No news is good news?
Sorry, haven’t been out in the world lately, just holing up in my apartment, which is good on days like today, when it’s colder than a welldigger’s ass outside. I read WIlliam Gay’s Provinces of Night. He’s probably the best stylist I’ve read since Martin Amis. Here’s the first two paragraphs:
Just at twilight Boyd came up the gravelled walk, the chain with its plowpoint weight drawing the gate closed behind him, before him the shanty black and depthless as a stageprop against the failing light. On the porch the old man in the rocking chair sat staring burnt-eyed at him like some revenant out of his past.
Which he was, but Boyd went on anyway. Behind the shack the horizon went left and right as straight as a chalked line and as far as the eye could see, the furrowed earth tending away toward a hammered sky that looked like turbulent waters at land’s end. The old man just watched him come, sepia felthatted old man like a curling Walker Evans photograph, brittle and fragile as memory.
Still, the best part of the book is the author photo.
Aside from that, most of my excitement lately has come from grinding my own coffee beans. woohoo. Am possibly going to Nuevo Laredo next month when I go to Austin for AWP — if so, I’ll come back with a story for you guys.
Oh yeah–
Who’s not too old for Bonnaroo?
