Ben Tanzer's Blog, page 22
July 4, 2015
July 3, 2015
July 2, 2015
These Books - Big Venerable and Twilight of the Idiots - and This Podcast, Episode One Hundred and Eleven - Anarchic Non Sequiturs - by and starring, the Matt Rowan and Joseph G. Peterson respectively - Will Change Your Life.
We are so podcast. We are also old friends in the Matt Rowan and Joseph G. Peterson, who themselves are former podcastees with El Presidente and Timbre. Or Tamber. respectively. Not to mention Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Lindsay Hunter, George Saunders, Sam Irby, David Mamet David Foster Wallace, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and The Simpsons.
Yet, as if all that was not enough, that's not all, not even remotely, because we are Big Venerable by the Rowan and Twilight of the Idiots by the Peterson too. Both are recent releases from Chicago's own Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, which had us wondering how these books just might hang together? And we think it has something to do with systems. Rowan seeks to understand the systems that imprison and embrace us - integrating themselves into our lives as they overwhelm with language and rules - even as he rails against them with an absurdity and wit that both mocks and models the absurdities of the institutions themselves. Of further note, is that Rowan's previous work Why God Why was a collection of stories short and fast, death by a thousand little cuts as it were, but in contrast, Big Venerable lets the humor breathe, the stories now expanded, the lives captured within richer for the effort.
With Twilight of the Idiots, Peterson goes in a new direction as well, but in his case, he goes smaller, providing us with a collection of "yarns" after a career of novels and epic poem. The characters crafted within are certainly Peterson's people though, blue collar and raging, stumbling down streets, being tossed into bogs and frying fish, while all the while lurking outside the systems, and there's that word again, that won't have them, will never welcome them and are all too happy to pretend they don't exist. But they do exist in Peterson's mind, and like Rowan's people, on the page, fresh from CClaP, available now, and more than willing to change your life, if only for a moment.
July 1, 2015
June 30, 2015
The New York Stories Stand By Me Twitter hype there is. And most humbled by that comparison we are.
@BenTanzer are you a big fan of Stand by me? Keep getting thoughts of it in your writing. Or maybe I'm the huge fan. Either way I like.
June 29, 2015
The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live. All Dungeon. And full of Porter.
The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live, and we are thrilled to have new story, Dungeon Dragon's Owner Manual, by new friend, Jennifer Porter, and (almost) as always, photo action from Adam Lawrence, music curation from Jason Behrends and ACA 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, Pride, yo.
June 28, 2015
June 27, 2015
June 26, 2015
"It is so ordered." - SCOTUS
Please do file under #LoveWins.
June 25, 2015
Among The Wild Mulattos & Other Tales by the Tom Williams there is. Which is most awesome when you stop to think about it.
Right? Totally, yes, and more here there is.
