- Matthew Simmons

- – -

WINNER: Sewage Treatment Technologies

[matchup #50 in Tournament of Bookshit]

I don’t have specific thoughts regarding either of these things. I imagine that working at Best Buy is similar to many retail jobs? You deal with a lot of odd customers, coworkers, and supervisors? Maybe that is an unfair assumption. See, the only retail job I worked was at a used book store in Virginia when I was in graduate school. I stocked the shelves and I also purchased inventory according to a massive buying manual that the owners had seemingly haphazardly created full of random rules regarding what sorts of books we should take in and what we should not. We bought a lot of mass market paper backs and children’s books. My following these rules at the buying table often meant that I turned down a lot of great books, fascinating and interesting books, that the owners had deemed a waste of shelving space. Probably, from a business standpoint, they were right: they knew their customers, and theirs were customers who were not interested in Fowles’ The Maggot, nor were their customers interested in Barnes’ Nightwood. Both of these books intrigued me when I held them in my hands at the buying table, and even as I turned them down, I wanted to know what was between their covers (I later read Nightwood in a class; still haven’t read The Maggot). Another terribly weird part of this job is that we threw out a lot of books. Like, shitloads of books. And the owners required us to rip the covers off these books because a few years before I worked there, a customer had pulled books out of the dumpster that they had trashed and resold those books to the store several times. So there I was, tearing covers off books like O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, simply because these books had ‘been on the shelf too long.’ After that, I began to take the discards and put them nicely in a box and hide the box in the store until my assigned closing night, and then I would take the box to my car. At one point I had five boxes of books in my car, books the owners had deemed a ‘waste of shelf space,’ and these I distributed to my friends in order to make room to save more books. Eventually, the store closed because the owners couldn’t pay the rent, and I spent my final weekend at that job boxing up books to save from the dumpster in between breaking down shelves and stacking the book carts in a moving van.

- Ryan Call

- – -

WINNER: calling yourself the editor-in-chief of an online journal.

[matchup #49 in Tournament of Bookshit]

The year was 2012 and we were all under the assumption that, in some way or another, the world would end soon. We knew that the Mayans had nothing to do with it because, as we all know, when one calendar ends we just buy a new one, we don’t assume the worst. Capitalism might collapse, geotraumatic insistence might just find us no longer rooted on the earth, it’s too bad NASA itself is gone. All that’s left to feel is our own collective solar body moving through time and space.

We find our bodies in bars, we find our bodies consuming alcohol, we find our bodies consuming more alcohol, we find ourselves going outside for a cigarette, we watch stars plummet and all make the same wish; that we can sustain, that the world won’t end, that our accelerated reality stops, calms down, pauses for a second.

Back inside the bar the same reader is still reading, and we have all lost track of what he’s talking about. He’s just listing numbers now. The numbers have no context, but suddenly the numbers take form and there’s a black obsidian rock floating in the middle of the room. A mexican black king snake slithers around it. This is an image we can all relate too, but the guy who is reading can still be heard. Everything is distracting. Words have lost their meaning by now, and we’re either drunk or just decentered from whatever it is we’re supposed to be paying attention to. We understand that the world is ending so it’s time for a bender. The only way to make time infinite is to be drunk. The man keeps talking and we don’t want this sort of infinity, we want another.

I watch the snake freeze in the air. I want to grab him and straighten him out, fashion him into an object to hit the speaking man with. I want to shout at the man STOP FUCKING READING AND PAY ATTENTION TO OUR WORLD but I can’t seem to commit to making any sound whatsoever. I realize it’s because I’m not actually in the room, I’m standing outside the door incapable of crossing the barrier that stands between me and the room of the bar, namely the barrier of space. I pull out my dick and try to get hard but realize that the man’s voice has frozen everything. Is anybody asleep? Can we sleep now that we have nothing?

The world will end soon and the only escape for us, the working class, is alcoholism. This disease will cure our unease as we sleaze our way into unmitigated sexual utopian nightmares. Fuck you reading man, your story is gone. I am here. Let’s do this.

- Impossible Mike

- – -

WINNER: Alcoholism

Click here!!!

[The tournament is back on! It will be decided before the 1 year anniversary of the tournament!- ed.]

