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ToBS R2: [yourauthorname].com vs. working at Best Buy

[Matchup #35 in Tournament of Bookshit]

adamrobinson.com redirects to some Sarasota Real Estate company. That’s stupid. adamrobinson.org is “The Truth,” a Christian dude’s fervent website. He was married in November. Congratulations to you both! adamrobinson.blogspot.combelongs to a bass player who hasn’t updated since 2004. So basically [yourauthorname.com] sucks for my fellow Adam Robinsons. Except for maybe the preacher and his Dreamweaving and his wife/husband and his devotional books which are available at bulk pricing in case you’re interested. But enough about myauthorname.com — how’re things for yours? I do appreciate being able to go to one site and seeing all of your publications listed, for when I’m bored and hiding out in the bathroom at my job working at Best Buy, crying and scrolling through your mobile site on my Samsung Vibrant S2, reading your sweet poems on the toilet with my pants up. Plus that blue shirt matches my eyes and I happen to know a lot about RAM anyway, and sound cards (SOUND CARDS!!! People upgrade your SOUND CARDS!!!), and how Dell’s GX270 desktop form factor has a known issue with the nodes leaking on the motherboard so, sorry mister, you’ll probably need to buy a whole new machine if you’re going to finish that manuscript which I hope you saved to one of our external harddrives. But in this challonge I need to hearken to the best authorname.com case study, which was aboutjatyler.com, made famous by those early Stamp Stories. I mean, damn, that’s how you get your name out there, on the backs of little slips of paper.

– Adam Robinson

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Contests / 6 Comments
December 13th, 2011 / 11:53 am

Sean Lovelace

BOOKS + BEER: Dune and Budweiser

Why? Because a student handed me the book and suggested I read it? No. Students routinely want me to read books and they are usually this one, or Neil Gaiman and I’m not reading any fucking Neil Gaiman. I’m an adult. I read it because so many of my students are writing Sci Fi lately. From a genre trickle to categorical gusher. Could be my doing this semester. I instructed them to write a QUEST. I think some of their brains went quest=genre, though I showed them many, many quests that were just like two dudes trying to get to Hollywood or the latest Jennifer Aniston Must-Get-A-Man flick or just some guy swimming away into cognitive dissonance or a newlywed couple needing to rob McDonald’s but no/no/no they go genre, fantasy or Sci Fi. That’s OK. I mean we had no zombies. (Best zombie film to show students about genre irrelevant—characters matter.) I could be like some in academia (and literary publishing) and say no to genre. OR…I could admit many literary works are indeed gestures of genre…OR I could/should meet the students half way and feel a need to increase my knowledge base on Sci Fi, admit I haven’t read Sci Fi in many years (is Vonnegut Sci Fi?) and so feel a pedagogical necessity to read something and Dune is on all the lists and I know Sting is in the movie version (though I’ve never seen it and have no plans to) and so here we go into the box, the hour glass, the sand.

Three things we know: 1. You can show all the patriotic commercials in the world, but Anheuser Busch is still a company owned by Belgium. 2. Women die when they get near August Anheuser Busch IV. 3. Budweiser is Ok to drink. Not great. Not absolutely bad. (Fuck off, beer snobs, we know how much you blar this beer and, honestly, it’s a little ridiculous.) But OK, an OK beer, in certain situations…

Other People: An Interview with Brad Listi

Other People with Brad Listi is a twice-weekly author interview show with a unique literary emphasis. Rather than focusing on their books, Listi asks his writer guests to open up about their lives as writers, what’s driving them, how they work, their personal philosophies and their opinions of other writers’ books. Sometimes an episode seems to be about everything except the subject’s latest book. Whatever they talk about, the shows—which typically clock in at just over an hour—are almost always filled with interesting conversation, and Listi has, in just a few months, had a lot of terrific guests, including Blake Butler, Steve Almond, Victoria Patterson, Joshua Mohr, and Dennis Cooper.

