Comments on: if

by: betegrise

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:37:14 +0000

So glad to read that the UnNarr still attempts to strike up conversations in libraries (the perfect place for it)! And thanks for reminding me about the opus of the terrific novelist John Gardner. The unfortunate timing of his death in 1982 simply confused casual readers into thinking he'd transmogrified himself into the John Gardner who ghosted Ian Fleming (e.g., No Deals, Mister Bond). Those dour trolls at the Library of Congress added one of my favorite subj headings to October Light: "Mentally ill—Vermont—Fiction." Golly, who could resist that teaser?! • Helplessly laughing editor: Just brilliant; I can only hope to earn such a subject heading someday. And October Light! I love it! With exclamation points! I am now slogging through the much less cheery (and that's really sayin' somethin') Sunlight Dialogues right now. WHYYY is Gardner so criminally neglected?! (I mean, I know why: because he pissed off everyone within earshot; but still.)

by: miss bovary

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:55:13 +0000

Pye sounds a lot like Heather Hamilton. I wouldn’t be surprised to find they’re related.

•

Annoying editor who doesn’t want to seem hopelessly uncool but curiosity gets the better of her: Who’s HH? I even stooped to g••gl•ng and still don’t know. Or do you mean Heather Armstrong and that my ANNOYING REPEATED USE OF ALL-CAPS has long since become tiresome? ;o) If you’re thinking GEORGE Hamilton, my God I couldn’t agree more—maybe even one of the Gabor sisters. She’s so petulant and femme, shrieking at me to come witness her entrances and exits via the painstakingly installed cat door, for example. Or insisting that I touch her kibbles before she will eat them, like her royal food taster. I thought cats were supposed to be all independent and shit. I’m sure it’s user error, but I miss Eloise’s self-reliance.

There. I’ve said it. I had a favorite child. Jesus, this alone could make Pyewacket neurotic.

by: unnarrator

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 04:54:06 +0000

So when do I get to read your thesis, she said evilly….! That would make my WEEK.

by: oleoptene

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 04:38:05 +0000

I know I read and referenced Metaphors We Live By in the thesis (but don’t own a copy) and am hazarding a translation from an ancient version of Microsoft Word so I can cringe at said thesis just for the fun of torturing myself. Not that I am bored, but taking a break from swimming and knitting and reading and weeping unabashedly at movies. But if there is yet a chance for your day to be made, well, I want to make it.

Love.

by: unnarrator

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:56:21 +0000

Goshamighty, and I wasn’t even thinking about your thesis! [smacks self on forehead] Of course I’m wiggling rhetorically, anaphrastically even, when I coyly suggest that spilling the beans (as it were) “might” be a metaphor, but refuse to say for what.

PLEASE tell me you have read George Johnson and Mark Lakoff, because this will make my day; and said day is in need of some making, owing to a nerve-wracking near-incident involving a) the Brujo’s cactus seedlings, which always seem to suffer some harm on MY watch, and 2) an out-of-the-clear-blue (literally) summer monsoon.

by: oleoptene

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:27:45 +0000

Repeating to myself “that might be a metaphor for something; except that it’s not. It was just itself.” Maybe what I didn’t write in my philosophy thesis a million years ago on metaphor was that at first it looks as if the creation of metaphor from our lives is a one-way thing, but in fact we go the other direction (it’s just like, just like how purl stitches are the perfect inverses of knit stitches: I watch my mother managing to teach my nine-year-old son to knit where I have not managed and not managed, and his triumph is sweet) and we create our lives from metaphor also.