Rude Democracy, Jon Stewart, Your Face
“Do we want more civil talk than uncivil talk?” she asks. “Of course. But what we need to focus on is how both civility and incivility are structured, contained, and used… Even some incivility can move a policy debate along. Creating a culture of argument, and the thick skin that goes along with it, are long-term projects that will serve democracy well.”
Scott McLemee looks at Susan Herbst’s book Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics and comes away with a great justification for Mean Week (in case anyone needed one). Addressing the Jon Stewart rally thing, McLemee argues, “the anti-ideological spirit of the event is a dead end. The attitude that it’s better to stay cool and amused than to risk making arguments or expressing too much ardor — this is not civility. It’s timidity.”
I’ll always argue that it’s possible to disagree nicely, but I also liked the quote McLemee ended his article with, from T-Bone Slim: “Wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack.” Impolite rhetoric has its place, why not. But in a comment box? Y’all’re morons.
2 Obituaries: Narrative and Opium
Narrative (September 21, 1995 – October 29, 2010) Longtime literary magazine Narrative, a nonprofit profit organization dedicated to storytelling in the digital age, finally succumbed to a rare enormous cyst, having suffering from Being So Full of Itself. Narrative will be remembered not only for its contemporary “lit lite,” but for their colorful array of contests, to which slush-pile fated folk tirelessly submit; and most of all, they are remembered for the awesome mug (w/ logo) provided to “Patrons” upon a $5,000 – $9,999 donation. Their “Backstage VIP access” allowed donors to read unpublished work, but (to mitigate such sadism) only by accomplished writers. Contributors were either attractive, or were friendly with professional photographers, pointing to a glossy cosmetic tragedy of sorts. Please join us as we celebrate their passing this Sunday at 11am at the Alpha Smegma Pi House. If you would like to submit an elegy, please include a submission fee of $15 at the door. All manuscripts should be in 12 pt. type, double spaced with one-inch margins, sequentially numbered pages, and contain exactly four metaphors, three similes, two foreigners, and one tear drop stain. If applicable, an editor will condescend with you.
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Opium (October 19, 2000 – October 29, 2010) Opium Magazine died of exhaustion during its most recent Literary Death Match tour, on whose behalf editor and MC Todd Zuniga (clearly with independent financial means) perennially traverses the world betwixt London; New York; Beijing; San Francisco; Oxford; Edinburgh; Boston; Los Angeles; Toronto; and inexplicably, Kansas City. Zuniga’s enthusiasm for life (and frequent flier miles) was not just conventionally conveyed with the exclamation points adorning almost all of his descriptions of said events, but more notably, with hair gel purposefully rendering his look “chronically just woken.” Remembered as the first online literary journal to publish more event announcements than actual fiction, Opium is survived by approximately two thousand participants and audience members who must now find something else to do tonight. Of the occasional story that was published, they provided their trademark “estimated reading time,” assurances for their fickle readership that not too much time would be wasted. Opium is heroin’s main constituent, which may explain how publishing there can collapse a vain. Condolences may be offered at your nearest International Airport, Concourse B (Gate B7), where Zuniga’s apparition, on layover, will be briefly seen sitting by an outlet recharging his iPhone and hair.
Christopher Higgs—
“Is anything more tiresome, in fiction, than the problems of sensitive adolescents?”
– John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse”
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Sean Lovelace—
What is the #1 all time overrated, over–anthologized, you-are-sick-of story or poem or essay?
Reading out loud to an audience.
Dear touring authors,
A lot of you are really lousy readers of your own work. I’ve seen thousands of you. I’ve been bored by quite a few of you. Stop doing it.
If you suspect you are really lousy at it, you are. Stop doing it. If you are on a book tour, talk to the audience about the book. Pitch the book to people. Just answer a bunch of questions. Stop reading to us. It’s boring. You are boring us. There are other things you can do. Figure out where your strengths are, and go with them.
