I didn't get into the class I wanted to get into. I wasn't even wait-listed, which was something of a surprise. Apparently there was something I needed to click on in order to stay wait-listed. As it stands currently, I'm not registered for anything. And the class I want to get into isn't letting in new people. There's been some talk of a group contract for all the rejected, where we'll just ape the syllabus. The syllabus, as previously discussed, is pretty solid. However, tonight? Tonight I've been assigned a short story by Joyce Carol Oates to read, Faithless.

In high school I threw around the word "pretentious" a lot. Not as much as some of my friends, who would call Nathaniel Hawthorne pretentious. But: Joyce Carol Oates is pretty goddamned pretentious. At least she is in this short story. There's sentences like "Voice mixed with dreams, and the wind."

It's bad. It's not good. Joyce Carol Oates. Let this be a warning. Avoid her writing.

You know what is good? That Pavement Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain reissue. Hot damn. Also: Lifter Puller's Fiestas And Fiascos.

So that's music one, short stories zero.

Writing is for lllllooooooosssssseeerrrs.

The short story I'm writing now has this tendency towards internal rhyme that I wish I could avoid, but I can't. This one tries for this kind of clever denseness, and writing things that read well because of their meter ends up rhyming a large portion of the time involuntarily. It's kind of good and it's probably able to read it without thinking it's rhyming all the time, but it's there. Still. I like it more than my other stuff because it gets away from traditional short story tropes. I also like it more than my other stuff because I'm writing it right now, so there's a certain amount of freshness to it.

But I should go back to reading this terrible short story.