Soffi and Catherine will kick yr ass

I know you hate to see us break up the 90% sausage party. The truth is we’ve been trying for a while now to bring a more feminine presence to this onslaught of often rude/crude dudism, but, well, girls don’t like us? Or if they do, they certainly don’t want to make it public. We each had to promise Kendra our first born before she came on board, but now those are all eaten up.

Thankfully, in the face of such dire straits, two lovely Female bloggers have now agreed to strap on their rubber suits and come swim in HTML Giant fun pool. It might be belated, but now Kendra has someone to whisper to behind her hand when we start acting like Jocks. Not that our women might not act like jocks sometimes. They’ll probably box our ears and rub our heads in the dirt. But only because they are both rad and excellent women. And they are here to help us keep it real.

So please welcome Soffi Stiassni and Catherine Lacey to the HTML Giant team.

We’re excited. Other things are going to keep changing and expanding. And no worries about us not being sassy or weird or ridiculous a lot of the time. That just comes naturally. But do look for the new sleek, ripped out 2.0 version of Giant coming hopefully before the year’s out. In the meantime, let’s have fun and spread some creation.

Dateline: New York City

CUSTOMER SERVICE.

I forwarded this piece from the NYT Cityroom blog, “M.T.A. Plans Steep Service Cuts and Fare Increases,” to my friend and co-editor (of The Agriculture Reader) Jeremy Schmall. It’s a short article, but if you want to know why I sent it to him in an email with the subject-line “like being fucked with a laser beam that is somehow also a rusty old knife,” this paragraph pretty much explains it:

>>For New York City Transit, the biggest component of the authority, the deficit-closing plan would eliminate the W and Z subway lines; eliminate service on the M line to Bay Parkway in Brooklyn; shorten the route of the G line, which will permanently stop at Court Square in Long Island City, Queens, instead of 71st and Continental Avenues in Forest Hills, Queens; lower the frequency of most letter-line trains to every 10 minutes from every 8 minutes on weekends; lower the frequency of all trains to every 30 minutes from every 20 minutes from 2 to 5 a.m.; eliminate overnight bus service on 25 routes; and eliminate the X27 and X28 express-bus lines.<<

Anywho, Schmall wrote back the following cryptic musings, and I thought I would share them with all of you:

>>zizek writes that the atrocities of communism are easily identifiable, quantifiable, and well known; of capitalism, however, little is said.

nathanael West told his teacher he wanted to be a writer, and she advised that he would need to get used to being poor. the ensuing great depression made that easy: everyone was poor.<<

A PRIMER FOR THE UNINITIATED BUT CURIOUS.

LOOK FOR THE SILVER LINING.

HAPPY BRAVE NEW WORLD, EVERYBODY!

In late December I’m going to redesign this site. I’m pretty sure we’re going to move towards a more magazine-type blog, mostly because I’ve found some good templates to steal and why the fuck not, but other than that I’d like to hear some suggestions from the fine people who visit the site.

Do we need a flash intro? Animated gif backgrounds? More pop-ups?

Also, there’s the whole issue of women and how we smell like hot trash to them. Can we fix this? Is it possible to save ourselves from becoming, as Mike Young put it in a very poignant email last night, “a boys’ yuk yuk fag joke club.” I mean, I love a tasteless joke as much as Sam Pink, but we’ve got to temper it with some sweet love and tenderness if we’re going to make this relationship work.

I think. You guys know better than I do, I just build the framework.

This is not a Calvin Liu.

To the old farts like me who ran shit in the olden days and submitted to their e-journals by carrier pigeon, I need your calling ears: What ever happened to Calvin Liu?

More people will remember Bullfight Media than will remember The Glut (which is sadly no longer archived by Google unless you go into one of those time machine databases, which are scary).

