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Nom_de_plume
Veteran Poster
Username: Nom_de_plume
Post Number: 114
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, August 10, 2008 - 10:53 pm: | 
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I've been raving about her and her stories for a few weeks now and Friday night I got a beautiful copy of the 600 page Mosquito. Has anyone read that? It sounds so intriguing that I want to start it first; Corregidora might be a bit much for me right now cause I'm STILL reeling from Eva's Man, which I had to have finished a month ago.
Thoughts on Mosquito?
Troy - is there any chance you could get an interview out of her? LOL |
Thumper
Veteran Poster
Username: Thumper
Post Number: 591
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, August 11, 2008 - 12:04 pm: |
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Hello,
Nom: I read Mosquito years ago, right after it was published. I loved it. But, it is trying. I wonder if it is Jones version of Joyce's Ulysses. I haven't read Ulysses. I have a copy of it and I'm not going to lie, the book is a little intimidating to me. I have a size phobia when it comes to books. So it was an event that I even started Mosquito, but I was enamored by Jones, I would have read anything that had her name on it. |
Crystal
Veteran Poster
Username: Crystal
Post Number: 430
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, August 11, 2008 - 12:06 pm: |
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Hey Nom - I just picked up Mosquito too in doing my duty to stimulate the economy. Don't know when I'll get to it though. Right now I'm following Thumper's lead on Faulkner's Light in August and I think it's gonna take me a minute.
Wasn't Eva's Man something? Brothers were on her so hard she didn't stand a chance. |
Nom_de_plume
Veteran Poster
Username: Nom_de_plume
Post Number: 116
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, August 11, 2008 - 06:43 pm: |
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Yes, it just really got to me. And I can tell Corregidora will be some of that same rawness I can't handle just yet. LOL
Thumper - I hadn't even considered the Ulysses similarity, you're right! It may very well be. I only just started it, but you definitely have to concentrate because the character rambles on and on and ON. I'm enjoying her voice and the narrative though.
I hope that she is working on something new right now. I know she's kinda "throwed" but it would be great to hear from her! LOL |
Thumper
Veteran Poster
Username: Thumper
Post Number: 593
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, August 11, 2008 - 07:10 pm: |
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Hello All,
Nom: I hope she is working on something new as well. *big smile* I would love to have an on-line chat with her, but I don't see the actuality in it. But, if I could, I most definitely would. |
Nom_de_plume
Veteran Poster
Username: Nom_de_plume
Post Number: 118
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - 03:00 am: |
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Thumper, you know what? I am just going to stalk you until you read "White Rat".
*eyebrow raised* LOL
It will really give you some perspective on her life and especially that of and with her late husband because many of the last few stories are written from "his" perspective or talk about marrying a "prophet", etc just like the one she apparently meets in Mosquito.
Promise you'll start it soon??? |
Thumper
Veteran Poster
Username: Thumper
Post Number: 597
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - 09:13 am: |
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Hello,
I will start it soon. I'm in the middle of a thick assted book right now, The Meaning of Night. I'll do White Rat when I get done. I've already pulled it out of the pile and placed in on my desk. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 7302
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, August 15, 2008 - 11:58 am: |
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I don't think she talks to anybody. A few years ago she was involved in a tragic incident where her husband stood off the cops and cut his own throat and she was institutionalized for a while.
I was surprised to hear she was out. |
Nom_de_plume
Veteran Poster
Username: Nom_de_plume
Post Number: 121
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, August 15, 2008 - 10:41 pm: |
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Yeah, I posted a link about that whole catastrophe in another thread not too long ago...and I see on Amazon that there is a book of essays about her work called After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones. Hmmm.... |
Nom_de_plume
Veteran Poster
Username: Nom_de_plume
Post Number: 122
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, August 15, 2008 - 10:42 pm: |
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Info from Amazon - this was published in 2006:
"At last, a serious, sophisticated, audacious collection of scholarly essays worthy of the reach and imagination of Gayle Jones's craft. After the Pain approaches Jones's career with the fresh eyes of critics willfully unencumbered by the obscurant niceties of traditional African American literary criticism. Mills and Mitchell have done the fields of African-American and American literature an incalculable service. Gayle Jones is a literary giant and to continue to pretend not to notice her genius, because we have not yet wholly grasped it, diminishes us more than her. Compellingly, After the Pain challenges the black literary orthodoxy by calling into question Jones's exclusion from it. Its unified labor to reclaim Gayle Jones shows a caring for Jones, for black women writers, and for the truth of race, sex, and silenced subjects seldom achieved in critical collections. After the Pain is a necessary work. Most necessary." --- Maurice O. Wallace Associate Professor of English and Associate Professor of African & African American Studies Duke University
"Gayl Jones is one of the most provocative African American writers of the second half of the twentieth century, and she has long deserved the keen and perceptive examination of her work offered here. This landmark collection of illuminating essays covers the full range of Jones’s work, from her controversial Corregidora and Eva’s Man to her more recent and remarkable Mosquito. This anthology will prove indispensable to students, scholars, and teachers alike—to those who read Jones as well as those who study her sharp, unflinching portrayals of women and men struggling with the complex and contradictory inheritance of North American slavery. Every page flashes with the knife of close insight." |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 7315
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, August 18, 2008 - 11:26 am: |
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the fresh eyes of critics willfully unencumbered by the obscurant niceties of traditional African American literary criticism
(What the hell is that supposed to mean?)
Gayle Jones is a literary giant and to continue to pretend not to notice her genius, because we have not yet wholly grasped it, diminishes us more than her.
(If we don't grasp it, how we supposed to notice it? And she ain't no spring chicken. Why ain't nobody grasped it yet if it's there?)
After the Pain challenges the black literary orthodoxy by calling into question Jones's exclusion from it.
(This is some bs. He acts like she ain't been published. Maurice O. Wallace should be horsewhipped) |
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