ii ii uh o
After reading the new issue of iO, I know some new things. Like some people will forgive you right to your face. Like every pier is out to get you. Like animals get into the distillery just fine. Like one thing you do is you want to hear someone say “that’s the one I want.” And the other thing you do is you know that, as you age, your desires start to feel less unusual. Then the way you know it’s real is when no one’s dreamed about you so much, or told you they dreamed about you so much, and in such detail. The way it is is a sad song about oranges. No one really cares about germs. The world moves even if you don’t take it out for a walk. My cereal tastes funny does your cereal taste funny? Some things I still don’t know, even with iO to help me. I still don’t know what roll tide roll means. Or how many corporations does it take, anyway, to make a dark that shreds the citydark like a bed of incriminating documents? How many years does running in the wrong direction become, if not right, at least something people stop niOticing?
Pop Serial No. 3 Contributor Quiz
Hi. Stephen Tully Dierks here. The third issue of Pop Serial is being serialized online here. A print edition is forthcoming. The magazine also has a regularly updated tumblr with news and things concerning past, present, and maybe future contributors.
The third issue features writing and/or visual art by the following people: Tao Lin, Luna Miguel, Ben Brooks, Sam Pink, Steve Roggenbuck, Blaise Larmee, Frank Hinton, Timothy Willis Sanders, Richard Chiem, Ana Carrete, Crispin Best, Poncho Peligroso, Andrew James Weatherhead, Cameron Pierce, Shaun Gannon, Michael Inscoe, Cassandra Troyan, DJ Berndt, Madison Langston, Zachary Whalen, Liam Bjartrun Adams, Spencer Madsen, Elaine Sun, Jackson Nieuwland, Omar De Col, Stacey Teague, Meggie Green, James Duncan, Cassandra Nguyen, Marshall Mallicoat.
To celebrate, I asked random questions to friends of mine who were on gchat at the time. Omar De Col and I came up with some questions while intoxicated. I gave each person a choice of question. The vague topics/subjects from which to pick were: bloodthirsty Lappet-faced vultures; otters; poop; Omar De Col; fish butt-rape. Some people picked the same question as each other. Fish butt-rape was the most popular question. Below are the questions and responses.
Franzen’s Status
This follows Roxane’s Tuesday post, and Jami Attenberg’s initial observation/criticism of something she heard Franzen say. Their defense of Twitter/Facebook/etc. is of course right: small press writers and publishers need those tools to promote themselves and their works. But I’m less convinced that Franzen has “lost perspective,” as Attenberg puts it, or “doesn’t understand what Twitter is for,” as Roxane claims. Instead, I think Franzen is making a deeper, more disturbing criticism—the latest salvo in a decade-long attack on certain writers, certain kinds of fiction, and ultimately, a certain construction of art itself.
To grasp all of that, let’s look more closely at a different part of his complaint:
[Twitter is] like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’…It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium.
Um—huh? What do lipograms have to do with social networking? And how are they irresponsible?
Do As Franzen Does. Do What You Like
In some ways, we’ve brought this on ourselves; it is a slippery slope. First you wonder what Angelina Jolie had for breakfast because she was so great in that one movie or whatever and then you’re buying cereal and thinking, “Does Oprah eat Raisin Bran?” Eventually, you even start to give a damn about what famous writers think about the weather or, say, social networking, and someone like Jonathan Franzen revels in his dislike of Twitter and other means of social networking from his Important Writer perch and we respond because if Franzen hates Twitter does he hate us too? The angst is unbearable and yet it’s all sort of inevitable.
Franzen’s A Great American Writer and all but I don’t give a much of a damn about his opinions on anything (see: Edith Wharton obvi). Or I do. Is it really surprising that Franzen doesn’t care for Facebook or Twitter? His overall comportment does not suggest an affinity for the levity of social networking. I can’t really say I love Facebook, myself. It has become increasingly hard to make sense of the interface and I keep getting invited to parties and readings in Bali and Temecula and I don’t live in those places so the experience is, at best, fragmented. At the same time, I don’t need to proselytize my dislike unless I’m on Twitter. Who cares? My opinion doesn’t matter nor does Franzen’s, though he is Very Fancy so in the calculus of mattering, his irrelevant opinion is less irrelevant than mine. Math.
