Faux-Democratizing Links Section * Opportunity Knoxxxxxx
In the spirit of broadening the Giant’s beholden link section (**SELF AGGRANDIZING CONTAINED** since our link taste is so badass), and because we already have established ourselves firmly in the elite anti-email response genre of outfits like Octopus, Action Yes, Pitchfork, Dump Tumumbulum, and etc., here is your opportunity to help us help ourselves so that we quit looking like secret handshakehandjob daddies (which we are).
The links section of the Giant (seen to the right here, and inclusive of only a small smattering of print presses and online journals, etc.) was constructed in about 8 minutes of ‘this is what I look at most’ from one editor’s head. The sole criterion, outside of being places often frequented, was that the aesthetic of the journal, or such places, is in its own way singular and tasty. That is, no ug pieces and no ga-ga. Beyond this short list, there are several many places I go at to do looks, but these are the ones I thought of in those 8 minutes.
Now, readers, I open it up to you: who should we be linking. All suggestions will be taken whole-heartedly, if then either ignored or scoffed at for their self-pointing, or just laziness, or just because the whole intentionally smarmy tone insists that we now ignore any fruits that are borne from it.
Really we like a lot of people, and we just haven’t felt the urge.
But yeah, let’s hear it. What should be linked? Should we include authors or just institutions? What deserves attention? How many people we aren’t already sucking on read this site anyway?
How far up my own ass should my fist fit?
Am I getting older too fast? Is the Sunn o))) discography a bunch of ass-palpitating bullshit or is the sound my refrigerator makes actually a deleted Steve Reich composition?
What happened to all the tits?
Dick and tit submissions are mailable to htmlgiant [at] gmail [dot] com 24/7/364 (fuck you, I sleep on Thanksgiving).
The New Socks Economy
Thanks to Brian Foley’s sharp eyes, here is a terrific NY Times profile on Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift, the contemporary artist’s Bible and parking meter guide to plying our (or “their,” if you hate artists and you just came to this blog looking for our we’re-a-real-literature-blog practice of Boobs Friday) “trade” in an era of commodified everything, when you have to explain how poetry is supposed to make you the skrilla. We don’t even have patrons anymore! So how–ask the barrel-chested Rotary Club wardens of the world–is poetry supposed to seat us cleanly on the respectable cultural (read: cash exchanging) train of gravy? Hyde is the original and saintly articulator of the “gift economy” theory, which answers that question by pointing out how commodity trading economies throughout histories have cordoned off space for an alternate system of exchanges based on gifting, giving things to people as gifts and accepting gifts in return, where you have 1 to 1 value (“oh, that is your gift, here is my gift”) and not weighted currency (“two of your sheep for eight of my fingernails”). This system builds its own communities based on–think Christmas afternoon–a kind of buzzy empathy.
Though I’ve never read Hyde, I’ve heard enough about this “gift economy” idea second and thirdhand to understand the basic principles, and I’ve always been kind of skeptical. Not because I’m into making bank off my litter-a-churr, but because I’m a little uncomfortable with the whole idea of “gifts,” the latent obligations of them (“dear grandma, thank you for the lizard balls”) and their harrowing ideological weight (“’tis tradition, young man, this gift giving!”). “Gifting” seems to formalize in some unnatural and self-congratulatory (self meaning group self here) way a process that should feel, I don’t know, more humble and altruistic or something. If we want to trade poetry, why can’t we just trade poetry? Maybe it’s just that the whole “gift economy” idea seems to be apologizing to the capitalists (“oh, here it is in a way you can understand, you know Christmas, right? you know about the ‘gift’ of talent?”), and that leaves a shitty aftertaste.
But! Like I said, I’ve never actually read the silly book. And this profile makes Hyde’s philosophy seem really appealing. All the ideas about how we’re communally developed, for instance, and how whatever genius might arise is not unique but accumulated: that sounds good. So maybe I will read the book now. And I’ll like gifts more.
What thinketh the commentariat?
Two Modest Proposals
PURITY BALL.
I think these new rules should be enstated, on HTMLGiant if nowhere else. They both have to do with terms we use and how we use them.
THE FIRST.
From this day forward, if you want to use the term SELLING OUT, you must needs be able to identify
(a) what is being sold out,
(b) to whom it is being sold, and
(c) what you believe the sale garners the seller.
If you don’t know all three of those things, or aren’t prepared to defend your choices, then you should stop talking/typing right now.
FATHERS HOLD THEIR DAUGHTERS' SMOOTH BARE TEENAGE SHOULDERS. STILL PURE. STILL A BALL.
THE SECOND.
