Ben Tanzer's Blog, page 38
January 27, 2015
January 26, 2015
January 25, 2015
The 100th episode of This Podcast Will Change Your Life starring the Brad Listi Twitter hype there is.
@BenTanzer @otherppl A terrific listen. Thanks so much!
— Kara Norman (@SutNamBonsai) January 20, 2015
January 24, 2015
Twilight of the Idiots by the Joseph G. Peterson is so being released from CCLaP this coming May and our heads might just explode in anticipation.
Like totally gloriously for sure. And do feel free to learn more, a lot more, here. Nice.
January 23, 2015
That time we were wearing a Houndstooth blazer and Story Sessions most graciously invited us to get all Fillet of Solo.
For real, yo, and all the recap love you can possibly stand can be found right here.
January 22, 2015
Lost in Space Twitter hype there is.
Just finished @BenTanzer 's Lost in Space. Feelin real weird about all dads everywhere.
— NiKKI`oki (@nikkiSAMO) January 21, 2015
@BenTanzer haha no apologies necessary. I meant weird in the way that it reminded me that dads are people too.
— NiKKI`oki (@nikkiSAMO) January 21, 2015
January 21, 2015
These Books Will Change Your Life - Winterswim and The Waiting Tide by the Ryan W. Bradley.
We could tell you all about how much we love the Ryan W. Bradley in all of his sexually obsessed awesomeness. Well, at least the obsessiveness of his characters anyway. Maybe we could just tell you how much we love him regardless of all that. But it's possible the two are intertwined. The personal is the political is the words and the art. Or something like that. We suppose we are ruminating on this because we just read Winterswim and it is one nasty piece of work. Something we say mind you in the most loving way possible. It's a folk tale, and it is obsession and sickness, and as you might expect a book where the reading experience engenders an equal amount of obsession and sickness, if only to see what will happen next, the good and the ill. 
However, to say we felt sullied as we read it would not be accurate. To say that we were reminded of Bradley's poetry collection The Waiting Tide, which we hadn't revisited since the MS landed in our inbox some time ago, would be. We re-read it with the film of Winterswim still coating our brain, and to do so, is to see some of the same obsessions, water and sex certainly, spill out across the pages as something else, a love song, and an homage. Which is not to say Winterswim isn't an homage and love song to Bradley's Alaska. It's just that they're different experiences, both possibly warped, but in their own ways. One because love overwhelms everything in its path, and the other because illness and decay does the same. That both find sex and water as a means to the end, as well as, the end itself, only reminds us that authors have their themes, and that when they are good, and even when they are not, they are trying to figure something out, and trying to change lives, if even only their own.
January 20, 2015
"Nerve twitching literature." After the Flood. Much appreciated goodness.
Much goodness and much appreciations. Also, much love to Notes on the Shore for making it so. Excerpt? Word."I think this is his magnum opus. Which would be a dumb thing to say since I haven't read anything else of Tanzer's other than the story collections, but I'm getting there. But this was seriously my most fave CCLaP publication. Here's a funny thing, yesterday, there was a sudden black out because some doofus broke something somewhere in New Jersey and that caused something to break and knock out the electricity in the late afternoon, so I actually read some of this in the dark and it just fit so well. Luckily, it came back in the evening, so the post-apocalyptic feelings didn't freeze me to death. This is also his most violent and the darkest, I was actually kind of worried, because the characters felt so familiar. I was actually waiting for it to somehow turn into a horror story, the best horror story ever, because I rarely get scared despite being scared easily. If that makes sense. But I think it's also because we all dealt with hurricanes and that Super Sandy storm was so scary, this was pretty close to real life."
