My heart expands / 'tis grown a bulge in't / inspired by / your beauty effulgent.

William ,'Conversations with Dead People'


Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.

There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."


Hayden - May 15, 2006 10:11:52 am PDT #495 of 28095
aka "The artist formerly known as Corwood Industries."

This had me giggling madly

AWESOME.


Steph L. - May 15, 2006 10:15:20 am PDT #496 of 28095
Unusually and exceedingly peculiar and altogether quite impossible to describe

Corwood, you were the first person I thought of when I read it.

"Caught some allusions to The Odyssey. Nice."

"Think you accidentally stapled in something from your playwriting workshop for Ch. 15."

"Typo: last word capitalized."

::snerkity::


Jessica - May 15, 2006 10:27:24 am PDT #497 of 28095
If I want to become a cloud of bats, does each bat need a separate vaccination?

BWAH:

Remember last week after workshop, when we got trashed on Guinness and came up with the ludicrous idea of a 700-page novel that puns every few words on the name of a river? Maybe there's something to that.


erikaj - May 15, 2006 10:28:37 am PDT #498 of 28095
Always Anti-fascist!

You should also read the one that's about the fiction prompts.


P.M. Marc - May 15, 2006 10:31:58 am PDT #499 of 28095
So come, my friends, be not afraid/We are so lightly here/It is in love that we are made; In love we disappear

"Snotgreen" = hyphenated.

Man, coffee hurts when it goes up the nose.


Steph L. - May 15, 2006 10:36:26 am PDT #500 of 28095
Unusually and exceedingly peculiar and altogether quite impossible to describe

You should also read the one that's about the fiction prompts.

Okay, I'm probably hurting myself by trying to stifle my laughter over these:

Write a short scene set at a lake, with trees and shit. Throw some birds in there, too.

Imagine if your favorite character from 19th-century fiction had been born without thumbs. Then write a short story about them winning the lottery.

Write a story that begins with a man throwing handfuls of $100 bills from a speeding car, and ends with a young girl urinating into a tin bucket.

(I think I've read that story....)

A man has a terrifying dream in which he is being sawn in half. He wakes to find himself in the Indian Ocean, naked and clinging to a door; a hotel keycard is clenched in his teeth. Write what happens next.

I can't help myself -- I actually like that last one.


Matt the Bruins fan - May 15, 2006 11:27:19 am PDT #501 of 28095
"I remember when they eventually introduced that drug kingpin who murdered people and smuggled drugs inside snakes and I was like 'Finally. A normal person.'” —RahvinDragand

I expect to see it on Lost sometime next season.


Jesse - May 15, 2006 5:47:25 pm PDT #502 of 28095
Sometimes I trip on how happy we could be.

It makes me laugh at myself every time I think of Jesse's maxim because in the face of such wisdom I still instinctively rail, "Nuh uh! The shit I like is the BEST!"

I'm telling you -- it's shocking but true.


JoeCrow - May 15, 2006 6:23:57 pm PDT #503 of 28095
"what's left when you take biology and sociology out of the picture?" "An autistic hermaphodite." -Allyson

No love for Little, Big ? Bah. These people do not speak for me. Despite the A Winter's Tale nod. Bah, I say again.


IAmNotReallyASpring - May 16, 2006 10:55:54 am PDT #504 of 28095
I think Freddy Quimby should walk out of here a free hotel

All novelists who are worth anything at all resist a version of life as it has been presented to them. What Flaubert meant by bourgeois life is not what his age meant by bourgeois life, and what Austen meant by the word "woman" was subtly at odds with the usage of that word in her time.

Well, it depends on what she means by 'worth anything at all'. If she means 'good writers of literature', then I think she's right. I've come to think of the literary novelist as being primarily concerned with psychological and social mechanisms that work at right angles to received wisdom, which would mean that their novels would, incidentally, 'resist a version of life as it has been presented to them.'

But that implies that writers of entertainments, no matter how well crafted they may be, is not 'worth anything at all'. So, I also think she's wrong.

And that's if I understood her meaning.