etc etc etc

Last Days by Brian Evenson - a self-mutilation guidebook. not really. that would've been funny. this book is not funny, or not funny very often. it's amusing sometimes. Evenson's prose is flat, tempered, and full of violence. it's a detective story intertwined with a superficial spiritual component (i say this negatively) that keeps the reader reading and also wanting a bit more. while it's good, i felt the vague quiet annoyance that i feel too often with genre-bent fiction, that it's characters were a bit too characterless. still, it was fun to play in.

Livability by Jon Raymond - i mentioned this one a while ago. Raymond is the author of the stories "Train Choir" (now a movie called Wendy and Lucy) and "Old Joy" (also a movie). i liked the movie Old Joy better than the story. i felt the movie complicated the characters, went deeper into their lives and their disappointments. his stories are affecting, but sometimes i feel they're rough sketches for a larger thing. the small changes in the movie Old Joy added so much to the characterization and the story as a whole that I wondered: why didn't Raymond write it like this? the prose is clean, clear, but a little bland, though this does fit the lives of his somewhat bland and over-ordinary characters living in an over-ordinary world. "The Suckling Pig" is one of the better stories in the collection for its depiction of odd loneliness and foreigness.

As I Lay Dying by Faulkner - reread it for a class i'm teaching. still as cool as ever.

Last Night by James Salter - to me, Salter's gotten to that point in his career where he's crafting sentences so perfectly and knows so well how to a construct a story that there's almost nothing one can do except sit back and be sort of impressed. he's a craftsmen. these stories are stories, exactly like stories, with a nice twist, a compression of language and emotion, a perfect character sketch, etc. he's also a writer of sex, of attraction between the sexes, and that's evident here again. still, it doesn't compare to A Sport and a Pasttime, but that's okay.

i read some other stuff, but that was longer ago now and i don't feel like i could write about it accurately at all. thank you. i'm going to read blake butler's Ever next. thank you.