I wonder mainly because in retrospect I think Calvin was a freemason. I was looking back through a copy I think the first perfect bound thing I was ever in, Calvin’s MITOCHONDRIA: AN ANTHOLOGY OF LOOSE ENDS, which included stuff from his then several mini mags including The Glut (an online site with fiction about food), Sexy Stranger (a mini pamphlet that you could give to people in the street that you thought were hot, with flash fiction in it), and Mitochondria, another site of short weird shit.

I was pretty amazed to see a list of contributors who, at the time, to me were strangers, and now all seem to be some sort of Childbearer of Planet Cooch (I wanted to say they do good shit and have been successful in their work), including: Mike Topp, Tao Lin, Matthew Simmons, Ryan Boudinot, Darby Larson, Kevin Sampsell, Brandon Shimoda, Christopher Owens, James Grinwis, Jimmy Chen, David Gianatasio, Jensen Whelan, Jonathan Messinger, Mark Cunningham, and several other now widely present faces, including myself.

It was a real trip going through some of that old stuff, and surprising that it was actually mostly really good, even though this was in early 2005 that it came out, which means the work was 2004 or earlier.

I hadn’t even gotten my dick pierced yet back then.

After that he did the Bullfight Review, which managed to put out 3 really killer issues, as well as a mini book contest winner which happened to be Roy Kesey’s NOTHING IN THE WORLD. I still have that Bullfight mini version, before it got picked up by Dzanc and Roy blew up.

So, what I’m wondering is: where the fuck is Calvin Liu?

In like ‘05, he and I had talked back then about starting another print mag that we never got around to launching, which he suggested me call Anthology A Trois. Come to think of it, we used the same image from Jodorowsky’s HOLY MOUNTAIN that Ken and I ended up using on the No Colony website 4 years later. I never get tired of repeating myself.

I think I found him on myspace once and sent him a message that never got answered.

I would love to know what he’s doing, if he’s writing, publishing, etc. He also had some great fiction and poetry of his own pen, I recall.

Anybody? Anything?

(All you dudes/dudettes who have that Mitochondria anthology could have a fine time flipping through it again, let me say.)

I don’t know if we’ve already mentioned this, but I’ll go ahead anyhow. The Review Review is a newish site that reviews literary journals. Pretty straightforward right? Sure. I like that they link to online essays by various editors of literary journals; sort of emphasizes the people behind these projects. I also like that they have organized their reviews into categories, such as “In The Grammar Gutter” and “Overwhelmingly Positive.” This seems funny to me; I mean this in a good way.

Becky Tuch started the project this past spring. Here’s her ‘manifesto’ or ‘editor’s note’ or whatever:

Wanting to get published in lit mags had started to feel like doing community service so that it would look good on your college application. That is to say, lit mags did not represent pleasure, engagement or intellectual growth, but merely a stepping stone toward recognition from book editors and maybe agents.

At first, this discovery was comforting. I’m not alone, I thought. No one reads these things! But the more I considered the situation, the worse I began to feel. How could we expect lit mags to care about our work, when we didn’t care about theirs? Why would anyone make time or pay money for our stories if we were unwilling to take a lit mag on our morning commute or shell out the twenty bucks a year for a subscription?

I like the idea of someone suggesting that we ought to care about the work that literary magazine editors do, the ‘discourse’ that literary magazines create. I like this idea. I haven’t had a chance to look through the reviews, so I can’t speak to the quality of writing on this site, but I like the idea. It seems similar to the kind of stuff going on at Newpages.com and Five Star Literary Stories.

Anyhow, have a look. Report back to us; I’ve done enough work today.

(Thanks, Cliff)

It was difficult to pick a winner.  Many of the submissions were excellent critiques of the photograph, especially Adam R’s Life is awesome and Darby’s Jesus Christ looks down and Larry and JImmy briefly…  Jereme managed to draw some human interest to the pink-dress character as a professional tree-kicker.  She’s almost forgivable in that light.  Almost.  Really, you are all winners in my eyes, but since I have to choose one, I think the winner is Mark:

[Here is the original photo, and the winning prose - JT]

Come in and eat something. It’s all free for me. It’s all free from me. Do the dodododo. What’s new pussycat?

