The TPR Stream - March 2013
06.03.2013
A Brothel Is a Place Called Home By The Editors
Things were so much better in the old days. You could smoke cigarettes in church and drink while driving a school bus. The wars were worldlier. The racism more economically fortified. Horses were things you actually rode instead of just showing up in miscellaneous meat products. Even the polio was stronger. Not only that, a dry bob was only $3.50. What’s a dry bob you ask? How times have changed. There used to be something called a brothel.
05.03.2013
A Nexus of Sea and Sky: Of Kafka, Duchamp, and the Arts of John Kay By Douglas Arvidson
At TPR, we provide ourselves in the meeting of the literary with the visual. Author Douglas Arvidson explores in his indelible style the art of John Kay, a man who has made a career on the line where photo-art and poetry meet.
04.03.2013
On Meeting a Crazed Saint By Shaan Joshi
Through wholesale criminal negligence, I had missed my connecting train in Ostrava. The lady at the window kindly informed me the next train to Warsaw would come at two in the morning. The clock showed 6:15. I’m being generous. It was a few minutes short of the quarter-hand. The evening would serve as a reminder that time is never bought or sold, even in Ostrava.
03.01.2013
Because It's 5 O'clock Somewhere: An Atheist's Guide to Drinking By The Editors
At TPR, we like to think we know a little bit about whiskey. Not everything, but enough – after all, the whiskey-making world is wide and growing wider (you even have Americans drinking Japanese whiskey nowadays). To be honest, it would be a depressing thought to think one had drunk all the brands and flavours of whiskey one was ever going to drink. But in our own modest way, we believe we've reached a certain level… you might say verging on the alcoholic. We prefer connoisseur.
07.03.2013
Transaction Ghosts By Anne Brechin
“Money get back. I'm all right Jack. Keep your hands off my stack,” quoth the philosopher. In a piece every bit worthy of Glengarry Glenn Ross, Anne Brechin explores daily working life and the madness that ensues.
08.03.2013
Because It's 5 O'clock Somewhere: A Proper Literary Climax By The Editors
Throughout the centuries there has been no better muse to the artist than the woman. In about every way possible they’re better than men, which makes them so damn inspiring. So to celebrate this International Women’s Day, we can think of nothing better than a woman getting joy from the art the fairer sex has inspired. And by joy we mean an unseen device of pleasure bringing the incomparable Stoya to climax while reading Supervert’s Necrophilia Variations. Yes, women are a joy especially in the grip of le petit mort. Forget story structure, and enjoy another kind of climax brought to you by the good people of literature.
11.03.2013
The Author's Intent: From Page to Screen By Vishwas Gaitonde
Intent can be notoriously difficult to determine, especially when interpreting something as dense and complicated as a novel into the moving images that make the silver screen. Author Vishwas Gaitonde continues his exploration of what happens when an author’s intent is taken from the page to the screen with a dissection of the many filmed works of the incomparable sci-fi legend Edgar Rice Burroughs.
12.03.2013
I am a Fantasy Geek: An Interview with Jon Snow By Anne Brechin
I am a fantasy geek. I will hold up my hands and admit this, to anyone who doesn’t know, which is pretty much no one who has known me since high school. Nowadays however, geeks don’t have to hid away their LARP chainmail and well-thumbed collection of David Eddings paperbacks. We can parade the streets, dressed as elves and warlocks and waving DVDs of Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal should we so wish. This miraculous liberation has been achieved by the success (on the small screen) of George RR Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice series – or Game of Thrones, as the TV series has been named after the first book in the sequence. Called by one British parody news site “a fantasy gateway drug”, GoT (as those in the know dub it) has made it thoroughly acceptable to spend that awkward time hovering near the water cooler talking about dwarves and dragons, instead of who Mindy from Accounts was getting off with in the stationery cupboard last week.
14.03.2013
How to Burn a Book: The Fahrenheit 451 Coda By Ray Bradbury
Ed. Note-Paper burns at 451 degrees. At this point its cellulose structure will break down. The paper will curl and blacken, releasing carbon in three forms: elemental carbon, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. This is what happens when a book burns, but there are so many more ways to do it than simply lighting a match.
13.03.2013
Can the Catholic Church Be a Force for Good? By Shaan Joshi
As a child I was always a hit at Indian parties. I’ll tell you why. Indians are generally familial people. Maybe, it’s why we call everybody older than us Auntie and Uncle despite the fact we’re not related. It’s a sign of respect and makes for good parties especially when you realize an Indian “uncle’s” predilection for Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch whiskey. After four or five scotches they’d inevitability call me over and say Shaan, tell us about Jesus.
15.03.2013
Because It's 5 O'clock Somewhere: Ayahuasca May Be the Final Fix By The Editors
It was lost in the Amazon jungles in 1982 that we staggered into a small jungle village. In our unending search (at the time) for the lost city of El Dorado, we became separated from our river guides. Your editors, unwashed and ripe, struggled across that verdant terrain for three days fighting trench foot and a particular madness that caused one of the editors to throw our only map in the river. Those villagers, though skeptical, nursed us back to health and sanity not just through food and body, but also through yage and spirit. Yage, or Ayahuasca, is a decoction whose psychoactive agent is often called “the God drug” because of its provided connection to the supernatural.
18.03.2013
Sit with the Dead By Scott Archer Jones
“I don’t think she’s breathing!”
