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

Maureen’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Lara wrote: "Morning Patty - and everyone else! How funny we have a tie :)

I'm happy with what you suggested above."

we actually would not have a tie if patty's vote had been tallied -- illiya would've won! when you are "owner" of the poll, you can see things that others can't, so i saw patty's vote earlier this week but then one day it was gone so i assumed she was considering changing her vote (i think when you hit change vote it voids your previous entry.) still, i have no desire to re-poll the group or consider the results invalid because we should get this show on the road. :)

Patty wrote: "Mo, is there a way to extend the vote another day? I'm concerned that we'll only have 5 votes and they'll all be for different places."

hi patty! yes! i can definitely extend the vote for another day. maybe you could do a facebook post letting people know there is one last poll?

it is now extended to March 6th. :)

all that said, poll ends tomorrow. which might be midnight tonight, i think. :)

Patty wrote: "I have no idea how I'm going to decide which one to vote for. I still really love the looks of Cameron, but now that I'm reading it more carefully, I thought I'd point out that it also (like Dipper..."

i know. it's tough! i like that coby has a pool and the lake, and clean filtered water (!) and life jackets and you don't have to bring them but then they don't seem to have a lot of boats. dipper says you have to bring life jackets but they have three boats you can use once you have them (i have none but maybe you could rent them somewhere?) i also like that dipper actually has six bedrooms instead of five even though it says the capacity is only 11. some of them are closer to the city (i've done rough checks from my place to the cottages and none is more than 2 hours and 10 minutes (tack on at least another 20 minutes driving from pearson airport). illiya seems to have everything, is shortest at an 1 hr 22 minutes from my place (i.e. downtown) but is most expensive. not sure if all of them demand check-ins on friday. if they do, we'll be facing cottage traffic and commuter traffic driving up (usually fridays are worst for it) so it will likely take longer, especially if people arrive later in the day. decisions!

Les wrote: "I have moved into the probably camp! Will be definitive in the next couple days.

Thanks for your hardwork, Patty and Mo."

oh hurray! that's great news, les! happy to do anything i can do to help along a canadian dorkapalooza edition. :)

also, i wanted to say i am keeping an eye out for flight deals on air canada for the US and UK but you guys might want to register for alerts, just in case i miss any.) for people on the east coast that could fly out of burlington, vermont, chicago, d.c., or new york, porter air (smaller canadian airline) also does crazy deals. they just finished up a 60% off promotion (flights had to be taken by the end of june so not right for us) but i'm also keeping an eye on them. :)

here's the link to the poll: https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/9...

p.s. since we want to get this settled asap, i'm only going to set the poll to be open two days, okay?

Jonathan wrote: ". . . hey, so sorry i've been out of the loop . . . wherever and whenever it is decided we have our dork this year, my family and i are in . . . wasn't sure if toronto would be affordable for the w..."

skipper! very glad to hear it. you are the soul of the group, after all. i remember talking to lauren once about toronto and her telling me she'd like to visit as well. and i had a dream about owen recently: he was about 12 and was driving me a hard bargain but we were obviously old pals. :)

patty! glad you liked those places! the coby salt water pool is kind of neat, eh? they look super pretty. i did notice that they say you have to bring your own linens at dipper and coby. dipper says they can provide sheets and towels but for an additional 200 bucks! cameron also mentions linen charges. and also at dipper: bring your own drinking water? is the water not potable??? it's CANADA?!! i could probably bring some extra towels and a couple of extra sets of sheets(not sure what i have left in the double size but i do have some extra queen sets if we decide to go to either. :)

anyway, i guess a poll makes sense so i'll do that now. :)

well, i think we're all agreed to go cottage bound so we're almost there.

i guess the next thing is to agree on a venue. most of the cottage locations currently proposed have a capacity of 11 or 12 and we have that if we included the yeses and the probably. if we want to have a place that has a little more wiggle room for maybes then it seems to me that this one http://www.cottagesincanada.com/illiya (the owner's website with more photos is http://www.balanceyourlife.biz/page/3... most capacious in addition to being probably the closest to the city. apparently if you book before march 15th, he'll knock 200 dollars off, so it's 3600 CDN, and the most expensive (though not by much if you divide over the group.)

