Posted by kluster on October 20, 2009
Bill Cotter’s novel Fever Chart (McSweeney’s), and
Annie La Ganga’s memoir, Stoners and Self-Appointed Saints (Red Hen Press).
Most of the venues at which Annie and I read and signed our books while on our authors’ tour of the States were utterly independent---not links in a chain of bookstores, not attached to a university or house of worship, not N.A. clubhouses, not fronts for illicit hold’em games. Some were so indie they weren’t even bookshops: In Rapid City, South Dakota, we read and signed at a coffee shop to a welcoming, attentive, and enthusiastic group of persons positively boiled in caffeine. Another venue, the KGB Bar in NYC, which trades on the quaint delusion that communism worked (and by that virtue will not sell brands of beer it deems capitalist), was also hospitable and seemed excited we were there. (Two other writers, Ernie Hilbert of Philadelphia, and Greg Sanders of New York, both in the Red Hen Press stable, also read that night, adding another storey of warmth to the evening.) And in Chicago, we read at the Green Mill, a saloon and the birth-hospital of Slam Poetry.
The Green Mill was one of the few events not populated in the majority by friends and shills; more than half were strangers! On hand to listen to people read their writing! Though also generously welcoming, my Green Mill reading did not go well. I write fiction, a genre not often read in places where poetry is expected, so the audience—at first merely disoriented by narrative prose with characters behaving in linear time---began to shift and yawn and politely exasperate. When I hadn’t stopped after five minutes, I became aware of budding menace and hostility. Since I was pretty tired after the 15-hour drive from Rapid City (q.v. above), and thus in no shape to tussle or dodge chucked bottles or endure reputedly gnarly Chicagoan rebuke, I raced through to the end of the planned bit and leapt from the stage to the safety of my booth. The emcee came on and gave me a little shit, and several people afterwards came up to me and said things like “Don’t worry man, it’s okay, happens to everybody,” and “Hey, you weren’t as bad as it seemed,” and “Glad I’m not you.”
Annie, not incidentally, blew the fucking place away. Go buy her book, you.
Bill Cotter
Austin, Texas
bill cotter, annie la ganga, book tour
Posted by kluster on September 30, 2009
Bill Cotter’s novel Fever Chart (McSweeney’s), and
Annie La Ganga’s memoir, Stoners and Self Appointed Saints (Red Hen Press).
Of the many places Annie and I stayed while on our severely budgeted national book-signing-and-reading tour, I noted that only a few of them were not occupied by at least one cat. One of those places was a motel, a form of shelter from which cats and other domestics have been, by tradition and without prejudice, wholly banned. So it doesn’t count. And another place, a couch-surf stop in Salt Lake City, Utah, served merely as a snack bar for a neighbor’s cat. We never so much as glimpsed this animal, whose only witness was a half-noshed bowl of dry vittles on the front porch. So that doesn’t count either.
A moment of simple calculation reveals a startling figure: 82%. That is the percentage of households we visited with at least one cat. Why does this startle? Because the national percentage of becatted households is <34%,* that’s why. More than double.
Wherefore this wildly off-key statistic?More...
bill cotter, annie la ganga, book tour
Posted by kluster on September 24, 2009
Bill Cotter’s novel Fever Chart (McSweeney’s), and
Annie La Ganga’s memoir, Stoners and Self Appointed Saints (Red Hen Press).
I have not kept my promise, issued on this blog three weeks ago, to supply Kluster with regular updates on the progress of my 8000-mile book tour of the States with the poet Annie La Ganga, and, even though it is generally agreed among the semi-civilized and the sporadically ethical that spouting excuses for the breaking of oaths merely makes one look like a self-serving tenderhead, I’m going to do it anyway. (In fact, I am a self-serving tenderhead.)
Possibly the single largest obstacle was the surprising countrywide paucity of telecommunications technology. Even though Annie and I have an iPhone (given to us by my sisters specifically for sending distress signals while on tour), and even a dashboard-lighter-socket inverter for on-the-go recharging, it was largely useless because our itinerary took us through those swaths of the United States least concerned with communicating with the outside world: West Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota. Hundreds of thousands of square miles undotted with cell towers, wi-fi zones, or internet cafés. (Lots of cafés, though---my favorite was the Chat ‘n’ Chew, in (I think) Nevada. Didn’t go in---it looked like the sort of place where the chatting is about how to kill and eat, or enslave and auction, city slickers who happen upon the premises.) From such arrant geographies few communiqués ever escape, [except maybe via “mail” (like, with stamps) or smoke signals. (With the latter, punctuation gets all fucked up.)]More...
bill cotter
Posted by kluster on August 31, 2009
1. A pre-tour signal.
Fever Chart by Bill Cotter
Stoners and Self-Appointed Saints by Annie La Ganga
In the last few years, the nonliving object that has terrified me more than any other is my pocket calculator. Today, in summing up some data regarding my girlfriend Annie La Ganga’s and my dual book-signing/reading tour, upcoming this September 3-22, my light-blue Texas-Instruments 503SV shocked me thrice. The first figure it produced - 7886.63 - was so frightening that it could only be an error. I added its components again. Again I came up with 7886.63. So it was true: this was to be the number of miles we would travel in the fourteen-event tour. Not just travel. Drive. For the benefit of those forced into metrification, my calculator notes that this is equivalent to 12,692 km.
The second figure my calculator produced, 127.17, a function of the number above, proved to be the number of hours we should expect to spend, in the car, driving. This does include the number of hours we will spend in the car as a stationary object, a metal and glass pup tent, parked on a narrow shoulder, sleeping. Nor does it include the hours we will spend in the car becoming and unbecoming lost, jammed-up in traffic, idling while an officer of the law runs our tags, or bogged down in Midwestern floodwaters.
The third figure, 976.44, is in many ways the scariest - the absolute minimum number of dollars we will spend on gasoline. TI503SV says: 1159.04 AUD. This is in hopes that our car, a 2001 Nissan, will achieve at least 21 miles per gallon (8.93 km/l), and that fuel will not exceed an average setback of $2.60.More...
bill cotter, book tour, fever chart
Posted by kluster on August 21, 2009
Kluster Magazine :: Issue VI, The Writers’ Issue
Editor-In-Chief, Kat Hartmann talks to McSweeney’s Senior Editor, Eli Horowitz. Melbourne artist/author Shaun Tan shares thoughts on his art. We explore the ancient art form, typography, with New-York based Mike Perry. Time Out Sydney Editor, Dan Rookwood, explores the lost art of love letter writing and Elmo Keep attempts to decipher her motivation for music journalism.
There's also a spattering of up-coming writers; Bill Cotter, Reif Larsen, Shady Cosgrove and Eleanor Catton, some stunning Henry & June Miller inspired fashion pages and some insight into the Australian/Vogel Literary Awards.
And more, more, more.
eli horowitz, shaun tan, mike perry, typography, dan rookwood, elmo keep, bill cotter, reif larsen, shady cosgrove, elenor catton, henry miller, june miller, australian/vogel literary awards