Ben Tanzer's Blog, page 2

"An intimate glimpse into the lives of writers, runners, sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers." The New York Stories is TNBBC Top Reads of 2015, quite fine company and so Ludlow.

It really is Top Read, much appreciated, fine company, thrilled, and Ludlow, be still our hearts. Excerpt? Of course. Endlessly.

"We have the privilege of seeing some at their most honest and vulnerable and others as they make mistakes, come of age, regress in maturity, and carry forward hope that they will make better choices next time." 

"My destiny was to make people happy." Meadowlark Lemon (1932-2015)

These Books Will Change Your Life - USA-1000 by the Sass Brown, Hustle by the David Tomas Martinez and errata by Lisa Fay Coutley.

"There's nothing in this worldI don't want." - Sass Brown, "Wildcat Canyon"
We suppose this applies to us as much as anyone we know. But it also occurs to us that there is nothing more American than all that. We want it all and we think we deserve it. Why this occurs to us at the moment is in relation to the poetry collections we have just consumed, or to paraphrase the poet Mark Strand, and by extension the Greg Santos, the poetry we have been eating and the resulting happiness that has accompanied it.
 
All of which is to say that we were honored, if not outright geeked, to attend the 2015 Devil's Kitchen Literary Festival, and spend time with so many talented authors, including, but not limited to - and yes we are thinking of the Megan Milks - the poets we read, ate and ran with - Sass Brown, David Tomas Martinez and Lisa Fay Coutley.
 
It is in their respective collections - USA-1000, Hustle and errata - that we started thinking about America. Or what America looks like in 2015 anyway. A mash-up of love and family, sex and immigrants, gender, pornography, pop culture, race, parenting, humor and violence. The fight for self-awareness. Grappling with trying to understand our true, and truest, identity. And how the good people of Devil's Kitchen - we're thinking of you Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble - may or may not have consciously sought to present this vision of America, but they have, and it is available, all of it, to all of us and sure to change lives.  

This Podcast Will Change Your Life Days of (both) Future (and) Past.

Glad to be on @BenTanzer's podcast. Love city background as we talk online violence, films, journalism, fight club. https://t.co/9wuw7t6MuJ

— Amy Guth (@amyguth) December 20, 2015

i was reminded by @BenTanzer how much I miss writing and geeking out over music.

— Not Kendra (@kdc) December 22, 2015

The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live. All Soulmates. And full of Williamson.

The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live, and we are thrilled to have new poem, Soulmates by new friend Kristen Williamson, and (almost) as always, photo action from Adam Lawrence, music curation from Jason Behrends and presidential primaries so soon 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, Merry Christmas, if that's your jam, yo.

And now we pause for (semi-) annual holiday wishes from faux TBWCYL, Inc. celebrity spokesman Steve Martin.

If we at TBWCYL, Inc. had one wish that we could wish this holiday season, it would be that all the children to join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace. If we had two wishes we could make this holiday season, the first would be for all the children of the world to join hands and sing in the spirit of harmony and peace. And the second would be for 30 million dollars a month to be given to us, tax-free in a Swiss bank account. You know, if we had three wishes we could make this holiday season, the first, of course, would be for all the children of the world to get together and sing, the second would be for the 30 million dollars every month to us, and the third would be for even more encompassing power over every living being in the entire universe. And if we had four wishes that we could make this holiday season, the first would be the crap about the kids definitely, the second would be for the 30 million, the third would be for all the power, and the fourth would be to set aside one month each year to have an extended staff-wide 31-day orgasm, to be brought out slowly by Rosanna Arquette and that model Paulina-somebody, we can't think of her name. Of course our lovely wives, and husbands, can come too and they are all behind us one hundred percent here, we guarantee it. Wait a minute, maybe the sex thing should be the first wish, so if we made that the first wish, because it could all go boom tomorrow, then what do you got, y'know? No, no, the kids, the kids singing would be great, that would be nice. But wait a minute, who are we kidding? They're not going to be able to get all those kids together. We mean, the logistics of the thing is impossible, more trouble than it's worth! So -- we reorganize! Here we go. First, the sex thing. We go with that. Second, the money. No, we got with the power second, then the money. And then the kids. Oh wait, oh jeez, we forgot about revenge against my enemies! Okay, we need revenge against all of our enemies, they should die like pigs in hell! That would be our fourth wish. And, of course, our fifth wish would be for all the children of the world to join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace. Thank you everybody. 

(Borrowed (and slightly tweaked) from Steve Martin's monologue on the 1991 Saturday Night Live Christmas Special).

Check-it - Gamut Magazine is coming.

So coming, and so from the endlessly fertile mind of the Richard Thomas. Hence so sure to change your life. So do learn more about the Gamut here, now, all post-haste, thank you.  

SEX AND DEATH is quite fine Seidlinger Bookporn - 2015 Edition.

For reals, the Bookporn, the Seidlinger, the fine, the SEX AND DEATH, all of it.

SEX AND DEATH is quite stellar blurb from the quite stellar Lauren Becker.

"In SEX AND DEATH, Ben Tanzer deftly illustrates the struggle between fidelity and desire in a uniquely sympathetic manner. His stories display an honest exploration of the governance of our sexual thoughts and deeds, as determined by natural urges and behaviors modeled to us in childhood."
--Lauren Becker, author of If I Would Leave Myself Behind

And more to come. 

Tortoise Books is seeking submissions for its first anthology and now needs you to S.Y.S (Send Your Saudade).

For real. Tortoise Books is anthology and the theme is saudade. What is saudade? Tortoise Books describes it as something like this:

"If you don't know what that means, don't worry. Saudade famously has no direct English translation; it’s a Portuguese word describing the nostalgic longing for something that may never return, or may not exist."

So there's that. There is more detail here. And you should submit, like right now, because it just might change your life.