J. Franz talking smack about Twitter, though, thems fighting words.
Lily Hoang—
Please forgive the shameless self-promotion, but did you guys know Puerto del Sol has a blog now? We’ve moved into the 21st century, yo. We’re talking writing, MFA, journal editing, AWP, fonts, avatars, internet, whatever. Come, visit, say hello.
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linkdump.com
Today seems quiet. Everyone is probably packing?
Threats by Amelia Gray is out, and I can tell you it’ll do to your head/brain/skull all things promised, and more. (I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy, borrowed from someone who had borrowed it [now I have my own], but it is available HERE)
Picador has been reprinting the novels of Donald Antrim with new intros: George Saunders (The Verificationist), Jonathan Franzen (The Hundred Brothers), and Jeffrey Eugenides (Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World). Elect Mr. Robinson… will be out this June.
Kaleidoscope is a randomized novella by Jianyu Pên.
Madras Press recently released a special edition of “Stone Animals” by Kelly Link, with illustrations and a letterpressed cover.
The second issue of The Coffin Factory just came out, with work by Aimee Bender, Lydia Davis, Edwidge Danticat, Justin Taylor, Adam Wilson, etc. (more later)
The Guggenheim has digitized many of its (out-of-print) publications.
Redivider FINALLY (yes I’m calling you out) has an updated website with the new issue, featuring the talented Mike Young, Mary Miller, J.A. Tyler, Melissa Broder, etc. The cover is nice:
Some of these things will be available at AWP. Do you think someone will write a blog post soon called “AWP recap?” What if that didn’t happen?
VIDA numbers I’d like to see
It’s disheartening and necessary to see the same VIDA numbers every year, but I’d also like to see three different (and more difficult to obtain) statistics next time.
1. A gender breakdown of articles and stories submitted & pitched to magazines. In my experience with slush piles, they can be quite male-heavy and I’ve heard the same from editors.
2. A gender breakdown of books submitted to agents and publishers. (See above)
3. A breakdown of how many books written by men are marketed as “literary” or serious works versus how many by women are marketed as such. This, I think, is the one of the biggest and harder to tackle problems. Books written by women get a picture of a bare shoulder or a pair of legs on it and then men don’t buy it and “serious” reviewers don’t want to review it. Pretty simple. Pretty much a bummer.
4. A gender breakdown of how many male writers are solicited by these magazines. Because, you know, your short story probably isn’t going to make it out of the The New Yorker slush pile. It just isn’t. We know the major magazines (hell, even a lot of the smaller ones) are made almost exclusively out of solicited material. We know that. And because of the same problems that the VIDA numbers point out each year, editors know less women they want to solicit. So, yeah, it’s a vicious cycle, blah blah blah, but one thing you can do about it is be a woman and work hard and submit everywhere until you cannot be ignored.
Exits Are
So I hesitate to use this space to self-promote, but in this case I will make an exception, for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that the project is online and free.
Exits Are is a series of collaborative stories that are also games. The games borrow their format and many of their conventions from text adventures (“interactive fiction”). From the about page: “A text adventure is a game that takes place in prose. The computer describes a world to you one room at a time, writing in the second person. ‘You stand in the center of a cool, dark cave,’ says the computer. ‘Exits are north, south, east, and west.’ The computer waits for you to tell it what you want to do. ‘Go east,’ you might say. Or if there is a key, you might say ‘take key.’ The computer parses your commands as best it can and tells you what happens next. . . . love text adventures, but they usually disappoint me. I wanted a way to make them more open-ended, less about puzzle-solving and more about language: its weirdness, its beauty. So I started playing a game with some of the writers I knew. Using gchat, I pretend to be a text adventure. The other writer is the player. We use the form of the text adventure to collaborate on some kind of strange, fun narrative. The only rule is that we take turns typing. We never discuss what we’re going to do in advance, so the results are improvisational and surprising/exciting/stressful/upsetting for both participants. Every time, the player does things I never could have seen coming.” READ MORE >
I have become dead to your book recommendations.