I think the terms “innovative” and “avant-garde” and “experimental” writing are often just code for one of two things. The first is “non/anti-narrative”–which are both fine, if that’s what you’re into, but why not just say so? The other thing those words are often code for is “this bullshit I cranked out in 20 minutes and am going to start submitting as-is, and I guess one of these fourth-rate online lit journals is bound to pick it up.” (I think a lot of writers today go through a phase where they do shit like this—it’s a function of the age we live in, when submitting is usually one-click free, and every third person with a blog claims to be a “review” of some kind or other. The question is whether you grow out of it. And just to prove that this is the voice of bitter experience speaking, rather than a claim for my own intrinsic betterness or intelligence, I invite you to go search for the stuff I published a few years ago in Mad Hatters Review. Just don’t tell me about it after.)
THIS IS WHAT GOOGLE SAYS SILENCE LOOKS LIKE (WITH SAFE SEARCH ON).
Anyway, from now on, if you want to describe writing as:
“innovative” – I want you to be able to tell me in plain English what exactly is being innovated. It doesn’t need to be an exhaustive critical essay. A simple, “I think this opens up the possibility of ____ and/or shows a new innovation in the field of _______ literature” will do fine. In college I took a literature course which examined Marilynne Robinson’s innovative use of spaces–especially the domestic space–in her novel Housekeeping. My teacher also mentioned that the book actually includes a neologism- the word “lucifactions,” used to describe light on water, in the scene where the girls are out on the lake.
THIS IS AN INNOVATIVE WRITER.
“experimental” – you should be able to describe the experiment. “I wrote this to see if I could fabricate the feeling of a Burroughs cut-up without writing a text and cutting it up, so I made up three storylines and forced myself to switch off between them mid-sentence, twice a paragraph.” It also works when you’re talking about somebody else’s writing. “Dennis Cooper said that one of the ‘rules’ for his novel, Try was that there had to be action in every single moment of the book.”
THIS IS AN EXPERIMENTAL WRITER.
“avant-garde” – is a military term, which literally means “advance guard.” As Donald Barthelme once pointed out, the function of an advance guard is to protect the middle. It would probably be useful, when thinking of things that are avant-garde, to think of them in this way. What body are they advancing out of? What middle is it that they (or you) are protecting?
MADE THE WORLD SAFE FOR RAYMOND CARVER, WHO DID NOT RETURN THE FAVOR.
I’m not saying every use of these terms has to come with an attached explanation. I’m just saying these are things you should think about when deciding whether—and how—to deploy them. If you were also capable of discussing your thought process in conversation, well that would just be jimmies on the sundae, wouldn’t it?
I USUALLY CALL THEM SPRINKLES, JUST LIKE YOU DO.
i’m drunk and it’s stupid how awesome this is
Except I might mean it’s awesome how stupid this is. But no promises.
He’s wrapped up so pretty
And I can unwind
His neat little ribbons,
And then I find –
His tummy comes open
And what do I see?
Special little organs that
Belong to you and me.
I wash them all off
So he can be clean
Then put them back in
And do up his seam.
Then just like a mummy,
I wrap him up tight
Then I cuddle him close
And hold him all night.
Matthew Simmons interviews Brian Evenson
A great interview with Brian Evenson on his forthcoming book LAST DAYS is now available to be read at the Underland Press website. Simmons does a great job discussing Evenson’s masterful ability to impart extremely brutal or heavy circumstances in an even tone. Here’s a quote from Evenson regarding his restraint:
There’s an ethical openness there, a refusal to tell readers what they should think about what they’re perceiving. At its best it can create a tension between the reader and the characters, one in which they start to project their responses into the hole left by the flatness of the response. I try to be very precise, to give the readers just enough to let their imaginations do the work: the words are a catalyst to get their imaginations to take a dark inward turn.
Check out the rest of the interview and keep tabs for more new web only content from Underland, it is a press to watch for sure.
NaNoWriMo – 101 Reasons to Stop Writing
Today, people all across everywhere have typed the first word on their way to writing 50k words that should resemble in some way a ‘novel.’
I am not a ‘fan’ of NaNoWriMo. There is something corporate and mindless about it, to me anyhow. Even the website looks corporate and mindless. Not that corporations are bad. I just have a hard time thinking about writing that way – have you seen these romance novels that you can insert your name into and the name(s) of your lover(s)? That is corporate to me.
But I know many people who are fans of NaNoWriMo and who participate in it, and they are all good people (I think). So that makes me think that maybe there is something I don’t get about NaNoWriMo. That maybe I am the moron. That maybe while I complain about NaNoWriMo, all these other people are actually getting some writing done.