If you are an agent and you have an author who is not good at reading to an audience, tell her/him. Seriously. Just say it. And then figure out what the author can do instead. Stop sending them out to bore the hell out of an audience. A small audience. A very small audience that will inevitably get smaller and smaller because so many authors are so damn lousy at reading to an audience.
If you have a friend who is not good at reading to an audience, and her/his agent won’t say anything, or her/his editor/publisher won’t say anything to her/him, cowgirl/boy up and tell her/him. For all our sakes. Tell them to cut it the fuck out and figure out something else to do when given the chance to stand in front of a group of people her/him hopes will buy her/his book.
“Hey…listen. You guys in the front, if you see somebody going down, help them out. It’s what we’re here to do.”
And, really, if you are a terrible reader, but you insist on following the silly ritual, if you think because you are a writer asked to go to a bookstore, you must read something, read something in first person. First person fiction, memoir, maybe some autobiographical poetry. People perk up at the “I.” And you are a lousy reader of your own work. At least you can cover it by appearing to talk about yourself.
Obituary: Third Face
Third Face (May 22, 2010 – October 28, 2010) This freewrite fart joke 420 rated-NR-because-we-want-to group “lit” (as in “to’e up”) blog lived so briefly it never was able to pass its oral and anal stages, thus there’s really not much to say about them in the way of remembrance beyond, “Who?” They are survived by none, and there will be no services, no corpse. I can’t even remember the URL. All that remains are some Fritos, a couple miles of lubey cellophane and Kleenex, some ICP gear, a couple of crusty one hitters, the mystery of how they were ever able to get women involved, a whole hell of a lot of mental cringing, and this photograph taken of the death gasp of two of Third Face’s longest standing (crawling?) members in the extra-social throes of what they did best, their very very own best, while they still could:
Obituary: The Faster Times
The Faster Times (July 9, 2009 – October 9, 2010) The Faster Times, an online newspaper known for attempting to find a way to make the internet pay writers, was pronounced dead on the scene of what Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz called a “perverse and often baffling” three-day riot and siege of the Cobble Hill brownstone that the The Faster Times just purchased. “Who knew that journalist-bloggers had the upper body strength, let alone the organizational capacity to riot?” Markowitz asked.
Sadly, the Faster Times was torn limb for limb by a mob of seething, red-eyed editors who chanted about revolution, wasted hours and, inexplicably, the crappy font choice. “Justice, I say, Justice!” one editor screamed. The New York Times declared the riot a “a twee, revolution in the journalists’ minor league.”
Among TFT’s greatest advancements to Internet Media during its short but thorough run, was it’s idea that Facebook ‘Likes’ could be converted into dollars, though this plan never actually came to fruition. Had the likes-to-dollars conversion occurred, The Faster Times’s editors and writers could have been the 95th highest paid collective of journalist-bloggers in the first quarter of 2010.
In lieu of flowers, the remaining two editors who didn’t wish the Faster Times a slow and painful death are asking for mourners to “Like” the Faster Times’s Corpse’s Facebook page.
MEAN WEEK Writing Prompt
How about you just go write something, asshole? Stop: blogging about writing, commenting on blogs about writing, surfing the web for youtube videos that might somehow “inspire” you to think about your “craft”, hanging out at dull author readings, having a beer with a boring writer after a dull author reading, having a beer (or five) alone when the laptop is sitting right there with a barely considered manuscript on it, starting another online literary journal or blog, playing video games and trying somehow to appreciate them on a “narrative” level, reading a book because you are “researching” something, getting involved in some “project” that is loosely connected to “literary” work, masturbating while high, etc. etc., and write. I mean, you’re a “writer,” right?
