by ALEC ARCENEAUX
Axe and Palm, light of my late-nights, fire of my bowels. My sin, my meal plan dollars. Axe and Palm: the tongue making me take a trip of three steps down Lomita to TAP, at two a.m., while tipsy. Axe. And. Palm.
by KATHARINE SCHWAB
When listening to Alex Clare’s The Lateness of the Hour on repeat for the past several months, I pictured Clare as dark, handsome, and brooding, a man whose soul poured like liquid from his throat. When I arrived at the Regency Ballroom on April 23rd for his concert, Clare turned out to be a rather short British redhead, complete with full beard and knitted beret, with an endearing awkwardness and a smile only slightly less jolly than Santa Claus.
Winner of the Stanford Story Slam
by SOPHIA WESTWOOD and SARAH STERMAN
I was chained to the rack. Prisoners stretched to my right and left, no room to lie down even if that cursed bolt hadn’t forced me upright in the chill night.
by T. DOYLE
This profile is third of three in support of the Lane Lecture Series. T.C. Boyle reads in Cemex Auditorium on Monday, May 6th at 8pm.
“I want to be taken away to a different place every time.”
-T.C. Boyle, in an interview with Peter Wild
Tom Coraghessan Boyle’s twenty-four books of fiction—fourteen of them novels, ten of them short story collections—include the novel World’s End (1987), winner of the PEN Faulkner Prize; The Tortilla Curtain (1995), a national Book Award Finalist; and “T. C. Boyle Stories” (1998), winner of the PEN Malamud Prize.
by JACK DUANE
The dust has settled, quite literally, on Weekend 1 of Coachella 2013 in Indio, CA. After three days of standing, swaying, and sweating it’s time to break down the hits and misses from this year’s festival.
Coachella sold out both weekends this year, a testament to the rising popularity of the festival format. The annual Indio tradition stands alongside Chicago’s Lollapalooza and Tennessee’s Bonnaroo as one of the nation’s favorite festivals, and the rise of regional festivals in San Francisco (Outside Lands), New York City (The Governors Ball), and The Gorge Amphitheater in Eastern Washington (Sasquatch) indicates that music fans will continue to encounter live music in bulk.
Before covering the highlights from this year’s Coachella, I’d like to break down the benefits and drawbacks of the festival experience.
Pro - Cost Effective
A ticket to Coachella ($349) or Lollapalooza ($235) can be pricey, even before you factor in a camping pass, transportation, and $7 slices of pizza. That being said, its still cheaper, and easier, than seeing twelve of your favorite bands at twelve different venues.
Announcing our first collaborative writing competition! Submissions due April 22nd.
by KATHARINE SCHWAB
Richard Powers fits right in at Stanford. One of the first people to have his genome decoded, he has worked as a computer programmer and planned to major in physics while studying at Urbana-Champaign. But most importantly, he’s a prolific novelist and National Book Award winner with his eleventh volume on the way. His work fuses his fascination with science, stemming from what Tobias Wolff called an “extraordinary wide-ranging curiosity,” with the humanity he ultimately finds within his characters and his readers.
On February 13th, Richard Powers read a brand new short story to an intimate crowd at Cemex Auditorium. As the Stein Visiting Writer this quarter, Powers is teaching a creative writing workshop entitled Form and Feeling. He and his students are exploring how to produce the maximal emotional affect on their audience. The story he read, Saints Hill (he was very clear that there’s no apostrophe), is his own final project and answer to this question. “The paint is very, very wet,” he laughed to the crowd in Cemex. He had finished Saints Hill that afternoon, inspired by an unnamed painting by artist Olaf Krans. The story, half realist and half allegorical, details a couple’s journey to a small prairie town, which is described as “the last breath-catch before facing down the bloody future.”
by SABRINA BEDFORD
When I first heard the name “Flogging Molly,” I told myself that that band was not something I’d like to hear. Such a violent sounding name (although I recently learned that in Ireland “flogging” can also mean “to sell”) kept me from enjoying some of what later became my favorite songs, with incredible lyrics and tunes to which I could just Schottische all night.
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