SH Comments
Reged: Feb 16 2004
Posts: 1056
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This thread is for feedback about Bone Women by Eliot Fintushel.
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Anonymous
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I guess I'm not the target audience for this one. I gave up.
I suspect it's Literature.
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Anonymous
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I really liked the first paragraph. It reads as good as some of the poetry around here--(if you just broke up the lines, wink, wink)--but I gradually lost my initial rush as (maybe) we spent too much time listening to the protag get all clever with himself. Definitely worth reading, though.
Ward
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Anonymous
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Mental masturbation...like poor art, meaningless to everyone except the author. Hey, everyone. Look at me smear myself in feces and call it SF! STRANGE HORIZONS, what were you thinking?
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Karen Meisner
Fiction Editor
Reged: Oct 15 2003
Posts: 27
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Well, obviously it was meaningful to someone besides the author, since we loved it enough to publish it. This one's a difficult piece, I suppose, not as straightforward as some of the stories we publish. I find it beautiful, the narrator riding the line between self-delusion and a painfully honest awareness of the truths that lie underneath. It's passionate and tragic and funny and deeply human, and the language reads to me like poetry. Sorry it didn't work for you, but that's how it goes sometimes.
Readers interested in the Inuit folktale of the Bone Woman (or Skeleton Woman) can read more about it in Estes' Women Who Run With The Wolves.
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Jules Noble
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Quote:
I guess I'm not the target audience for this one. I gave up.
Me too.
As a sometime stumbling poet I am inclined to sympathy to all writers, and was raised on W Boroughs and other non-sequential and indeed sometimes distasteful writing but this.....
Like my boss said to me long ago: Intro, Middle, End. Thus structure and plot. Where were they? What on earth was he trying to say?
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Anonymous
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Quote:
Readers interested in the Inuit folktale of the Bone Woman (or Skeleton Woman) can read more about it in Estes' Women Who Run With The Wolves.
Well that what drew me too it and why I persisted so long in trying to read it. I know of the Bone Woman both from W W R W T W and from shamanistic dance work, but frankly I saw little connection between the powerful Mythos and the lost protagonist and shambling lovestruck girl
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It\'s me, Eliot!
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I know I shouldn't be doing this, but whatthehell, that other Eliot published footnotes to his Wasteland, yes? So why should I be above EXPLAINING things, huh? In a word, BONE WOMEN is about facticity--about the tension between what we human beings ARE and what human beings want or need to THINK of ourselves as being. So the main polarities/tensions in the story are those between (1) mendacity and truthfulness (2) fantasy and reality and (3) romantic or idealistic love and lust (or lust's dark twin, revulsion), or put it this way: (4) between our divine and our animal nature. I tried to manifest these tensions on three levels, in the events of the story, in the composition itself, and in the narrator's perorations around those events. The protagonist constantly tries to idealize himself and his desires, but he's not dishonest enough: he repeatedly catches himself at it, and then he suffers agonies of remorse and self-deprecation, which, of course, he dramatizes as extravagantly as the noble "love" he's seen through. He is unable to reconcile himself to the animal side of his own nature. It is true that the movement of the story is not a movement of plot. It IS a movement toward clarification of the nature of the dilemma, culminating in the most fundamental aspect of our facticity--death. This story's end is by no means the end of OUR story, in my view. It's certainly not the end of mine, anyway. In this story I wanted to frame what I think to be an important question about what we are, we humans. Half god, half mud. What of the mud, huh? What's that all about? How do we find the Great Conjunction of those two, the Heavenly Marriage? It is certainly possible for us, though the protagonist of this story, for all his poetry and aspiration and angst, has not yet quite reached the depth, "the rag and bone shop of the heart" from which some resolution can, at least, be envisioned. By the way, that I use my own name in this story--and that I mention a few places and situations I've been in--is theater. It is not autobiographical.
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Jules Noble
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Thankyou for replying to my comment. I am relieved to find that I did just about follow what you were trying to get at in your writing. I feel perhaps you ignored the literary equivalent of the 3 spice/flavours rule useful for cooks experimenting with new dishes. (If there are too many flavours the dish becomes unclear and can never be brought to perfection) and you list 4 pairs of polarities thus 8 'flavours'. If you were trying to tell a parable for ethical/moral purposes then surely clarity and thus simplicity is more important not less. But thanks anyway
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Meghan McCarron
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Whatever this story is AWESOME. Really, one of my faves of the year. Thanks SH for publishing it. This is what I come here for.
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