2 Obituaries: One Story & Failbetter
One Story (June 24, 2002 to October 25, 2010) The offices of long handed and literary-Illuminati-color-coded One Story collapsed this week in a grand gesture of at last fully defining in unwavering lifelike syntax their own definitive time, setting, and central theme. Long teased and haunted by their authors’ knack and exuberance in the construction of sentences that end the story as exploration before it can begin, the corpus of long story has whispered in its ruffling thin pages a yearning for at last the transcendence of the human spirit into the beyond, at last concretely demonstrating that yes, we all die, and yes the human heart is large, and yes, A really does lead to B if you line it up right. Survived by a collection of sentences clearly of a reputable but closely related bloodline, a brief but heartwarming reflection on One Story’s days and times will be issued to all past subscribers as well as anyone who has serially submitted to their enterprise every single open reading period since their inception, which notably and privately led to their development of the now ubiquitous Submission Manager (since bastardized incessantly by at least three anarchistic, freely sharing knockoffs), which affords self-hating pencil pushers across the globe the right to realize just how ridiculous this whole submit-then-wait-then-hate-then-submit-again thing is. Meanwhile, the spirit of the One Story lives on: truly, by now, a single story in our minds, espousing all. Friends and relatives remain hopeful that the termination of the ephemeral notion of the singular short story proves to extend beyond its time into a one to three book contract for those involved on the merit of this leap of faith into the demonstrable prowess of details that is the narrative short prose masterwork, more evidence that even if Raymond Carver is dead he isn’t dead and neither (for real this time) is Michael Chabon.
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Failbetter (May 10, 2000 to October 25, 2010) At last deciding to put their money where their browser is, longtime publishers of romantically edgy online lit Failbetter succumbed to their own moniker and failed as hard as they could, driving their proverbial website animus into the proverbial nowhere of even this special little world called the online. Originators of the insanely-long-submission-response-time-even-if-you’re-just-a-website rule of thumb, Failbetter will surely be preserved only as we all remember them, if we remember anything, which in my case is that year when AWP was in Atlanta and these dudes showed up in suits standing next to a laptop on a table telling you to check out their website right there in the Hilton so that you might remember to do the same again when you got home, though as I recall again the web connection in the Hilton’s basement sucked and you couldn’t even do that, a pretty decent failure on the part of online literature perhaps in some way predicting this biggest and baddest of all failures, again ahead of the curve of all of us in publishing or elsewhere still supposedly extant, like gash marks on the wrists in a vertical fashion years before the gun goes in the mouth.
One Obituary: Duotrope’s Digest
Duotrope’s Digest (August 4, 2005-October 14, 2010) Duotrope died today, of its own name, some vague ailment of droopy eyelids and an ass so smart its brain filled its hole and then all the universe exploded into the nearest ceiling fan. Today dead, Duotrope of serial liposuction, as in the last time (Jesus, chill-the-fuck-out, you Heidi Blair Montag of a site. Hey guys, leave Newpages! We got bigger tits!) they crunk-a-ma-jigged the layout and then hit me and my kin up for money. (As I write this, Duotrope is status HIGH, as in YELLOW, 36% short of their monthly pecuniary quest. Year-to-Date they are 20% short, labeled HIGHE$$T, or Holy Fuck!, a RED alert 4 alarm {low} fire of tattooed lipstick. [Like our government, Duotrope has a color code system that all but douche bags ignore]). Duotrope dead of popped pronephros, dribble, dribble…Duotrope deceased, choked on the very versicolor vomit of statistics they choose to shove down our hoary throats (They eat it too, see? That’s how they know it tastes good.) Do you understand Willow Springs accepts 0% of submissions (well, fuck me and my latest Spam-villanelle), yet they reject 88%? (If you don’t believe me, go to Duotrope.). Dark times, folks. Death by jostled lynx this morning, Duotrope. Dead by sub-sprachgefühl, I mean divaricator/dust, of course. Or simple spoon? Note: Duotrope killed today by wound of flung nacho. Duotrope eaten by my father. Like every empire (or umpire) known to history, Duotrope has fallen. Croaked. Expired. Sad to report, that spreadsheet we once called Duotrope, dead as disco this morning, done, d-uh, died–of exposure.
