Maureen’s Comments (group member since Mar 02, 2009)

Maureen’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Moira wrote: "Maureen wrote: "then ovid would hit on me with his ars amatoria, and i would tell him he'd better watch himself or he'd be getting run outta roma"

Then he could hit on me! <3"

you'd be the carmen, and i'd be the error. :) hi lovely moira! i bet you would also have been the only in my high school that margaret atwood could stand (i've never read cat's eye but apparently it includes her time at leaside. i did just go to my high school reunion so i sort of empathize with her now. :)

do you have an era, or time?

i have to say, that thinking about it, for the modern era, i think the twenties might be it, for me (as much as i like the idea of all the casual sex of the sixties :P)

but then truly, before that? nope. because i would still want to be a girl, even in a fantasy. :)

you know, it was still bugging me that there was somebody else famous like that, and i did another search, and found a similar story about eric clapton. funny, i really thought there was a writer. but you know, i think this happened quite often back in the day. and actually, my mother was 42 when she had me which she thought was too old to have a child and so she walked in the alleys behind our family house to do errands and whatnot while she was pregnant, and so when i was born, my oldest sister took me to the park and people asked if i was hers. she was 16, and very well could have been my mum. but she's not, i assure you. :)

in high school i really wanted to live in paris in the 20s. i thought it would be wonderful to hang out with joyce, and hemingway, and drink absinthe over sugar cubes: meanwhile i bought a couple of airplane bottles of absinthe in mexico at least six years ago i've never bothered to crack. :P

i've always wanted to live in republican or imperial rome, so i could lie around at the bath, get in subway-delay shipwrecks, and drink pearls and gold. then ovid would hit on me with his ars amatoria, and i would tell him he'd better watch himself or he'd be getting run outta roma. :P

what i'm getting at is in most of my time-travel fantasies i'd also have to be fabulously wealthy or well-connected or just as talented as the people in question to do any of the things i'd want to do but since they are fantasies, what the hell, right? but... that said, it does strike me that your california music scene one might be one that would be the most egalitarian, and easiest to access without money or connections or a talent on that scale.

the other day my comic book boys were talking about the same question, and my friend michael said he'd like to live in the permissive weimar republic because he could wear a funny moustache and offer to draw pictures of fancy boys, and he would be able make lots of dough, and be left alone to enjoy it. :)

very happy to help out, elizabeth. i just love five-dollar words. and ten-dollar ones, too. the other day i thought about revisiting the etymology thread just so i could wax poetic about the word "stultified". :)

but also: "why i love and hate little tiny hats on clips". i don't actually know what this means. do you mean those 1920s dealies? or like that god-awful maple-leaf thingie that princess kate wore while she was here on her royal visit to canada? (i don't know what kind of hats she's wearing there. :)

check out this neat preview post about her comics from flavorwire.

fantagraphics is publishing the book in december:

http://flavorwire.com/193282/flannery...

Adrian wrote: "Maureen wrote: "they were raised together as siblings but later it turned out she had got pregnant as a teenager and he just thought she was his sister..."

Are you claiming that Nicholson believed..."

i realize that wasn't the clearest prose i've ever written, mister. i miss you. :)

oh emonk, i just saw this. :)

sweet sweet chinatown. :)

Sean wrote: "Which Chesterton drove you away? I hope not The Man Who Was Thursday...great quote from Maltese! If you've never read the Continental Op shorts, they're really wonderful.. "

well, it was a little something called "manalive" -- i checked the reviews here and people love it, so maybe i am just sour, but i remember really really not enjoying it. i wrote about it on my old msn space which i guess has disappeared from the web... though i notice people are saying it's funny, and i remember not finding it funny at all. but i have a specialized sense of humour, i think :P i did like the man who was thursday, but not as much as the ball and the cross, or the father brown mysteries which i loved most of all. :)

also, love the op! that was my first hammett, and i never looked back. my favourite is red harvest, but i've also read the lost stories and his letters. :)

and don't even get me started on pkd. we have a thread for him, if not several. :)

actually, just reading your exchange with the skipper there, and i didn't find waugh particularly funny either, so maybe you would love manalive! of the waugh i've read, i liked handful of dust best: i love that last story in it very much: the man who liked dickens? you might already know it was published prior as a separate story before it became the end of the book.

anyway! i will stop blabbing now. we can always start a waugh or chesterton thread around here: i don't think we have either. :)

