Questions about the VQR thing
The death-by-suicide of Kevin Morissey is sad. It is also complex, and I’m not sure there is a lot to pin on VQR or Ted Genoways. But reading the Hook article about it is halting more for the operational procedures of VQR than for the details about Morissey’s death, which is speculation and arguably the sort of connect-the-dot journalism that creates its own dots.
This isn’t a disclaimer I make to extend any credit to Genoways. If I could punch one person in the nose, it’d be him. The fact that his management is more interesting than suicide really just shows how bizarre VQR’s business is.
The article is worth a read, but here’s the outline: READ MORE >
Adam Robinson—
If you were thinking about commenting at Silliman’s blog, you can’t. However, we’re happy to open the comment box to this post for whatever boring ass shit you were gonna say there.
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Where did the women folk get the idea that writing about their lives might be interesting?
From Flickr user samelovesherdog
I’m not happy right now. A few days ago I read this article in The Guardian that included phrases like “unapologetically female” and tried to link all contemporary writing by American Women back to Candance Bushnell, author of the Sex & The City column which spawned a book and the HBO series and the most obnoxious 25% of the female population of New York City. I know it’s probably silly and naive and suspiciously female of me, but I expect more from The Guardian than an article like this.
Full disclosure: I didn’t know that Sex & The City was based on a book or that the book came from a column written in the 90’s in the New York Observer. That still doesn’t make any of it interesting to me. The whole Sex & The City phenomenon probably did have an effect on making Americans a little less prude in the way they talk about sex, and I can appreciate that from a distance. People in their 40’s and 50’s might be ‘more comfortable talking about sex’ now, but the 20 and 30 somethings I know were teenagers before sex & the city and already talked about sex more candidly than a bunch of white chicks drunk on vodka. We didn’t need their permission, but this is really beside the point.
The point is, I am not OK with The Guardian trying to find the root of a literary shift in Sex & The City. The tail didn’t wag the dog; the culture shifted. Nonfiction and memoir have been on the rise in America for a while now and trying to connect all female essayists back to Sex & The City is just lazy and absurd. Lazy and absurd and irritating.
Enough is Enough: The Slushpile is Not the Enemy
First I read this and then I read this, and then as we know there is the Tin House thing and Brevity is considering a reading fee to help fund honorariums and, perhaps, dissuade inappropriate submissions, which is certainly their right and I do understand where they are coming from, and finally, I read this. I’m frustrated. I can’t speak for the big fancy magazines, but for the smaller magazines such as PANK, we live and die by the slushpile. With no slushpile we would have no magazine and frankly, it would take way more time and effort to solicit writers for twelve monthly issues and a 240 page annual than it does to read submissions. Save for a handful of writers, literally, a handful, we have published the magazine exclusively via work from the slushpile or as we simply call it, the submission queue. Let me go on record as stating that even on the most frustrating days, I love reading submissions. It is what I get to do to relax and step out of my “real” life. I actually feel fucking lucky to be able to co-edit a magazine. Even when I’m reading something terrible I think, “well this is just awesomely bad,” and I feel a little thrill. I literally feel a thrill. When I stop feeling that thrill, I will take a break.
The slushpile fatigue being lamented here and there and everywhere tires me. It bores me. Please, let’s just shut up about it already. If you don’t want to deal with the slushpile, don’t have open reading periods. It really is that simple. Listening to your dissatisfaction with having to deal with the bad writers and new writers and mediocre writers who dare to submit to your magazine that is willfully accepting unsolicited submissions is about as interesting as listening to someone talk about their diet. I don’t care what you had for breakfast.
“PAY FOR SOUP / BUILD A FORT / SET IT ON FIRE”
If one were so inclined, one could buy The Whole Livery Line, 1987, by “Jean-Michel-Basquiat [sic] faithfully recreated by hand using the finest art quality linen canvas and Winsor and Newton oil paints” for just $255 from either of these companies – judging from the templates, presumably run by the same “on the fringes of legality ethics” mo-fos. I wonder if people will openly sell forgeries of Rammellzee pieces in ten or fifteen years, when people realize, maybe, that he was, like, really important, and dead. Probably not.
The Window of Perception Are The Doors To The Soul Or Something
I sort of want to start a band called Girls Looking At Puppies,
it would sound like Arthur Russell playing in a garbage can.
God damn it
Hindu god Vishnu got eight limbs, and so does this toddler who they say is a reincarnated god, though science will tell you the extra four limbs are from a ‘parasitic twin’ (sounds like a relationship). Hindus don’t eat cow cos cows are holy, which is where “holy cow” comes from — Protestants wanting to curse, but not at their own god. Hindus won’t eat beef, Jews won’t eat pork, and I won’t eat pussy; yes, we are all self-absorbed. Christians see Jesus everywhere, mostly on toast. Toast is an example of its verb manifesting its noun. Let me help: bread → toaster → toast. The other kind of toast involves champagne and having to lie about liking someone.
BREAKING NEWS ON THE 3D FRONT
You should have gone to graduate school for so that you could make video games,
you dummy. You are such a dummy.
Charming, but explain the wrist watch
“Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.”
— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)
I’ve been accused of finding photos which incriminate authors, which I’ll gladly admit to, but the above photo/quote mash-up illustrates my skepticism towards philosophy, especially ontological mathy ones. Dude needs to relax and have some weisse bohnensuppe (German bean soup). It’s awesome ripping apart the palpable world on page, but Heidegger needs time just like everyone else — when his appointment with his proctologist is, never mind that they’ll only find beans and thyme.