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672. Ulgine Barrows - 5/17/2006 10:16:46 AM i'ts cold out here and rough 673. judithathome - 5/17/2006 12:37:00 PM Yep, it's hard out there for a pimp, that's for sure. Or so they said at the Academy Awards. 674. Jenerator - 5/17/2006 10:10:11 PM Arky,
Still teaching. How about you? 675. Jenerator - 5/17/2006 10:11:08 PM Webbie,
Great interview.
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I love how subtle he is with the relationship between Mum and Dad. 676. arkymalarky - 5/17/2006 10:28:26 PM I'm out for the summer after next week, but I didn't know if you were still on maternity leave. We've got three or four pregnant teachers, so next year's going to be a real juggle for the district trying to cover for them. 677. Jenerator - 5/17/2006 11:10:53 PM I didn't get maternity leave - I had to take my once a life supplemental leave and that was for 6 weeks.
It was hard going back to work so soon.
I'm ready for summer, how about you? 678. arkymalarky - 5/17/2006 11:15:00 PM Oooh. We work leave differently, evidently, and I accumulated enough days to take the rest of the year off after surgery in April. I had Mose around Thanksgiving and came back around mid-January, if I recall (21 years ago).
I'm ready for July. I have a 12-day, 12-hour a day seminar in June, as part of my Masters. But once I get it behind me I'll be halfway through and the rest of the summer will be nothing but fun. 679. arkymalarky - 5/17/2006 11:16:17 PM That is the hysterectomy I had last April. I'd accumulated enough between having Mose and the surgery because I hadn't had to take off much in between. 680. Jenerator - 5/17/2006 11:18:40 PM You're lucky you had so much time. We only get 7 days of leave per year and with a young child at home, taking 7 days off per year (or close to it) was easy. 681. webfeet - 5/18/2006 2:06:02 AM Mirror mirror on the wall, who'se the scariest of us all?
Why...it's Ulgine!
Ulgine, instead of your usual vagina monologues why don't you charm us with a story? 682. webfeet - 5/18/2006 4:57:31 PM On second thought, maybe you shouldn't. "If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, :When you're ready." --Black Swan Green
We're all vampires here..come join the dead.
683. webfeet - 5/19/2006 9:44:56 PM NUPLANET-I think what I would really love to read is Chicken Piccata, part III.
I'm not going to critique--I promise. karl has the vapors again and will have to stay on his Louis XVI daybed and repose. I think, as macnas and alistair have intimated, that this might really be deconstructive to this thread.
Getting published for me right now is life or death. M.A.'s depreciate and children grow up and then what? Let's not answer that. 684. webfeet - 5/19/2006 10:15:04 PM On second thought, yes, let's answer that.
Answering an ad in the pennysaver, I go to work as a bookkeeper in a mid-sized vacuum-cleaner company and play darts every thursday night with my colleagues, Roy and Cherish at a bar. My novel fossilizes inside a drawer beneath our income tax files and medical receipts. I don't look back.
On my seventieth birthday a spirit visits me in my sleep and whispers.."open it" then flies out again into the ethereal blue night. I bolt awake, or some approximation of that as I gather my dressing robe about my twiny shoulders. And, candle in hand, I reach inside the drawer, the burial ground for all my wasted emotions, and pull it out with a triumphant cry!
The clock strikes two, I sit down and then start from the beginning, all over again.
685. webfeet - 5/22/2006 3:51:38 PM A few final thoughts as I approach the end of Black Swan Green. Even though Mitchell dislikes the term "coming of age story" when describing BSG, the name, too clumsy and pedestrian a term for a book that soars over the other titles in that category, it is nevertheless, a coming of age book, just not an ordinary one.
Mitchell is so intense and passionate a stylist---and his aesthetic sense is so far developed he is practically extra-terrestrial--that he can, with the power of words do just about anything. He recreates the poetry inside Jace's head with eye-popping metaphors that sometimes, however, pop a little like cherry bubblegum, landing in your face.
Sometimes I wondered if Mitchell was on crystal meth or lost in his own thought-tormented music under an I-pod when writing. With fresh intensity, Mitchell does succeed in capturing the tormented beauty in the mind of a thirteen-year old who writes poetry under the name of Eliot Bolivar and is bullied by the blowhard Ross Wilcox.
And talk about a book that smells this book reeks! Lots of evocative, sensual and, er, earthy passages.
That said, it's a novel that dazzles, surprises--but surprises in a formulaic way--that was actually my surprise-- in reading Mitchell. His plot twists lack originality even though they are brilliantly and imaginatively executed. Maybe the hitch is that Mitchell wrote each of the thirteen chapters as a short story, so that in themselves they work, but as a whole, the novel is disconnected, making you feel less for any of these characters than you expected to at the start. Which may be Mitchell's way of giving the finger to the ordinary coming of age story.
On the subject of schoolyard bullies--David Mitchell has a long way to go before he can get in the mud with heavyweights like Philip Roth, who pack more punch in a sentence than the light, effete jabs Mitchell swings. But nobody boxes like Philip Roth. Maybe Mitchell just needed to grow up in New Jersey.
686. Jenerator - 5/22/2006 9:31:23 PM My God you're good, Webbie. 687. webfeet - 5/22/2006 9:52:28 PM Do you agree, though? Help me out here. I want out of Black Swan Green! You are the only person, in the world, who has been there, too.
I bet the book is sitting under a baby blanket as we speak, and, if so, a part of me does not blame you!
688. Jenerator - 5/25/2006 5:33:57 PM Webfeet,
I admit to not being as far through BSG as you are. IAnd you are right, it is addictive even while being mundane (in certain parts). I got chills reading about Hangman - all I could think about was Dylan's speech delay and if it will be like this for him when he gets to Jason's age.
I am new to Micthell and found him because of you; what a world you have opened up for me!
What I think I like best about Mitchell are two things: his *mastery* of the simile, and his rippling, resonating effect. His words remain after reading them and few authors do that for me.
Roth is an apt comparison because Black Swan Green is a hybrid of Portnoy's Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus with Mitchell's take on 80s adolescence. 689. NuPlanetOne - 5/25/2006 5:47:42 PM
Web...I am working on chap 3. Ah, but it is such work for a lazy poet. I understand now why novelists need benefaction and solitude.
690. webfeet - 5/31/2006 6:02:53 AM It was really fun to read. Just go do do your voodoo. don't listen to me.
691. webfeet - 5/31/2006 6:12:20 AM What I think I like best about Mitchell are two things: his *mastery* of the simile, and his rippling, resonating effect. His words remain after reading them and few authors do that for me.
This is now what I like least. In this book, anyway.
No, honestly, he's formi-dabluh, but 'Cloud Atlas' was what stays with me. Have you gotten to Madame Crommelnyck?
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