Hearing it for the first time, one wonders why it took so long for this podcast to arrive. The thread that runs through every show is Listi himself: intelligent, self-conscious and completely open about his own idiosyncratic approach to life as a writer and reader. In addition to posting two new episodes of Other People each week and serving as editor at his online culture magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, Listi works as a novelist. His first novel, Attention. Deficit. Disorder. was released in 2007. READ MORE >

Author Spotlight / 24 Comments
December 12th, 2011 / 4:27 pm

Judge: Laura-Eve Engel

ToBS R2: the guy who goes 20 minutes over the suggested reading time vs. AWP

[Matchup #34 in Tournament of Bookshit]

To locate the source of a power that’s true and absolute, a power that comes from the center of the integrity of the essence of each contestant, one must not go through hate, but love. So hear you this, Guy Who Goes 20 Minutes Over the Suggested Reading Time—GWG20MOTSRT, if I may be so bold—you have made me love you. You’re right, for the first 50 minutes, I wasn’t really even paying attention to you or the carefully coiffured bedhead you clutched as if in pain in between poems, though I did come up with some handy new ways to discreetly check my email on my phone, and looking back now, it’s safe to say I was taking you for granted, GWG20MOTSRT, or GWG20MO, can I call you GWG20MO? But G-MO, a few moments before it’s been suggested by who knows what power (probably that guy sitting in the front row who introduced you not 57 minutes earlier) or what authority (God’s) that you step down or at least cede the floor to a Q&A, I begin, at last, to notice you. I notice your breath, the speed and cadence of your voice, the way you shift from foot to foot, with an increasing and increasingly wild alertness, as if there is some kind of pattern to be discerned there, a pattern that might gesture towards a greater, future happiness. Perhaps two swipes through that hair, now drooping despite its coif, means two more poems; perhaps when you’ve leaned on your right elbow’s jacket patch for the length of three gossamer moons and a grackle, the task of supporting of your own admirably well-kept head will become too much and you’ll be forced to shut the book—GWG20MO, I can’t take my eyes off you. It’s as if we’re the only two people in the room. You’re sweating now and I can see it and it’s so intimate. Do you give even one good God damn for me? Can you hear me shift and sigh and slouch towards you? Is this punishment for those times I very suavely deleted messages from Groupon about 25% off tanning with the heel of my boot while American starlings combed pensively those vast and lyric skies? I am rapt. I have failed to resist you. I have, so very badly, to pee. READ MORE >

Contests / 7 Comments
December 12th, 2011 / 1:37 pm

Reviews

Rachel Levy

Stranger In Town

Stranger In Town
by Cedar Sigo
City Lights Books, 2010
100 pages / $13.95 Buy from City Lights

“One must keep holy the edges of fragments.” That line appears twice in Cedar Sigo’s second collection of poems, Stranger in Town, and brings to my mind the kabbalistic notion of the shattered vessels. In the beginning, according to Kabbalah, was a divine light so potent that it shattered the vessels in which it was contained, scattering sparks and shards throughout all of creation. Mankind was charged with the task of recovering the fragments and restoring the vessels.

ToBS R2: ‘magic realism’ vs. Alcoholism

[Matchup #33 in Tournament of Bookshit]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez dropped his iPhone on the sidewalk. A crack shot through the street sending fire hydrants blasting into the sky, splitting the 9/11 Memorial in two, setting the Wall Street Bull a-bucking after a bunch of shrieking schoolgirls in preppy outfits. No, wait. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez took an upskirt of himself on the base of the Statue of Liberty, Alcoholism stumbled over and sent his iPhone tracing a slow arc to the sea. When Marquez looked up Alcoholism held one of those Zack Morris phones to his face and said, “I’m at your house.” Gabriel paled as he reached for the phone. Alcoholism punched him in the nose with it. “Just kidding, jackass. I went to your house but you weren’t there. So I burned it down.” Gabriel held his bloody nose in both hands peering through a pair of watery almonds. “By the by, saw those penis enlargement pills in your medicine cabinet. Are those for your clit?” Before Marquez could stutter, Alcoholism reared a fist and hooked a hole through his face, which contorted into hyperbole. “L-O-L,” slurred Alcoholism. “Who do you think you are, Franz-fucking-Kafka? I think no.” READ MORE >

Contests / 9 Comments
December 12th, 2011 / 11:53 am

Erik Stinson

Midtown Skin Essay Series Part 3 of 5: Lunch Hour

3. Lunch Hour

Can we stop all this? Can we just stop for an hour?

The Indian buffet on 39th Street simmers as fat men in blue suits break their day into two unequal pieces. Neither piece seems palatable, at this juncture. The morning was dull and the afternoon will be a replete – so the whole day is a tangled mess, layers of nothing upon layers of too much. Clients have weighed in, money is on the line, and all of the executives are out of office (OOO) selecting window dressings for their new condos in MiMa.

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