My chest is elevator globules. I’m less bouncing than freighting. I can’t say where my car was parked.

In retrospect, maybe this was a ridiculous idea.

This story’s richly detailed prose on vapidity validates the initial project: truthfully, a shallow one.  I appreciate the ominous voice and its multiple perspectives, artfully equal in number to the characters in the photograph and at the same time also the subtle voice of the reader/viewer/narrator.  I’m wondering, whose ridiculous idea was this in the first place?  And which ridiculous idea are we speaking about?  The jumping on the bed, the request for a story, my continual feelings of inadequacy?  Artfully and well done, Mark–congratulations and thank you.

The prize for HTMLGiant’s first-ever literary contest is a bottle of homemade linen spray.

+

MARK, to collect your prize, contact me via my website with your address and I’ll fwd the info to our anonymous contest-runner, who will mail you the homemade linen spray.

WINNER.

“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”

I’m sure a lot of people are getting this in their mailbox. I received it twice, so I figured I’d add to the chaos of the universe and post it here. McSweeney’s is having a sale to promote being poor. It’s cute, just like potty training, and it’ll probably work. I’m seriously thinking about buying some books or something from them.

Here’s the email:

M c S W E E N E Y ‘ S   C R A Z Y   E X C E S S I V E   S A L E

Crazy Excessive Sale through this Friday, November 21.

Cheap, fast, painless, mutually beneficial. Also, good books. Do not deprive your loved ones! Please go now: store.mcsweeneys.net

Want more? How about this: if you spend over $60, you get a FREE copy of either Nick Hornby’s new collection Shakespeare Wrote for Money or Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends. All you have to do is spend $60 (not including shipping) at our online store; then, at the bottom left of the first page of checkout, find the field for Promo Code. In this field, type in the code for the book you’d like:
- MAPS AND LEGENDS promo code: MC01
- SHAKESPEARE WROTE FOR MONEY promo code: NH05

You feel poor. We feel poor. Let’s feel poor together. This week only, almost everything is half-price at store.mcsweeneys.net. Escape the holiday rush and cross every name off your list in one cheap swoop.Angsty cousin? All Known Metal Bands. New fan? The Better of McSweeney’s. Paleontologist in the family? “What Happens in La Brea Tar Pits Stays in La Brea Tar Pits” t-shirt. Newlyweds spending their first winter together? The Secret Language of Sleep. Michael Cera fan? Wholphin No. 6. And so on — we’ve got all your bases covered, and it’s all excessively discounted, all right here.

Do it. And good luck. The economy can only get better.

John Deming on Mark Doty

Melinda Wilson on Patricia Smith

Jason Schneiderman on Frank Bidart

John Deming on Richard Howard

Hansa Bergwall on Reginald Gibbons

I owe Monkeybicycle a lot. My first ever print publication was with them. One of my first online pieces appeared on their site. And for a brief time, they turned editing duties for their site to me—probably long before I was really ready to do it, too.

The last thing published before I took over (the last thing edited by Shya Scanlon) was this piece:

America Fell In Love with the Explosions Technician

Did you read it? Go read it. It rules. It seriously rules. It makes my top ten best fucking things published online list. (As does the previously linked to Thomas Game Boy thing Gene wrote.)

At some point during my tenure as the editor, I wrote to this person, this “Henry Mansfield” and attempted to solicit more work. I never heard back from him. I’ve never seen anything else by him online.

So I figure its a pseudonym. But I can’t be 100% sure.

Dear reader, are you Henry Mansfield? Say hello! Write to me at giantblinditems at gmail dot com.

Dear reader, find Henry Mansfield!  Dear reader, let’s make a saint of Henry Mansfield.

Dear reader, write the hagiography of Henry Mansfield in the comments. A prize for my favorite.