Books & Talks

Q&A with H. Jon Benjamin from 'Bob’s Burgers' and 'Archer'

Wed, 01 May 2013 11:29:00 -0700

Image: Fox

The cast of the FOX animated show Bob’s Burgers is rolling into Portland on May 10 for the sold out Bob’s Burgers Live! performance at the Crystal Ballroom. The evening will include a raucous and lively mix of fan Q&A, a table read, an exclusive sneak peek at upcoming episodes, and stand-up comedy from the cast’s who’s who of contemporary comics, including H. Jon Benjamin (Bob Belcher), Kristen Schaal (Louise Belcher), Eugene Mirman (Gene Belcher), Dan Mintz (Tina Belcher) and John Roberts (Linda Belcher).

This contest is now closed.

Because we're delightfully perplexed by the idea of a live tour of an animated show, we talked with comedian and actor Benjamin, who in addition to being the family-man Bob Belcher is also the nasally voice of the promiscuous, hard-drinking spy on FX’s Archer.

Culturephile: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.
H. Jon Benjamin: Oh. We’re done?

[Laughs] Not quite yet.
Okay. We can continue for a little bit. But I’m not gonna lie, let’s wrap it up.

So you’re coming to Portland—
Yes. Coming back to Portland.

You’ve been here before?
Yes. Three years ago. But this is a big reunion.

What were your impressions at the time?
Sad. Melancholy. A place steeped in the history of blood and toil. No, I like Portland very much.

So you’re doing a live in-person show here to promote an animated show?
Yes. It’s a real riddle within a riddle.

Is that weird to you at all?
Well, no. Everybody in the show is a live performer, along with being a cartoon character. We’re not just one thing. We’ve done this live show once before, in the Midwest. Maybe Chicago. Everyone performs a comedy set. And then the creator of Bob’s Burgers comes out to much fanfare. Well… a smattering of applause. And we read some scenes and do stuff from the show. So it’s kinda like a little bit of everything for nobody.

Bob's Burgers Live!
Crystal Ballroom
May 10 at 7 p.m.Are you guys all in the same room when you record the voices for the show?
It varies. There are people who live in New York, like myself. And then most of the people are in LA, where the show is produced. So we are kind of like the kid’s table here in NY. We have limits on what we can eat. Everything’s done on the cheap here, where in LA it’s a bounty of riches. People get what they want and they’re all assholes and they live it up and enjoy themselves and all the money is flowing through the system. And we’re in some shitty studio in the Flat Iron District. Suffering. Bad Air. Exhaust fumes. And a lot of construction.

That sounds absolutely miserable.
And we only get like one Rice Krispie treat per session.

To share?
No, everybody gets their own. But that’s it. It’s not a lot. And the sessions sometimes last over three hours. It’s pretty bad.

Image: Richard Foreman/FOX

The cast of 'Bob's Burgers': (from left) Dan Mintz (Tina Belcher), Eugene Mirman (Gene Belcher), John Roberts (Linda Belcher), H. Jon Benjamin (Bob Belcher), and Kristen Schaal (Louise Belcher). Standing: creator Loren Bouchard.

Let’s talk about your voice. Did you ever imagine your voice would be as famous as it is, between Bob’s Burgers and Archer?
I didn’t predict that, no, that’s for sure. No. I don’t think my voice is that great. It’s hard to like your own voice. So I can’t, like, speak on it. I have to hear it all the time.

Why do you think other people like it?
I don’t know. It’s tapping into something in their childhood probably. A guy who yelled at them.

Do you do any other voices?
[In a high-pitched boys voice] Yeah, I do this one.

[Laughs].
Never heard that before? That’s the kid from Newsies.

[Laughs] I remember that kid.
No, you mean like impressions? I never really did that. There’s people on Bob’s Burgers that do that, like John Roberts and Eugene Mirman, and people who are exceptionally good at mimicry. But, I can only do this voice, and then a little more Jewish than this.

If you could be the voice of any animated character ever, who would it be?
Uh. Wow. There’s been a lot of it, right? I would say… Wasn’t there a Disney cartoon that had a Nazi in it? Like in the 40s? Yeah, that guy. Hey, I would’ve taken the work. “Anything you say, Mr. Disney!”

So, getting a little weird here. Not quite sure I’m with you on this one.

Do you watch a lot of TV?
Yes. It’s starting to fill my nights now. And my mornings. Sometimes my mid-days. I have that lifestyle where I would say to the people who are in jail, “You think you’re in jail. I’m actually in jail.” But that’s philosophical.

