Friday Five: Five Best Things Ben Tanzer has read recently

Ben Tanzer (right) at a recent CCLaP party.

There's no doubt Ben Tanzer is a man of exquisite taste. Tanzer is not afraid to inaugurate a publisher with Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine or take a chance on a e-publisher with his short stories, Repetition Patterns.

Publisher Jason Pettus of CCLaP said Repetition Patterns "is Sherwood Anderson with a fair dose of Sam Shepard injected into it, plus a dash of Chuck Klosterman for good measure, all of it filmed with a flattened lens by Robert Altman; yes, they are related stories about small-town life that are sometimes nostalgic, but with a pitch-black sense of despair many times thrown in, tales of rural smothering and the tragic consequences that can sometimes ensue, most of it tinted through the grimy filter of '80s pop-culture gone to seed."

My kind of story. One of Tanzer's chapbooks, "I Am Richard Simmons" has also dropped over at Mudluscious.

Tanzer also blogs like mad over at This Blog Will Change Your Life, where he publishes his portrait regularly. Here are the five best things Ben Tanzer has read recently, as of late November.

1. "Protects minor cuts, scrapes & burns." This was on the label of a very dusty 3.75 OZ. container of Vaseline I bought at a truck stop in Michigan. I'm not sure why other people need to buy Vaseline at truck stops in Michigan, but I was having some chafing issues and I should probably leave it at that.





2. When the Cats Razzed the Chickens & Other Stories by Mel Bosworth. I got to read an Advanced Reader Copy of this and it is the goods.

3. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. I was asked to write about a piece about the intersection between running and writing and I decided to read this first. Murakami comes off as low-key and slightly compulsive. It has highlighted for me how not low-key and highly compulsive I am about both running and writing and how I want to capture that in this piece.

4. "Bulldozer love powers." This was the subject line of an e-mail I received at work. My wife was especially excited about this one and the possibilities explicitly and implicitly promised there in. The results were not exactly what we were hoping for, though you should in no way read this as having anything to do with (1) above. Nothing.

5. "Ezra Furman's song just for you." This was from an article I read about
this local Chicagoland singer Ezra Furman and how he is writing a song for
every fan who buys his latest album - Ezra Furman and The Harpoons' "Moon
Face: Bootlegs and Road Recordings: 2006-2009." I love everything about
this.