“Castle” ABC TV Series! It’s about WRITERS and MURDER!
I love the television show LOST! (no, really! the show’s title is actually in all-caps! this isn’t part of my MEME or my writerly VOICE which you are trying to STIFLE! what is this an undergraduate poetry workshop?) If you haven’t heard of LOST it’s about people who are LOST on an island! They also might be LOST in their own LIVES, but I’m not sure!
Anyway, during LOST they’ve been showing promos for a new TV show called CASTLE which stars the guy from the last season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (Sarah Michelle Gellar STAND UP!) and I am sooooooooooo excited for it because another one of my favorite TV shows is HOUSE which is also a show where the main character is also named after a shelter or building that is a dwelling or place for habitation by human beings and is ALSO the name of the show! Wow! I feel at HOME already! LOL (did you get that joke?)
Get this! RICHARD CASTLE is a WRITER who helps solve MURDERS! Whaaaaaat? What do writers know about MURDER? (except for street poet SHYNE, FREE SHYNE Y’ALL SKIDDLY WHOAAAA)
‘I Hate This Essay’
This comment came late to Mike Young’s ‘Magazine Debasers’ essay. I wanted to post it here, because it is cute.
Anonymous comments:
I hate this essay. This is all about the insular world of MFA “writing.” And if the author was at a “top tier” journal, he wouldn’t have written it. But his own journal isn’t even third-tier so he has to come up with this essay to defend it.
Truth is, most journals are full of sloppy writing, soft ideas, poor thinking, and all manner of third-rate junk.
I hate the MFA world. I am an independent: no degree, no connection to universities. I am a writer and I am published.
Here’s my criteria for submitting to a magazine. It’s simple. I just look at how much they pay. That’s number one. Second is the audience. I look at their circulation (if it’s print) or their hits / ad rate (if it’s onine). I’d sacrifice a little pay for more eyeballs, sometimes, but it’s all about the money.
In other words, 95% of those “journals” are immediate nos for me, since they don’t pay squat.
But that’s how writing should be. It’s how it used to be. If more writers went independent, and avoided the MFA schoolteacher CV “credit” world completely, then there would be less of these lame journals and maybe more real outlets that paid.
Remember, a magazine pays its writers because the magazine is professional, the writers who work for them are pros, and above all they have *readers*. These lamebrain unpaying journals don’t have any of that. Who want them? Not me.
Hooray!
AWP Chicago: A Human Being’s Notes
Browsing through the many post-AWP posts for something that does something that I don’t know what, maybe something worth mentioning, or something else, I found this up at Agni (via the Newpages blog): ‘AWP Chicago: A Gamer’s Notes’ by JS Tunotre. I read it and tried to think of how it applied to my AWP experience. I found myself resisting it, wanting to respond. Then I told myself I wasn’t going to post about AWP, especially not one of those ‘thank-you’ posts to everyone (which are fine and fun to read, but there are just so many of them, and I can only read so much about how weird it is to meet people in real life whom you’ve only known online). But I changed my mind today when I realized that I couldn’t focus on the student papers piled on my desk. So here goes:
Before you read on, recall that we’ve already talked a little bit about the ‘submissions game’ here, so maybe this AWP post will pick up a little bit where Mike Young left off?
And if you haven’t, please read Blake Butler’s BE AN OPEN NODE post for some more thoughts that sort of go with what I’m thinking here.
So, to the essay. Give it a quick read, then come back and let’s talk. Also, you should know that I’m reading/responding to JS Tunotre’s essay honestly. I’m aware of its satirical qualities, its humor, etc, but I think Tunotre is describing a common perception about AWP, publishing, writing, and so on that I want to treat as a serious argument, despite his framing it in gamer’s language. We can also discuss how serious Tunotre is about this issue in the comments.
Okay, enough delay. My first question after you’ve read the essay is this: does Tunotre speak for you?
I am speaking here for all of us who still cannot walk into a room, a literary arena, without immediately seeing it as a complexly graded hierarchy, a scarcely disguised Hobbesian jungle, tyrannized over not by teeth and claws, but by their verbal equivalents.
Probably not, unless you are a robot, in which case you are probably small and round and vacuuming up all of the crap after everyone leaves town.
Or you are insanely intelligent, live alone in a garrett that you never leave, and write very long books, in which case you have no experience with crowds anyhow.
But seriously, does Tunotre speak for you? I’m curious to hear from people who think of AWP this way (or any other social interaction for that matter).
