three a.m.

I recently finished a draft of a story about a guy who shoots a lion in rural Arkansas.  I felt   compelled, if only because a similar event really happened and to my knowledge nobody has written about how weird that is.  I don’t think that came across in my story either — maybe the next draft.  I couldn’t resist the urge to make it kind of silly.  I like Hemingway as much as the next guy, but…then I found this funny graphic on the web.  (I was trying to find photos of lion shit — you know, for descriptive purposes?)  You can actually get T-shirts with that logo for about 7 bucks. 

Then I read the new George Saunders novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, an allegory about war and human nature, played out by characters whose bodies are composed of tuna cans, sliding brains, multiple mustaches, etc. People are comparing it to 1984, I guess because they don’t know what else to compare it to.   It has nice illustrations, but I think Saunders outweirded himself.  It reads like a parody of Saunders best work (of which I’m a fan).   It made me want to write something realistic, or at least something harder to ignore than a story about alcoholics and lions.  (Although alcoholics and lions are much more difficult to ignore in the flesh!)  Anyways, that Saunders guy has been on a roll for too long, so I guess it’s a little satisfying to see him put out a clunker. 

All right — I’m going to take Joel’s advice and finish Moby Dick.  Good, serious, whale-slaughtering literature.  I just saw on Amazon where a reader claims that Melville most resembles Shakespeare.  I better think about something else, or this is going to turn into a bad day.

One of my students left Flaubert’s Sentimental Education in the classroom yesterday, so I began reading it today.  It’s good.  Have people read this book?  I’m amazed by the books I haven’t read.  I’ve never read any Flaubert or Lawrence or Hardy or Zola.  I haven’t read Jane Austen either, and I’ve only read a couple of Updike stories.  I didn’t finish Hamlet, and I only got about 30 pages into Ulysses.  I’mprotesting Joyce and Shakespeare from here on out, but  I still haven’t read The Sound and the Fury, or any Steinbeck, except half of The Winter of Our Discontent.  I’ve still got a bookmark about 60 pages into Moby Dick, though I’m sure I’ll go back to that one.  I haven’t read For Whom the Bell Tolls, or that other thick Hemingway one, the name of which eludes me right now. 
    I should do that thing where you make a list of all the books you want to read before you die, except too many of those lists look alike.  How many great books are there?  I know there’s thousands of really really good ones, more than I’ll ever read.  I don’t know if that’s comforting or depressing. 

Yeah, I did that.

I just finished reading Bill Buford’s book "Among the Thugs" a couple of days ago, and it was so good I have to tell everyone about it.  It covers span of ten years or so (the eighties) when the author was living in London, hanging out with soccer thugs on the weekends.  The book is about violence, and about crowd violence in particular.  The first hand accounts are pretty chilling, and the broader discussions are smart — Bill keeps it real.  About two thirds of the book is first hand accounts of what he did — meeting up with the Manchester United supporters, rioting in Turin, going to a party for the National Front, etc.  Wow.  (For some reason, I think you should read this, Allison.)