I enjoyed reading "Tuscaloosa Nights." It had a real old-school feel to it. The first-person perspective worked well and the descriptions were excellent.
After reading Carmer's story, my original impression of Brad Vice's story is significantly diminished - not because of the plagiarized section, but because Carmer's story is that much better. Vice's prose pales in comparison to Carmer's. And I don't think such comparisons are unfair, due to the similarity of the stories.
One thing that was really obvious, and goes back to my review of Vice's story, is the way in which Carmer handles references to Tuscaloosa. In his story, they are essential and never distracting, even to me, which was a problem in Brad Vice's story.
While I don't think Vice's plagiarism was committed maliciously, he still used extremely bad judgement. It is also of note that he didn't just plagiarize the whole section without altering it, but made several changes which, in my opinion, were to the worse and cheapened Vice's attempts significantly. As it looks to me, Vice was trying to imitate one of he writers he looked up to. Well, he failed. Carmer's story is infinitely more vivid and important. It's funny how reading it lowered my opinion of last week's story.
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