Weekly Dispatches Category
The DNA of Place: On Richard McGuire’s ‘Here’
Posted on December 9, 2015 1 Comment
By Rob Casper So we’ve reached week 13 in the NFL season — time enough to think of how FBC has changed my life. I’ve read a whole lot of books I never would’ve known of, or otherwise found the time to break open. Which has led me to more reading — right now I’m […]
Two Sides of Being Hyper-Specific: On ‘The Sixth Extinction’
Posted on December 1, 2015 Leave a Comment
By Dan Bjork Upon reading The Sixth Extinction and sitting down to write this, I had a very similar initial reaction as Adam: sheer amazement at human beings’ ability to compartmentalize. We are so hyper-specific in our outrage. Never again will we allow Subway to put this specific yoga mat ingredient in their bread. Never […]
The Organizing Principle Is No Organizing Principle: On the Bears, the Patriots, ‘Ash vs. Evil Dead,’ and ‘Milk & Filth’
Posted on December 1, 2015 Leave a Comment
By Adam Boretz It’s Year in Reading time over at The Millions, which, for the purposes of FBC, means one thing: I did not have time to write a proper post about Carmen Giménez Smith’s Milk & Filth. Which is why, Gentle Reader, you are reading this piece, which is pretty much entirely lacking in any organizing […]
Pure Potboiler: On Ray Russell’s ‘The Case Against Satan’
Posted on November 25, 2015 1 Comment
By Ryan Joe Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan is a pure potboiler with grand aspirations. Spoiler alerts. Most exorcism stories are implicitly about a bunch of sexually excitable old men trying to deal with a teenage girl. Gabriel García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons springs most immediately to mind. But The Case Against […]
What Have We Done to the Earth? On ‘The Sixth Extinction’
Posted on November 22, 2015 1 Comment
By Adam Boretz 1. I never cease to marvel at the human ability to ignore inconvenient truths. Present us with a fact that is not to our liking — smoking cigarettes causes cancer; it’s pretty much impossible for an invading army to win a land war in Afghanistan; the music of Bon Jovi is simply […]
Bad-Ass Beatific Yawp: On ‘Milk and Filth’ and ‘The Case Against Satan’
Posted on November 21, 2015 1 Comment
By Rob Casper First off, the Packers. My sister and her sons went to last weekend’s game, and she consoled them after the loss — to the Lions! — by saying at least they’d seen some crazy football in the closing minutes of the game. But still…now they have to beat the Vikings (the Vikings!) […]
Jumping the Rails: On ‘Slade House’ and Not on ‘The Sixth Extinction’
Posted on November 16, 2015 1 Comment
By Ryan Joe I decided to make like Colin Kaepernick’s career and jump the rails. Instead of reading this week Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction — which I’ve every intention of reading — I picked up David Mitchell’s Slade House. I grabbed Mitchell’s haunted house/Hansel and Gretel fairy tale at the behest of our friend Chandler, […]
Circling Around Something Abstract: On ‘Speak,’ White Space, and What We Do When We’re by Ourselves
Posted on November 14, 2015 Leave a Comment
By Dan Bjork I spent around 90 minutes last Wednesday night (November 4th) on Periscope watching a man and his girlfriend give a tour of their apartment. I don’t know either of them, or rather, I have a pretty good feel for them — I was watching because I already felt like I knew them […]
Coming Home Again: On Books, Travel, Life, More Books, and the Green Bay Packers
Posted on November 13, 2015 Leave a Comment
By Rob Casper I feel like I need to write my fellow FBC folk an apology note. I did not mean to be absent; in fact, over the course of the first few weeks I realized how invaluable reading you and writing to you could be. But then my life overwhelmed me: five trips in […]
The Joys and Perils of Math Rock: On Rush, Guns N’ Roses, and ‘Speak’
Posted on November 10, 2015 3 Comments
By Adam Boretz Let us begin our discussion of Louisa Hall’s Speak by quoting Ryan Henry Joe: Here’s my fucking problem though: Individually, each subplot is a drag. The narratives work well only as pieces of a puzzle, and the character arcs really overextend themselves. Yeah, okay, Mary misses her dead, soulless dog and is […]
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