Roxane recently mentioned one of those weird, unspoken things about writers: we are constantly pretending to buy and read each other’s books. Publish something yourself and you’ll quickly see what I mean. You get an e-mail every time someone makes an order. The e-mail tells you the buyer’s name and even where he or she lives. So when someone says on Facebook, “I can’t wait to get this book!” and they tag you in the post so you’ll definitely see it, you get really excited about the order and you look forward to mailing them the book that you’re sure they’ll enjoy, and you wait and you wait for that e-mail with the person’s name and address, but the order never comes, and because you want to stay friendly with the person you tell yourself that it wasn’t a lie, that they probably just forgot. And sometimes they really did forget.
Sometimes they say, “I just ordered this book, you should too!” and you can plainly see that they haven’t ordered the book, and this is harder to forgive, but really, who cares? Why should anybody care?
Flamingo Rampant! Gender Independent Kids Books
The amazing writer S. Bear Bergman has started a Kickstarter to fund a really exciting, much needed project: Flamingo Rampant–Gender Independent Kids Books.
Why?
Kids’ ability to see themselves in books available to them is an incredibly valuable thing. Any parent, teacher, librarian, or caregiver will tell you that kids love books that reflect their daily experience. Kids with dogs like it when the kid in the book has a dog; kids with non-nuclear family structures cherish books in which families like theirs are shown.
Knowing this – or instinctively grasping it, as most of us do – makes it easy to see the value of children’s books with trans characters to trans or gender-independent kids (or kids with transgender family members).
More details here! This is definitely a project worth throwing a few dollars at.
Mike and Mike bring you The Volta
Hey Mike is there a one stop poetry megasite where I can 1) go to read cool poetics essays by everybody from C.D Wright to Laura Glenum, 2) catch up on reviews of books out from presses like City Lights, 3) watch videos of shit like Joshua Clover getting kicked out of a bank, 4) scan all the current poetry news that stays news and otherwise, 5) dive into a nicely manageable monthly poetry journal that features one poem by three people per issue, especially if those people are like Noelle Kocot or something, and 6) speaking of people also maybe find smart interviews with people like Tyrone Williams? Also it would help if this online poetry megasite were based out of the American desert. Like not the proverbial American desert but some actual sand and shit. Like also if the site were designed to be as clean and navigable as a desert highway.
Oh cool, I like them. What is this thing called?
Awesome. Also why is there a light on your water pitcher that flashes different colors depending on filter age?
I have no idea, but it’s terrifying and soothing in equal measures.
Yeah, yeah, ‘equal measures,’ boring, whatever Mike, if you’re so fucking smart why don’t you go talk to yourself using some bloated smart person prepositional phrases like ‘that which’ while I actually do something with my life like checking out The Volta.
=(
Sorry just kidding Mike I know how you need relentlessly undiluted adoration all the time so don’t worry I still love you.
=)!!!
Wow I didn’t think you could put exclamation marks after emoticons, that’s really kind of a new low, please don’t ever talk to me again.
Fund Mark Baumer’s 50 Books in 1 Year
The first and only Kickstarter I’ll probably ever pledge to fund:
Watch the ALT LIT GOSSIP 2011 Awards Broadcast
ALT LIT GOSSIP ran a live awards broadcast hosted by Steve Roggenbuck. Below you can watch the archive footage.
The Price of Revelation
This week, I read an article in the New York Observer that baffled, bothered and bewildered me. The article tells a story about Marie Calloway, a “part feminist, part fame whore,” young woman writer (pseudonymous) who e-mailed a much older Internet writer in New York she admired, told him she was coming to the city and wanted to sleep with him, slept with him, and wrote a 15,000 word “story, “Adrien Brody,” about the experience. None of that is necessarily shocking though some of the details (his relationship status, for example), make the assignation a bit sordid.
