Posts too short to post

The poet Donald Hall, I believe it was, had a box in his attic with this label on it: "String too short to be saved." Of course, the box was full. Mine is getting that way as well, so I thought I'd post these post-ettes:

A welcome to students from my classes. I hope you find something here that you find interesting. Those curious about the Magritte pictures you wrote on--what they look like, that is--can find them here. You might try also looking at some of the Favorite Posts as well as what's on this page.

As part of my book project, I've just started reading Jeffrey Lent's 2000 novel, In the Fall. So far, so excellent. A reviewer notes the Faulkner and McCarthy echoes, and I'd agree, but Lent isn't just mimicking a style and at the same time forgetting that those writers have more going for them than their style. Here, for example, is Lent's narrator's little one-sentence description of fall in Vermont:

The woods a carnage of color, the early autumn-smell sweet as if death could be that way.

Powerful, no? Strange it is for me when a writer tells you exactly what you know is true about something and yet it's as though you'd never been told or realized that thing before. But such is Art's power.
Lent is a pretty good writer--so good, in fact, that it's a bit distressing to me to see that Amazon is selling some used copies of his for as little as a penny. But hey--drop the penny. He's worth many times that.

And speaking of books: I'll soon be posting something else about Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat, about which I had some things to say in a previous post. I'll try to connect Ferber's novel with some things I've been reading about American romances (as opposed to "novels") without, I hope getting too bogged down in stuff that only specialists would worry about.

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Books, American literature