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

Maureen’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Carmen wrote: "I was wondering where you guys went. Used to be on this group when it was on myspace."

glad you found us carmen! i left a note! ;)

Joseph wrote: "Maureen,

This group seems to attract people of taste,who also share my love for the short story. Besides, you speak Italian(or at least know how to say,"Do you understand?") That's good enough..."

Hi Joseph:

welcome to the fiction files redux!! and thanks for taking the time to introduce yourself to us. Our skipper Jonathan Evison must be given the credit for bringing us all together on myspace -- i just spearheaded the move to goodreads. :)

i grew up in a multicultural neighbourhood, and my calabrese neighbours spoke italian to me until i came to understand enough to reply. i've lost quite a bit over the years though: when i was in roma a couple of years ago i found it easy to understand but i was pretty shy in my speaking. thanks to my italian neighbours, i also came to love an occasional frangelico, and sauce that's been canned by a big italian family. :)

people who come to the group to talk about writing and books are more than welcome to tell us about the books they are publishing or working on -- we just hope that you will come back now that you've introduced yourself, and join in our discussions. we know that sometimes it hardly seems there's time: the skipper is a writer himself, and has less time than he used to to keep the conversation flowing (it was amazing how much work he put in!) but he still makes an effort to come by and keep us up to date on what is currently out there. a lot of our other authors do too: for example, you'll see posts from keith dixon, and james p. othmer, and patrick kilgallon throughout the threads.

thanks for dropping by and hope to see you again soon. i am sure shel would love it if you dropped by her short story threads. :)

happy birthday michael! i hope it is a wonderful one.

and lauren, you knock 'em dead for us, cream cheese angel. pull a susan boyle, even though you like paul potts better. :)

p.s. i'm waiting for dan to announce his news. :)

Patty wrote: "re: the protection of the general, i'm still curious about it. it seems to pervade the culture of this novel. the daughter wants to protect him, the district attorney wants to protect him, the hea..."

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SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING HERE -- DON'T READ IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHODUNNIT.

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the story goes that when they were writing the screenplay, faulkner and brackett contacted chandler and asked him who killed owen taylor, the chauffeur that according to police opinion was blackjacked and murdered, and sunk in the car. chandler was infuriated at first, but then admitted that when he checked the book he realized he'd never resolved it. in fact, when marlowe's meeting with wilde, and ohlms, and the c-named homicide detective, he says to them that they have two murders on their hands and they've both been resolved. marlowe's opinion that they could claim suicide to cover the murder of owen taylor (the official explanation in the papers) doesn't tell us who murdered him but it seems that chandler accepted it himself, forgetting he still hadn't given a satisfactory explanation for who killed the chauffeur when he put these words in marlowe's mouth. was it carmen? or brody, even though everybody insists that brody is NOT the killing type? he's a two-bit operator: chandler stresses his reluctance to use a gun, and it leads to his demise: he gets killed by a heartbroken lover, not somebody who is accustomed to the act.
when i checked IMDB, it mentioned that in one cut of the 1946 film they resolve the murder but they don't say how. if anybody knows, they should step forward. otherwise, i'm going to have to watch it (i actually do have the double dvd which has both versions) to find out. :)

yes, the general. there's still been no satisfactory explanation offered, has there? but here's the thing, in some ways the construction of the novel has some beautiful parallels. (THERE'S STILL SPOILERS here if anybody is concerned -- really. i mean it.) the book opens as i see it, with a description of the portrait of a man who could have been general sternwood, and then immediately introduces us to carmen, the killer. these two characters propel the novel and he begins and ends the action with them.

the first sustained description we are given in the sternwood (stern in the name) household by marlowe is of the portrait of a man who couldn't possibly be general sternwood. is it not? i think it is. it is of a man who was greater than other men, and now he is old and laid low. he was a knight above all knights, if you take the earlier analogy, and marlowe explictly echoes it in the novel. marlowe's honour is innately tied up in courtly love practices, or his perception of them, anyway. i would imagine most people who take on law enforcement roles, or in the case of the butler who seems to have a military past (perhaps he served under the general in war time? actually it's likely all of them served in some kind of war. marlowe did, no? i'll have to double-check) all seem to be the type to venerate and honour this kind of man. even mars using the epithet "soldier". so perhaps this portrait is the key to what you are trying to place your finger on. that all these men in the novel honour him for what he was, and know that he deserves better than they. he outranks them all. and the daughter is loyal no matter what else she is.

swanny, i hope you're not grading these posts. patty thank you for making me think. :)

more to say but i've blabbed on forever about this it seems. it may be that i've just watched white christmas too many times. :)

Slowrabbit wrote: "guilty here. i still enjoy the mashup love child game.
Mickey Spillane and Harriet Beecher Stowe... that's hilarious.

