40

typical LP ( Split by The Groundhogs, for example) in the house where I grew up.
    for a longish two-zone, one-change journey on the London underground (Ladbroke Grove to Waterloo, say).
    for a quick lunch with a friend or a moderate-paced solo lunch.
    for a half of rugby union.
    for a game of squash, but not for a satisfying session of rallying on a tennis court.
    when I was younger, to sink three pints at the Effra before time was called.
    to cook pea and asparagus risotto (and quite a few other
dishes too).
    to feel the effects of Ecstasy coming on.
    for sex.
    to drive less than a hundred yards on the M40, heading west out of London on a Friday afternoon.
    to arrive at LHR and comfortably make your flight (assuming you only have carry-on bags and have already checked in online).
    to drive fifty miles or more on the open road in the American west.
    to discover – at the Hawkeyes’ stadium in Iowa City – that American football is even more boring than one imagined.
    to realise, during Looper – a film about time travel – that we should have walked out twenty minutes earlier.
    to wait in line for – and drink – a cappuccino at Intelligentsia on Abbot Kinney Blvd in Venice, California. (Hard to believe, but worth it, and it’s not like I had anything more important
to do.)
    Geoff Dyer, author of Zona: A Book About a Film About
a Journey to a Room

canongate was 10 in 1983
    i drink beer rarely, maybe twice a month on average
but the number ‘40’ immediately reminds me of beer
because of how famous the ‘forty,’ which is a glass bottle
containing 40 ounces of malt liquor, is in america
i don’t exactly know the difference between malt liquor
and beer, because i rarely drink, so i view both as beer
    the ‘forty,’ or ‘forty-ounce,’ is maybe especially famous
to people who were around 18 in the late 1980s
which means the ‘forty’ is probably currently
most famous to people in their 40s
    when i was looking at wikipedia earlier, to research
a little for this poem, i clicked a ‘new york times’ article
from 1993 that said ‘the outsize 40-ounce bottle’
was ‘introduced in the late 1980s’
    when i think about 40 ounces of beer
i’m usually reminded of the song ‘rock the 40 oz’
by ‘leftover crack,’ whose singer is most known
as stza, i think, which is a reference
to the hip hop group ‘wu-tang clan’
whose members include rza and gza
and method man, who sings ‘i got myself a forty, i got
myself a shorty’ on the song ‘method man’
which was released in 1993 when he was 22
    when ‘rock the 40 oz’ was released
in 2000 stza was 24 and i was 17
if i were 57 stza would be 64
and the year would be 2040
and canongate would be 67
but the year is 2013 so stza is 37
and method man is 42
and canongate is 40
and in july i’ll be 30
    Tao Lin, author of Taipei

Forty
    I turned forty two years ago. Canongate is my little brother.
I got him in trouble that time with the Easter egg dye on the sitting room curtains. I showed him seven different ways to tie his shoelaces (he only uses one, still, all these decades later). I made him forever afraid of summer camp before he’d even gone. I told the teachers who would teach him two years after me that he was a little slow and that they’d have to give him extra time for tests and things. He complained about this until he realised he was getting free extra time for tests and things. It only stopped when they noticed his grades were as good as mine (not that we’re competitive). I talked to him about girls. He asked, What if I like boys? So I talked to him about boys.
I took him with me when I went to India. I left him behind when I went to Berlin, because I knew that would force him to go on his own (He did; he met Thibault there, who’s French,
but Berlin is where you meet people, everyone knows that).
I wasn’t his best man at their wedding – they didn’t have them, something about ‘straight hegemony’ – but I am godfather to a few of his thousands of children. He understands that I would give him my kidney without hesitation on the condition that
it’s highly unlikely he ever asks. We talk. We see the movies
that neither of our spouses likes. We used to have a beer, but now more often it’s lemonade and something tastefully salmon on the plate. I’ll be forty-two, he’ll be forty. We’re good. We’re solid. Happy birthday, bro.

    Patrick Ness, author of The Crane Wife

Ytrof: The View From Mars?

    Margaret Atwood,