Ben Tanzer's Blog, page 151

Each Year An Anthem. With No Need For A Name. Goertel. Poetry. Hit it.

Here. And here.

These Books Will Change Your Life - Get Up Tim: Stories by Sally Weigel and Have You See Me - A Novella by Katherine Scott Nelson.

So this is like not travel read. Because we have not been travel, but we have been read. We assume it has something to do with timing, things get done and there is space to read. There is also excitement about what is suddenly sitting in front of us. And of course there is obsessiveness, or mania, we get reading on the brain, and we can't let go, it has seemed untended, lost briefly to the ebb and flow of the day, week, month, and it must be reclaimed. And this weekend it was all of this, or maybe none of this, but we did read, both Get Up Tim by Sally Weigel and Have You Seen Me by Katherine Scott Nelson, both from our good friends at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, and both of which continue CCLaP's mission to find ways to tell old stories from fresh perspectives and from fresh voices, capturing small town lives and perspectives, told with urgency and spareness. With Get Up Tim we are presented with a collection of stories, including It's Hard to Say, which originally ran in This Zine Will Change Your Life, word, love that, that is as fresh in voice as any we've read recently in part because of who the stories are primarily about, and how they tell the tale, young women stumbling in and out of relationships, beds and family, and populating narratives that conclude in ways that are not so hopeful, even if the characters themselves seem to hold out hope for something different, maybe better, but definitely different, and burnished with realism and actual storytelling, something refreshing in and of itself. 
Similar language applies when trying to capture what Nelson has set out to do in taking the small town coming of age story in Have You Seen Me and then twisting and bending it in ways that rarely get traction in any space remotely mainstream or popular. It is the tale of a young gay male also wanting something different and better as tries to find his way. In terms of actual escape he barely gets outside of his own head, but he is none-the-less in continual contact with his best friend who's run away and who in most tales would be the story, not the mirror or foil. It is a book then that is indeed fresh, and yes, we are using that word again, gladly, but it is also more than that as well, urgent, desperate, and ultimately a reading experience that leaves us hopeful for places literature may yet go in an ever-bending new world order, literary and otherwise.         

Becker. Sparks. Shut Up/Look Pretty. Tiny Hardcore Press. Lit video love.

Will read soon. For real. Promise.

Giron. Curbside. Reader. Beautious.

Here. For real.

These Books Will Change Your Life, Part II - Tongue Party by Sarah Rose Etter and Three Ways of The Saw by Matt Mullins.

There was travel and read and kid sleeping and here we are, more read, more books, more riff. And we are talking Tongue Party by the Sarah Rose Etter and Three Ways of The Saw by Matt Mullins, one, the former, we long intended to read, and the second, the latter, just magically appeared at our doorstep from those endlessly cranking literary elves at the Atticus Books. We are also talking stories, and maybe gender differences, can we do that? We can, yes, maybe, or is it gender difference speculations? Is there such a thing? Either way Etter writes of pain, of women, of what women lose or sacrifice to be here because men are here as well, fathers and husbands, and she does so with little jabs of beauty, that are sometimes, often times crushing, though none more so than the title story, which still upsets us just thinking about it. 

Mullins on the other hand writes of those men, all men, any men, and their struggles to be whole, to grow and find their way, which is maybe based on the mere fact that they are men to begin with, though regardless, they are teeming with anger and a lack of fulfillment, dragged down by women, they think, though mainly it seems to be their own inability to become what they think they should be. They are men who lack the proper road maps for navigating the world around them, something Etter's characters just might possess, in a different, better, less fucked-up world than the one they, and we, know all too well.  

These Books Will Change Your Life, Part I - The Sky Conducting by Michael J. Seidlinger and Creamsicle Blue by Mike DeCapite.

Travel. Read. Fly. Read. Lie on couch as kid sleeps. Or claims his own row on empty plane.  And we are read and talking The Sky Conducting by Michael J. Seidlinger and Creamsicle Blue by Mike DeCapite, books that came to us to be consumed, and books that read as rumination. In The Sky Conducting, Seidlinger weaves a web of post-apocalypse, though it is also more than that, because while there are so many ways the world can end, this is different, it is rumination by way of commentary, and it is not the end of the world as much as the death of America, hollowed-out by consumerism and misplaced direction.
It's also about the flow of words adding up to something and seeking to capture the sense of terror and dread that accompanies this death, psychic and otherwise. Which is not a bad way at all to talk of Creamsicle Blue. More rumination, more words, more hollow, and more death, though more focused on how we all die, always moving forward, yet looking back as well on what is lost along the way, love, youth, opportunities, and decisions made and not made. It is all told smaller too, the story of an individual in mid-, and possibly ongoing, wander. And while it's true that we don't really know these authors personally, we were struck that maybe there's something generational going on here, with Seidlinger representing the new generation, one certainly focused on self, but also part of a world that feels like it's rapidly deteriorating even as so much lies ahead, and DeCapite reflecting a generation just removed, more individually focused, with less to come. And maybe, just maybe this is all projection, but it is the state of the world, if not literature, we look back, we look forward, we are where we are, and things fall a part even as they sometimes fall together.

The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live. All Slants. And Johnson.

The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live. We have a new poems from old friend Michael Lee Johnson, which we are way excited about, and, (almost) as always, photo action from Adam Lawrence, music curation from Jason Behrends and dueling jobs reports spin 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, play ball.

Interlude.

We are Powell's Books on Hawthorne. And most appreciative at that.

Quite cool this is and big thanks to the John Longstocking for making it happen.

Davis Schneiderman is Busted Books at the remixthebook.

So true that, heady even, and needs to be seen, read, absorbed certainly, here or here and here, and quite possibly sure to change your life.