but if i'm looking for serious reviews of something i wouldn't look here or..."

i love you patrick. :)

Brian wrote: "i'm guessing at this... filipinos abound in singapore mostly as house helpers (maids). sundays are their day off. on their day off they all go out to the parks, some to the shopping center, many to..."

thanks for the impressions brian. i think that's closer to the mark than flip prostitutes myself. but then again, i am a big fan of chicken adobo. :)

the book is a fast read. i'm done. you should add it to the roster. i found myself wanting to read the long goodbye again...

oh, let's add a little bit of racism to the sexism, and homophobia, as i've just run across the line:

"cute as a filipino on saturday night"

i have no idea what this means, and in doing a cursory search of google for the answer all i discovered was a bunch of reviews from people who really don't like this book, primarily because they think it is dated because of stuff like this.

i don't want to get into a whole sub-discussion of whether a novel loses its power because it's not socially acceptable to be sexist, racist, and homophobic anymore but i am curious if anybody has an annotated version of this book that might shed some light on the origins of this "quaint" simile.

all right. so i haven't made much headway but i wanted to chime in on what you guys have been discussing:

plot vs action: i think anybody who has read a lot of chandler, and is familiar with his style balks at using plot in a positive sense while discussing him. the plot usually indicates a plan of some sort and it's generally accepted that chandler's plots meander and have dead ends and don't actually make sense sometimes and that they didn't, even to chandler himself.. there's no through line. so while you are a propelled along by chandler in a whirlwind of action sometimes that action goes nowhere, and does nothing to serve the plot. i don't want to give any spoilers for those of us who haven't finished the novel yet, but there's a famous example of this here, in his first novel. you could of course argue, that life doesn't resolve itself in neat little packages and therefore the fact that things are left unresolved only serves to make the stories more realistic. for myself, i'm too busy enjoying the ride to be bothered by his loose plots.

dialogue: the passage that kerry pointed out is a wonderful one. i am always floored by the rapid-fire dialogue that comes out of these character mouths but it never feels awkward to me. actually, when the tv show dawson's creek was on people said, "teenagers don't talk like that" and i thought that was ridiculous. teenagers talk whatever language they feel is appropriate for the situation they're in. chandler's characters and their milieu beg for jaded, wise-cracking, pontificating dialogue: a verbal pas de deux. it's not like they're saying what they really mean half the time anyway. :)

speaking of milieu: chandler is definitely immersed in los angeles. you can picture los angeles in his writing. i thought this metaphor was interesting:

".. A big curly-headed Irishman from Clonmel, with sad eyes and a smile as wide as Wiltshire Boulevard."

quite often a metaphor helps a reader visualize a concept by invoking something familiar to them e.g. "as fierce as a lion" and yet, i think this simile does the opposite: it informs us that Wiltshire Boulevard is a damn wide street if it's been used to invoke the smile of the obviously winning irishman. so some kind of knowledge of los angeles begins to permeate the reader.

patty's remarks re: the general and his daughters are well-founded i think. it appears that marlowe takes the general's excuse that he deserves their trouble-making for having children at the age of 54 at face value. i really don't think it has to do with detective/client relationship so much as it has to do with his perhaps unfounded veneration of an old man who accomplished much, a long time ago. marlowe has his code of honour, yes, but i think it's often based on his gut instincts, and he tends to sell women short. let's not even talk about the gay characters, please.

of course, the hard-boiled genre needs a mixed-up dame almost as much as it needs the private detective to do his job: to quote swanny from above: "Marlowe's job--and the detective's job in this sort of fiction, in general--is to reassure us that there is some explanation for what's going on, no matter how confusing it gets." i sometime sub in "maiden in distress" and "knight in shining armour" for "vampy vixen" and "private eye" but i think you know what i'm getting at.

i love the film from '46, but i've also seen the one from '78? where a much older than 33 years robert mitchum played marlowe. and while i love bogie's hamming in the bookstore, i actually think mitchum made a better marlowe. and an elderly jimmy stewart as general sternwood is great casting.

strangely enough, i didn't recollect all these remarks about how handsome marlowe was at all and i found them annoying reading the book this time around. i don't want marlowe to be a matinee idol -- i want him to be a seeker of truth, loyal to himself and his convoluted code.

hi hi:

sorry i haven't been around very much. still looking for a way not to live in the gutter so i don't know how much i will be around yet. am reading the big sleep for swanny's read and that's about all i can commit to at this juncture.

anyway, i'm afraid i don't know anything about this story. again, it's not in either of the collections i've read, and the intro from claire tomalin, to my favourite one, says this about the story:

"other late stories, like 'the fly', and 'the canary', have attracted much critical attention, perhaps because they cry their symbolism so loudly -- too loudly, i think, to work well as stories, whatever they do for critics".