What do you watch?
I don’t really watch a lot of animation. I watch a lot of South Park, which I have on DVD. Mostly I watch sports—a lot of basketball and baseball. And as far as shows, Game of Thrones! And The Killing. That’s another one I watched. In its entirety. I watched a season in four days.

Which Game of Thrones character do you identify with the most?
[Laughs]. The fat guy. The fat one. The fat, dim one. What’s his name?

The guy on the Wall? [Samwell Tarly]
Yeah, the guy who’s always f**king up. He seems like the guy in the first part of Full Metal Jacket. The guy who blows his head off [Private Pyle]. He’s always holding everyone up. But I just saw the last episode, where he ran away with the girl. So maybe he’ll be alright… wherever fat, dumb people live.

So, drinking. Archer drinks a lot. Do you?
Very much so. Beer, wine, whiskey, bourbon, Slivovitz. It’s a Russian or Polish spirit of some sort. No, mostly just beer and wine and bourbon.

How much of Archer is you?
Certainly none of his professional qualities. I can relate a bit to his sense of inheritance and his juvenile attitudes. I definitely have a lot of that going. And some of the things, like his voice messages, prankish, annoying things that he would go to no end to keep continuing to create, I’ve done in real life, prior to being Archer. So that was fun to discover that Adam had wrote that, without knowing that I had already done that.

You enjoy annoying people?
Yes. It’s how I interact.

What about Bob. Have you ever worked in a burger joint?
No. Only restaurants. A friend of mine worked at a burger place similar to Bob’s in Cambridge, MA called, uh, Bartley’s Burgers. It was family-run and the sons worked there. And Loren Bouchard who created Bob’s Burgers is from Massachusetts. Now I’m wondering if there’s a connection. The guy who ran it was a real kind of a surly Boston guy, and my friend worked there and he hated that job. No offense to Mr. Bartley. But I think he like peeled potatoes or something. Kitchen duty.

Last question: what’s your favorite joke?
[Ed. Note: The rest of this conversation is not appropriate for this blog. Ask Benjamin about it at the show].

Bob's Burgers airs on FOX on Sundays at 8:30 p.m.

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Adulting Tips from Kelly Williams Brown

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:32:00 -0700

Image: Nicolle Clemetson

In April 2011, while working as a columnist at the Statesman Journal in Salem, Kelly Williams Brown came up with the kernel of a book idea: a beginner’s guide to adulthood, from writing a condolence card to buying a used car. This month, Grand Central Publishing will release Adulting: How to Become a Grown-Up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps. Her companion blog has already racked up more than 100,000 dedicated followers. A TV adaptation is in the works with J. J. Abrams’s famed production company, Bad Robot. And along the way, she even conquered her fear of bleach.

•••••••••

I think from the outside, my life looks pretty successful. I have a job, I have a cat that I’ve kept alive for seven years—but I’m prone to these feelings that I’m not really a grown-up. There are these things that other people know and they just do, but I don’t know them or do them, and it makes me feel like a failure. What I realized is that everybody kind of feels that way.

When I was in Mississippi at the Hattiesburg American, I had three older friends in the newsroom, and they kind of took me under their wing. One day, one of them took me aside, and was so, so kind, and said, “You know Kelly, you always look really beautiful at work, and this is a beautiful dress. But it is a little bit of a cocktail dress.” And so that was the day I learned, just because you look great in a dress does not mean it’s a work dress.

Being an adult is being really decent to people, including yourself. It’s correctly discerning the things that need to happen, and then doing them.

I’m a really anxious person. I tend to see doom and gloom and worst possibilities in everything. I attribute that to a lot of things: to having been a hard-news reporter and often surrounded by chaos; and to having the formative experience of going through Hurricane Katrina; and also just being kind of a neurotic girl.

Bleach is terrifying. I had never used it until I started the “cleaning” chapter of the book ... and then I was kind of amazed. And I went a little bleach-crazy. I had pictured it as a menacing cloud that would just get into everything, and I’d breathe it in and die. But no, it’s really useful—you just have to dilute it. That’s it.

When I met with Bad Robot in la, J. J. Abrams was saying that one of his favorite sitcoms of all time was The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He just loved its humor and its optimism—and then he said that he sort of has the same feelings about this [book]. And then my head exploded.

