Ben Tanzer's Blog, page 141
July 24, 2012
July 23, 2012
July 22, 2012
This Book Will Change Your Life - A Cloth House by Joseph Riipi.
The Joseph Riipi has written a most beautiful book, and we always find it interesting when we find ourselves talking beauty and death in the same moment or thought. On the face it, it should all be more contradictory than that. Of course, this is one of the many things art does for us, be it literature, paintings, movies, theater, or dance, it takes our tortured, at times unknowable feelings and reflects them back to us in ways that are beautiful if not still unsettling and confusing. It is in this reflection though, this funhouse mirror, and again the contradictions abound, where beauty is found, and it is in reflection that Riipi's A Cloth House resides. This is a book about making sense of death, but more than that it is about feeling and memory, and how these things intersect and morph into one another to form a narrative. It is touch and smell and missing pieces slowly fit together. Tragedy as confusion seeking to be understood. And fragmentary scenes from a life slowly piling on top of another as they build and sort themselves out into something that almost makes sense so many years later.
July 21, 2012
Scott McClanahan is having a moment.
More accurately it is a series of moments with more to come soon. Still, we will focus on the here and now, and what we will focus on is the Lazy Fascist Press release of The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Vol. 1 and McClanahan's recent appearance on the Other People with Brad Listi. Both of which we are not only terribly excited about, but sure to change your lives. We will also take a moment to not focus on the here or now, and draw your attention to the quite legendary, in our minds anyway, episode of This Podcast Will Change Your Life starring McClanahan - "Lightning and Women" - because ultimately we're most self-serving like that. [image error]
July 20, 2012
The Way We Sleep is pre-order. It is also filled with a practically unquantifiable number of quite awesome writers and illustrators.
Frankly, The Way We Sleep is like a parade of literary awesomeness. And it includes an excerpt from TBWCYL, INC. spokesperson Ben Tanzer's novel You Can Make Him Like You titled "The Vanessa Hudgens Diaries" which has been most joyfully illustrated by the quite inestimable Nathan Holic. So please do hit it, because it will most definitely change your life. [image error]
July 19, 2012
July 18, 2012
Happy Birthday.
"It never got weird enough for me." Hunter S. Thompson
July 17, 2012
Sam Weller. Ray Bradbury. Come home.
We do not know the Sam Weller. But we know he loved Ray Bradbury. Which means we love him. It also means we love the Bradbury remembrance he published in the HuffPost this week. Most beautious that.
"And then there is the basement. The famed basement office of Ray Douglas Bradbury. The fluorescent lights that hang from the joists will never buzz again. Not over him, at least, perched over his hulking metal office desk, as he loved to do, stout fingers gliding over the keys of his IBM selectric typewriter.
The basement filing cabinets, stuffed with unpublished tales and fragments of story starts waiting to be finished will now, likely, go to a cold repository for study and academic rumination. All the toys and the books and the old pulp magazines have lost the man who collected them all with love and fervor over a lifetime of excitement. This basement, this repository of a man's childlike wonder, will never see the man ever again.
And it is as if the very house itself, on a moonlit California summer night, says, hushed, "Come Home. Come Home."
July 16, 2012
The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live. All full of Luminescence. And Smyth.
The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live. We have a new poem, Luminescence by Alexandra Smyth, which we are way excited about, and, (almost) as always, photo action from Adam Lawrence, music curation from Jason Behrends and outsourcing prose love from Pete Anderson. We hope you enjoy this edition and we appreciate all shout-outs and links. Finally, please note, we are hoping more of you will submit comix, and music, novel excerpts, and art, and video, yes, video, and combinations there of. And most finally, Jeremy Lin, no.
