By J.J. Tindall

The third of five parts.
Part 1: She left. I asked for it, I think.
Part 2: They met in a bar.
*
They were digging the same band. She asked him to dance. He danced.
Billy could dance.
Billy was 21 and about to graduate from Lincoln University. Bethany, born and raised in New Lincoln, Illinois, a university town sprung up not much taller than the Illinois corn around a river grove, always wore beautiful pleated, paisley or scotch-check skirts over blue jeans and cowboy boots. Her round face shone like a ripe summer peach. Her soul shone and simmered with the angry passions of a smart girl from a broken home. She loved to ride on the back of Billy’s bike, a ’73 Honda CB-750 he “inherited” from his older brother Art, and close her eyes and hug Billy’s back hard. Burnt-orange gas tank. Billy wiped it on I-74 between Champaign and New Lincoln, after a Gang of Four (featuring Ms. Sara Lee) show at Mabel’s that he’d taken Bethany to but they got in a fight and she disappeared, and he started to drive home alone on his bike drunk. The last thing he remembered before waking up in a hospital room were the orange-lit letters “O’s Gold,” a hybrid corn seed, on a barn off the highway, orange letters shimmering through black rain and drunken tears.
Billy wiped out.

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Posted on December 5, 2007

By J.J. Tindall

The second of five parts.
Part 1: She left. I asked for it, I think.
*
Yes: Billy hated poetry, or, more specifically, poets. Mimes, it was like being a mime to him, or any other legerdemain proffered by anyone calling themselves an “artist,” some who, maybe too much like Billy, was trying to find a way out of the normal Hell that life can be. He’d get a chill of rage up his spine whenever he heard anyone refer to themselves as an “artist.”
“If they were really artists,” to himself Billy would go, “they’d never say it aloud.”
He felt that such discretion was the rest of the world’s due.
Soon, he’d learn a long, if not hard, lesson regarding such matters, such certainty, such cynicism. Not quite yet.
Billy wanted to be a genius, but he didn’t know (yet) that he’d have to become an artist first. And in order to become the artist he could be, he’d have to develop some serious, late-hour humanity. Period.

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Posted on December 4, 2007

By J.J. Tindall

The first of five parts.
She left.
I asked for it, I think. Yes. Come to think of it, I believe I did ask for it quite specifically. Well. There. There you go.
I wanted to get back to her.
It would be like digging a hole to China.
Not like a slow boat to China, because that is a reality, something that could readily happen. This hole is a hole in my soul, rendered by the arrow having been pulled back out by Cupid, crudely and diagonally back through my heart, as though through a flesh globe, and which to fill would require the dirt dug out from a hole to China. Cupid breaks the arrow over his chubby knee.
Another hole. They keep happening. There goes a ghost of me. I put it on the payroll. Kind of thing that happens a lot here in Stinkweed.

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Posted on December 3, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

A (somewhat irregular) weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Cell Mates
What follows might sound like science, but bear with me. As one subject says in the New Yorker story “Darwin’s Surprise,” if you think about this for five minutes, it’s wild stuff.
“Viruses produce rapidly and often with violent results, yet they are so rudimentary that many scientists don’t even consider them to be alive. A virus is nothing more than a few strands of genetic material wrapped in a package of protein – a parasite, unable to function on its own.
“In order to survive, it must find a cell to infect. Only then can any virus make use of its single talent, which is to take control of a host’s cellular machinery and use it to churn out thousands of copies of itself.
“These viruses then move from one cell to the next, transforming each new host into a factory that makes even more virus. In this way, one infected cell soon becomes billions.”
Okay, so big deal. Nice biology lesson.
Well, the thing is this: Scientists are piecing together extinct viruses and bringing them back to life. By doing so, they can figure out how they work and, in the case of HIV, for example, find a way to stop them. But that’s not really the point of the article.

