news break: Nebraska Revises Child Safe Haven Law
The work of unruly teens?
ALL POINTS BULLETIN: To anyone who was thinking about writing a story “premised” on the uber-inclusive Safe Haven law of the state of Nebraska, be aware that your work has just become HISTORICAL FICTION. (all text leads to full NYT article)
Top Google Image Search result for "historical fiction." Umm, okay.
The law was revised during an emergency legislative session this week, is supposed to be signed today, and will go into effect at 12:01 AM Saturday, i.e. tonight. So if you’ve got a baby, child, tween, or teen you’ve been waffling about getting rid of, I advise you to put petal to the metal RIGHT NOW, and decide if you’re really serious while you’re en route. For reference, this where you’re headed:
Stalking Sessions Revealed
Shane Jones wrote a post on his blog about who he thought had a job, who he thought didn’t, and who he didn’t know. It interested me a good deal, because I think we all passively ‘stalk’ one another without actually contacting each other. Of course, there are bloggers who become friends, but for the most part, we only have an abstract idea of people—abstractions which are enabled by this ‘virtual’ internet medium.
I thought it would be fun to tell you what I think I know about certain characters’ personal lives in this nearing incestuous lit blogosphere. One disclaimer: in writing this post, I have not done any research (i.e. checking their blogger profile for stats, etc.). The following information is solely based on my perception of these people based on aggregated passive stalking sessions via blogspot, flickr, facebook, etc. Again, these are all conjectures, except for when I state a fact.
Ryan Manning
I have a feeling Ryan either ‘gets a lot of chicks,’ or is a weird virgin. His relationships with females seem like they would be intense. He lives in Virginia and has a lot of time.
Brandon Scott Gorrell
Brandon lives in Seattle, and used to be a dork. Now he’s a hipster (I use this word neutrally) because his hair is shaped funny. He recently got a girlfriend, who I think is ‘hot,’ because when a man is very talented, he increases his chance of getting hot females. Brandon uses a PC.
Shane Jones
Shane posted an mpeg touring his house, in upstate NY. There was a cat, which is not surprising because Shane is sensitive. His blogroll is female only, and I think he’s making a political point. I think he probably has a girlfriend, and that he’s a considerate lover. He has some politically progressive job because right before the election, he had to go somewhere.
Blake Butler
Blake lives in Atlanta Georgia, which he’s always bitching about (people in the south are very vocal that they don’t like it there). I think he has a girlfriend. I haven’t seen any pictures of his room or home, but I have a feeling it’s a total mess.
Tao Lin
A lot of this everyone knows, because Tao is so open with his life: he lives in Brooklyn, is vegan, and works at a vegan café, I think. He used to live in Florida. As for his personal life, I think a lot of strange women are severely attracted to him, but I think it’s hard to get into a relationship with Tao because he’s a) very busy, and b) very intense.
Justin Taylor
I think Justin and Tao were roommates, or still are. I don’t know much about Justin, because he doesn’t blog (except at HTMLgiant) and his website just lists his projects. He exudes ‘intellectual.’
Ken Baumann
Ken is an actor. I’ve youtubed the show he’s on, about a teenage girl. I’ve also seen him in Audi commercials. Ken is ‘young’ and his tone is mature. I think he’s loaded, like has a big swimming pool that no one goes into.
Mark Baumer
Mark, of everydayyeah, used to live in Minnesota, and moved to LA. He helps edit Thieves Jargon. I don’t know anything about him other than that.
Aaron Burch/Elizabeth Ellen
I think they are married, or at least going out. I don’t know where they live, but I think it’s either Ohio, Indiana, or Iowa—like not in a big city. I know that they really like Bourbon and poker. I group Barry Graham with them because they know each other.
Barry Graham
Barry Graham could totally kick your ass, not because he has any martial arts skills, but just because he’s really large. Barry isn’t ‘artsy’ the way most people here are, and I like that.
Claudia Smith & Lydia Coupland
I group these two together because I think they are friends. Also, they are ‘the moms.’ A lot of their fiction involves being a mom.
Mazie Louise Montgomery
I know for a fact that’s not her real name, and anyone who was involved in the online lit world pre-2004 will recognize her real name, which I’m not going to disclose out of respect.
Mazie is obviously depressed. I think she has strange affairs with older men. She works at a library.
Zachary German
Zachary used to live in Pennsylvania and moved to Brooklyn because the former state could not contain his hipsterness. He’s gay and obsessed with food. He takes glamour shots with Ellen Frances, who is a NYC Warhol type of person who calls people she likes ‘geniuses.’ She is beautiful and I am sexually attracted to her.
Ellen Kennedy
I thought Ellen Kennedy and Elizabeth Ellen were the same people for the longest time because of the shared ‘Ellen.’ Ellen Kennedy is depressed and recently went ‘crazy,’ like literally institutionalized (she talks about it on her blog, so I don’t think I’m stepping on any toes.) She took ‘major ass’ pictures of forests for awhile, so I think the mental facility was in thick woods.
Scott Garson
Scott Garson edits Wigleaf, and I think he’s a dad. I saw a picture of him with long hair (down to the butt) and it seems he used to be some Pynchon obsessed literary ‘freak,’ and now he’s more normal.
