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

Maureen’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Matt wrote: "I thought all of shakespeare's stuff was written by a contemporary (or contemporaries) of his"

oh you mean francis bacon, and christopher marlowe are to be blamed for the winter's tale? we're always trying to cut this guy slack. :P

actually what's interesting about the source material of the winter's tale is it was written by some guy who didn't like how uppity shakespeare was for writing plays when he was just an actor. at least i think so. i studied this in school and it's been a while. :)

someday i'm sure we'll all be studying tekwar, and shakespeare will be irrelevant anyway. "how much of this did shatner actually write himself?" "what value does a work written by an actor really have?" -- same questions, different sh___:P

and of course, i need to come up with my same points: you might want to consider shakespeare's source material in the case of the winter's tale. it was written by a contemporary of his, as opposed to ovid. ;P

Jonathan wrote: . . .oops i failed to mention gatsby in my first mention of fitz . . .

you could always go back and edit the post in our fancy new venue here. :)

Lauren wrote: "Well, the Darwin work in question was a selection from the Origin of Man and it was in the Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume E: the Victorians), which is required for the class.. so...?"

i too have a couple of norton anthologies from university: they're handy for profs because they collect a bunch of different things in one place. they seem to make more and more norton anthologies these days, so yeah, if we're going to look at what was written by victorians, darwin would certainly fit. but so would The Pearl A Journal of Voluptuous Reading, the Underground Magazine of Victorian England, if norton's editorial board deemed it so. it's just more of the same, you see? :)

Jcamilo wrote: "You just want to call me literary snob ~_^"

but now that i've decided i'm you, aren't i calling myself that? ;P

(p.s. i am a literary snob -- who just happens to like a lot of genre fiction. i'm hoping smartykate can psychoanalyze me for free. :)

Jcamilo wrote: "Hey I can still provide several evidences that I am a fictional identidy with something not related to either identidy.

As Borges, do not forget he is an atheist that mistrusted his atheism, so..."

hey oro:

i think i am you,

oro :)

Jcamilo wrote: "he would not, he dislikes Voltaire, and certainly would exclude lots of ... of my posts (For example, Derrida and Foucault), but that is very simple... Artistic vallue is not a good criteria, becau..."

what i was trying to say oro, is this is exactly what he does: he lists a bunch of works and says they are literature, literature defined. so proud not of your list, but your methodology. :)

Jcamilo wrote: "I just know something, if the definition of literature does not include Herodotus, Agustyne, Cicero, Marco Polo, Spinoza, Voltaire, Gibbon, Borges, the Bible, Poe's Eureka, Coleridige Biographia Li..."

harold bloom would be so proud of you. :)

Charlaralotte wrote: "On its own, "The Lady and the Dog" didn't strike me as so much of a love story, but as a statement about the dullness of life and the desperate need for people to fill their time with something, anything. Dogs help. Jobs help. Marriages help. Chidren help. Restaurants help. Affairs help.

But the desire for intrigue in order to pass the time before death also creates tedious repercussions. If only humans could stop this constant need for diversion, for new experiences, then we could all sit in Buddha-like contemplation and be happy. Instead we manufacture more plot-lines and then hold our heads in angst, trying to figure out how to finish writing this most recent headache.

Well, that was bleak. Sorry to be such a downer. "

truth can sometimes be bleak -- i don't think that's your fault.. :)

and clearly, i think you've nailed this one. the lady with a dog was never more to me than a title. the dog was not a gun at all. shel said something similar above that hinted at my feeling on it: the dog was a distinguishing feature, to differentiate her from everyone else -- she was like a tabloid headline at first: representing something new and interesting, a person of intrigue.

this story is told by a jaded person, who can't come to life on his own. he needs the drama that he perpetuates to feel alive. and should he and the lady with the dog have ever found a way to be together, there is no doubt in my mind he would soon find a way to become bored and unhappy with his lot.