so do we need another poll for the venues? if so, i'd be happy to post one. i am leaving for my mum's now but can do it when i return in a couple of hours. :)

hurray for ben and potentially les!!! there are more hurrays for people who change those maybes into yeses. :)

i did check the cameron location and the calendar is showing it as free for the week we were looking at. that said, i realize that the shoe is on the other foot this time, and the west coasters people have to count more expensive flights as part of the plan. decided to check to see if there was a way to keep the housing price down as much as possible, so i took a shot at looking on vrbo for the week of july 20-27 for cottages in the vicinity of toronto (no more than 1.5 to 2 hour drive) for around 2500 dollars or less and found this:

http://www.vrbo.com/415011 (has to start stay on a friday though)

but then i realized there must be somewhere else people look for cottages and came up with this site cottagesincanada.com!) which had some places closer to where i went to university (so an area with beauty i can vouch for.) a lot of the cherry places that are cost-effective are already booked at this point. based on one of the postings, it looks like rates might go up after march 15th so i'm guessing we should try to make a decision before that if we can. :)

http://www.cottagesincanada.com/dipper

http://www.cottagesincanada.com/coby

http://www.cottagesincanada.com/illiya *just realized this jumps to 3800 in summer

i think the vote showed that people preferred a cottage and travelling into toronto for activities but maybe this also something we need to decide on as well. i did find one other house that could accomodate the group: http://www.vrbo.com/403791 -- it's closer to my apartment and in a nicer neighbourhood.

i should also mention that i have a spare key to my apartment and if we went the cottage route, if people wanted to stay at my place overnight, or use it as a rest stop while day-tripping, it could be done. i have a queen-sized bed, and a full-size? double? lay-down couch in the living room. i could probably also borrow an air mattress in a pinch. so potentially six at maximum at a time.

hope this helps!

hello everybody:

i've been keeping quiet about this dork because a) i didn't want to appear to be trying to sway anybody and b) i didn't want to get my hopes dashed. i've decided that i should just do what i usually do and say what i feel: i really hope that you guys stick with the canada plan. after last year's dork i didn't think i'd see anyone for a long time, given my circumstances, and i was trying to bravely reconcile myself to that. i don't really count myself as a lucky person but this group is evidence of the odds sometimes turning in my favour, and i am very grateful for having you in my life. i would love to be able to help show you this part of the world. i wish i could do more to organize it but suffice to say i would cook up a merry storm and a have about a bazillion ideas for day trips and restaurants and all. i do think if it's going to happen, it should happen soon -- cottages will book up fast!

Robert wrote: "Folks, there is a new Nicholson Baker. Sequel to The Anthologist. But a review made me want to read The Anthologist. That said, it also sounded from the review that there are more than enough sente..."

hey robert: i have read the anthologist and the follow-up, the recently released travelling sprinkler (had the ARC and have given it away) and i would be very curious as to what you thought of the anthologist. for my money, though, travelling sprinkler is the better book, and my favourite of his to date. i can't recommend it enough. :)

i just read a pretty negative review of the documentary. will be interested to hear your take, dan. :)

i just did this quiz: quotes are from salinger or kanye west: how well will the fiction filers do on this?

http://www.cbc.ca/books/2013/09/who-s...

i nearly got one wrong.. but then i didn't. :)

patty, back on the old fiction files i had a friend named brandon who was always touting her work. if you are enjoying your foray with her, i could ask him for some additional recommendations...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08...

i read this article just now when i should be working on the endless pile of content grids for work instead. i really don't know how to feel about it. i'm both anxious and excited by the titles of unpublished books bandied about here, especially and of course, the revised version of "The Last and Best of the Peter Pans". but the extensive 700-page biography is freaking me out a bit.

