Thursday, October 26, 2006

The bar that launched a thousand manuscripts

The Foxhead is an Iowa City institution, an ordinary looking bar where extraordinary writers converge to discuss life, literature, and who got ripped a new one in the last workshop.

It's also the most cancerous tavern in the United States. The smoke in the Foxhead is like the home crowd at a football game, a 12th man than can turn ordinarily healthy lungs in to black sponges darker than a West Virginia coal mine. But for $2 pints of Anchor Steam, I sacrificed my health and accompanied The Lovely Becky there on many a night, listening to the morbid tales of short stories disembowled by fiendish criticism.

Well, the Foxhead is popular and sentinent enough to have its own MySpace page. There are a number of quotes about the bar on the page, but this one is my favorite:

"The only changes made at the Foxhead through the decades have been to occasionally paint over the extensive bathroom graffiti, which by all accounts is surprisingly bad for a writers' bar."

Sadly, speaking as someone who has read the bathroom walls, it's true. But only because those writers have used up everything in workshop.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gee, perhaps Bossy can blame her lack of success on the fact that she lives in a dry town.

Brando said...

Really? They still have those? Holy crap, I'm amazed you can write at all!

Churlita said...

Some of that same bad graffiti has been in the women's bathroom since the eighties. The best graffiti I've ever read was in the old employee bathroom at The Mill. Aparently, waiters didn't use anything up and had plenty of material left for the walls.

Chuckles said...

I graffitied a bathroom in Slovakia a couple weeks ago.

Anonymous said...

Oh aren't we so lucky Chuckie is back?

This is one of the funniest posts. That quote is classic.

Happy Halloween!

Brando said...

LOL, Grendel, that's awesome.