Jayne: What're you gonna tell the others? Mal: About what? Jayne: About why I'm dead. Mal: Hadn't thought about it. Jayne: Make something up. Don't tell 'em what I did.

'Ariel'


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."


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.


Gus - May 19, 2006 11:25:36 am PDT #505 of 28095
Bag the crypto. Say what is on your mind.

Sure. Come back looking for some real people talking about real stuff. If it is all about green snot and Irving, you just need to adjust your definition of "real stuff".


erikaj - May 22, 2006 7:08:16 am PDT #506 of 28095
Always Anti-fascist!

What? Not following, bunk. English, motherfucker, English!(On an international board, that comma is wicked important. Also, it's a total quote.)


Gus - May 22, 2006 2:07:00 pm PDT #507 of 28095
Bag the crypto. Say what is on your mind.

Bunk, thanks for the fix-up. I lurves me some Irving. Green snot is not high among my favorite topics.

Short sentences. I should stick to short sentences.