Tortoise and the Hair
Malcolm Gladwell
Getting really tired of Malcolm Gladwell’s “genius” hair, that intentional stylization, or at least neglect, of the intellectually consumed. His 1999 appearance on Charlie Rose is proof that he understands what normal hair is (no comment on the tie). In 2008, on the same show, he looks either high on meth or himself. Gladwell has made a career of being a provocative thinker, and while I do find him pleasantly curious at times, his constantly enthralled persona is exhausting. One more cappuccino on the per-diem en route to The New Yorker offices and he’s gonna have an epiphany about foam. (What the tale don’t tell you is that a fast rabbit is running away from itself.) True, everyone is a poster child of their own cause; I’m just weary of the cause.
What’s More Annoying: Special HTMLG Self-Reflexive Edition
What’s more annoying:
How Amy McDaniel never misses an opportunity to remind us that she studied with David Foster Wallace, which somehow endowed her with a magical (foolproof) grammar wand?
OR
How I never miss an opportunity to come across as a rotten pretentious elitist who loves the sound of his own voice yet can’t seem to talk about anything of interest or importance other than worn out concepts like experimental writing?
OR
How often HTMLG discusses Tao Lin?
OR
The fact that Chelsea Martin is still on the roster, even though she hasn’t posted since the great Wiggergate fiasco?
OR
How Justin Taylor, the inventor of the “craven self-promotion” label, which (btw) appears to have been discontinued, can somehow always find a way of self-promoting in every post?
OR
How Jimmy Chen seems both extremely smart and utterly incapable of playing any role other than class clown?
OR
The way Roxane Gay champions good ole fashion storytelling, the way regular folks do?
OR
How Ken Baumann is so smart and handsome and successful?
OR
???
Sean Lovelace—
Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week.
Two Obituaries: Glimmer Train and Tin House
Glimmer Train (1990 – October 2010) Respected literary magazine Glimmer Train died of exhaustion yesterday evening, having finally succumbed to the strain of ‘going full steam ahead’ to ‘present stories in a handsome physical publication that people would keep.’ The literary community will fondly keep alive the memory of Glimmer Train by storing the colorfully illustrated issues in English Department libraries across the country. Glimmer Train is survived by its two founding editors, sisters Susan and Linda, and by approximately 22,250 contest finalists, many of whom will console themselves by listing the meaningless accolade in their submission cover letters. Funeral services will be held on Saturday, October 30th, 2010 at 2:30 PM, 1211 Glisan Street, Suite 207, Portland, OR 97209. Glimmer Train will be buried next to its siblings, Iron Horse Literary Review and Night Train, may they all rest in peace.
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Tin House (May 1999 – October 2010) Bi-coastal purveyor of literary culture, Tin House passed away on Monday after a long battle with alcoholism. Tin House will be remembered for its tin-sided Portland office, now an iconic landmark to many literary acolytes; its popular writer’s conference, at which authors could add their voice to the desperate din; and its less popular ‘New Voices’ magazine feature, occasional evidence of the staff’s tin ear. Memorial services (Theme TBA) to be held Sunday on the hallowed grounds of Reed College, Steve Almond officiating. In lieu of flowers, please send receipts of your latest purchases from a bookstore. If you cannot provide a receipt, please send a written explanation in 100 words or less.