sounds like claire tomalin agrees with bonita. :)

it should be noted that her husband john middleton murry inherited all her writing when she died, and despite her leaving instructions to burn much, he published almost all of it, much of it that she didn't like while she was alive, and even changed the punctuation and flow of the unpublished stories before he released them into the world. her friends, the woolfs, and d.h. lawrence,thought murry brought her down both in life, and afterwards.

a quote from lawrence: "she was a good writer they made out to be a genius. katherine knew better herself, but her husband, j.m. murray, made capital out of her death."

anyway, shel, i guess the lesson to me is to suggest not only authors, but story titles too. :)

i will read this story when i get a chance and let you know what i think of it in comparison with her other works, but in the meantime i feel i should post links to stories that i do like, and enjoy, so that you can see what prompted me to suggest her, or not, as the case may be. :)

her hands-down most anthologized story:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1429/1... (the garden party)

patrick mentioned the daughters of the late colonel which might be interesting to read given a question patty asked in the big sleep thread:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1429/1...

and ones i am fond of that you can find online:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1472/1... brechenmacher attends a wedding)

http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei... (the tiredness of rosabel -- again my interest in shopgirls :)

http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei... (how pearl button was kidnapped -- another of her new zealand stories)

and something a little different:

http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei... (the woman at the store -- influenced by dickens)

Adrian wrote: "Incidentally, at no time did Jesse James ever mumble "To flee or not to flee, that is the question," so don't any of y'all start up with that nonsense!"

this doesn't help ben but i couldn't resist the connection to adrian's comment -- from the dictionary i was working on last year. ben: is it a quote from one of the other western movies you saw in the last year? appaloosa? :)

i think it's a great april fool. to list just a few clues: echoes is spelled wrong, the author's name is spelled in two different ways on the cover and the gloss, and i'm pretty sure harlequin would NEVER use times roman as a title font. :P

i have read dozens of these, and what's missing is the reference to the sheik's nose. inevitably, the hero's nose is sexier because it had been broken at some time in the past. also the phrase, "throbbing manhood".

i think the best one i ever read was one that was obviously written by a big fan of bloom county comic strip because it involved an artist of a similarly-themed comic strip called heartland, his long dead twin, and the woman that tortured them both coming back to claim her rights over him, after he fell and hurt his drawing arm in a horseback riding accident. how could tony, the mousy italian drawing assistant who has come to help the master finish his strips on time, ever hope to compete with the ghosts of the past? (i read it many times -- i really identified with tony. :P)

love,
oro

i'm glad to hear that i'm not the only cola zero addict in the bunch. and glad people are sharing happy announcements as well as dental appointments. :)

my announcement is that i'm taking a break from the group for a while. i really need to focus on getting a job, and taking quizzes on facebook, so i'll check back in a week or so. looking forward to seeing lots of interesting posts when i get back. :)

Ben wrote: "i disagree with this idea of it all being something they are engaging in to pass the time, or create a little drama, or stress, or whatever. the guy, whatever the hell his name was, he's been havin..."

well we can agree to disagree. :)

i was reading the magus and this story at the same time, so it could be my feelings about both protagonists cross-pollinated but in both stories i'm being told that the feelings of the main character are different this time, that they've changed but the language, the tone and the thoughts behind it don't seem different at all to me. so if this was what chekhov intended, he doesn't do it successfully for me. i just don't believe that this time is any different for gurov.

and for me, despite the title of the piece, it is his story. :)

Shel wrote: "You know, I've been waiting for someone (I mean anyone, not this discussion) to adequately define what this blanket statement means... people say things to me all the time like "oh, she just needs ..."

okay. here's an example. i have a friend and we used to characterize her as having "adult ADD" -- she is flighty, chews her nails all the time, and she's never happy. she calls me to complain about work which is always either too busy or not busy enough(where's she been promoted and given tons of opportunities beyond her experience -- which she admits-- while i was fired after ten years' service). She took a year mat leave coverage contract which guaranteed her a bunch of perks she didn't have before that will end this coming october, and is complaining that she took it because she doesn't want to have to wait "forever" to travel (she's contemplating severing the contract early and going in may, and has been on at least four vacations in the last year -- three to europe). she isn't attracted to guys but still dates them because she likes to keep her options open and then gets upset when they get hurt or angry about her disregard for their deep feelings. she complains to me about money and paying down her debt (i believe she has about 5 grand in credit to pay down, mostly because she will spend 800 dollars on two coach purses she doesn't even really like) when her dad gave her a little under half a million dollars to buy a house last year, and when she didn't find anything, let her keep it investments, until she does find something. if you look at her life in basic essentials she doesn't have a bad life: she's got a job, security, looks, close family, the works. when i finally have enough of hearing about all her problems and tell her to stop complaining to me about them she says "it's all relative" meaning that my not having a job, security, etc is just a more extreme form of her own malaise. at which point i usually start to cry, and she feels bad and shuts up. it is clear to me and all that know her that she just enjoys complaining and finding things to be frustrated about.