[matchup #48 in Tournament of Bookshit]

i’m not on facebook, cause i guess i’m like THAT GUY or whatever, so what happened is that my gf gave me her login info so that i could browse it and be able to accurately judge this battle but all i did was look at her emails and private messages, and, like, pictures of dudes who comment on her pictures and also i looked at pictures of attractive women who seemed to show up a lot in general. but right now i can’t think of a single thing worse than facebook-based political ‘activism’ such as the bunch of posts i couldn’t help seeing that attempted to ‘deal with the problem’ of animal suffering and eating meat re thanksgiving and veganism. i maybe half respected the lady on the street who yelled “make the leap, go vegan!” at me as i passed but what i did on thanksgiving was sneak downstairs late after dinner and eat cold turkey by the light of the refrigerator, thinking of her. do i even have to mention ows here or can i just ignore it the same way everyone ignored the local elections last month?

litblogging at age 35 seems fine since nobody cares about lit blogs and nobody cares about 35 year olds. it’s cool to be 20-something and even early 30s can be good because you get a fair amount of pity but at 35 everyone knows you’re well past being interested in anything anymore so you lose plausible deniability that the reason you’re blogging at all is anything but an attempt at getting new kinds of laid. we can all let that slide since we’re americans and the pursuit of happiness is something we grant everyone equally and 35 year olds are not yet a protected minority, though probably they should be because there maybe isn’t a single worse thing that can happen to you in life than simply just being 35.

- Matthew Savoca

- – -

WINNER: facebook-based political ‘activism’

“I don’t know how many poets could write a book bringing together meth, Barney, racecars, black metal, God, and the Lakers in one massive feral hymn, but Daniel Bailey is the only one I’d trust. Water into wine is fine but this man can do it to dogshit. Hallelujah Giant Space Wolf is hilarious and true and beautiful. Hail holy spazzlord Bailey.” —Blake Butler

“If Daniel Bailey’s poems were people, they would be the kind of people that you love to get drunk with but you’re always a little afraid that they might try to slit your throat. When you tell them about Emily Dickinson feeling the top of her head come off, they reach for a saw. Still, you can’t help but love them. They’re a blast! They’re always a step away from going to jail or running into your parents or causing you to rearrange the furniture in your loneliest apartment. Daniel Bailey’s poem-people are in a gang called The Space Wolves and they are really, really excited about learning something from this terrible, amazing, gigantic world, even if that means that we’ll need a mop for all of the blood.” —Peter Davis, author of Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!

]]> http://htmlgiant.com/contests/giveaway-of-daniel-baileys-hallelujah-giant-space-wolf/feed/ 47 http://htmlgiant.com/contests/goodreads-independent-book-blogger-awards/ http://htmlgiant.com/contests/goodreads-independent-book-blogger-awards/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2012 01:37:28 +0000 HTMLGIANT http://htmlgiant.com/?p=87640 Vote for Vouched in Goodreads Independent Book Blogger Awards.

]]> http://htmlgiant.com/contests/goodreads-independent-book-blogger-awards/feed/ 3 http://htmlgiant.com/contests/at-halfway-point-14/ http://htmlgiant.com/contests/at-halfway-point-14/#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2012 21:08:22 +0000 Sean Lovelace http://htmlgiant.com/?p=86537 Continue reading →]]> So I was fudging juggling judging a poetry contest yesterday

And

Stumbled upon many Centered Poems. Why do I retch them so? Where

Did they come from? Origins? Why am I biased since one

Was about a glass basketball and I like that general idea

And this was for cash $$$ (Wait, I thought poetry

Couldn’t make money.)

Sorry. They seem like cover letters on purple paper to me. Or I

mean like people who ask about copyright. Who knows?

Who writes Centered Poems?

I am drinking beer now so wanted to

Bring this question in front of the quart

Of public opinion. When you see a

Centered Poem, what do you think?

Is it arbitrary for me to hate them?

I don’t know.

(moon, gossamer, wings, love, tendrils)

What u think?

]]> http://htmlgiant.com/contests/at-halfway-point-14/feed/ 10 http://htmlgiant.com/contests/the-sky-went-red-giveaway/ http://htmlgiant.com/contests/the-sky-went-red-giveaway/#comments Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:54:19 +0000 Ken Baumann http://htmlgiant.com/?p=85481 Continue reading →]]>

I’m giving away two copies of THE SKY WENT RED WHILE HE WAS INSIDE, a small book produced by Kiddiepunk. The man behind Kiddiepunk and the cover artist/brilliant artist in general is Michael Salerno. This book is made of edited sections from CALL OUT, a novel I wrote. To enter: comment! I’ll randomly pick two people and hunt their e/meat addresses down. Thank you.

]]> http://htmlgiant.com/contests/the-sky-went-red-giveaway/feed/ 57