Sean wrote: "Hi I'm Sean. I've gotten to know Johnny E. a bit around the way here in Seattle and somehow landed amongst you. I am perfectly willing to talk about books in perpetuity, like those rats in Stanford..."

woooohoooo! thanks for joining us. we never have enough people to talk to about books, it seems. some of your favourites are still on my list to read but others are deeply loved. i was just thinking about chesterton the other day, and how i let one not so great book chase me away, and that i should probably do some re-reading. hammett sends me into paroxysms of joy, actually. i was obsessing about the flitcraft story in maltese falcon again last week and came upon this great quote from his daughter's memoir about it:

What I remember is his delight in the story -- as if it were a gift he had received that was just right. As a boy he had wanted to find the Ultimate Truth -- how the world operated. And here it was. There was no system except blind chance. Beams falling."

what a moment for a writer! that sweet epiphany. :)

anyway, hurray and welcome!

i love the serial comma. this article does a good job of explaining the clarity it can bring to writing. :)
i know why people moved toward open punctuation (limited space), and so forth, but sometimes i can't read things properly if they're not festooned with serial commas. :)

my message to gloria (and anybody else who is going to the dork for the first time this year):

i'm sorry i won't get a chance to meet you at the next dork (it seems i only get to appear on even-numbered years) but i'm really glad you're going. truly, this is a really great bunch of smart and funny and interesting people who love books. there used to be this thread the skipper (jonny evison, our fearless leader) had started that we'd frequent when we had our digs at myspace called, "dorkapalooza starts now" and it was largely... "hey! i just got back from: library/bathtub/pub/renovating/writing/staring/enter some location/activity here, and i drank some:
mango lassi/bourbon/hotdog water/pints/pinot grigio/sweet sweet coke zero/enter some kind of beverage here, and i'm still feeling a little loose or a little wired but i want to talk to people that i normally talk to about books right now." and then the skipper got a motor home and it was christened the dorkapalooza by us, and then he took it one further and held the first dork (or dorka, depending on your favourite usage) at his home (or in a field? i can't remember i wasn't there -- i only sent cookies) and people have been trekking to the gathering ever since from all kinds of places. i really think you'll have a lovely time. my apologies i won't be there to provide 10 pm lasagna. :P

disclaimer: thinking back (i'm not checking sources for this so somebody may check my version of this origin story as my memory/detail/psychotic break/enter mental state here is not infallible. so i'll say that this might not be exactly, precisely how it happened but i can assure you that the hotdog water was definitely real).

have fun! i might now have to stop following this thread because i'm getting really sad i can't be there and have to be in the dark place (called work) instead of the dork place. :)

hey gloria! welcome to the group! i've just written you a long message that i think more properly should go in the dork thread so feel free to go there to hear me tell you an origin story in babble format. :)

Elizabeth wrote: "This might fit everyone's favorite poems, but these guys lay under the wings when it's finished like creepy little hatchlings. Maybe that's irresistible. :)

G.O.B."

ha! that's absolutely wonderful! i think this is a perfect activity for you all to partake in after drunk bingo. complete with photo ops. i would like you to put many red devils by stephen crane on it for me, please :)

Elizabeth wrote: "Kerry wrote: "Hi Claudia, welcome! I ALWAYS have a book with me too, just for those exact moments!"

Hi Claudia! Also welcome to Mike and Jim.

Claudia, wonderful idea. Kerry, we should put tog..."

i hope this folded collection is an origami bird. a giant origami bird, and its beak sticks out the top of your satchel.

hi elizabeth. do you know how to make giant origami quote birds? :)

Hi Claudia! You are a good woman -- I might be inclined to say "go out with the boys! have fun" then crawl back into bed with my book. :P

what kind of books do you like?

Hi Mike! Glad you dragged your butt over here. Looking forward to debating and agreeing with you. :)

Hi Jim! Welcome! there's a thread micha just started about books and music -- you might want to check it out as i'm sure she'd greatly appreciate any comments you might have in that vein. :)

Hi Oro: i know i know you already but i would dearly love to know if you ever showered with borges, and if that's how you came by the knowlege of his clothes-shower fetish.

Hi Les! I am envious you are going to the dork!