Power Quote by Angela Carter: A Fancy Way of Saying “Eat Me”
From the short story, “The Lady of the House of Love” . I would normally stick my tongue between my two fingers, but this is a much fancier and therefore a better way of saying eat me? This is a reaction to all the uncalled for harshness of life, for all the sick joy that people get from their little, or big, acts of hostility (I know, I should save it for Mean Monday, oops. I read the story this weekend, so it is fresh in my mind):
And I leave you as a souvenir the dark, fanged rose. I plucked from between my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave. On a grave.
SCUMBAG HYPOCRITE ALERT: Maureen Mullarkey loves painting the Gay Pride Parade, but she hates everything it stands for, and all the people in it–and probably you as well
Maureen Mullarkey, the art critic and artist well-known to the gay community for her iconic portraits of drag queens and gay pride parades, was yesterday revealed by the NY Daily News to have contributed $1000 to Proposition 8. […] When asked how she could have donated money to fight gay marriage after making money from her depictions of gays, she just said, “So? If you write that story, I’ll sue you.”
(h/t to Joe.My.God)
A quick trip over to Campaignmoney.com reveals that the person in questions–Mrs. Maureen Mullarkey of Chappaqua, NY–ALSO gave nearly $1000 to different arms of McCain/Palin ’08.
Dumbshit guidelines
Apt is a beautiful journal which I will never submit to because they – like a good handful (hugful?) of journals – destroy any inspired feeling of goodwill or camaraderie upon reading their somewhat self-obsessed guidelines. What follows after the break are their submission guidelines with light commentary from me.
Magazine Databases: Magazine Debasers?
This evening, I got an email asking me if I wanted to add NOÖ Journal into a new literary magazine database called litmags.org. Here is some text from that email:
Dear Editor:
I’m a student working on my MFA in creative writing, and my final project for one of my classes was to construct a website through which readers and writers can more easily find literary magazines that suit their tastes and styles. This is an invitation to have your magazine listed in the site’s database.
Okay, sure. Sounds good. Like competition for Duotrope. Cool. But here’s what I wonder: do these databases really aid some earnest reader’s desire to find a new favorite magazine all about snowshoe poetry? Because sometimes it seems like they just facilitate the ability to find “markets” that “suit” a submitting writer’s “aesthetic.” Which seems–with all due respect to the people who maintain and program these databases, people who work awesomely hard on their projects–like a depressing and bullshit way to go about reading and writing.
My Issue with Issuu
Issuu’s slick yet invariably muffled interface aims to mimic the printed page with ‘animated page flipping’ and rendering the shadowed contours of a flayed open book/magazine. Such dramatic flourishes beg the question: what the fuck?
In order to actually read the words, one needs to zoom in, an experience likely to induce vertigo spells. The lightest tap on your cursor will throw your eye over a vast terrain of ‘zoomed in’ space to another part of the book, abandoning it from the context usually established by peripheral vision. (Imagine having your nose to a page then getting hit in the head with a force going 20 miles per hour.)
Mean Monday: The Barcelona Review (again, half-assed mean, cause I like their stuff!!!)
This Woman Has Her Nose in the Air
I really like the short stories and book reviews that Jill Adams publishes at The Barcelona Review. And so it is with some mixed feelings that I speak of her literary journal on Mean Monday. But then I did some thinking: she doesn’t give a rat’s ass what I think of her! Nor should she! I posted my ass on the internet! So- whooosh, letting the bitterness flow, people. Bitterness is a huge embarrassment, to say the least, but here it goes.
They do not accept simultaneous submissions and that is fine, in my opinion, if your turnover time is in the three month range. The last submission I sent them (and yes, I did not send it to anyone else), was there for ONE YEAR. I then withdrew it.
Also, I feel they publish an unnecessarily generous amount of “reprints”. Here are three of the many: a Benjamin Percy story from the Paris Review (oh, thanks Jill! I would have never read the Paris Review myself!), Douglas Coupland and Irvine Welsh. READ MORE >
Mean Monday: Again, Not Really Mean. But Where Are You, Land-Grant College Review?
Again, I am not really being mean here, but where are you people? Your issue number 4 (2007), which I own, is so great. Amazing work by Christine Schutt, Nicholas Montemarano and Kevin Wilson. Actually, all of the stories were rock solid and pushed the limits of what is allowed. And then?? And then -where are you people? Here is a fantastic bit from a deeply disturbing, amazing story called “The Lucky Ones Get to Be People” by Rachel Haley Himmelheber: