Not dead

Just, ah...napping. Much like my houseplant. And disco, pre-LCD Soundsystem.

Still reading Pynchon (though I'm almost done and while I'm not having nearly as much fun as I did with Gravity's Rainbow there's still been enough moments of jaw-drop beauty to make the rest of the pages I'm not so much into worth reading) and I'm still reading Vonnegut during my lunch break (I really like the stories in Bagombo Snuff Box a lot, they've got me thinking a lot about the notion of fashion as it relates to short stories, in so far as I wonder if stories like those in Bagombo exist in any form anywhere today) and I got my copy of The Stories of Stephen Dixon yesterday (and promptly read the first story in the book and promptly fell out of my chair because it was an awesome little story and reminded me of how much possibility there is for the short story form which gave me some strength to start hacking away at a first draft of a story of my own, which might now be the first piece of writing in months that I might manage to stick with for longer than three days without getting sick of it) and I'm still thinking of moving on to John Barth next (though maybe not because maybe that book really is long and maybe I'm not actually in that mood the way I thought I was when I picked the book up a week or so ago) and somewhere in there I picked up a copy of The Collected Stories of William Faulkner (because I've been semi-randomly, semi-not-randomly itching to read some Faulkner lately but couldn't decide which novel I'd want to commit myself to for any length of time and so decided the only appropriate course of action was to commit myself to a 900 page story collection, right).

If you're looking for something that might be worth looking into, you might want to look into ways you can help save book reviews. I'm not vouching for this whole thing, as I haven't had a chance to review all the material and make anything like informed decisions about it (and as Ed Champion displays, there's complex issues at play here) (well, there might be complex issues at play here, or maybe there's just people who might be making complexity out of simplicity, like knots in shoelaces) (which is to say I really don't know what I think about any of it yet and am not nor will I hold the actions of anybody at this time against them) (as if such sanctions mattered, as you could still easily buy my respect in Canada) (no embargo, see) (ha ha) (right), but I do suspect it's a movement worth at least highlighting. Which I'm doing now, here, on my blog. So, mission accomplished.

Also in lit crit news, William H. Gass has won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. I've got his big fat novel The Tunnel over there on the TBR pile, waiting for me to push some of the other big fat novels off the top of it. I think somewhere along the line I read something out of A Temple of Texts that made me want to read the rest of it...but, for the life of me, I can't find it or remember what it was. Bummer.