Is this group defunct?

anyone interested in Arlt?

Could be. Are you looking to talk or read The Seven Madmen? I have to finish the last hundred pages of something else but would be interested in a little conversation of a good book.

You still doing good Rick? I remember you from that Salon group. Your son has grown so much!

Thanks--Yes, life is excellent. And my son is taller than my wife...

What's happening re Arlt is one of our LT members translated the second half of The Seven Madmen, THe Flamethrowers, never before available in English. He did a great job as far as I'm concerned, and we're discussing the whole of it in a private group, but I got to thinking that there must be a lot of Arlt readers here (whatever a lot is) and I thought the more people it reaches the better. I don't remember, but I'm now wondering if you read Spanish? Am I right? The strategy is to use a discussion here and some close readings to fix any flaws remaining in the translation before trying to sell it. The translator is probably familiar to you--Iriley, a very humble guy, and a trufflehound when something interests him. I've written an introduction to his work, which I will post wherever we end up having the discussion.

Oh that's great! Yeah, he's got some good growing genes, that ball card is fantastic.

You might of planned it right, Drumpf has me thinking of leaving this country for somewhere else almost everyday now.

I have no Spanish unfortunately. It sounds like a fairly necessary project maybe even a lucrative one. I'd be happy to read both though when the time comes.

Well, lucrative...probably not, but I know Iriley doesn't care. He would be pleased to get it published, of course.

The time is supposed to be now, or yesterday, March first was the opening of the discussion, but no one said anything--besides me and Iriley there are probably five or six others reading.

Yeah, Arjun's card is two years old now, I think. Currently he throws 8 pitches. He's too young for a curve or slider, so we started experimenting with cut fastballs, and changes, and he can get movement on everything relatively consistently. Last summer his wipeout pitch was the Greg Maddux change, which moves the opposite way, so is like a curve. He's skinny, catching up physically, so he's not the hardest thrower, but he had some great games last summer, one in which he struck out 6 in 2 innings, a stretch of 24 strikeouts in 14 innings. He was the only pitcher with moving changeups. He checked youtube for lessons in throwing a split finger and it breaks sharp, but a former pitcher for the Blue Jays minor league told me it's too stressful on the tendons and he shouldn't throw it.

But back to Arlt--the thread should be available to you shortly and my intro to FT is in there, and Iriley should have one done soon. Right now we're on Chapter one of Seven Madmen...or getting to chapter one.

FWIW the events in The Seven Madmen are pretty tame compared to what happens in the Flamethrowers. I began working on it in 2001--had a few encouraging back and forth emails with Naomi Lindstrom (the original translator of The Seven Madmen)--completed it and shelved it in 2003. It had too many holes and wrong turns. My typewritten copy and the several copies I made of that were overloaded with punctuation and there were hundreds (if not thousands) of typos. It was complete but pretty much a mess. Rick one day told me how he named all his characters in his Driftless Trilogy of novels as a homage to Arlt--so I gave him a quick synopsis of what happened in the Flamethrowers--one thing leading to another I sent him one of my copies and he loved the mess I made of it. Anyway--I didn't like it so much and I ended up with his help painstakingly going through every chapter again and it's IMO a lot, lot better for it and now we now have a Word copy. That took several months. The bulk of the real work was done back in 2001 through 2003 but it needed a thorough cleaning up.

And now we wait to see if an Arlt group draws interest outsde Tropics...or we go discuss only in Tropics...