Last Bender

I work at Cornell University and live in Ithaca with Maja Anderson. We have 3 children together and two from a previous marriage. I don’t have an MFA or PhD.  This website is dedicated to my poetry and fiction. I don’t attend workshops, retreats or conferences. I am a working writer and a passionate reader. Writing as Buzz Callaway, I’m the author of Specimen Tank and The Last Bender. Specimen Tank is published by Manic D Press. The Last Bender will be published here, eventually.  

What Kind of Things Do You Write?

Most people, agents, publishers and editors included, upon being told that you are a writer ask, ‘What sorts of things do you write?’ Like most writers I’m allergic to labels. I consider myself to be a literary writer and don’t really care what genre I do or do not write in. If I’ve done my job my books could go on any number of shelves in a bookstore and I’d be happy to have them there. But, I think my Buzz Callaway books can be comfortably described as Avant Pop, Splatter Punk or a category of my own devising, Low-Tech Noir. The term Tech Noir is used by Jonathan Lethem to describe one kind of Sci-Fi. That’s not what I write.

Low-Tech Noir

What is Low-Tech Noir? Low-Tech Noir is a novel set in the future that doesn’t concern itself with technology and gadgets. It sees the future as the same grubby place as the present and follows the hapless descent of a friendless boob into hell, often guided by a femme fatale. It is a paranoid world full of random violence and despair and bad television. Everyone takes drugs. It is not the world of Kathy Acker and William Boroughs. It is more the world of Richard Yates and James M. Cain, of Jim Thompson and Philip K. Dick.

My other novels, also to be posted here, are written under my real name. They are The Man Who Can’t Die and Endangered Species. I have no idea how to categorise these and won’t even try except to say that Endangered Species is a cross between Henry Green and Green Henry, and The Man Who Can’t Die is a revelation about another world simultaneous with this one, one Henry Corbin among others writes about, the Hurqalya, Blake’s Beulah.

Poetry

The other half of this website will be dedicated to my work as a poet. This has been my vocation since 1976. I think the poetry business is totally fucked and hate all aspects of it. I post for those who care.