Ben Tanzer's Blog, page 213

"What I required of myself was: Both as a person and in my writing, I had to live with honesty, responsibility and dignity." Liu Xiaobo

New joint. Ain't No Reason. Binghamton story. Full of Crow.

Quite happy we are to have a new piece Ain't No Reason in the new edition of Full of Crow, the final version of which was highly influenced by the repetitious ebb and flow of the fabulous noir novel Beautiful Piece by Joseph G. Peterson. We are also happy to share that this is the final Binghamton story to find a home in the group of stories we wrote following and in reaction to discussing the stories in Repetition Patterns, and yes we know this is a lot of repetition, during the Repetition Patterns blog tour. Those stories include among others, Goddess at Annalemma and Never Said at Girls with Insurance. Big thanks to the crew at Full of Crow and for your reading pleasure a brief excerpt below.

"I am in bed and staring at the ceiling as I always do at bedtime. I am not sleeping and I am never going to be sleeping. I am thinking about the endless things that keep me up at night, school, war, my looks, sex, being cool and my parents' voices that I can always hear drifting up the stairs as they talk, and talk, long into the night.

I am on the little league field down by MacArthur where I go to elementary school, and it's hot, upstate New York hot, all humid and moist, the air thick and full of gnats, endless gnats getting in my ears and nose, flying around my face, and sticking to my forehead when they get too close and their wings no longer work."

99 Problems gets a shout-out from the Chicago Tribune, craziness ensues.

Well, to be frank we're not sure craziness has ensued anywhere but here at TBWCYL, Inc. headquarters, still big and most humbling thanks to old friend and TBWCYL, Inc. favorite Amy Guth for said shout-out, we are beyond thrilled to be mentioned in any article that name-drops us along with Amby Burfoot, Haruki Murakami and Rachel Toor, the latter of whom is getting a lot of shout-outs this week in the lead-up to the Chicago Marathon and whose book Personal Record: A Love Affair With Running we plan to consume soon. Very soon. For real.

This Podcast Will Change Your Life, Special Edition - So You Think You Have Nerves of Steel?"

Are you sitting? Good. Because we have a special edition of This Podcast Will Change Your Life featuring TBWCL, Inc.'s Ben Tanzer appearing live at the re-launch of THE2NDHAND's So You Think You Have Nerves of Steel? and not only interviewing the ever-stimulating Harold Ray, but reading "Just Say No" which ran in THE2NDHAND, and was originally written as a tribute to the super-fly Lindsay Hunter, but was retro-fitted for this show and newly dedicated to the super-something Christine O'Donnell. We should add here, that we greatly appreciate the chance to participate in the show, we hope you enjoy it and per our legal team we feel obligated to stress the endless and bountiful levels of impropriety captured there-in.

Relationship status. Final clubs. Napster. Fincher. Isolation. Friendship. Sorkin. Betrayal. And Justin Timberlake. The Social Network.

Relationship status. Final clubs. Napster. Fincher. Exclusivity. Friendship. Sorkin. Betrayal. And Justin Timberlake. The Social Network.

We are Barrelhouse blog. We are Lady Gaga. And we feel fine.

Word. there is new Barrelhouse blog. There is Glee. There is Lady Gaga. And there is goodness. Enjoy. [image error]

So hit it.

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Confessions of a Book-Bagger. Karen Lillis rocks the JMWW.

The quite awesome Karen Lillis not only has a new serialized memoir happening at Undie Press titled Bagging the Beats at Midnight - Confessions of an Indie Bookstore Clerk about her days as a bookstore clerk at the quite awesome St. Marks Bookstore, but a quite happening interview about the project with TBWCYL, Inc. favorite and This Zine Will Change Your Life contributor Jen Michalski at the JMWW. Anyway you slice it, its goodness all-around, and we do love the goodness.

JM: So what came first for you—the idea for the bookstore tour or the idea for the memoir?

KL: The memoir idea came a few years ago, when I was in library school and all the 22-year-olds in my classes were saying that books didn't matter to them, that they were just "information containers" like any blog, e-reader, or PDF. I think my blood pressure went up during library school because of this ongoing conversation. The thought came to me, "Everyone I've ever loved, I related to through books." In 2007, I started keeping a notebook of book anecdotes, of my life spent with books, of my friends and loved ones and the books I associated with them. More recently I decided to make my book clerk years the parameters of the book—because St Mark's is so unique, and because those years were the ones most intensely lived with books. St Mark's was at the center of so many book-related friendships I made.

Cultural Tourism is an idea I have been really interested in ever since I found Larry Portzline online (maybe 2007), he invented Bookstore Tourism. Over the past few months, I've written about Small Press Tourism, Creative Tourism, and Library Tourism, and it was from these writings that SPF (Pittsburgh's Small Press Festival) asked me to do the two tours.

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Fisk. Brand. Tanzer. Eggs. Bacon. Silverthought Press. Breakfast with the Author. Guerrilla-media-style love.

We are really thrilled to have participated in the debut episode of the new "guerrilla-media-style video podcast" series Breakfast with the Author from Silverthought Press. We are even more thrilled that we got to do so with TBWCYL, Inc. favorites Jason Fisk and Mark R. Brand. And we will be especially thrilled if watching it changes your life. Wait, did we say if, we mean when, because we think it can, at least for a little while anyway.

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