We are in the age of Internet confession. Have blog, will reveal, memoir, pixilated for a hundred random strangers to read. Or more. I wonder about the cost of confession these days, and the reach.
LIES/ISLE IS FILLED WITH TERROR
The new issue of LIES/ISLE, which I’d been working on since like February or March or something, finally came out last month. It’s my favorite issue I’ve ever done, so I want everybody to see it. It features killer work from Ken Baumann, Helen Vitoria, Mitch Patrick, David Peak, James Tadd Adcox, Mike Buffalo, Erik Wennermark, Ben Segal, Tyann Prentice, Nate Dorr, Elizabeth Witte, William VanDenBerg, and Clayton T. Michaels. Halloween might be over but horror lives forever. This is also possibly the second to last issue of LIES/ISLE that will ever exist.
Check it out?
“The city is a giant brain giving itself directions.”
If it’s raining on you and the music you’re listening to, I suggest adding even more input to your afternoon by checking out Barrelhouse’s new all-poetry online edition, guest-edited by Justin Marks. All the time cool stuff comes out in the vein of online magazines, etc, but I forget to post about it, but this time I didn’t want to forget, particularly because the author pictures are maybe inadvertently the best set of author pictures, together, that I’ve ever seen. I mean look at Dan Hoy (originator of this post’s title line) with that bear. Look at Ish Klein with those eyes. Look at Jeremiah Gould sideways on the railroad tracks. That also all the poems are pretty great, that’s like a coupon for your favorite chips right there on your favorite chips bag. Go go and see see.
Let’s all take the internet addiction test together and compare answers
I’ll start! Then you show me yours, in the comment box, if you want.
1) How often do you find that you stay online longer than you intended?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always
2) How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time online?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always
3) How often do you prefer the excitement* of the internet to intimacy with your partner?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always
*haha, ‘excitement’
One sky is dark and one is monochrome
What a sweet week for mice who live in walls. Wait, I mean what a sweet week for this pink skull and crossbones wrist thing. Wait, I mean what a sweet week for all these old MTA bus passes I am uselessly collecting. Wait, I mean what a sweet week for new litmags. That’s it. Adam already posted about LPZ, and since I just got in trouble the other day for accidentally double posting about Ryan Call’s Whiting Award, I’m going to stick to a strictly newsworthy diet.
Dark Sky 14 is out! You should read Dark Sky 14 if you like mustached short Siamese women, a family crawling naked from the sea clutching plastic suitcases, counting bullet holes, Burt’s cans of nuts and screws, broken floating, a horse in a Dumpster, seagulls collecting Styrofoam with their beaks, Mars sex, kicking ants, cashmere moons, warbling accountants, smoke that turns into bears and vice versa, and anonymous book reviews where the book itself is the anonymous.
NOÖ [13] is out! You should read NOÖ [13] if you like dance-offs, Russian salads, laundromats outside of burnt down malls, people who give you their ADD medication for your birthday, Ivan Lendl nostalgia, Hawaiians with machine guns, fake boyfriends, people who marry houses, confused police, sisters who are boxes of snakes, sisters who threaten you with ginsu knives, pummelhorsing social compromise, meat screams, oysters collected by widows, letters to jailed Lil Wayne, hearts too full of apples and wind, slut bags, triangle booth sandwiches, fucktrys, lung balloons, the bicycle in the wrong part of the neighborhood, the fast snapping motion of a neck during the fickle stages of a swan-dive, whiskey & chocolate, roller hockey coaches, furniture apocalypses, people who swallow entire friends, and eerie floating underwear. Plus one review of one giant book, a book written by a person named Adam Jameson Rod Smith Jennifer L Knox Brad Liening Jennifer Denrow Christian Hawkey Ryan Ridge Dan Hoy. Can you imagine calling for that guy in the doctor’s office? Luckily you don’t need a doctor to read either of these two new issues, but you might need a doctor after them.