i don't think we actually have an author thread on gr for salinger, or at least i couldn't find one... so this might have to become the de facto one. :)

Matt wrote: "interesting article on algebra in the latest harpers?"

i don't buy harpers but i bet the article is at least food for thought. he's aces at that. did you read it?

i started to reply to this yesterday and lost my comment. sigh.

it sounds like you've landed in an interesting place on the spectrum: annoyed with some small interest piqued. i certainly think he gives a lot of food for thought in a variety of ways.

about voice: i know i've talked about this before other places so i will try not to repeat my self too much. :) i read a quote by eudora welty on twitter recently where she said, "[When I read] some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too." i often distinctly hear the voice of a writer in my head as i read, and i did also when i wrote. not every writer's voice is distinct as another's, and it's not merely the fact of its existence that appeals. as i noted in my review of travelling sprinkler, certain voices really resonate with me, like nicholson baker's. others do not (c.f. all my rants about margaret atwood).
agreed that there are a couple of ways at looking at voice and the whole thing is fairly subjective -- but in essence i'm talking about a signature rhythm and personality that imbues the work of some writers. style influences it obviously but i usually clearly "hear" the voice when reading: for example, p.g. wodehouse always sounds like p.g. wodehouse, does he not? each book is not exactly the same -- though some come close -- but i can hear the arch voice when i read him.

your point about his work not being fiction? well, in that interview they talk a lot about the book i haven't read about him feeding his baby and that sounds a lot like this it may be the most non-fictional of the lot, even if he "fictionalized" aspects to it. i don't want to have the whole james frey debate again, certainly. i will reiterate as i did in my review of the travelling sprinkler that he, nicholson baker seemed very present to me, even though i was cognizant of the fact he was telling a story about paul chowder even though he was obviously filling paul with aspects of himself, there was still fiction there, at least for me. ben pointed out in his review of travelling sprinkler that he thinks baker has become more like brautigan as those works were poetic too, and yet very autobiographical, fictionalized to some degree but perhaps not a huge one. in any case, i'm not sure it particularly matters to me.

you rightly note that the mezzanine is chock full of digressions about minutiae, but as also you point out, he wrote it and published it pre-seinfeld, and pre-sharing of all our little details with the world via the internet. he tapped into a place that some people really like to go (i am one of these people -- you'll see if you look at my review of the mezzanine that i couldn't resist looking up everything about straws while i was reading about it because he noticed it and made it interesting to me. with this latest book, he also does that -- i've never had an interest in knowing about debussy before he fixated on him in my "hearing". so in some ways i look at these as flights of fancy. but at the same time, it has something that the others before didn't. i really hope you choose to read the travelling sprinkler when it comes out -- i suspect you might like it more or decide you were done with him forever. :)

hi patty! thanks for starting a thread on nicholson baker! i really can't believe i never thought to do it! :)

i'm on a nicholson baker high after Traveling Sprinkler: A Novel but i have to admit that vox is still waiting on my to-read pile. i did actually pick it up at one point and i quickly put it down again. i'm curious to see where you will come up on the mezzanine spectrum.

i really enjoyed the mezzanine, and i really haven't stopped thinking about the fermata since i read it, to be honest. i just can't begin to write down why -- but i think i appreciate it in the same way i do lolita, and given nicholson baker's admiration of nabokov, i can't think he would be too disappointed at that.

here's a link down below to a paris review interview with baker. i sort of fell madly in love with him when i read what he said about the elm blight in his childhood. he's just really my kind of neurotic, smart, passionate person. he makes sense to me, and if he keeps doing what he did in the travelling sprinkler, i may die and go to literary heaven. :)

http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...

hi audi! nice to see you here! :) mo/xo

Katie wrote: Hopefully Goodreads and the love of a good man can help."

:P

a good man is hard to find -- or so flannery o'connor tells us. but i suspect a deadpan man is rarer still, and you've got that nicely covered. :)

nice to "meet" you before i get to meet you, katie. :)