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Sunday Stories: “The Sunburned Cowboy”
The Sunburned Cowboy
by David Byron Queen
When I met the cowboy on the bus to Palm Desert, I had a few months sober still and life was open and full of possibility. This was 1995. Everything I owned was in a suitcase in the compartment above me—toothbrush, socks, underwear, jeans, t-shirts, a box of nicotine patches, my father’s meditation tape, a tambourine, and a 1971 Selmer Mark IV saxophone that had once belonged to my father in a plastic music case. I looked good. I’d shaved my beard, gotten myself a haircut, and wore a neat dark suit my father had given me around the time he left, told me to wear it one day at the start of my career. And well, it had taken longer than some but there I was.
Afternoon Bites: Anna Meredith, Low Interviewed, Constance Ann Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Hand on Chicago, and More
In our afternoon reading: an interview with Anna Meredith, new writing from Constance Ann Fitzgerald, and more.
“Watertown bodily”: An Excerpt from Grant Maierhofer’s “Marcel”
“I began remonstrating with the men in the soap operas.” – A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley I think of Wittgenstein’s notion of a great work of philosophy being one that causes the reader to eventually throw the book against the wall/toward the ground and after this the ideas melt forth. Whether we intend it or not we construct the histories of fictions as they’re read—the before/the after/the minute—and these (not the great fictive works of time) consume our minds for […]
Notes on the Modern Elegy: A Review of “Gabriel: A Poem”
Gabriel: A Poem by Edward Hirsch (Knopf; 78 p.) Elegies, in our age of access to centuries’ worth of poems, can seem outdated, stilted, and perhaps even a bit indulgent. It’s hard to imagine a straightforward popular and populist book lamenting death like John Gunther’s howl of an elegy for his young son, Death Be Not Proud today. I find it hard not to feel an instinctive response of both been-there-seen-that and the attending tic of kindness that tells us […]
Sunday Stories: “Chloe in Brooklyn”
Chloe in Brooklyn by Julie Hart –“the 19th century city is surprisingly intact and, in parts, it is unusually handsome, with its low skyline and big old trees and rows of sculptured houses of brick and brownstone. Writers seldom live where it is ugly, if they have any choice in the matter.“ Evan Hughes, Literary Brooklyn Chloe finds a third-floor walk-up in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, a block and a half from where Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s. […]
Weekend Bites: Peter Kaplan, Barbecue Poetry, Great Literary Parties, 2013 Poetry, Alissa Nutting, and More
The passing of a great New York City editor, 2013 poetry, literary parties, Alissa Nutting, Balthus, and more.
Morning Bites: Indie Publishing, Musto Talks To Marie Calloway, Gezi Park Writings, Black Flag Flyers, And More
Plenty of black Flag flyers, a trip through one of Eastern Europe’s most literary places, Waugh talks Capote, and much more.
At Portland’s Nationale, The Artist as Shopkeeper
While visiting Portland last month, I visited a number of excellent shops with Yeti editor/publisher Mike McGonigal. One of these spaces was Nationale, which offered both a smartly selection of books and zines and contained excellent art. (At the time that I was there, they were preparing for an exhibition of Carson Ellis’s work.) I also noticed a stack of books by Don Carpenter, whose novel Hard Rain Falling remains seared into my brain. The Carpenter novels, I learned, were there as part […]