It had been the dining room before they had installed the hospice bed, had scurried in with the paraphernalia of a sick room, had hoisted a dying woman carefully but without ceremony onto the sheets and covered her in blankets. Little non-decisions taken by the family over a couple of days divided the awkward rectangular room, now a bedroom for dying on one end and on the other a den-like space for waiting.
19.03.2013
Women Vol. 1: Low Fidelity By Luke Maclean
“I love women, or life, too much - which it is, I don't know,” wrote Henry Miller to Anais Nin. We happen to think it was both Henry, and for good reason. In our new series we hope to bring you tales of heartbreak and inspiration. Of love and lust. Tales about life, really. And we want them to come from you, dear reader. So send us your very best writing on one of our favorite topics. Women. The stylings of Luke Maclean kicks us off with Women Vol. 1: Low Fidelity. Look for Men: Vol. 1 coming soon.
20.03.2013
Men Vol. 1: A Letter to You By Anne Brechin
Men bring love and frustration. Both pleasure and pain. In the launch of a new series we ask you, dear reader, to send us your musings on the rougher sex. We want your best writing on men. We want the stories of your relationships and their demise, of your one night stands and your wanting. Anything to do with the subject of men. In the first in our series, Anne Brechin brings us, in her own irrepressible style a story of man an d sex and want. This is Men Vol. 1: A Letter to You.
21.03.2013
How to Borrow a Book from Albert Einstein By The Editors
It was in Prague in 1911 that we first met Albert Einstein. We liked him right away and not because of his penchant for mathematics or chess. Or even his amateur violin abilities. The guy was a total cad. We bonded at the dog track and a few other less than admirable places depending on your particular universal view. He would spend most of his salary there until the had a breakthrough. We had just placed our bets and were returning from the counter to the stands when they let the hare out and the dogs after it. Instead of returning to the stands, we slumped over the railing and watched the dogs approaching. Your editors leaned over to him and asked, “How fast do you think those dogs are moving, Al?”
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22.03.2013
Because It's 5 O'clock Somewhere: Use Proust to Heighten Your Consciousness By The Editors
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking,” so writes Haruki Murakami in Norwegian Wood. It’s very appropriate that Marukami writes about reading’s ability to modify our thought processes. When we read we are replacing the constant narrative in our heads with those of the great authors (hopefully) we read. In effect, the dialogue of your consciousness is co-opted by that of a Dostoyevsky or a Proust. If one can take this temporarily imposed consciousness, argues philosopher Alain de Bottain, and apply it to the world as a whole, beautiful things will start to happen within your mind.
26.03.2013
On Lying in Bed By G.K. Chesteron
The bed, some say, is blessed with redemptive powers. A sick man will arise healthy. A tired man relieved. A man with no hope may raise with some at the prospect that hope is never done. Even the angry may rise anew. Only the unimaginative man will awaken unchanged for his mind cannot comprehend what it means to lay with leisure. His life is a calculation. To work for rule. A slide on the abacus. His only insurrection is against his own creative humanity. Let us save you of that fate, dear reader. While the world busies itself in a commotion, some of us prefer to quietly wage rebellion against the forces of industry by simply doing nothing. It is from nothing that the wellspring of imagination is born. Find a comfortable place. Then read G.K. Chesterton’s classic essay On Lying in Bed. Then do nothing until nothing compels you. There is an art to idleness. Just don’t forget your imagination.
25.03.2013
My sister is getting married this week. When I think about it I was always think about this picture. It’s a picture of me with my sister and our cousins. I'm on the left. My younger brother isn’t in it. He wasn’t born yet, but when you have a sibling younger than you your own childhood becomes a relative thing. When he was born, I realized I would always be getting older. I would always have somebody to take care of. The picture above is before that. It is the picture of an eternal childhood. That special time when you’re too young to realize the world exists.
27.03.2013
Neal Cassady Pens the Great Sex Letter to Jack Kerouac By Neal Cassady
Back in a year called 1952 there was a man named Neal Cassady. He lived a rambling, shambling soul and died drunk and exposed on Mexican train tracks in a Mexican desert night. The man lived and burned and burned and all those guys called the beat generation buzzed around his filament, huffing his energy and bleeding in great globs of ink across many pages for many years until the light burned out and then they bled some ink some more because the man’s name was Cassady and damn sure he lived like it. That guy named Kerouac sat and glowed in his light maybe more than all of them.
29.03.2013
Because It's 5 O'clock Somewhere: Neal Cassady and the Merry Pranksters By The Editors
There are two things invented in the '60s that time and technology haven't improved. One is space travel. So much so that we've pretty much reverted to the original Saturn rockets that carried the first men to the moon. The other is acid. Not only was it stronger back then, the government actually used to provide it. At least if you were Timothy Leary anyways. Like any good Merry Prankster or deadhead knows, government grade is the best.
28.08.2013
To Lose One's Balls: Héloïse, Abelard, and Shakespeare's Lost Love Story By Anne Brechin
Romeo and Juliet. The greatest medieval lovers, right? Even if the story is a little twisted (because essentially it’s about teenagers killing themselves…) and, as might be considered evidenced by old Bill’s pre-Floydian use of the Wall in A Midsummer’s Night Dream, originally stolen by some Italian jackanapes from Ovid. But there are some who claimed that Shakespeare once started to write a play about another two, far more famous and real-life lovers, although for some reason the manuscript was lost in Spain and never finished. I’m talking of course about Héloïse and Abelard.
