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Suggested Pairings: Garth Greenwell and Harry Porter and the Bourbon Soaked Vanilla Beans Porter

You are in Bulgaria. You are a teacher. You are an American man seeking to meet men. To meet them in a certain type of bathroom, “…a chill room with its impression of damp…” “…having a single purpose only, any other use of them accidental.” You meet a young, homeless Bulgarian, Mitko. He tries to sell you drugs. You don’t want drugs, you want sex. So he sells you sex. A transaction. But you want to take this transaction further. Most would not—it’s a crazy idea, to confuse this form of transaction with something deeper. Unless you are torn, to the own self. Your wants, motives, and mind. Well. Here we go. And so it begins.

As you surmised, I’m a drug dealer. Example: Yesterday, a young man pedaled over to my house to trade beer for drugs. I gave him 75 tablets of ibuprofen, four packets of raw sugar, and 2.6 pounds of Starbucks Coffee House Blend Melange Maison. He loaded these into his bicycle basket and passed me a six pack of Harry Porter and the Bourbon Soaked Vanilla Beans Porter (Great Lakes Brewery). Dork. But I will say the beer pours a dark cedar with a spare diminishing marshmallowy light-auburn head.

Books by people named Garth. I rarely read them.

Author Spotlight / 23 Comments
May 19th, 2011 / 3:58 pm

Alec Niedenthal

Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch on Food Network!

Not really, but close. In this new episode of Emily Gould’s “Cooking the Books,” Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch make green juice and read from their collaboration Ten Walks/Two Talks. Along the way we learn that Cotner and Fitch met as 19-year-olds in Boston. They were both crashing on someone’s roof, and started talking. They’ve kept talking. We also hear some thoughts about Basho and zits.

Timothy Donnelly, who selected Ten Walks/Two Talks as a Best Book of 2010 for The Week, included an excerpt from Cotner and Fitch’s new project Conversations over Stolen Food in Boston Review‘s National Poetry Month celebration. The short piece is called “Spiritual Laws.” It takes place in a grocery store they call “W.F.” This excerpt moves from Emerson, to a kid who soils his shorts, back to Emerson, then ends with a discussion of anxiety and bicycles.

Author News / 24 Comments
May 19th, 2011 / 12:30 pm

Sean Lovelace

Dogs and such

I once felt compelled to finish everything I began. Not sure why. The tendency can be just as foolish as admirable. Today I was on page 188 of Peter Arnettt’s Live From the Battlefield (Yes, I know, a certain classic) and I came across yet another scene that had me off my feed. Ever have that friend who only tells stories where they personally come out on top? Here, the young reporter Arnett confronts an older established journalist for writing a too optimistic account of a military operation during the Vietnam conflict.

I felt he had misrepresented the action.

“Son,” he grinned bitterly at me, “I was doing this long before you were born.”

“Tom,” I responded angrily, “I’ll be doing this long after you’re dead.” He looked at me in startled shock and mumbled into his Scotch. Reddy didn’t say much to me after that.

Everything about this exchange felt phony to me. The adverbs. The older journalist as “startled” by the exchange, the mumbling into Scotch, The John Wayne/Noir mix of the comeuppance Arnett is recalling 30+ years later. He lost me. I stopped reading. I give myself permission. Because written words were doing their thing long before I was born and will be doing it long after I’m dead. I only have so many books I can read in my lifetime. I now stop a book when I’ve read enough to feel I need to stop. And then pick up another.

Random / 24 Comments
May 18th, 2011 / 3:49 pm

Guest Post: J.A. Tyler

Editorial Notes

Some positive notes I made editing the final version of Mathias Svalina’s I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEUR (Mud Luscious Press, July 2011)

Fuck I love how you write things like this

Kills me – fantastic as all get out

Cripes. I couldn’t love these phrases more

Fuck. YES.

