novel, Flatland.(Sorry but the book is a little dry just like Dante's tour of the Inferno.) For those of you who know Borges' vocarious reading habit, I wondered if any of you know for a fact if Borges happened to read it? I feel the concept of perceptive is shown more in Flatland, and very upfront but Borges's own concept of perceptive is shown in a very very subtle way. To be poetic about it, Edwin Abbott worked with geometric shapes like circle, square, triangler, while Borges worked with geometric lights and shadows. (I believe it was Brian who talked about great works with light and shadows in his favorite authors.)

It was the ending that shows strongely that it was not a horror story when the narrator turned to face the thing described as an animal, or god's, a play on H.P. Lovecraft's way of writing and being unable to describe the horror specifically. I am still mixed up about the word he used which is not in the current dictionary I have. "Amphisbaena." -I just checked it out on the internet...it is a creature born from Medusa's blood that dripped from the grogon's head. It is a creature with two heads, one at one end and the other at the tail or the "butt" end. (Now I know why men driven mad by the horror cackle and screech with laughter. It is darn funny to have a head out of the wrong end.)

The story is a brillant game on leaving the reader to interpret according to his or her belief, and it seems that from reading your previous postings on him, especially about the religion strifes, the writer is content to leave whatever your conscious/conscience dreams of open to interpretaton. I would decribe this story as a Chinese finger puzzle, meaning the events related in this story is helluva a lot closer and and more relative than you would think, no matter how far apart or unrelated they seemed and the only way to get out of this is to push these things closer together until something gives.

I am still wading a bit in his work but probably at the shallow end of the pool, while you stronger readers are already floating at the deep end of his pool. Will check in with his other works that sucked me in. Hope you guys don't mind these long posts. Sorry about the mixed verb tenses because he seems or seemed to be an immortal writer.

At least I moved on from Rerun being stabbed in the balls jokes.

Jonathan wrote: " . . . i just read greg's most recent novel, the last white man in america . . . and let's just say that i used the names mccarthy and faulkner in writing my blurb!"

Man! You must have the brass balls the size of coconuts to use other authors' names in your own review as soon as Brian posted a thread mocking reviewers who use Borges and Kafka to compare rising writers'novels. :)

I think one of his novel appeared to be in collberation with another author or maybe it was a hoax. Thanks for the belly flop warning though...

I just got back from the library and plan to dip my toes in Borges whose name is unfortunately also 'writ in water'. Since I am the kind of a guy who, after dipping my toes, shrieks 'Aiiaagggh! Jesus Christ, Cold! Cold! Cold!" I would probably start with his short stories before taking a belly flop into his novels.

Hmm, looks like Flannery O Conner is trying on her newest cowgirl hat, yee-ha?

It would be interesting to see how a Scotlander would do a regular American western.

Yes...it seemed that O Henry is not the only master of irony and twisted ending. I bet it would have made a great crime story, or a Tale From the Crypt story if it had been gory. It is sad that she lost ten years to replace the friend's necklace that was lost and the horrible kicker ending made it even more harsher.

It seems that Maupassant wrote this like a fairy tale but with such bitterness of reality of everyday stupidity. It is horrible how that brought on such lost years of her desperately making up for that one night of glory.

I have not read Paste yet but look forward to reading it tonight.

Schadenfreude is the word I was looking for, although throughout life I have often been grossly cheated out of that kind of a feeling. For example, one of my friends complained to me that "my mountain bike fell off the wall in the garage and onto my BMW." I was like, "Ha-ha-ha! Douchebag-wait a minute...you own a BMW?"

I am almost finished with Edith's Diary by Patricia Highsmith...It did not really meet my expectations because most of the things Edith had done was really successful, including having her article published in Rolling Stone.

The only thing that she was not really successful at was the family, even though she works 24 hours a day at it. It would have been scarier and enjoyable if Edith was less successful with less things. At least it would have given me a chance to experience that German's expression in German, not sure how it's spelled, that means taking pleasure in others' misfortune.

Hopefully, you would be willing to overlook the part where the moderator yelled at me for whining about not being able to pimp my book, or win friends without people sending me computer virus through myspace messages, and having it ended up with me being laughed off that thread.

I called that event my own personal Vietnam.

For me, it's the "ch's" sound and "d" and "t".

I had to go to speech class and say the words again and again until I start to sound like normal people. It is actually grotesque torture but if you want access to the entire world, you would have to find a way to use sound. After all, earth is spelled with e-a-r, not e-y-e.

Many times, when I go to P.S.D., and tried to work with the Deaf children, they hate it when you hold a dictionary out to them. To the Deaf children, a dictionary is exactly like a crucifix to vampires. They would actually hiss and try to ward it off. I was at first irritated but if you noticed, a dictionary is spelled with D-I-C-T-I-O-N-. a style of speaking. It would be nice if the Deaf children are taught to think diction as a style of writing first rather than a style of speaking then writing.

And the Whysees is a bit of inside A.S.L (American Sign Languagae) joke at the Gate in which the deaf population ask "Why are you watching us?"

The signed question would probably be comprised of two handshapes, WHY and SEE and both of the handshapes are a bit different in shape and movement.

Damn, now I wanna buy a copy. Will look foward to your thoughts on that book, Wittgenstein's Mistress.

Thanks, seriously man. I really need to read these compliments for encouragements. It is a brutal world out there, and I am talking about being a writer rather than being a ward. Readers like you guys make it worthwhile. :)

Brian wrote: "I'm bringing this over from my currently reading status to ask if anyone thinks this is as ridiculous as I see it to be.

I'm reading Pamuk, an early one called The New Life and I hav..."

I always felt the reviewers, the "real" reviewers are just showing off what books they have read. It's like Mark Twain said. (Well to paraphrase him) "A classic is a book that you wish you have read."