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Posted on November 29, 2007

By Connie Nardini

Out Stealing Horses: A Novel
By Per Petterson
–
“Are you coming?” he said. “We’re going out stealing horses.”
Trond and his friend Jon start out on a sunny morning in 1948 for one of their usual summer adventures in a small and isolated farming community in northern Norway, near the border with Sweden. “Stealing” meant going for a wild ride, bareback, on some neighbor’s horses without permission. Petterson takes you with Trond; you leave safe and its twin, sound, and you have landed . . .
“. . . on the horse’s back, a bit too close to his neck, and his shoulder bones
Hit me in the crotch and sent a jet of nausea up into my throat . . . I heard Jon yell ‘Yahoo’ behind me and I felt like yelling too, bit I couldn’t do it, my mouth was so full of sick that I couldn’t breathe . . .

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Posted on November 26, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

A weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Uncle Thomas
The psychological stewpot that is Clarence Thomas is on display once again in Jeffrey Toobin’s review in The New Yorker of Thomas’s memoir, My Grandfather’s Son. Yet, what is lacking in Toobin’s otherwise fine work is what has been lacking in every review of Thomas’s memoir that I’ve seen: The fact that the case against Thomas has been proven; the meticulously reported facts are in and Thomas is, in fact, a lout.

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Posted on November 15, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Publication: Tribune
Cover: A quill to represent a book about the Founders.
Other Reviews & News of Note: Of course not.
*
Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: “Studs on Studs,” a review by Carol Marin of Studs Terkel’s memoir, Touch And Go.
“At last,” Marin writes in a beautiful piece, “Studs Terkel has turned his trusty tape recorder on himself.”

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Posted on November 14, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

A weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Wilco Wah-Wah
A friend more accepting of Wilco’s decision to license its songs to Volkswagen says “That’s what it takes to pay for Nels Cline.”
I don’t know if that’s true, but it sure isn’t an excuse.
Cline is the guitarist brought into Wilco in 2004 “as one more sign of bandleader Jeff Tweedy’s ongoing interest in broadening the scope and ambition of the band’s sound,” Jesse Fox Mayshark writes in the November-December issue of No Depression (not available online).
“The band has given Cline more visibility than anything he’s done before,” Mayshark writes. So maybe he oughta be paying Tweedy.

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Posted on November 7, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

November 3 – 4.
Publication: Tribune
Cover: Um, if you look hard enough, you’ll realize it’s a “Spotlight on Education” issue. Is the school year starting?
A paragraph from You Won’t Remember Me: The Schoolboys of Barbiana Speak to Today thus graces the cover. It’s not a bad paragraph, I’m just not sure – once again – why this is the cover of the Chicago Tribune book review.
The book featured on the cover doesn’t even get its own review; it shares a review with Jonathan Kozol’s Letters to a Young Teacher. I think we can see what the editor was thinking here, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. Which it isn’t.
Other Reviews & News of Note: What can I say, there’s only three other reviews in the whole damn issue, and one of them is of the new Charles Schultz biography. Been there! One of the other two combines three books in one review. Budget cuts at the book review?

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Posted on November 5, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

A (mostly) weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
That’s Mitt!
Ryan Lizza’s profile of Mitt Romney in the latest New Yorker examines the management consulting theories that inform his approach to governing. It’s a lot more interesting than that sounds.
Agent of Fortune
In the same issue, Ben McGrath profiles superagent and scourge of baseball Scott Boras, in a piece called “The Extortionist.”
Boras has a couple Chicago connections. First, he was actually in the Chicago Cubs organization at one point. Second, he joined the Chicago law firm of Rooks, Pitts & Poust after getting his law degree in 1982, focusing on medical malpractice work. Third, Boras represents White Sox third baseman Joe Crede, who spent most of last season on the disabled list. Why is this important? “The White Sox have historically tended to avoid doing business with Scott Boras,” McGrath writes. “[Dennis] Gilbert [a special assistant to Jerry Reinsdorf] also pointed out that Joe Crede, a a Boras client on Chicago’s roster, spent most of this season on the disabled list.”

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Posted on October 31, 2007