YESSSSS

Hilarious

I feel like this section in particular really speaks to the whole of the book, underneath the clever disguises

Lovely

Shit. Brilliant

Behind the Scenes / 21 Comments
May 18th, 2011 / 3:14 pm

David Fishkind

Watching The Twilight Zone

A few weeks ago, the lymph nodes along my neck suddenly swelled up. I had a doctor check it out and he determined I had strep throat, and then a week later, added mononucleosis to the diagnosis. Sort of a one-two punch of undergraduate illness. I didn’t feel that sick, and suffered little symptoms other than the inflamed globules along my jugular, but it became clear to me, getting drunk off three beers and exhausted at 5pm, that I should probably take it easy. My regular leisure, after school, work, and whatever other responsibilities I’ve lined up for myself on a given day, is to kick back with a few-to-several beers and do things on the internet. The doctor recommended I avoid this, so there was only one viable solution to passing time at the same rate and pleasure level: watch TV. I am one of those lucky enough to have acquired a password to my friend’s Netflix Instant Watch account, and, after watching The Larry Sanders Show, Archer, The Stand miniseries, My So-Called Life, and The League in their entireties, I noticed that The Twilight Zone original series had been recently added to the queue. Though perhaps the most referenced and acclaimed cult series in history, I must admit, I’d never seen one episode. I resolved, then, it would be my next big tackle in my imperial takeover of internet television.

Film & Random / 34 Comments
May 18th, 2011 / 10:12 am

Amy McDaniel

6 Books: Kevin Sampsell on Nonfiction

This is Part II of a series where I ask writers I like for 6 book recommendations according to some loose guideline. Part I is here. This week, Kevin Sampsell, editor of Future Tense Books out of Portland, Oregon, doyen of Powell’s Books, and author of the wildly excellent memoir, A Common Pornography (Harper Perennial). To give you an idea of the goodness of Kevin’s book, I’ll confess that the first copy I had didn’t make it through my ravenous reading of it and I had to switch to another.

I asked Kevin to recommend 6 nonfiction books, old or new. He obliged, and then some:

Black Box: Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of In-Flight Accidents by Malcolm MacPherson

I’m fascinated with this book and the way these transcripts reflect the collected calm of airplane pilots and then their sudden confusion, panic, and tragedy. An eerie and morose reading experience.

I Remember by Joe Brainard

Whenever I go talk to a writing class about memoir, I always point out this book and read a little from it. Then I have the class write a few of their own “I Remembers.” It’s such a non-threatening and easy way to access parts of your life that you think are uninteresting and trivial, but turn out to be engaging and universal.

Time Out of Mind by Leonard Michaels

Besides his fiction and his essays, this book is a bit of an oddity because it’s more like disjointed journal entries. It took me a few pages to lock into Michaels’s groove, but once I did, this book turned into a thing of uncut beauty. I would have to say that Leonard Michaels is the author I’ve been most obsessed with for the past year since I read his novel, The Men’s Club.

Oedipus Wrecked by Kevin Keck

This book is so dirty and hilarious, but also sweetly heartfelt. For fans of Jonathan Ames and other straight-faced pervs .

Author Spotlight / 20 Comments
May 17th, 2011 / 6:32 pm

Alexis Orgera

When art and life mix?

Townspeople at a reading

I’ve been doing some readings lately for my new book. I’ve read at colleges, in the community, at art centers. I’ve sold a lot of books at these readings. I’ve watched people smile and cry at these readings. Sometimes people laugh at the right times, sometimes they laugh at the wrong times. Always, people seem to be hearing me. Except for the one deaf guy who told me I read too fast. People buy books for themselves, for their daughters, for their childhood best friends.

Poets talk a lot about how poetry is dead to mainstream culture. Nobody wants poems anymore. Well, I’m beginning to wonder about that. Have we, the poets, created an insular world for ourselves because we’re insecure about our words? Is it safer to keep ourselves sequestered in the academy–or even on the internet where we know the audience who reads our work will respond in a way familiar to us? Is it frightening to think that we might write something not quite as erudite as we imagined?

Random / 19 Comments
May 17th, 2011 / 3:40 pm

Brian Foley

We Are Dead Unless We Do Something – a conversation between Brandon Shimoda and Matthew Henriksen

Matt Henriksen is the author of Ordinary Sun. Brandon Shimoda is the author of The Girl Without Arms. Both books are available now from Black Ocean. Both authors are currently on tour.

Adam Robinson recently had some good things to say about Matt Henriksen’s book, finding its poetic attempts at translating the incommunicable both frustrating, yet filled with meaning. As Johannes Goransson wrote at Montevidayo, “The ‘difficulty’ of Henrikson’s poetry is not about access but the experience it aims to put the reader/writer through.” So I invited Matt & Brandon to interview each other, to further collide those ideas of frustration and experience, and the poetry that comes out of it. What takes place amounts to late night cross-country trek talk, hallucinatory and winding, filled with shunned understanding and been-through truth. Enjoy.