Hi Lavinia -- I love your name -- it's so Roman!

and now i'm all cut up with hellos. i'm happy to see so many new names putting themselves forward -- it's always such a pleasure to get new blood in to talk about books -- not that i don't love the old blood because you know that i do. :)

Jonathan wrote: ". . . i FINALLY got my ticket!!!! . . . i almost couldn;t come because the tax man and animal surgery gutted our finances, but i picked up a bunch of freelance work the past couple of weeks! . . . ..."

agree with kerry! this is wonderful news... i'm sorry i can't be there, but it wouldn't have been the same without the creator of the fiction files being at the centre of the gathering. :)

http://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/71...

god goodreads is being glitchy. i've tried to post this a couple of times now, and it's not behaving at all well.

bottom line, i am still trying to decide how to vote on this poll. i'm not sure i can! i am torn between so many, and the poll has a long list of fantastic quotes, but you can also write your own in! ahhhhh!

nevertheless i am sure are all more capable of making decisions about first lines more adroitly than i. :)

you guys! i still haven't found my copy of moby dick but i just saw this new release on netflix (in canada) and had to tell you about it so we can be horrified (and not in a good way) together. i am quoting directly from netflix here:

2010: Moby Dick
2010 NR 87 minutes
That infamous whale is bigger, badder and a whole lot stronger in this sci-fi reimagining of Herman Melville's classic tale of the battle between man, sea and sea creature starring "Xena" alum Renée O'Connor as the (traditionally male) narrator. But the boat -- now a high-tech submarine -- is also bigger, and Capt. Ahab (Barry Bostwick) is as determined as ever to settle the score and take down the mighty sea mammal that maimed him.

http://ca.movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/...

imdb link in case you can't see the canadian netflix one: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1694508/c...

and lastly, the link to the trailer:

http://youtu.be/lXSHCzCuKzg

i used to trust you gabrielle. xena has made way better career choices, i guess. :)

i like this statement from patty a lot: "maybe being well read just means having read enough to know that you'll never be able to 'finish'"

a character in b. travens' story, "the night visitor" says he has written eighteen books. His friend asks why he has not published and he opines:

"Nonsense! For people to read them? There are thousands of books--great books--which they have never read. Why should I give them more if they don't read the ones they already have?"

i agree a lot of what people consider canon is now subjective, and the net is widely cast. harold bloom has made some efforts to define for us what is western canon, and i hotly disagree with some of his choices. and that is just him trying to prescribe to americans.
here in canada we might be required to read margaret atwood, and mordecai richler and robertson davies in our high school curriculum. if streaming is done in a particular school, a gifted class might read theatre of the absurd playwrights like albee and ionesco, instead of romeo and juliet, and macbeth. and if you move past high school into university, in the same way that ebert's prof inculcated his own tastes into his students, a thousand others throughout the world are doing that very same thing. i agree with kate that no matter what their individual tastes decree required readings for the syllabus they create, as English instructors it behooves them to "remind people of power of words and well-structured sentences, which ultimately contributes to our (English major or not) ability to communicate effectively in daily life".

oro and i have been having a conversation on facebook that reminded me of intertextuality and it reminded me of jimmy's comments here, and previous conversations we've had about this in the ff. he pointed out a b. traven novel has the same plot kernel as an episode in chaucer. i rejoined that shakespeare looted holinshed and ovid for plot and pulled whole sections to boot. what a revelation to me it was when i realized i had read words in shakespeare before, only then they were spoken by medea! at first i was crushed, but then when i studying apollonius of rhodes' jason and the argonauts it was made clear to us that all the textual references and quotes he used were meant to be recognized in the way that the simpsons loads in tons of references to films, and books, and other media, today, and it was only my modern mentality that expected a copyrighted work to be without context. how could you claim to own the right to those words otherwise? i once thought.

i'm going to go ahead and say, i feel well-read. this is not a boast but take as such if you like. i don't much care if anybody else thinks i am or not. i know i will never get to the end, but i appreciate the piles of books that i still have to get to, and appreciate the opportunity to unearth a favourite writer among those unknown to me. it doesn't much matter if that favourite is on harold bloom's list or not. :P and wonderful resources like project gutenberg mean we can all have a say in what remains behind to be read, and savoured. :)

thinking back to other books: Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge (written ten years apart by the same author -- i've been meaning to review these excellent novels for a year now) are both very vivid characters. those books succeed on the strength of connell's depiction of them as a typical WASP couple, and he's able to show you what they're like internally and externally, and how they see each other in reflection in those two books. they are both marvels of characterization, and i truly felt i understood WASP-y people a helluva lot better after i read those books.