I feel lucky to have had a book idea that directly stokes the fears of the New York Times–reading, concerned-about-millennials audience. And it just happens to be this time when comedic voice, especially of females in their 20s, is kind of a zeitgeisty deal. But I think that no matter what, growing up is a challenge. The passage of time is not easy for humans. That’s just how evolution works. I think that people grow up when they want to or when they have to.

THe audience for this book is really me—when I was 22. It’s for people for whom, up until now, the progression of life has been obvious ... and then you get to the end of that line, and all of a sudden everything opens up and you just don’t know. And also you probably have a disgusting, filthy fridge.

I’ve only ever been a millennial. I’ve only ever had the experience of right now. It would make me really happy if people who were of a different generation read the book and felt like they got some useful perspective. But I also hope that it’s something that maybe someone in their 30s or 40s or 50s could read with that little cringe of recognition, remembering what it was like.

My professional goal is that I want to write things that are funny and I want to write things that are useful. And hopefully at the same time.

Q&A with Michael Pollan

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:29:00 -0700

Image: Courtesy Fran Collin Photo

How does the act of cooking at home fit into the larger sustainable food movement?
The local, sustainable food movement depends for its continued growth on people buying unprocessed produce—both vegetables and meat—directly, or nearly directly, from farmers. If we insist on having large corporations cook our meals, this movement will top out pretty soon, because big corporations don’t know how to buy from small farmers. Big deals with big. So in my view, building a new food economy depends on our willingness to cook—not every day, but whenever we can and more often than we do.

How do you make time to cook, given your travel and teaching schedule?
Some days it’s tough. But it takes time to wait in line for takeout or for restaurant food, too, don’t forget. There are plenty of 20-minute meals I make on busy days, and I will often use half of a weekend day to make several meals, like homemade pasta sauce or soup, for the week and for the freezer.

Michael Pollan will discuss Cooked with OPB’s Dave Miller at the Newmark Theatre on May 14 at 7:30 p.m.

You’ve called Portland, Maine, “one of the most interesting food towns in the country.” How does Portland, Oregon, rate?
Both the Portlands are great food towns, bracketing the country admirably. I always eat well in Portland, and I particularly like what the great grass in the Pacific Northwest means for those of us who like pastured meat and eggs.

In an article for the New York Times Magazine in 2009, you wrote about the paradoxical relationship between our love of food television and the decline of home cooking. Do you think your new book can succeed in bringing people back to the kitchen, when so many culinary personalities have failed?
I hope so. This book is not a diatribe or lecture—it’s a story: the story of my education in the kitchen, the brewery, the dairy, and the BBQ pit learning a new set of skills and a new way of engaging with the world. I discovered just how rewarding and pleasurable this “work” can be, so much so that I hesitate to call it work. My hope is that the book will help people see that cooking deserves a little more of our time and attention—and that we always find a way to make time for the activities we value.

Breaking: Chelsea Cain to Kick Off New Series

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:21:00 -0700

While trekking round Portland for a story for our first ever Summer Guide (hint: it involves corpses and comes out in June), the New York Times–best selling author Chelsea Cain let it slip that she has penned a three-book deal with Simon & Schuster, two of which will jump start a new series. The first book, titled One Kick, is scheduled to hit shelves August 2014. Cain will do a second book in the series, and then—fret not “Beauty Killer” fans—start alternating its stories with future books in her hit thriller series about the detective Archie Sheridan and his hunt for serial killer Gretchen Lowell.

This from Cain about the jist of the new Kick series:

Kick Lannigan was abducted at age six and rescued when she was 11. Now she is 21, and she has spent years honing a very special skill set (target shooting, martial arts, archery, lock picking, etc.). If she's ever kidnapped again, it won't be for long.

Kick has an understandable, if somewhat obsessive, interest in missing kids, and she is following the most recent Amber Alert in the news when an enigmatic man named Evans approaches her with a proposition. Evans made a fortune as a weapons dealer and now wants to make good by using his resources to rescue abducted children. With his money and government contacts and Kick's particular brand of expertise, they could make quite a team, he says.

Kick reluctantly agrees, and the two quickly become entangled in a missing kid case in Seattle. But Kick can't quite shake the feeling that Evans isn't who he says he is. SPOILER ALERT: She's right.

As for the setting, Kick lives in Portland. During our tour, Cain said that she intentionally drops Portland landmarks into her books, like burning down the Made in Portland sign, so that any TV series or movie would be forced to film locally. (A well-placed source hinted that there just might be interest from TV Land, although Cain did not confirm).