Mike Young
Mike used to live in Portland, and now lives in Massachusetts. He sings well and plays guitar, kinda of a Jeff Tweedy way. I think he’s an honest good guy who sometimes gets depressed. He likes taking road trips, in that Kerouac way.
Sam Pink
Sam Pink is not his real name. He mailed me a chapbook from Indiana, I think. I have a feeling he is older, maybe 32 or something. I think his fiction is ‘real’ in the sense that he is utterly alone and abandoned, but despite his 1st person narrator, he doesn’t act like an asshole. Sam Pink is probably a pervert.
Colin Bassett
Colin lives in Indiana I think. He takes a lot of pictures looking outside windows from inside, and I think that’s a concept for him. He’s very effeminate, but I think he’s straight. He’s very thin because he’s often too detached to eat. He goes to the library often. I think he’s single, but somehow not lonely. He seems mature.
Noah Cicero
Noah lives in Ohio, that is very apparent. Somehow he has a whole house to himself, where he just shouts into the camera all the time. I think Noah thinks he’s Dostoyevsky. He is into politics and speaks in a manner which is not consistent with his high intelligence.
Gene Morgan
Gene recently became a dad. I think he lives around Texas, only because he does the website for Nano, which is some university in Texas’ creative writing journal. Gene, Barry, and Noah are like the ‘men,’ in the sense that all the other males on this list are sort of effeminate, in a literary Rilke/Proust kind of way.
Matthew Savoca & Colin Bassett
I group these two because they are in Europe. Matthew is in Italy, and Colin is in UK—though Matthew is an American expatriate and Colin is actually English. They are both thin and talented. I suspect they both get chicks.
Molly Gaudry
Molly is ‘new’ to this scene. I think she’s either Asian, Hapa, or Southeast Asian (which is Asian I guess). For those who don’t know, Hapa is when you’re any percent Asian. Like if your great grand mother had sex with a man who was ¼ Thai, you’d be hapa.
Ryan Call
I haven’t really followed Ryan Call. I don’t know, it’s like ‘Call’ is a very boring last name and I unfairly assume that he’s boring. He publishes in great print journals and has an interesting sister. I wish his name was Ryan Louvet Mallester, then I would become obsessed.
Matthew Simmons
Matthew Simmons lives in Seattle, and I wonder if he knows Brandon. Matthew works at a bookstore and I imagine him having a lot of hair, especially on his face.
Catherine Lacey
I saw some footage of Catherine brushing her teeth in the subway (NYC), and I think it was either an ‘art project’ or she wanted to have interesting material to post on her blog. Her name is sexy. I think all the NYC people hang out, or at least go to readings together. I saw footage of their behavior ‘in public’ and felt that I would be irritated if I met them in person.
—
I hope nobody is offended, or thought that I was being sarcastic about them. I’ve just been a little obsessed about all of you.
There are still some who I am obsessed about, but I got too tired typing. If you weren’t included in this list, I’m not being elitist, I’m just tired and want you to know that I’m probably obsessed about you too.
HTML Giant is almost Gender Neutral!
According to Gender Analyzer HTML Giant is only 54% male!
As for your new X-chromosome representatives, Soffi’s blog is probably written by a woman, while mine is decidedly written by a man!
The absence of your essays turns my blood into hot oil.
My boyfriend tells me that when I’m asleep, I radiate heat, that my skin is feels like it could inflict first degree burns. This is troublesome for a few reasons:
1. If I set the sheets on fire I will be screwed becuase I don’t have renters’ insurance.
2. Normal people are supposed to experience a one or two degree decrease in body temperature.
Last night I had a nightmare typical of literary journal slush readers everywhere: there were five submissions, an approaching deadline and nothing was any good. I am convinced that this recurring nightmare is the reason I turn into a little furnace-woman every night, but you can help. Submit some nonfiction to Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Fine Art. We have a contest going on until December 1, if cash prizes are your kind of thing, and if not, you can just submit the old fashioned way.
Why just nonfiction? Because I am on the nonfiction board and perfectly content to let the fiction people do their own begging. But I will also say this: the fiction editor these days has a wild streak and his fiction is hysterical and surreal, though his tastes are broad, I think he wants to laugh and cry at the same time when selecting fiction. So far he’s only gotten one story out of the slush (as opposed to solicited stories) and it’s his favorite story thus far. As for poetry… meh? The poets are a tad hermetic on the whole and I have no idea what their tastes are right now.
I like personal essay things over high-minded pie in the sky stuff and the other two people on the board tend to lean that way too.
Also, Columbia is run by 2nd year MFA students (at Columbia U) and the staff changes every year. If we’ve rejected you in the past, try again, because we are not the same we anymore
Welcome the New Giant Crew
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.
local news break: economics is politics by other means. politics is…
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!
Time Has Passed, Now Lets Get Some Love and Tenderness
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.
Calvin Liu where r u?
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.)
The Review Review
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)
OUR CONTEST HAS A WINNER! CONGRATULATIONS TO MARK
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.
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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.