Book Talk

The woman-who-wanted-to-be-a-man married the man-who-wanted-to-be-a-woman. The arrangement felt confusing at first, not knowing who belonged to the wrench set, the mascara tube, where one body ended and the other began. Sometimes it was hard to tell if they were really married at all.
The woman-who-wanted-to-be-a-man resented her partner. The way “he” loathed his body hair, mocked his Adam's apple, complained how his testicles always looked so sad. Annoyingly sad, hanging around with not much to do but fish for the occasional disingenuous compliment.

Beneath the moon
Beside an ancient lake
Enter again the sweet forest
Enter the hot dream
Come with us
Everything is broken up and dances.

AWAKE
– Jim Morrison
I've taught writing for seventeen years.

Being an artist doesn't take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it's no big deal. They are one and the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this meaningless gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.
– Hubert Selby, Beat writer

Think of your death now. It is at arm's length. It may tap you any moment, so really you have no time for crappy thoughts and moods. None of us have time for that. The only thing that counts is action, acting instead of talking.
– Carlos Castenada

The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember…
…Where you've nothing else, construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.
– Cormac McCarthy, The Road

This whole rhapsody, better go capture this moment
And hope it don't collapse on him…
– Eminem, “Lose Yourself”

I'm walking away from my credit union toward Fred Meyer. I have just failed to be able to use one of my new credit cards to get a cash advance so I can deposit it in my son's California bank account so he can pay his rent. He can't pay his rent because he is a writer living in Los Angeles who works every day for chump change, and in America, 2009, “Writer who works every day for chump change” is a redundancy. My mind is nothing but run-on sentences, bad practice for a writer.

Amelia Gray's AM/PM
Amelia Gray's AM/PM (Featherproof Books, $12.95) consists of 120 impeccably compact stories of love, discomfort and concert souvenirs. The single-page stories were written, one in the morning and one in the evening, over the course of two months. This timeline, and their brevity, may make it sound like this is a simple little book, but it's not; like the best tiny tales and single lines, Gray's snapshot stories are treacherous and sly, capable of changing the cadence of your thoughts and tinting the way you look at the ordinary things around you.

They made it mean something, the choice between cake and pie. Whoever thought as children that the world would grow up cruel enough to pit frosting against filling? History tells us the seeds of revolution came from one too many times hearing, "The proof of the pudding is in the crust." Maybe the kind of place where they do things like write letters, on actual paper, and drink tea understands pudding with crust, but we make no attempt to understand it here.

The pie people called the cake people "gimmicky." Too much precedence placed on sugar flowers and fancy writing and those little plastic dinosaurs and clowns and princesses that make their way to the center of most celebrations, only to be rescued from sweet sludge, licked clean, and displayed like precious mementos along a child's favorite shelf. People who eat cake suffer from arrested development. The cake people called the pie people old-fashioned, equating a fondness for the much-maligned crust with other dubious things, like leaving your Christmas decorations up past Valentine's Day and playing the state lottery.

It would not be accurate to refer to Jeff Johnson’s collection of wryly-funny anecdotes and sometimes frightening tales in Tattoo Machine as simply a memoir. Instead, Johnson-the co-owner of Sea Tramp Tattoo Company in Portland-uses his life experiences to help tell the story of the tattoo industry itself (though he isn’t quite sure when it became an “industry”). The reader learns about his turbulent childhood dabbling in drugs, and how he came to be the remarkable artist he is today through a series of lessons regarding different aspects of the business.
Johnson’s tales also describe the fascinating (and occasionally terrifying) characters that he’s come across in his 18 years tattooing. There were the large, stereotypically-gangster gun-toting men, whose leader wanted “Shaniqua” across his chest (the freaked-out and sweating Johnson had to quickly hide the fact that he’d accidentally written “Shaqu”). But the scariest individual who has walked into his shop was the tall, thin man who wanted a woman’s name and nine numbers across his chest. The first thing that came to Johnson’s mind was that it looked an awful lot like a social security number and when Johnson saw his back, he realized that this guy was covered in names and numbers. The next thing Johnson knew, there was a flash of white and the man was gone. The flash of white was the release form and the dude fled, taking anything he’d touched with him.

Misfits and Other Heroes
By Suzanne Burns
Dzanc Books
First off, we'll make no effort to hide the fact that local author Suzanne Burns is a contributor to this publication. You might remember her pieces on playing Bunco, traveling to Mitchell and you'll soon read about her experiences with psychics in an upcoming issue. But there's a good chance that your first exposure to Burns' writing came in the form of an excerpt of her quirky short story, "Tiny Ron," which took the top prize in the 2008 Source fiction contest.
Now, that short story - a woman's narrative of life married to the world's smallest man - appears in the aptly titled Misfits and Other Heroes, a collection of 14 short stories, all of which share the same whimsical quirkiness of "Tiny Ron." Throughout these stories, Burns weaves a collection of often-outlandish characters into fluid narratives that allow us to believe the tiny worlds she so meticulously creates. Each story is focused on wildly interesting characters, as evidenced by the soap opera star turned kidnapper in "Bittersweet" and the baking-obsessed copy editor in "Domestic Arts."

Katherine Dunn demonstrates that some poses are just eternally cool.

It’s been 20 years since Portland author Katherine Dunn published her quirky novel, Geek Love, a book that is still widely read and loved for its weird depiction of a family of circus freaks. Dunn’s fans also know her as one of the country’s most accomplished boxing reporters and some of her most memorable pieces on pugilism now appear in a new book, One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing. We caught up with Dunn before her pair of appearances in Central Oregon on July 15 to chat about, well, mostly boxing. Makes, sense, right?
When you were putting together One Ring Circus, was that sort of a walk back through your entire career as boxing reporter? Oh, absolutely. It was definitely a trip down memory lane for me. One of the things, of course, was that almost all of the pieces were written for general interest publications, not for boxing publications. Although I did write and continue to write for boxing publications, these seem to be the most consciously designed to reach out to people who were not necessarily boxing fans and to try to engage with people who might have even negative attitudes toward boxing, of which they are a larger number of, unfortunately.

Thanks For the Memories, George
By Mike Loew
Three Rivers Press
Reading
through to the end of Thanks For the Memories, George is not unlike
sitting down with friends for breakfast in a seedy diner the morning
after a brutal all-night bender on the town. Somewhere deep down, you
know exactly what happened, but you need to have it all recounted to
you - even the embarrassingly awful parts - just to make sure that it
really happened.
Mike Loew, a contributor to the hilariously
satirical Onion, uses this look back at the Bush presidency to remind
us that the last eight years were really not too far off from a long
and especially brutal bender. And now Loew is here to sit us down in
that diner and tell us what the hell just happened.