Brian wrote: "You've brought this up at an interesting time in my reading. I just read a book whose cover overflows with accolades. William S. Burroughs states, "Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer." T..."

it's nice to see that the things i value in literature are the things you guys are pointing out. :)

to brian's point, sometimes books are called literature because a critic says so: what will the world do when harold bloom dies and can no longer tell them what they should read and what they shouldn't? well, i guess they'll go to camille paglia. :)

and to extend matt's point: what is considered literature can be sold in different venues, and come in or out of style. there are books that we'd consider literature, like those of john fante, that weren't even available to people until the resurgence of interest in his work in the 80s. and while i love raymond chandler and some highly regarded contemporaries of his did too his work, or that of hammett, was not considered literature in their lifetimes. i'm sure you can come up with a collection of other examples.

we can't be certain that what we consider literature will be considered such in a hundred years. for example, i will always point out that good literature for the ancients always included a good amount of what we might call plagiarism today -- they did it to point out how erudite their works were, and it was commonly accepted. shakespeare pilfered from them in his turn. that kind of thing usually horrifies us now because people get paid for the words, and copyright them. had a bunch of monks stashed a different bunch of ancient works what would we be reading today?

deciding that darwin is literature because his book is of such significance sounds like the work of a professor who has a keen interest in that work, and has found a way to include it on his syllabus. happens all the time, in the same way you'll find courses in university studying buffy, the simpsons, or the graphic novel. the definition will always be in flux.

Shel wrote: Mo, I will eat almost anything with goat cheese on it. Except maybe sushi. My kids make fun of me about it, even. Oh! There's a salad with goat cheese! We know what mom will order..."

we share a sickness shel. i've taken to buying hunks of it at the grocery store in case whatever pre-prepared foods come into the house might need some goat cheese enhancement. :P

last night's pizza did not have a sufficient amount of goat cheese on it, so all of the slices i have eaten (the last three meals in fact) have all been the high ratio slices. now i am looking at my pizza in dismay and think it might be time to hit the grocery.

of course there's lots of nutritious spinach and broccoli on there too, but it's not what enflames the paroxysms of passion (thank you adrian and whomever that way he quoted the other day -- i love the word paroxysms almost as much as goat cheese :)

Esther wrote: "Ben wrote: "at the beginning of time, god didn't allow people to have chairs, and so they invented bottoms!"

Ethan (my 6-year-old): "Or you could call them butts.""

i love puns. my head is exploding with them right now. :)

but now that i think of it, what is the difference really between the pun and the double entendre? i'm not asking because i want a definition, what makes you groan about a pun that won't make you groan about the double entendre?

oh deadpan, you're a character -- easy to see how i could have imagined you were quoting something. it's all in your delivery.

did you all know dan sounds like a velvet fog? :)

Dan wrote: "what dude?"

isn't that who shouts inexcusable? the bald dude (wallace shawn) who tries to poison wesley? oh wait. that was inconceivable. so where does inexcusable come from?

thought it might be nice if we kept announcements of happy birthdays and dental appointments, or any other news that we want to share with our friends here to one thread. :)

here's an announcement. i am still unemployed. also, i like goat cheese on my pizza, and dan pretending to be that dude from the princess bride. :P

ah. o. henry. my old friend. what a great story: i like how shel has highlighted his breaking of the fourth wall. you see this a lot in his stories: they feel very much as if you'd sat down to dinner with him, and he is regaling you with a wonderful story over dessert.

i also like his women characters, and the fact that they don't always lose. in this story, i think i always took the wives' departure as entirely logical and right -- these two husbands seemed very much caught up in themselves, and their own concerns and the pictures we get of their wives are as appendages to themselves. they never seem to really accurately reflect what the wives really want. the only clue to that is in the maupassant line. certainly women don't alway make sense in o. henry but they do live and breathe, and have their own needs and wants. if the men in their lives don't appreciate that, they will suffer the consequences. and o. henry's women are practical. he tells us their budgets, and how they make ends meet in the dawn of an era where women are working to take care of themselves for the first time. he doesn't paint them as strictly business (incidentally the title of the collection that this story is from) but he makes clear that they must face their need for money, as much as their need for love.
check out an unfinished story, the enchanted profile, and a lickpenny lover, to begin to fall in love with his shop girls, and stenographers. ;)

the debate between writing styles that dawe and westbrook have also makes me laugh, for the simple reason that o. henry seems to have merged the two styles in all his stories: we have the lofty language and the homespun prose married within his writing.

