Ben Tanzer's Blog, page 180

"Wit and love and uncomfortable truth." You Can Make Him Like You gets Patrick Wensink'd. And likes it. A lot.

Quite stellar author and by far our newest and favoritest BFF Patrick Wensink has some quite kind things to say about You Can Make Him Like You on the Goodreads. Big thanks sir and quite enjoying the Black Hole Blues. More soon. Here. For real. And drinks on us for sure whenever, and wherever, we next meet.



"Once in a while a book comes at the right time in your life. Tanzer's book of a 30-something guy dealing with his maturity and a budding family arrived perfectly timed. It's eerie how well Tanzer dissects the mind of a married man with wit and love and uncomfortable truth."

Happy Birthday.

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." Ray Bradbury

Interview Sundays are back. Teaser. Cobalt.

True it's only a teaser for now, but the young upstart literary magazine Cobalt recently conducted an interview with TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer and in preparation for its most imminent release has rolled-out an interview teaser, and yes, management believes even a teaser interview question ought to qualify for the highly coveted Interview Sundays slot, which we thought we would share with you. Please do hit the Cobalt blog for the full answer, please do keep an eye out for the full interview and please do enjoy some excerpt below.



Cobalt: You're a busy man. You work in the nonprofit sector, you are constantly changing people's lives through your blog, and you have a family to come home to every night. How do you find the time to write at the great capacity that you do?



Ben Tanzer: Ball bearings are crucial. As is cloning, polygamy, and, like my great hero Korczak Ziolkowski procreating at as great a rate as possible so as to generate as many assistants as I can to work in substandard conditions for nominal rates of pay. Mainly though I seek to keep the fat in my schedule, i.e., Soap marathons and the like; the doubt in my head and any drifting towards preciousness to a minimum; while simultaneously stoking and embracing any and all compulsive desires to write the things I'm thinking about at as maximum a level as I can...

The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live. Full of pillage. And Smithson.

The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live. We have a new poem Adjusting by Vincent Turner, which we are way excited about, and, (almost) as always, photo action from Adam Lawrence, music curation from Jason Behrends and inopportune summer vacation 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, we are strong.

There is hypermodern paper 99 Problems. And there is happiness.

More here. Much more.

This Podcast Will Change Your Life, Episode Forty - Tracy Lords is Dead. And Goethe Will Get You Laid.

We are so This Podcast Will Change Your Life. And so Hatfield. Byron Hatfield. King of Boggle and founder of The Pub Theater. We have been thinking lately about engaging writers for the podcast beyond our Indy lit brethren. Who we love. A lot. But there are so many kinds of writers out there we've been running into lately, comedy writers, and playwrights, and they're interesting to talk to, and they're hustling, and we love that too, so why not, right, right, but who, when? Hatfield that's who. And when? Now. Go. Enjoy. It just might change your life.

A CCLaP Quadruple Book Release Party and Performance Extravaganza photo podcast wrap-up thing.

There was CCLaP. Readings. Books. Photo action. Podcast. Take a listen. Enjoy. And big thanks to the CCLaP and the Beauty Bar.

This Zine Will Change Your Life flunky Pete Anderson gets Contrary.

Maybe that's more contrary? Regardless, quite geeked to share with you that long-time TBWCYL, Inc. favorite, This Podcast Will Change Your Life podcastee and This Zine Will Change Your Life flunky Pete Anderson is now blogging for Contrary Magazine and his first post can be found here, here and here. Please do take a look, it just might change your life.

Pulling a Bosworth.

It's true. We are pulling a Bosworth. Here. Now. And no, that doesn't mean we are brushing our lush beard one hundred times a night until it reaches a golden hue. Or running through the dew-covered Western Massachusetts mountains before dawn with our deer and antelope brothers and sisters. Nor are we remembering, forgetting, destroying or finding things. No, what it means, is that just as the Bosworth once generously gave away his bonus copy of My Father's House, so are we giving away the now bonus copy of Freight, yes that Freight, the one we just riffed on yesterday here, and there, that arrived in the mail today. So, if you want it, and you know you do, hit us with an email at thiszinewillchangeyourlife@yahoo.com and in the subject line write "I WANT BOSWORTH," because you know you do, and we will pick a winner tomorrow. Cool? Quite. We know.

These Books Will Change Your Life - Freight, Nothing or Next to Nothing and Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone.

Vacation. Read. More read. Word. Many. We were off. Off of work. Off of the grid. Just off. There were a number of books we were reading as we left and now they are read. It's always tough to know if authors are up to what you feel like they're up to in their work, especially as you read a number of books at one time, and try to tease through your own biases, filters, and projections, tangling and unpacking your own stuff. This is probably even more the case as you wander from beach to porch to beach again, thinking and reading and thinking and unencumbered by office stuff and web distractions. Which leads to and leaves us with Freight by Mel Bosworth, Nothing or Next to Nothing by Barry Graham and Harry Potter, yes that Harry Potter, and The Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling.



We suppose that on the face of it these books may or may not seem to have much in common, and yet despite the various differences a foot, that's what it felt like at week's end. Start with Freight, a novel that reflects Bosworth's ongoing search for answers, completeness and love, and yes as always the Bosworth is love. The Bosworth is also about motion though, and Freight is about motion, and about trying to move forward by unpacking, and understanding, the past, the good, bad, the violent, and naked, all of it. There is always an undercurrent of pain and trauma in his process, coping, usually poorly, and the desire to resolve any and all of it, so the protagonist can somehow be something and somewhere he is not yet, whole, happy, healthy and intertwined with some girl if not the larger world itself. Nothing or Next to Nothing also continues Graham's efforts to capture characters who are searching for something as well, usually a way out of things that are ugly and contorted, though unlike Bosworth's characters, nothing good ever awaits them, their pasts too traumatic, too violent and messed-up, the poverty too grinding, and in Nothing or Next to Nothing as the character pukes, smokes and sexes his way forward, he is always in motion as well, though we know the motion will end badly with the same certainty that we know Bosworth's will not, still incomplete as Bosworth's characters' lives may be. We would add, that it didn't escape our attention that as we chilled on the beach in South Haven, Michigan, the people Graham channels and writes about were somewhere close by, getting high, working in Taco Bell and mostly ignored, by most everyone, ourselves included. Finally, for the moment, The Sorcerer's Stone, such a pleasant surprise in all the ways it captures a character at the start of his life, trauma lurking in the past and present, secrets still to be uncovered, and violence long established, but hopeful, the protagonist more courageous than anticipated, and also moving forward, always, a whole life ahead of him, and the center of a book we would have absolutely absorbed via literary osmosis when were the age of our older son, nine, if you are interested, and the only reason, though a most appreciated one, that we are even reading it in the first place.



And in conclusion, if you will then, a coda of sorts. Books. Read. Words. And stories, stories of motion and possibility, or lack there of. But also stories that in many ways coalesce around relationships, those lost in Bosworth's work, though maybe, just maybe with some understanding, showing a path forward; relationships twisted and dirtied in Graham's work, hopeless, though endlessly present; and with Rowling, relationships still forming and firming, but real and true and present as something great begins. Motion. Violence. Trauma. Relationships. Word.