“All the books will start in Portland but may travel elsewhere, as Kick's cases and my tax deductible vacations require,” said Cain with the dry wit that makes her gruesome tales so entertaining. “If readers start noticing that all the abducted kids in the books seem to go missing from high-end tropical results, you'll know why.”

Let Me Go, Cain's final Sheridan installment with Minotaur Books, comes out this August. Stay tuned for more on the Portland path of carnage that is Cain’s work.

Review: Benjamin Percy's 'Red Moon'

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:58:00 -0700

Image: Courtesy Grand Central Publishing

While Red Moon might open with a scene well known to many Northwesterners—aboard a flight from San Francisco to Portland—the familiarity ends quickly when a passenger transforms into a werewolf and slaughters the helpless passengers. In novelist Benjamin Percy’s parallel universe, “lycans” live alongside other Americans, dosed up on a mandatory anti-transformation drug called Lupex. (Their “disease” is transferred by blood.) The attack on the airplane, we soon learn, is part of a larger movement of werewolf extremists whose mission is to fight against the West’s oppressive, imperialistic inclinations. Sound familiar?

In his first critically acclaimed novel, The Wilding, Percy took readers on a modern day Deliverance through the untamed landscape outside Bend. Red Moon returns to Oregon to follow the interconnected lives of Chase Williams, governor of the state and anti-lycan activist; Patrick Gamble, the sole survivor of the opening terrorist attacks; and Claire Forrester, the lycan daughter of two prominent, retired lycan revolutionaries. As anti-lycan sentiments and military backlash grow, the trio tumble into each other’s lives.

“The moon glows and casts a sickly light. Claire tries not to look at it. She hates it. She knows how ridiculous it is to hate a spinning ball of rock, but she does ... It reminds her, like a grinning skull, of what she is.”

—Page 113

The language is as sharp as the fangs and claws it describes. “Her skin itches horribly, as if bubbling over with hives, and then the hair bristles from it in a rush,” Percy writes, describing Claire’s transformation. “Her bones stretch and bend and pop, and she yowls in pain, as if she is giving birth, one body coming out of another. She always cries. Tears of blood.”

Place exerts a powerful pull on Percy, who grew up in Bend. The novel makes a careful character of the damp, lush, gothic landscape of the Pacific Northwest, and local landmarks soak their way into Percy’s scenes: from PSU’s Park Blocks to the Sandy River—and even the setting of our own foiled terrorist attack, the Christmas tree lighting at Pioneer Courthouse Square.

But another Grimm this is not. Monster narratives may be in vogue, but Percy’s novel stands out from the pack as an allegorical tale of post-9/11 America that asks serious questions about identity and xenophobia. Here, the werewolf is the ominous Other—unknown, separate, and therefore feared. Call it lycan via Lacan. Red Moon does what good art should: it asks us, without preaching, to interrogate not only the worlds within us, but those around us, too. Benjamin Percy will read at Powell’s Cedar Hills on May 10 at 7.

Head to Portland Monthly's Culturephile blog for our Q&A with Benjamin Percy

Q&A with Benjamin Percy, Author of 'Red Moon'

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:43:00 -0700

This month, Oregon-born Benjamin Percy will release his second novel, Red Moon, a horror masterpiece about a werewolf epidemic that draws some eerie parallels to our own War on Terror.

[Read: our full review of Red Moon]

Percy is the author of the 2011 novel The Wilding, as well as the acclaimed story collection Refresh, Refresh. His writing has been read on National Public Radio as well as appeared in a multitude of magazines and journals including GQ, Esquire, Time, Men’s Journal, Outside, The Wall Street Journal, and The Paris Review. He is the writer-in-residence at St. Olaf College and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University.

Culturephile talked with Percy about men that howl at the moon, the merging of politics and horror, and Oregon’s inherent ability to terrify.

What made you decide to write a werewolf novel as a way to talk about colonization, xenophobia, and U.S. world politics?
A few years ago when I sat down to write Red Moon, I considered some of my favorite horror stories. The most lasting horror stories are those that seemed to channel cultural unease, to take a knife to the nerve of the moment. Frankenstein is born out of the Industrial Revolution. Dracula is channeling Victorian prudishness. The red scare gave rise to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Stephen King’s The Dead Zone is so connected to Cold War anxieties. And since 9/11, there’s been a slew of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives in literature and film. The thing we fear most now seems to be some kind of combination of disease and terrorism, so I braided those two together.

