Columns – Page 8 – Vol. 1 Brooklyn

#tobyreads: Journeys into Technique, Journeys into the Weird

March 21, 2014 No Comments

So I read MFA vs. NYC this week. I’d encountered a couple of the essays in it earlier–some in the pages of N+1; others at readings or excerpted elsewhere. And as collections of work go, it comes highly recommended: it’s an accurate summation of the debates around writing and the studying of it as you’re likely to find. Though looking to it for defined answers might be more difficult: the anthology offers up a host of points of view, each of which […]

Poetry in Motion

Poetry in Motion: Twelve Basketball Haiku

March 17, 2014 No Comments

Phil Jackson: Knicks bound. The Zen Master, soon tested by L train delays.

Columns, tobyreads

#tobyreads: Looming Tomes and History’s Weight

March 14, 2014 No Comments

When I was in Portland earlier this month, I was told that I needed to read Justin Hocking’s memoir The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld. The recommendation came from Michael Heald, who knows a thing or two about good nonfiction; I was in the midst of talking about various anxieties and frustrations relative to life in New York, writing, and other things, and he suggested that Hocking’s memoir would be a useful thing to read. I’m tempted to say that he’s right. […]

Columns, tobyreads

The Zinophile: Fragments, Arrivals, and Debates

March 13, 2014 No Comments

I have few regrets from my recent trip to the Pacific Northwest, but atop the list was my inability to make it to the new location of the long-running indie bookstore Reading Frenzy. I was happy to hear of their successful fundraising campaign (to which I contributed, leading to a print with illustrations of a number of zines that now hangs in my living room), and hoped to make it up to their new space. An abbreviated stay, though, impeded […]

Columns, tobyreads

#tobyreads: Cities Gone Idiosyncratic

March 7, 2014 No Comments

Cross-country flights often give me a chance to work through the larger side of my to-read pile. That’s how I came to read John Berger’s Selected Essays and T.J. Binyon’s Pushkin in the last week and change. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions ended up on my radar through WORD’s Classics book group. Initially, this was going to be what this week’s column would be about: Weighty Tomes, door-stoppers; books with a size suitable for comment. Instead, I’m going with novels. Weird, idiosyncratic […]

Poetry in Motion, Uncategorized

Poetry in Motion: The 9 Sports Books Coming in 2014 That Will Murder You if Not Purchased

March 3, 2014 No Comments

Checkers: 5,000 Years of Blood, Concussions, and Mayhem by T. Thaddeus Muffintop (March 11; Piddle & Sons, $24.95) Once thought a light-hearted romp of jumping and “Crowning”, the game of Checkers has in recent years revealed a dark side. T. Thaddeus Muffintop (of the popular Grantland column “Butterscotch-Fueled Outrage”) goes undercover to reveal a underground culture within professional Checkers, rife with brutal thumb violence, narcotics inhaled off game boards, and one elite player’s deadly addiction to that other Checkers: the […]

Columns, tobyreads

#tobyreads: Three Takes on Obsession

February 28, 2014 No Comments

This week’s dispatch may be a bit shorter than usual; I’m currently in Seattle, kinda-sorta doing the AWP thing and kinda-sorta catching up with friends and enjoying my usual explorations of the city. As of this writing, I’ve been in the city for seven hours and have purchased two books already; sowing the seeds for future columns? Perhaps.

Columns, The Zinophile

The Zinophile: The Making of a Zine About Soup

February 28, 2014 No Comments

Last month, Ami Greko and Rachel Fershleiser announced a fundraiser for Stock Tips, a zine that they were putting together that explores the world of soup. As both are friends of mine, I was immediately interested; as I now have the zine in my hands, I can also say that it’s a fine overview of soups. The title can be taken literally–there are, in fact, tips for making stock–but there are also recipes in abundance, trivia, and essays. (The more literary-minded […]