"Kicking Santa in the Balls: An interview with the Boston Book Festival’s Literary Squatter" is now live at the Boston Phoenix website and on page 6 of this week's print edition. Many thanks to Eugenia Williamson.
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9 comments:
Ha! I had no idea you did something like this. Fine work - any gadfly about the beast's back is a good thing in my book.
If Santa is hawking junk food and Grand Theft Auto, then maybe he needs to be kikt in duh bawls.
Yeah, and this particular Santa came down the chimney with a bunch of corporate logos plastered across his fat ass -- Verizon, Bank of America, Target, and four of the "Big Six" media monopolies that suck the life out of publishing . . . damn right I kicked him in the balls.
"...damn right I kicked him in the balls."
Is it true that they jingle?
You beautiful dreamer, you! If only the conversation could be centered around The Cruiser, which having read (and relished) I have subtitled: "Swallowing the Pedagogical Urge" or "Take the Quarters and Run!"
Both very apt options, Frances -- thank you for reading!
(But, er, how did you know he swallowed?)
Not your protagonist, your readers. It is we, your blushing readers, who do the swallowing...swallowing in the sense of accepting into the gut. Glug, glug, glug...
Well, my protagonist swallowed too, even though I never included that in the story!
Deglutition nation! I really look forward to reading that descriptive passage in your accomplished prose one day. I have my own literary cocksucking interlude in my new blockbuster, written, I'll have you know, before reading The Cruiser. So please don't sue me, or nothing.
Was this piece inspired in part by Courbet's painting The Sculptor, by any chance? I ask because I know you love the artist, because that particular painting features an artist at rest, and because those big blocks of text in the beginning of The Cruiser seem sculptural, like Michelangelo's unfinished marbles of his Slaves. (I'm guessing Richard Russo wrote his story in Times New Roman.)
I'm curious, as I remember once in The Bunker Pagoda you posted a piece with long paragraphs and Steven suggested revising into smaller more digestible forkfuls of spaghetti. (He was comparing luring a reader into a piece with enticing his then 3-yr. old daughter to eat her pasta.)
Around that time I was reading Federman's book of noodles, Double or Nothing, in which he is so careful with the presentation of the words--often repetitive--on the page, foregrounding composition as the sina qua non of literary art.
I just wondered if that all came together for you, as it did for me, in The Cruiser?
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