Benjamin Percy
Powell’s at Cedar Hill Crossing
May 10 at 7 pm

On the other hand, I don’t appreciate art that answers questions or that editorializes. I try to be political without being polemical. I want people to recognize all sorts of different anxieties and bring their own interpretations to the book and to feel the same way I do when reading a book by Ursula K. Le Guin or Ray Bradbury or Stephen King—that even though these authors are holding a mirror to our world, it’s a mirror with a crack running through it. In that crack is the fantastical element. Fantastical scenarios help us approach complicated political problems.

Did you have any anxiety about writing so-called “genre” fiction? Particularly about a werewolf?
This book has been a long time coming. I grew up on genre. I think most people do. I was obsessed for a long time with mysteries, with techno-thrillers, with fantasy novels. If it had a dragon on the cover, thumbs up. If it had a dragon and a sword, even better. But horror was the genre that enchanted me the most.

One of my favorite places growing up was the horror section of Powell’s. Even thinking of it now makes all the blood rush into my face. I went into my first creative writing workshop thinking this is the stuff stories are made of. If you’re going to write fiction, it should have a rip-roaring plot, it should have a life or death scenario, it should have a robot that shoots lasers from its eyes or an exploding helicopter or a ghost that can wander through walls. On the first day of class, I was told by my professor that you can’t write genre, and I thought, 'what else is there?'

So I became acquainted with the literary greats that filled my syllabi. But years later, I realized I had become bored as a reader, and I needed to get back in touch with what drew me to the page initially. I wanted to take the best of genre fiction and the best of literature fiction and blend them together and become neither fish nor fowl. You can have bunch of pretty sentences and three-dimensional characters, but also keep the reader wondering: what’s going to happen next?

What is it about werewolves that resonates with you?
In a way I’ve always been writing about werewolves. My characters have always been hairy on the inside. Now I’m just dealing with that more exclusively. The werewolf myth is one everyone can relate to. We’ve all gone a little crazy as a result of drunkenness, anger, or rage. Only later—maybe the next morning—do we feel regret. The werewolf story informs Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It informs the Incredible Hulk. It is about an unleashed Id. I’m trying to have Red Moon be less about the moon and the howling and the claws and the fangs and more about the human angle, the wildness we all have inside of us, escaping.

What kind of research did you do to make your werewolves human?
I spent a lot of time at the USDA labs and with Iowa State researchers trying to figure out the slippery science behind this animal-born pathogen that’s at the heart of the novel. I wanted to reinvent the werewolf myth and make it somehow possible. In Red Moon, you have a disease that’s not so different from mad cow disease and chronic wasting disease.

The Northwest figures prominently in the book. What is it about this place that makes us perfect for horror?
Growing up in central Oregon, I encountered danger on a weekly basis: rattlesnakes curled up in dry riverbeds, sheep that had been gnawed up by coyotes, vultures swirling in the sky, nests of black widows underneath our porch, scorpions hiding beneath the stones in our backyard. I had several people I knew growing up who were in skiing and rafting and snowmobile accidents and died.

You’re always hearing about somebody in Oregon who goes down the wrong logging road at the wrong time and ends up running out or gas or getting a flat tire and ends up starving to death or dying of exposure or someone trying to summit Hood and getting caught up in an avalanche. You’re always hearing about people along the coast who are knocked down and dragged away by a sneaker wave. These sorts of headlines had an effect on me growing up, as did my mother who was constantly warning me about all the things that might kill me.

The near-miss terrorist attack at the 2010 Portland tree lighting ceremony makes a sideways appearance in Red Moon. Why?

I’ve gone to that ceremony many times. And when I heard about the man who wanted to set off that bomb, all of the what-if situations ran through my head. I have kids of my own, and the horror of such an act makes my skin tighten up with gooseflesh. I felt like I had to find some kind of fictional outlet to that, and a lot of Portlanders will feel the same when reading it.

I’ve heard rumors that Red Moon might be made into a feature film. Is that true?
It is true, but Hollywood is all about speculation. So until I’m on set, I can only say who knows.

2013 Oregon Book Award Winners and Madcap Recap

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:52:00 -0700

Image: Courtesy Win Goodbody, Portland Theatre Scene

Storm Large accepts the award for general nonfiction at the 2013 Oregon Book Awards.