Shit I Don’t Like About Writers & Writing
- Hearing the words “writer,” “reading,” “poem,” “poet,” “the author of,” etc. more frequently than should any human regardless of his or her particular fondness, hobby, or paid work
- Ego, and reflection of ego onto others’ actions because the nature of ego is often that one can only see one’s self in another self
- The absence of self identity that seems to come along with so many of the more flagrant perpetrators of said ego, giving them even more excessive ability to flaunt said ego without losing any sleep
- Twitter and facebook feeds of writers who think about these “tools of social media” as personal sales pitches aimed at you, the “friend,” often unrelenting in their use of the terms of the 1st list item and w/o any form of layering of else that might lead you to believe they are an actual person
- “Tortured” updates on same social networks over how “crazy” today or tomorrow is going to be while editing or writing
- People who retweet Kanye West
- Kickstarter and other similar fundraising systems, which somehow have quickly become the means for acquisition of literary food stamps, even if a lot of people I like have used it to do some cool shit
- The simultaneous bent of many personalities or commentmakers to go on about how evil, ugly, mean, nasty, etc. in general negative or shitty a certain outlet is, matched with an equal to less bent of also complaining that things are “too positive” or “you forgot to include me” when said person or entity has made little to no effort to “get involved” on their own end
- How almost no writer ever has done a good job writing about what it is like to be obese
- How many writers are atheists and yet are proud of themselves as creators
- How the writers who are christian usually suck at writing
- How there are so many books now I can’t think
- How I’ve been reading so many of those books that I seriously am finally starting to get carpal tunnel from holding them up while on the stationary bike and from all this silly typing
- How I don’t quite have enough books now to build a new house out of them so I can sell the place I live in now and get out of this loft complex and live somewhere quieter
- When people don’t mention that their ‘is the author of’ refers to a chapbook, or call chapbooks books, or say chapbook out loud near me at all really
- When chapbooks cost $10 even though they might cost $2 to make most of the time
- People who “won’t read” chapbooks even tho some of them do some amazing shit a full book couldn’t really ever do
- Web magazines who have so little design skill that it actually hurts me more to not look at them than to look at them because I know the damage they are doing to all aura and yet people still submit to them and bitch about their slow response times
- Print magazines that look like they were designed in 1991 by someone who had bad taste even then
- Anyone who bitches about response times ever, usually signifying that they’ve never worked a day on the side of the editing table or even volunteering or trying to pay for the books that sit on the tables often unselling and just trying to break even and hardly reading anyway
- How proud people are of celebrities who talk about a book, like it’s some winged beast descending to kiss their face
- How at least a handful of people will hold this against me at least in a comment and think I think my shit doesn’t stink because I said any of this or that I hold myself to some other standard or that I think I’m special when really I’m just hanging out like anybody else I just sometimes will run my mouth and I like to think I have a lot of faith even when I bitch and this is all a big try
- People who pimp their social state of having or not having on either end, trying to justify lack thereof or surplus because someone has this or that or doesn’t have this or that or went here or there or didn’t or wanted to and didn’t and etc., as if anyone needs to or doesn’t need to experience anything or not anything to write a word down on paper and have it be something, as if those with money can’t think, as if those without money can’t think, as if everyone’s out to kill you because you are male female black white red candy sugar sandwich
- Gmail chat status updates that change every few hours
- Gmail chat’s winking box that goes back and forth until you click it and look at who said what even if you are on invisible and were trying to ignore the thing entirely but don’t have the balls to just log the fuck out
- People who don’t mind saying flagrant things about what other people say or do but won’t do anything flagrant on their own or outside the realm of people who will back them up
- People who think that because you made something that must mean you have to have it or you worship it or yourself for having had it or that you are out for glory in every move
- People who only ‘Like’ or comment on things when it involves something about them
- People with no sense of humor and/or who can’t laugh at themselves
- People who never get crunk READ MORE >
6 beer rules for writers i have known or been (with subtext)
1. if someone buys you a beer at a bar, buy them a beer soon-or-later (you slaw-cheeks fuck)
2. when you drop/dwell by my house and bring a 12 pack and then you have 1/or maybe 2 beer remainder in the 12 pack don’t take the 1/or maybe 2 beer remainder with you, leave it as a thank you (you lint-shuffler fuck)
3. why are you yipping about your own book while drunk/loose-lipped at a bar? (you cloud-hound fuck)
4. you didn’t tip the bartender?! whoa. we all noticed (you smart phone blue-haze fuck)
5. you may have visited my town, i might have even asked and glowed and paid you to visit, but that does not make me your babysitter (you donut-slusher/late night bailout caller fuck)
6. that is all, maybe (tonight)
