Tag Archives: university bookstore

Literature

TSB interview: Sara Benincasa talks to us about Bumbershoot, her “This Tour is So Gay” tour, and more

It would generally be a mundane weekday afternoon, but I’m more nervous than usual. I’m getting ready to take a break after approaching my ninth hour on the clock at my day job, and there’s so much I want to talk to Sara Benincasa about. I have been a fan of the comedian/writer/actor/former Sarah Palin impersonator/current hilarious person to follow on Twitter at least since I read her “Barry Can You Hear Me” column on Wonkette. And earlier this week, she wrote a great article for Playboy about discovering “The Simpsons” in its beginning-to-end marathon on FXX going on right now. And her short essay “Real Artists Have Day Jobs” feels like it should be everyone’s own personal pep talk.

She’ll be in town this weekend for two big events, as part of her This Tour Is So Gay tour. (Full disclosure, I contributed to its Kickstarter campaign.) First, she’ll be at Bumbershoot, taking part in the Literary Death Match (Saturday, 1:45pm on the Words and Ideas Stage) and then with a reading at University Book Store with local comedian Derek Sheen on Saturday at 5pm:

I spoke with Sara Benincasa by phone to find out what exactly she’ll be doing in Seattle (and after that).

Let me ask first, how is your tour going?

The tour is going really well! The tour is called This Tour is So Gay, and it was supposed to hit fifteen cities, but now it’ll hit seventeen cities in the United States and Canada. It’ll involve me doing a book and/or comedy event in every city. Then in each city, I’ll either do direct service with, or make a donation to, or do a fundraiser for an LGBTQ organization.

Here in Los Angeles, I made a donation to the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center; in Denver, I made a donation to a place called The Center. In Indianapolis, I made a donation to the Indiana Youth Group, which does really wonderful work out there. It’s very exciting, and I’m headed to Seattle this weekend. I’ve never been to Seattle, so I’m psyched!

I know you’re doing a reading at University Bookstore on Saturday, plus earlier in the day, you’re at Bumbershoot. Can you talk about that?

I’m really excited about doing Literary Death Match. It’s a ton of fun.

Literary Death Match is sort of like a boxing match, but for literary dorks. You have three expert judges of note and then you generally have four competitors. Out of the four competitors, two finalists are selected. The two finalists go head-to-head in really goofy ways, like playing Pin the Tail on the Hemingway. It’s always ridiculous fun. I’ve done it a few times. The last time, we were at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. We had 500 people, overflow seating in the courtyard and a separate theater. It was just fantastic. I didn’t win, but had a great time.

Do you know who you’re competing against on Saturday?

I know I’ll be against Rachel Shukert, who is very, very funny. She’s a funny, sexy, smart, great lady. I’m looking forward to an excuse just to hang out with her.

What about your University Bookstore reading?

The reading I’ll be doing will include me telling stories, reading from my book, plus Derek Sheen telling stories about awkward adolescence. I’m really excited about that.

Derek Sheen is also very funny. I’ve seen him a few times and he always makes everyone laugh.

He’s great. I’ve never actually met him, but I’ve seen his stuff online. A few people recommended him to me as being so funny and great. I knew who he was anyway, but wondered if he would help me out by hanging out at the bookstore and telling some stories, and he was down for it. I feel very lucky that he’s going to be there.

What’s going on with your tour after this weekend?

After I leave Seattle, I’m on break from the tour for the entire month of September because I’m writing a book. I really need to get that done. In October, I’m going to Asheville, NC, Greensboro, NC, and Chicago, IL.

Last question I’ll ask. You said that this is your first time in Seattle, so it’ll be most people’s first time seeing you perform, either at Bumbershoot, or at the University Bookstore. Is there anything you want people to specifically take away from your events?

I want people to laugh their asses off! I want them to have a great time. I want people to go home and do their art, whether it’s writing, or it’s something visual like painting, or dancing, or their art is making really excellent food for their family. I want people to come out and get excited and feel motivated to do whatever their dream is. That’s what I did and I feel so lucky and grateful to be a full time writer now.

 

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

Way Out West with The Sisters Brothers (Review)

Novelist Patrick deWitt speaks at the University Bookstore on May 18, 2011, at 7 p.m.

Patrick deWitt’s novel The Sisters Brothers opens in Oregon City in 1851, and from the first words there’s something head-tiltingly odd to the scrupulously “authentic” narrative–“I was sitting outside the Commodore’s mansion, waiting for my brother Charlie to come out with news of the job and I was cold and for want of something to do I studied Charlie’s new horse, Nimble. My new horse was called Tub.”

It’s possible that the narrator, Eli, doesn’t realize how drily funny his recounting of the horrific events that ensue are, but I think deWitt probably does. (John C. Reilly liked Eli so much he optioned the story and will star as the character.)

Eli and Charlie Sisters are two hardcases for hire, mostly hired by the Commodore to erase people he makes the appearance of having been done wrong by. By page 8, the Sisters brothers have their job in front of them: to travel to San Francisco, California, and kill a prospector by the name of Hermann Kermit Warm.

Their intelligence on the matter states that while Warm is small in stature, “he will not be teased about his size. I have seen him fight several times, and though he typically loses, I do not think any of his opponents would wish to fight him again. He is not above biting, for example.”

Because it is 1851, there are no direct flights from Oregon to California, and so some 200 pages pass in picaresque adventure just getting to San Francisco, where the mystery of Warm’s death sentence is revealed, and, if you can easily envision someone scratching through their skin, you may hurry along more than usual.

People are calling the book “cowboy noir,” which is close but doesn’t quite get to the unique assemblage deWitt has managed. The heart of the book is taken up by the uneasy but close relationship Eli and Charlie have, the sibling rivalry and private judgements. Charlie is the more suited to shooting people remorselessly; Eli is enraged by any attack on Charlie. Yet, except for the slaughter and thievery, they seem like good guys–dogged in their pursuits, tough on a bottle.

Eli is a soft touch, as such things go: “I had never been with a woman for longer than a night, and they had always been whores. And while throughout each of these speedy encounters I tried to maintain a friendliness with the women, I knew in my heart it was false, and afterward always felt remote and caved in.”

He also thinks very little of the man who has brought his son to see a duel, so he can see a man killed. Still, his main concern is what their employment is doing to the both of them, and he has time–in between run-ins with crazed prospectors who brew dirt for coffee, trials in dentifrice and dental surgery, and a short-lived experiment wearing a blue sash–to ruminate on what has made the two of them what they are (a difficult childhood, for one).

DeWitt has a way of parceling out these clues to the brothers’ characters amid the muck and guts of an earlier, much rougher time. Sometimes they come during a droll attempt to order a meal with vegetables. Sometimes while he’s working on gouging out Tub’s infected eye with a spoon. In the end, the book achieves a sort of triangulation: it stinks like history, though it’s an invented past, to suit a modern sensibility perhaps not quite sure of the present.

In connecting these points for his corpse diorama, deWitt creates an allegory inverse to The Pilgrim’s Progress. Here, you are constantly reminded that this world is the world to which you have come:

Crows and gulls fought over what was left, hopping and pecking, the clammy flesh gone purple, the wind coating it in sand, and the flies insinuating themselves where they could. I felt San Francisco standing behind me but I never looked back, and I thought, I did not enjoy my time here.