"I’m just a tourist in your literary world,” said a genuinely flabbergasted Storm Large, tears flowing freely, as she accepted the most highly watched award of the night for her memoir Crazy Enough. She beat out the other blonde literary bombshell, Cheryl Strayed—who the host called the Meryl Streep of the literary world—for the creative nonfiction title, although Strayed won the Readers’ Choice Award, crowning both winners at the 26th Annual Oregon Book Awards (and forestalling the wrestling match that Large tweeted Strayed would win hands down).

The winning hashtag/meme of the night, however, was “a**hole”—a moniker former Wordstock director Greg Netzer first used to describe Wordstock founder and Steward Holbrook Literary Legacy Award–winner Larry Colton. Colton denied it, but then seemed to embrace it with his irascible and blustery speech. Others jumped on the a**hole bandwagon like middle schoolers on a fart joke until it culminated in fiction-winner Ismet Prcic’s A**holes Anonymous admission, “I am an a**hole," before he launched into his “I want to talk about art” acceptance speech, which really was a gleeful tirade against all the lawyers and doctors who had told him over the years that they, too, could write fiction. “No, you can’t!” he shouted back. A source told us afterward that Netzer feared the word could be a star or a terrible dud for the night—but a star it was.

Certainly the audience of literary insiders at the Armory’s Gerding Theater celebrated the seven winners, chosen from 31 finalists, chosen from 179 submitted titles, but the most thunderous applause of the night came for teachers (for whom Colton demanded a standing ovation after sharing his calculation that the combined salaries of the Portland Trail Blazers’ starting lineup could fund 1300 teachers), and for the literary conquest that was Live Wire! house-poet Scott Poole’s epic poem that included all the finalists’ names, the titles of all their books, and all of the clunky award titles—68 ad libs in all—in an absurd and hilarious explosion of non sequiturs that was aptly called: “Love Letter to the Muse After a Long Silence.” He has our vote to host next year’s awards.

This year’s ceremony was hosted by one of Tin House’s founding editors, and now editor at large, Brooklyn-based Elissa Schappell, who warned she would ramble, and then proceeded to do so, diving into Twitter, best responses to people asking “if they should know you” when you tell them you’re a writer, and the commonalities between Brooklyn and the Rose City (ironic mustache anyone?). She hit some wit, but someone could stand to edit the editor. Finally, local singer-songwriter Laura Gibson kept the audience awash in lit-leaning folk and fabulous boots (so said presenter Karen Karbo).

And the official 2013 Oregon Book Award winners are:

Eloise Jarvis McGraw Award for Children’s Literature: Drawing From Memory by Allen Say
Leslie Bradshaw Award for Young Adult Literature: Blue Thread by Ruth Tenzer Feldman
Walt Morey Young Readers Literary Legacy Award: Oregon Battle of the Books
Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction: The Wrecking Crew by Kent Hartman
Angus L. Bowmer Award for Drama: Antarktikos by Andrea Stolowitz
Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award: Larry Colton
Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction: Crazy Enough by Storm Large
Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry: Fjords Vol 1 by Zachary Schomburg
Ken Kesey Award for Fiction: Shards by Ismet Prcic
Oregonian’s Reader’s Choice Award: Wild by Cheryl Strayed

But this is all old news if you follow us on Twitter: @aarondavidscott.

Tour Your Own Town With the Help of the New Book "Walking Portland"

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:00:00 -0700

Image: Courtesy Amazon.com

If the past few weeks have left you feeling a little, uh, Spring Broke, we've got a fix. Becky Ohlsen's new book Walking Portland offers 30 short in-town hikes that feel like mini-vacations yet cost you nothing.

The 200-page book, which hits bookstores tomorrow, traces two- to five-mile jaunts on both sides of the river, complete with suggestions for pitstops for Instagraming, people-watching, and—if you've got some spare pennies—worthy restaurants, bars, and cafés. With easy to follow maps, the book can also play tour guide for guests while you're at work.

Some of these routes, like the Hawthorne and Steel Bridge loop, are familiar. Others, like the three-mile loop from NW Nicolai Street through Slabtown, traverse less frequented parts of the city. But all of the walks present intriguing bits of Portland history and trivia that will delight even longtime residents. To wit: Did you know the Hawthorne Bridge needs to move every eight hours or else its gears might stick? We didn't either. But we feel a lot smarter now.

Walking Portland ($18.95, Wilderness Press) is available for pre-order at powells.com and amazon.com.