another example is a friend who got mad last year when she won $1300 in a radio contest because the following week they offered different prizes.

i don't know if that clarifies for you at all. if i relate this back to the story gurov has a lot that other people don't have. he doesn't seem to appreciate those things but instead seeks joy in flirtations with women, in acquiring new toys.

our culture is obsessed with wanting it all, in acquiring the latest and the greatest, or the youngest, if you will. most people don't really appreciate what they have, even if it compared to somebody who has nothing, they will find a way to say "it's all relative".

Shel wrote: "Wasn't it Mo's birthday already? Oh, well, Happy b'day again, my dear!"

Brian wrote: "damn. you people are lucky with dentists like that. here they just yank out your tooth and tell you about it after you stop screaming. and we pay for that!

and happy birthday mo! :D"

hey, i see no reason not to extend my birthday for as long as people keep wishing me happy birthday and giving me presents -- i got anne enright's The Gathering in a birthday package from ireland last week from my pal richard who just got published (Where Clare Leads, Ireland Follows) recently.

brian: it sounds like your dentistry is similar to the kind my dad practiced on himself. with the pliers. good times. :)

and shel congratulations on burning all those calories. i have taken to checking my watts when i work out now -- i like to imagine myself as a light bulb. :P

today i am going to eat pizza and drink pop all for the low, low price of $2.25. i am addicted to coca cola zero now, after a brief flirtation with diet pepsi max with ginseng. :)

i like the silly announcements thread. keep 'em coming. and despite what michael says, i hope you all know that he's not oro. :)

Adrian wrote: The TekWar books were ghost-written by veteran author Ron Goulart, though Shatner claims he provided the outlines.

I'm willing to believe that Shatner has done all of his own singing.

well, really. writing the outline is the most important thing -- without the outline all you've got is the actual story written out for people to read. :)

his own singing, and if they'll let him, his own horseback riding. he dearly loves a good horse ride. i call him bill. he doesn't call me anything because he doesn't know me. but he is my friend on myspace. :P

Charlaralotte wrote: "Happy Birthday Mo and Maureen!

Goat cheese is good. I also like Feta.

Dan: The Velvet Fog is an excellent name for a radio host. Run with it.

Completely unnecessary update:
At my last dental ap..."

thanks very much. i like getting birthday greetings. :)

i bought some goat cheese with peppercorns all around today. i had a hard time deciding. i am also crazy for feta, and make a mean spanokopita. :)

i'm so glad you shared about your dental appt. i was so afraid people would be shy about that. i can't believe your dentist "doesn't do" amalgams. is it because they aren't as good? or because they are cheaper? that seemss strange that you don't have the option. i had a similar filling a couple of months ago -- the insurance companies have decided that since people can't see that far back they don't need pretty fillings -- but my dental people just threw in some extra scaling to cover the difference in price of the fillings. we are expert in canada at getting medical attention covered. :P

of course, the most shocking thing is the 5 dollar sample. dentists already roll in dough and i can't believe they're siphoning another five out of you. i vote new dentist! :)

Ben wrote: "look at the madness that was myspace... i would vote for erring on the side of too many (book) threads instead one immensely long meandering (author) thread that covers ten thousand bases..."

i find this hilarious coming from the owner of "what have you read recently?" thread. :)

anyway, i just pulled the UBIK discussion into a Philip K. Dick thread last week. Should I change it back: or do we just name the next thread in authors Philip K. Dick - Voices from the Street? i do know if you have a naming convention and are consistent with it, it's sometime easier to absorb and sort information. ;)

Patty wrote: "Maureen wrote: "hey patty: will you invite us to the poll? i'm curious to see what happens."



done! let us know what happens! "

i got an email! well it turns out you don't get an email in your goodreads inbox, you get one sent to your regular email address. mine is headed "Patty invited you to answer a poll". So I'm guessing those of us who didn't see the poll invites last time were receiving them in their junk mail folders. but happily, this functionality works, which i'm glad to know about. it may be that margaret's suggestion to use the broadcast message to group option might be better if we find that people don't actually look at their goodreads notifications but do check their goodreads inboxes.. :)

thanks for trying it out patty. :)

Patty wrote: "ok, i've eliminated the noncontenders, and reset the poll for the next group read. even if you voted before, you'll have to vote again. i set the end date for April 5. "

hey patty: will you invite us to the poll? i'm curious to see what happens. when i did it for the previous poll nobody could tell me whether they received an invitation or not. :)