I've read: The Second Bakery Attack, The Kangaroo Communique, On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, and The Elephant Vanishes so far and found them incredibly enjoyable. I read them yesterday morning, before getting too drunk and wild to respond on Hubski, and them again right now. I was going to continue to read the other shorts, but I felt the need to read the same ones again and see if I could glean anything more substantial from them.

I don't exactly know quite what to say.

Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special....I don't know. I can't seem to remember anything about her - the shape of her eyes or the size of her breasts.

The same way he describes this girl, this perfect girl, is just about the way I feel about these stories. They leave me with something but when I begin to talk about them I don't know what exactly to say. It's peculiar but the impact alone obviously says something.

Perhaps if I had my AP English teacher (she was amazing) walking me through the reading I could let my mind and feelings become fully developed and realized, but for now I'm just kind of....here.

The writing itself is beautiful - the words and the story are just there and are so natural - they aren't trying too hard, they aren't begging to be read, they even seem indifferent to the fact that I am reading them. They aren't trying to impress or impact me and because of this, I am even more intrigued.

It reminds of of this boy in my middle school who never said anything to anyone or seemed to notice anyone's existence. He was always reading comic books (manga perhaps?) or playing with his shoelaces - he would fray them with paper clips he had pulled apart. The fact that he was so indifferent made me wonder endlessly about him, with more than a few fantasies about his life at home or what went on in his head and some odd romantic notions. I really wanted to be able to penetrate him and see what he was. This would've never been the case if he wasn't so indifferent and self-absorbed - then he would've been like the of the kids in middle school who were constantly looking for approval from everyone and everything around them.

I can see exactly what you mean when you say:

the stories cover the mundane, but they totally ignore it, too. they go beyond the mundane, and they don’t rely on a completed narrative

and...

"...often, it doesn’t feel valid, like it’s a waste. it’s nice to know how beautiful this kind of writing can be."

I think anyone can write a story that can entertain and perhaps fascinate for a moment - you need some characters who do something. If the actions are anything substantial enough, readers will read and enjoy it, even if it is written poorly. Good writers take the narrative and characters and write it in such a way to make make it transcend and transform into the emotions of the reader. But these require readers to make them real. To write about everything and nothing at once and to write where the words are simply themselves, sitting on a page, not caring if anyone reads or understands them is quite amazing. I think it's this that makes these so intriguing to me. Some of his stories barely qualify as a story and without skill probably wouldn't be a story at all.

I think I'm going to take a walk around the internet and see what others have to say and see if reading other's essays or interpretations can help me figure out exactly what is going on. Even the paragraphs I wrote above don't feel fully realized or true yet. I'm still missing something.