For more Northwest travel tips, deals, and itineraries, sign up for our biweekly Tripster newsletter, subscribe to our RSS Feed, and visit our Getaways & Trails page.

Neil Gaiman on Sale Today

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:10:00 -0700

[Editor's Note: We learned minutes after we sent out our weekly newsletter that the reading is now sold out. In a measly 24 hours. What a rock star. Please follow us on twitter @aarondavidscott to make sure not to miss future announcements.]

This just in: tickets go on sale today for a visit from the dark god of fantasy and graphic novels himself, Mr. Neil Gaiman (it’s a little surprising that he hasn’t been knighted yet so that we can officially call him Sir Gaiman). He’ll be appearing at the Crystal Ballroom on June 29 at 3 pm for what is being billed as an “Afternoon with…,” meaning there’ll be reading, questions, book signing, and, if you're lucky, maybe a Skyped in appearance from his wife, the dark goddess of social media and the ukulele, Ms. Amanda Palmer. (The two performed an epic four-hour public love letter to each other and the audience over a year ago at the Aladdin that featured duets, readings, and a surprise appearance by director John Cameron Mitchell).

Gaiman is on tour to promote his first novel in eight years, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. The $35.99 tickets include a copy of the book. Wear black. And maybe a cape.

Q&A: Pulitzer-Nominated Writer Karen Russell

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:17:00 -0700

Karen Russell’s newest book, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, might mention the blood-sucking craze cruising through popular culture in its title, but the short story collection couldn’t stray further from the anemic aesthetic impulse seen by the likes of Twilight. The book marks the much-anticipated addition to Russell’s highly decorated, albeit slim bookshelf—St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia!—that has won her a spot on seemingly everyone’s best young writers lists.

Whether she is describing a herd of horses that are really reincarnated dead U.S. Presidents or young girls in feudal Japan that spin silk from their stomachs while slowly turning into the product they produce, Russell paradoxically guides the reader through fantastical landscapes into surprisingly dark and familiar feelings.

In advance of her reading at Powell’s Books Cedar Hills Crossing on April 4, Culturephile spoke with Russell about the Pulitzer nomination, lemon-slurping vampires, busty elf maidens, and if there’s ever an idea that’s too far fetched.

Where were you and what was it like to learn of your Pulitzer nomination last year?
I had a fellowship with the American Academy in Berlin, and I had been reading about bullfighters, because I was going to interview Juan Jose Padilla for GQ. Or more likely I was watching YouTube videos to try and figure out what certain terms corresponded to, and I then I thought, “Oh the Pulitzers are announced.” They don’t tell you if you are a finalist in advance. I just went to the website and saw first no winner. Then I got a call from my publisher. It was a lot to take in.

Did you do something to celebrate?
A friend and I took the bus down to my favorite restaurant in Kreuzberg. I might have had one beer. I was like, let’s go to the buffet. I think it was kind of a buffet kind of sensation: all that food touching, everything a little mixed up. Why was that my reaction? Isn’t that so sad and way too candid?

Did the nomination up the stakes and the trepidation for this book?
It really did. But I think I was lucky insofar that I was actually in the last stages of revision and finishing two of the stories when I got that news. Short of going back to some hut on the mountain and rewriting all of the stories in the book, there was nothing I could do. I had a deadline. I couldn’t get too hung up on my own anxieties.

You write about such fantastical subjects. In addition to dead U.S. Presidents reincarnated as horses and young girls in feudal Japan spinning silk from their stomachs, there's the title story about two aged vampires seeking solace in an Italian lemon grove, having discovered, after sampling “coconut slurries in Oahu, jet-black coffee in Bogota, jackal’s milk in Dakar and Cherry Coke Floats in rural Alabama,” that Sorrento lemonade alone can cull their lust for human blood. Where do the ideas come from, and why do you choose such fantastical subjects?
I’ve always felt like I’m best able to be honest in a story when there is a slippery ratio of real to more fantastic details. One of the reasons I like working in that fabulist register—or having something happen that wouldn’t be possible in the natural laws of our universe—is that it frees me up in other ways.

I think with a lot of authors it’s the opposite. They would feel too silly to try to write from the point of view of a president’s soul inside a horse. That would feel alienating. But that leap frees something up for me. It’s fun to make up an imaginary place and set up the rules of that place, but I think in emotional terms, it is easier for me to be honest, to write about loss or whatever animating emotion, if I am a few degrees removed from the reality that we all occupy on a Tuesday.

