well i’m not going to pay $4.50 for shipping on a book from the publisher’s website

I made nine submissions to lit mags in 2009.  (My lowest total ever since I started tracking.  Got busy with longer pieces this year.)  They were all in the last two months.  One was rejected; the others are still outstanding.  How was your year, submissions-wise?  Did you send out more than ten?  More than a hundred?  Any acceptances/sales/publications you’re especially proud of?

how are your holidays going? tell me. tell me. i want to know.

The Tyrant has posted an uncollected Gary Lutz story ‘In Kind’ from their NYT issue 3 today at Vice. “I had no friends, just timid emergency contacts. I married the second woman to come along.” Also worth checking out, an excellent interview with the stoner-Manson-looking Alan Moore.

The Book Design Review blog has posted their Favorite Book Covers of 2009. Which others did they miss? What was your own favorite cover of the year?

Nice thread on the Dalkey Archive Facebook, featuring interviews with authors from their Best European Fiction 2010: Julian Gough, “Any decent writer is playing with nuances, rhythms, echoes, soundstuff that will evaporate in any literal translation. I like a lot of layers. Puns, resonances, double-meanings, Tipperaryisms, things my mum says at Christmas. Often the point of the sentence hasn’t anything to do with its literal meaning at all.”

Seriously fucking me up: pictures of animals inside the womb. Here’s a puppy:

Johannes Goransson has posted Joyelle McSweeney’s The “Future” of “Poetry”, involving Hiromi Ito, Kenneth Anger, Artaud, and a general consideration of the state of the state: “Poetry’s present tense rejects the future in favour of an inflorating and decaying omnipresence, festive and overblown as a funeral garland, flimsy and odiforous, generating excess without the orderliness of generations. It rejects genre. It rejects “a” language. Rejects form for formlessness. It doesn’t exist in one state, but is always making corrupt copies of itself.”

I will beat your ass if you give me The Top 500 Poems for Christmas again.

when do you drink coffee & how do you take it? do either of these things actually mean anything to you?