hello hello:

i am not going to be eloquent i'm sure, but i wanted to tell you how i met and fell in love with borges. some of you may have heard variations of this story before, but i don't much care about that. :)

i went to visit a friend in halifax -- maybe twelve years ago now. i had never been to the east coast of canada before and i was excited to see what there was to see though i didn't end up seeing much. he was there doing his masters, and i had taken a job in real estate (this was just after we both completed our undergraduate degrees at the same university) and so, despite the fact that we had been trained the same way (same classes from the age of 9 to 19) we felt very strongly the differences in our situation.

and a gulf appeared between us: he felt that i was not using my brain in ways i ought, and i thought he was using his brain for academic self-aggrandizement -- he yearned for his name to be known in his field of study, and he felt disgust with me that i didn't feel the same need to leave a legacy behind me. i accused him of being heinrich schliemann, carving his initials in trees of the black forest, two feet high, so strong was his desire to leave a mark.

and so there we were: he forcing me to watch him build ugly furniture -- me suggesting we watch the third man, and then me watching him fall asleep during it. i crept up to the room where i was sleeping and scanned the book shelves for books of mine i knew he had. and then i saw the copy of borges' collected fictions on his shelf. i opened it up and began to read. i stayed up reading half the night. i finished the book the next day while my friend built his ugly furniture. and then i began reading it again. his writing seem to underscore the change in my friend: that his love of learning was not like borges, or my own, but was lost to this idea of legacy in his mind.

borges is a man who loved books -- that love is implicit in his writing. he makes me want to read the books he has imagined and reviewed. he makes me wish that i could have a chat with myself on a park bench. his love of stories is what gives him his power, and his beauty, i think.

i think the pierre menard story is a good place to start: i can echo the others -- if he's for you, you'll know very quickly. :)

i was just lying here thinking about that thread where hugh and shel were talking about really on the nose writing, and i was remembering a poem i wrote once called "sink the arrow" -- which i actually love because it's so very on the nose and i think the archness (oh there i go again) shows through. it starts, "i grow taut as the bow string" and i realized how dirty i think the word taut is. not tot of course. tot is not dirty at all, except in a literal sense, sometimes, in a sandbox. but taut? oh my. i think when i have money again i'm going to copyright this phrase "that's taut"! people will start using it and paying me 5 dollars every time they use it. "that's hot!" and the ever-annoying "loves it!" (too similar to my appropriated porgie and bess "i loves you" to make me feel comfortable) will disappear and i will be sitting on a fat pack of money. :)

all thanks to the dirty word taut. anybody else got some evocative words?

i've moved UBIK over here to a philip k. dick thread. i see pavel is/was reading Voices from the Street, and brian are thinking about doing so as well. you're welcome to join us in our continuing journey into the works of PKD. i think after we read voices from the street, we'll be checking out VALIS an old favourite of mine.

interesting review hugh: i certainly never trusted runciter even though he resonated with me. and your notes about it seeming rushed are interesting in the context of his apologies noted above which i'll quote again:


SL: 285

Dear Sandra,

{...}{...}

Thank you for the review. I'm sorry the characterization in UBIK is so minimal, but I had this problem: I had to move rapidly from the opening status quo (the psi company against the anti-psi company) and into the retreating 'thirties world. Bear in mind that all the material at the beginning of the novel is for all intents and purposes dumped once the bomb goes off. Readers may well ask, "What ever became of S. Melipone Dole?" {sic} and they would be right to do so.