Do you ever reach a point where you go, “oh no, that’s simply too far fetched”?
Oh definitely. There’s a shallow cemetery of premises and ideas that never came to life. Not necessarily because they are too far fetched, but because I couldn’t find a way to make them feel consequential. Not for myself writing it, and certainly not for a reader.

Right, so in “Vampires in the Lemon Grove,” you use fabulist mythological monsters to explore the very real subjects of addiction, life-long monogamy, temptation, and deceit. And in “Reeling for the Empire,” you use silk-spinning laborers to probe the topic of sweat shop labor. What is the chicken and egg equation for you: does the fantastical subject come first, or the topic you want to explore through it?

With St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, in almost every situation I had a setting, or a landscape, and some kind of what-would-happen-if kind of jokey premise. If it worked at all it would develop its own life. I’d wonder: what if these two boys that live in a beach community in Florida found a pair of goggles that let them see ghosts. And then I’d wonder: what are they looking for? It could be a terrible story if they were looking for some kind of treasure or for Billy Cosby’s ghost dad. But they ended up looking for their dead sister, so it became a way to use that premise as a vehicle of revelation about what these boys really want to see, what they are longing for, which is to have a connection with their sister who they’ve lost. So sometimes it will happen that way.

Karen Russell
Powell's Cedar Hills Crossing
Thursday, April 4 at 7

In the case of the vampire story, it started with this image from when my siblings and I were on vacation in this lemon grove in Sorrento. We saw a tiny old man who looked to me like a septuagenarian tan vampire drinking lemonade, and I was just like: what if he is vampire and he can only be outside because the lemonade he is drinking is some kind of vampire methadone. Only I thought this was funny, but somehow it developed its own kind of life.

With “New Veterans,” I had much more of a graphed out and explicit approach to drafting. I never have a real specific agenda. I never have one single moral I’m trying to deliver. It never works like that for me. But I did know I wanted to think about trauma and the body and healing and that image presented itself to me as a way to think through those issues. Then there’s a feedback loop where they are kind of developing together.

Have you ever been nervous to trod into territory that might get labeled “genre” fiction? I’m thinking vampires specifically, which are such a craze right now?
I grew up reading a lot of sci-fi and fantasy. When I cite my influences now, I cite the masters, but I read plenty of funky stuff, real genre stuff. We’re not talking Tolkien. We’re talking there’s an elf lady with a lot of cleavage on a boat on the cover. Anyone who wants to read my stories, please come to that party.

But I was a little worried about the title. I know if I saw vampires in a title, I might assume that the book wasn’t for me. When I came up with that story, I don’t think Stephanie Meyer had completed her conquest of our country, so we hadn’t reached a state of total exhaustion and jadedness about that monster.

I don’t think I’ve ever worried my stories would get classified as genre. The suspense in them tends to be psychological. People who want the real gut-clenching suspense of genre would be like: “I don’t want any more alliteration. Somebody needs to die. I don’t particular care about this dudes interiority. Get naked or die.”

So elf-maiden fantasy. What other author’s and books inspired your writing?
Ray Bradbury certainly. Stephen King. The vibrancy of their imaginations and how idiosyncratic their worlds are: they are the only people who could have created those universes. Frank Herbert who wrote Dune. Richard Adams who wrote Watership Down. It’s about how immense their worlds were, how fully imagined—not just the characters, but there’s this place that doesn’t exist that you can import your memories into. Their writing is so precise, it feels like a memory returning to your body to read them

In college: Junot Diaz and George Saunders. I still had a narrow idea of what a short story could do then. Reading their idiosyncratic first person wisecracking—that these could coexist inside a “literary short story”—that was a great thing to see.

A huge one for me was Geek Love by [Portland author] Katherine Dunn. I just love that book. I’ve never read anything at all that comes close to the experience of reading that book for the first time. It felt like catching a fever to read it, like having some kind of jungle hallucination.

What are you working on now?
It’s a longer project set in the Dust Bowl draught, and, of course, I also have a few corner of the eye stories. It’s anybody’s guess whether they are going to pan out or not.

Have you had any interest from directors or producers about making any of your stories into films?
The title story of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves has been optioned for a film. It has been for a while. It would be exciting if anything came of that.

Somehow I doubt Warner Brothers is going to want to make presidents-as-horses into one of their three hour films. But Warner Brothers, feel free to give me a call. Daniel Day Lewis can play all of those horses.