After the panel I felt like Peters hadn’t quite revealed all.
So I took him out drinking.
Read MoreA weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.
"You’d be surprised how expensive it costs to look this cheap."
—Steven Tyler
"Me, I want to crack up at that completely ... But the look on Bop-Shop Carl? Pissing his pants slowly with his face."
—Bill Peters (from Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality)
"Two different faces, but in tight places
We think and we act as one"
—Irving Berlin
“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
—Virginia Woolf
"Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked."
—Bob Dylan
See the connections? Write your guesses in the comments — and feel free to leave your own "pants" quotes — and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.
Images: New York Daily News, Vulture, New York, CNN, Politico
Answers to last week's installment:
Colonel Hellstache — Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality is here! To celebrate, we'll be running sneak-peeks at the book and its author, Bill Peters, over the next couple of weeks. Here's part 1 of the Black Balloon interview, in which Peters sets the record straight on regional piss-beer and generally proves to be the funniest guy we've met in ages.
Your protagonist, Nate, is a wayward teenager whose slang-loaded vocabulary is almost like another language. How did you keep track of all those terms and expressions (check out all 146 of them in the Maverick Jetpants glossary)?
Keeping track of the terminology was somehow never a problem. I never kept a list with definitions. Although I did make a list of maybe 50 different terms for sex.
In the book, Nate talks about words that he finds inherently funny, like "pants" and "cheese." Is there a flipside? Are there words that you and/or your characters find repugnant?
Most corporate concept-reduction and noun-verbing is a bit like accidentally brushing your teeth with Bengay. The most recent word that has aggravated me is "onpass." As in, "to pass on." As in: “Would you onpass this item to Terrence?” The word is amazing in its total pointless efficiency. As if anyone has so little time that you could begin to tell them “I’m passing this on” and they would cut you off, throw their hands up and say “WHOA! GET TO THE POINT ‘WAR AND PEACE!’” I hope "onpass" represents some endpoint to brevity-worship, but it probably doesn’t.
You grew up in Rochester, which is also the setting of your book. But now you live in Gainesville, FL, where I imagine Genesee is hard to come by. What do you drink down there?
I have no problem whatsoever with cheap beer — I often prefer it. But sadly, and with utmost Whole-Foodsy whiteness, when I moved to Gainesville, I worried: would I get my Saison Dupont? My Reissdorf Kolsch? The answer: Yes, Bill, you will get your Saison Dupont and your Reissdorf Kolsch. Gainesville has lots to drink. There’s been no change. And looking at the country with red state / blue state anxiety? That’s no way to live.
Have you picked up any Gainesville slang?
In terms of local-speak — and I’ve only heard this within my friends — the blocks of bars and restaurants along University that are east of 13th Street have been referred to, half-seriously, as "Downtown." Downtown has more shows, more elven indie-rock beards, more tattoos, more sustainable-type things — Dwight Garner in a New York Times book review last year called these folks “Bleu collar.” Just getting that out there.
The other Gainesville slang I know relates to school spirit. Gainesville’s population is roughly 125,000, and Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, where the Florida Gators play, seats almost 90,000. "Tebowing" is the most obvious slang, although the phrase wasn’t coined, I don’t think, until after Tim Tebow left UF. Another term might be "jorts." That is, jean shorts. The term, according to at least one Gator sports website, is rooted in the Florida / Georgia rivalry, and supposedly became popular after a Georgia fan, desperate for a good insult, yelled to a Gator fan: “Gator fans wear jeans shorts!”
Images: NYTimes, Jezebel, logotv.com, CBS News, Huffington Post
Answers to last week's installment:
Explosions, weapons of mankind, friendship, and above all, pants. These are the things important to Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality, which is now available online and at awesome bookstores everywhere. Set in the urban decay of upstate New York, the novel follows a group of friends clinging to each other in the face of adulthood. Publishers Weekly calls it “the novel that's going to put Rochester on the map” and named it one of the Best Books for the Week. Anyone who's ever had their own version of Applebees and the Vomit Cruiser will see their own hometown in Maverick Jetpants.
A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.
“Aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists, to a large extent, in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer
“Shame is a soul eating emotion.”
—Carl Jung
“Don’t think of yourself as a surrogate mule, think of yourself as an entrepreneur of the physical.”
―George Saunders (from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline)
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
"There are still subjects that are in the Realm of Pain Beyond Uncomebackability."
—Bill Peters (from Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality)
Do you see the connections? Write your guesses in the comments — and feel free to leave your own "uncomebackable" quotes — and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.
Images: TimeOut New York, Newser, NYTimes, ABC News, Slate
Answers to last week's installment:
A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.
“Confronted by evil, comedy feels no need to punish or correct. It answers with corrosive laughter.”
-Martin Amis
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”
-Romans 12:19
“All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”
-Salinger (from The Catcher in the Rye)
“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
-Truman Capote
“Immediately, I’m scanning for anything that might be not just Murman-level Uncomebackable, but Pharaoh Uncomebackable, something so Pharaoh Uncomebackable that Necro will never leave his house again.”
-Bill Peters (from Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality)
Do you see the connections? Write your guesses in the comments — and feel free to leave your own "uncomebackable" quotes — and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.
Images: news.yahoo.com Newser, vice.com, abcnews.go.com, eonline
Answers to last week's installment:
Forget what you see on 4Chan and Reddit, some people think that the Internet is becoming too nice.
Though the Twitter-war that escalated from a harsh book review suggests otherwise.
Not to mention the smackdown that was William Giraldi's review of Alex Ohlin's latest book.
Perhaps those people should go into bookselling, where things seem to move at a much more pleasant pace.
In fact, that community can sometimes bring about miracles if they set their mind to it.
Hey, even the porn industry is experiencing a renaissance in the literary fiction word.
But if that career option is moot, you could always try writing your own version of Tolkien's classic trilogy.
But we hear there's an innovative new book coming out soon that might even be --dare we say-- better?
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