I once took a class that forced me to write a 40k word novel in a semester. The experience was painful. My writing was pretty awful. I felt like a kid throwing a temper tantrum. I purchased Chris Baty’s book No Plot, No Problem (NoPloNoPro, as I like to call it). In it, a man who has maybe three or four unpublished manuscripts sitting in his desk gave me advice about how to write a novel. Thanks Chris.
In good news, that class led to some stories that were later published.
But not a novel.
If the number of participants in NaNoWriMo each year equals the number of people who have purchased his self-help book novel book, then Chris Baty is making good money.
What is good about NaNoWriMo? I’m sure there are good things about it, but I am stubborn and like to only think about things in my brain using very simple language, such as ‘bad’ and ‘good’ and ‘sleepy,’ etc.
I am sitting in the Las Vegas airport and I am waiting to board my airplane to Houston. If the plane crashes, then this will be the last thing I ever wrote in my life:
A shitty post on NaNaWriMo.
Okay, we’re boarding. Wish me luck and then go visit this site – 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. I laughed a little bit: “Express yourself all you want. Just don’t keep submitting it for publication. You’re filling the world with shit.”
elimae’s Reading List in Archives
Randomly stumbled on an old list of Recommended Reading from the elimae archives, including lists of recommendation by Deron Bauman, Brian Evenson, Michael Kimball, Norman Lock, Dawn Raffel, B. Renner, M Sarki, and several excellent others. The lists form a pretty wonderful net of texts many of which I have loved, and many others I’ve never heard of or have meant to read. I added I think 5 things to my Amazon wishlist off of it. Worth exploring.
A preponderance of Cormac McCarthy reemphasizes the fact that if you haven’t read BLOOD MERIDIAN and SUTTREE by now, well, fuck, get to work.
Deron Baumann, oddly, refers to BLOOD MERIDIAN though specifically only wants pages 5-165, which is about as far as I got the first time I tried to read it. It’s a dense mother. But now that I’ve read it twice and change, and still not quite having absorbed a lot, I have to say, the images near the end with the child in the desert hiding from the Judge as he passes back and forth into the sand are one of the images that has haunted me most in all my reading ever.
Other names that appear on the lists rather frequently: Gordon Lish, Samuel Beckett, Amos Tutuola, Italo Calvino, Diane Williams. Though there is also a lot of hidden nuggetry and apocrypha.
This is a good puzzle, in a way, I love these kinds of lists. I want more.
So, not sure what to read next? You probably can’t go wrong with most of what’s on here.
Old elimae is like scrolls: if you’ve never dug from the early years, jeez. Go.
I Am Stupid When It Comes To Politics – Ignore Me
A few days ago, Shane Jones threatened to write an essay about the ‘politics’ of online writer’s blogs and the online lit scene in a recent post on his blog. For the record, Shane Jones does not link to my own personal blog, but I link to him from my own personal blog. Co-Editor of The Cupboard, Adam Peterson, links to my own personal blog but I do not link to his personal blog. Darby Larson links to my personal blog, but I have not linked to his personal blog. Jereme has linked to my blog, but I have not linked to his. I have linked to Sam Pink’s blog, but he has not linked to me. Fuck Sam Pink.
In good news, I have linked to Matthew Simmons, and he has linked to me. I have linked to Kendra Grant Malone and she has linked to me. Congratulations, everyone.
Nowadays, there’s just so much out there! So many blogs to read! The internet is so busy! Look here and here for proof. Wow! And it’s so hard to copy and paste a web address and add it to your list of links on the side of your minima-black-themed blog. Who reads all of them anyhow? What’s the use? Eventually you just get overwhelmed. Laziness interecedes. Some people just type stupid shit and publish it. Sometimes it’s not even worth your time to click on or link to certain people. And sometimes you just want to show that asshole Blake Butler that you’re more picky than he is (Blake Butler links to EVERYONE!!!). Why not try to limit your scene? Save some time? Tao Lin is famous for this: he links to twelve people and is very picky as to who he links to based on some ‘life-affirming’ philosophy, I think. I could be wrong though. I recall a post he wrote about it. You’d have to dig it up. Google it or something.
But, really, who can we count on to back us up? Does this matter? Does linking to people matter?
Probably not. This is a lame post. I forgot what I really meant to type here. Politics and something. I don’t know. I am drunk.
I don’t think that I should link to Mark Sarvas. He won’t back me up. And I haven’t read Harry, Revised, nor do I plan to, but man, that guy must get a lot of hits…if only he could send some of that my way. Although, maybe he isn’t cool enough, and besides, his readers might not understand my waste-paper-throwing-game. Or maybe I’m not cool enough.
I’m bored with everyone. I want to read new things. I want to find new blogs and literary sites that I can read. What am I doing wrong? Why is my blogroll so lame?
Give me some links.